The Everest Years

by Chris Bonington

  That left one place for the third summit bid. I could not resist putting myself into it, even though this would mean spending another week up at my Camp 5 command post. From there I could control the movement of the summit teams and react to any crisis.

  I announced the results of my morning’s work at the two o’clock radio call. Martin Boysen described the impact down at Camp 2:

  We waited tensed with expectation and ambition. Hamish took the call and Chris came over loud and clear in the warm air of the afternoon.

  ‘I’ve decided after a lot of thought … ’ Wait for it. I listened only for the names not the justifications. ‘Mick, Martin, Pete and Pertemba … ’ Thank God for that. ‘Tut, Nick, Ang Phurba … ’ I had no further interest in listening; I had been given my chance and now I looked at the others. Poor Allen, his face hardened with disappointment as the names poured out, but not his own. The radio stopped and everyone departed quietly with their own hopes, ambitions and disappointments.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon dozing. The decisions were made and next morning we were going to help Doug and Dougal move into the top camp. The evening radio call was filled with routine matters. Once we climbers had finished our business, the Sherpas took over, filling the air waves with their staccato language. After half an hour Pertemba had finished deploying his Sherpa force and turned to me.

  ‘Charlie wants to talk to you. He’ll come up on the radio at seven o’clock.’

  I was both disturbed and intrigued. He obviously wanted to talk to me privately, for no one else would be listening in.

  I switched on the radio at seven.

  ‘Hello Chris, this is Charlie. Can you hear me OK? Over.’

  ‘Yes. Over.’

  Charlie has a wonderful bedside manner, his voice both reassuring and confident. He asked me to reconsider my decision to stay on at Camp 5 and take part in the third summit bid. He pointed out the length of time I had been living at around 8,000 metres, the fact that my voice was often slurred over the radio and that my calls that day had sometimes been muddled. He also made the point that I was getting out of contact with the situation on the rest of the mountain, my eyes just focused on establishing the top camp and making the summit. He then told me that Hamish wanted to have a word with me.

  Hamish stated that he had decided to go home. There was no longer any need for him on the expedition. He assured me that he was not going to talk to the press but that, if he was cornered, he’d say he was going home because of the after-effects of the avalanche.

  When the call came to an end I had a lot to think about. The euphoria of the last few days had evaporated. I had no illusions why Hamish was going home and could sympathise with his disappointment. This more than anything made me realise that Charlie was right. I had been at Camp 5 for too long, had inevitably, and perhaps essentially, been single-minded about mounting the first summit bid, but now my place was definitely back at Camp 2. Once Doug and Dougal were in their top camp, I could do no more to help them. I had to start thinking of the expedition as a whole and particularly of the feelings of my team members. I resolved to return to Advance Base once I had made my carry to Camp 6 and give Ronnie Richards my place in the third summit bid, though natural optimism reasserted itself with thoughts of yet another bid in which perhaps Mike Thompson, Allen Fyffe, Hamish, if I could tempt him back, and I could go for the top.

  We made our big carry on 22 September. I knew that we had done everything we could to help the first bid for the summit. For me it was a moment of intense fulfilment, perhaps as great as anything I have ever experienced. All I could do now was to sit it out and wait … and wait.

  I dropped back to Advance Base on the 23rd, the day that Doug and Dougal ran a line of fixed rope across the summit ice field. I took turns with the others the following day to gaze through the long-focus lenses as they went for the summit, picking their way, tiny dots on the snowfield, which vanished into the South Summit gully. And then the long dragging hours as the afternoon slipped away without a sign of them.

  It was Nick who spotted them next.

  ‘I can see something moving. They’re at the top of the gully. Look, you can see something flash. They’re still going up hill.’

  It was four thirty in the afternoon, only another two hours of daylight and they were obviously going for the summit. We saw nothing more that night. Everyone was subdued, tense. I hardly slept at all and was back at the telescope first thing in the morning when I saw, to my vast relief, two tiny figures moving slowly back towards the haven of the top camp.

  The radio that we had left on all night crackled into life. They were back. They had reached the top just before dark, had survived the highest ever bivouac, just below the South Summit of Everest, by digging a snow cave, and had come back unharmed except for a single frostbitten finger. I cried with relief and joy at their success. It had been a magnificent effort, one that I suspect very few other climbers could have equalled.

  But that untrammelled joy was short-lived, for the expedition wasn’t over. I should have dearly loved to have ordered everyone off the mountain, to have escaped while we were all still safe. But I knew I couldn’t, for I owed it to the others to give them their chance of the summit. Worries were already crowding in. The second team was moving up to Camp 6 that day. I waited tensely for the two o’clock call.

  Martin Boysen came up on the air, telling me that Pete Boardman and Pertemba were with him at Camp 6, but Mick Burke hadn’t arrived yet. He was obviously worried about the time that Mick was taking. One of the Sherpas making the carry had also failed to turn up, so they were short of oxygen and only had enough for the three of them. I had been worried about Mick all along. He had stayed at Camp 5 for almost as long as I had and certainly hadn’t been going as fast as I on the two occasions we had climbed together above Camp 5.1 had tried to persuade him to come down with me when I pulled out of the third summit team, but he had been adamant. He said he was feeling fine and was determined to go for the summit. It was not just to reach the summit for its own sake. Mick was working for the BBC as an assistant cameraman with the job of filming on the face. Getting film on the summit was of immense importance to him and for the team as a whole. So I had agreed to his staying.

  But now my anxiety, triggered by Martin’s, burst out with all the violence of suppressed tension. I told Martin that in no circumstances did I want Mick to go for the summit the next day. Martin was shaken by the violence of my reaction and after he went off the air I realised I was perhaps ordering the impossible. Once climbers have got to the top camp on Everest they are very much on their own. Up to that point they are members of a team dependent on each other and the overall control of a leader but the summit bid was different. This was a climbing situation that you might get on a smaller expedition or in the Alps. It was their lives in their own hands and only they could decide upon their course of action.

  I kept the radio open and was working in my tent when Mick called me about an hour later. He sounded guarded, potentially aggressive, explained that he had been delayed because he’d had to sort out some of the fixed ropes on the way up and that anyway his sack, filled with camera equipment as well as his personal gear, was a lot heavier than everyone else’s. Lhakpa Dorje had also arrived and they had found another two bottles of oxygen buried in the snow. I was still worried about him, but there was no point in trying to order him down when I had no means of implementing the order, and, anyway, I wondered whether I had the right to do so. As an experienced mountaineer who had contributed so much to the expedition, surely it was up to him and his partners to decide how much farther they could go.

  Nonetheless, I didn’t sleep much that night. The following morning was hazy with high cloud coming in from the west and great spirals of spindrift blowing from the summit ridge, meaning you could only get odd glimpses of the upper snow field. At about nine that morning Mike Thompson reported seeing four figures, but they were scattered; two close together, far ahead, nearly at
the foot of the South Summit gully, one about half-way across and the other far behind. At the two o’clock call Martin Boysen came on the air. His crampon had fallen off, his oxygen hadn’t been working and so he had had no choice but to return to the camp. Mick, though far behind Pertemba and Pete, had decided to go on alone. The afternoon dragged by. Was the achievement of a successful ascent in danger of being destroyed by a stupid accident? I recorded in my diary:

  I’ve just got to sit it out. I must say it’s going to be hell for the next three days until I get all my climbers down. I just pray I get them down safe.

  As the afternoon crept on, the weather deteriorated steadily. The upper part of the mountain was now in cloud and the wind was snatching at our tents. We were keeping the wireless open the whole time. Dusk fell and still there was no sign of the other three. Then just after seven, Martin came on the air.

  He spoke in a flat, toneless voice that indicated that something was desperately wrong, just saying he had some news and he’d put Pete on. You could feel the exhaustion and anguish in Pete’s voice as he told us what had happened. He and Pertemba had reached the top at one that afternoon. Because of the tracks left by Doug and Dougal, they had made good progress in spite of a fault in Pertemba’s oxygen system. They had assumed that Mick had returned with Martin and were therefore amazed to meet him on their way back down, about a hundred metres below the summit, just above the Hillary Step.

  Mick was determined to make it to the top and even tried to persuade them to go back with him so that he could film them, but they were moving slowly, one at a time, belaying each other. Pete said that if Mick hadn’t caught them up by the time they reached the South Summit, they’d wait for him there. I’m sure that Mick made it the top. He was so close. They waited for an hour and forty minutes with the storm getting progressively more fierce and then decided they must start down. It was four thirty in the afternoon and they had all too little daylight left for the their descent of the gully and the long traverse back over the summit snow field. It was an appalling decision to have to make, but if they had waited any longer they would almost certainly have perished. The most probable explanation of Mick’s failure to catch them up was that he had walked through a cornice on the narrow ridge on his way back from the summit of Everest. This would have been all too easy in the maelstrom of snow that was now hurtling across the upper reaches of the mountain.

  Even so we couldn’t give up hope. Mick was so very much alive, cocky, funny, and at times downright exasperating, I convinced myself that he’d get back during the night and call up on the radio the following morning with his special brand of humour. But, of course, he didn’t and, as the storm raged through the day, pinning everyone down in their camps on the face, we had finally to admit to ourselves that there was no hope. It dawned fine on the morning of 28 September, but the mountain was plastered, with powder snow avalanches careering down the face. My third summit team was at Camp 5, but there seemed no hope of their being able to find Mick alive, no justification for a further bid for the top and I was prepared to take no more risks. I ordered the evacuation of the mountain.

  Once again we had had tragedy and triumph, that painful mixture of grief at the death of a friend and yet real satisfaction at a climb that had not only been successful in reaching the top, but in human terms as well. This very diverse group of nearly a hundred people had merged as a single team. Mike’s ‘underground and overground’ had become one. From my point of view, leading the South-West Face Expedition was the most complex, demanding and rewarding organisational challenge I have faced.

  But where did I go from there? Success on the South-West Face opened up many possibilities. When I had started to make a living around mountaineering, lecturing, writing and appearing on television, in the early ‘sixties after my ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger with Ian Clough, I had faced a fair amount of criticism from my peers. My sin was not only that of making money out of climbing, with all the accompanying controversy of amateur versus professional, but also in trying to describe the mysteries of the sport to a much wider public. I suppose I was the first climber in the post-war era to do this in a big way, though there was nothing new about it. Albert Smith, one of the Alpine pioneers, had drawn huge crowds to his magic lantern spectaculars in the 1850s and Frank Smythe had earned his living by writing and lecturing in the thirties in a very similar way to what I was doing in the sixties.

  But the 1975 expedition, perhaps helped by the fact that an increasing number of climbers were making their livings in this way now, changed many attitudes. I almost seemed to be becoming an establishment figure, was honoured with the CBE, made a vice-president of the British Mountaineering Council, appointed to the Northern Sports Council and asked to take part in an increasing number of charitable activities. I suppose I could have followed a path into public service similar to that of John Hunt, leader of the 1953 expedition, but I am not a natural committee man, and enjoyed the freedom of being a freelance writer and photographer, based on our Lakeland home.

  My lifestyle therefore didn’t really change. The lecture tours were more hectic; I found myself taking part in business conferences in exotic parts of the world and the pressures of work were to increase steadily over the years. I do enjoy this side of my life, as I do the wheeling and dealing associated with organising expeditions. In contrast my climbing remains a relaxing, if physically exacting, recreation, something to be grabbed at the end of a day’s work at home or in the middle of a promotional tour in the United States.

  My love of mountaineering was, if anything, stronger than ever, but I wanted to return to the mountains now with a more tight-knit team, without the heavy responsibility for other people’s lives that command of a large expedition inevitably entails.

  – CHAPTER 4 –

  Laissez-Faire on the Ogre

  ‘Fancy a trip to the Karakoram next summer? I’ve got the Ogre. I’ve asked Tut, Dougal, Mo and Clive. I’ll send you some pictures. Tut and I are going for the big rock nose but Clive prefers a route to the left. If you want to come you can decide which route you want.’

  It was Doug Scott on the phone in the summer of 1976. I accepted without hesitation. What a contrast to Everest. A small team, no responsibility, a trip that would be like an alpine holiday. The photograph arrived a couple of days later. The Ogre is well named; this was no shapely summit of soaring ridges to an airy peak. It is an ogre, solid, chunky, a complex of granite buttresses and walls, of icy slopes and gullies; a three-headed giant towering 7,285 metres above the Baintha Brakk Glacier. Doug had marked his line up a sheer nose of rock that resembled El Capitan in Yosemite. But this only went a third of the way up the peak to a band of snow ledges that wrapped their way like a big cummerbund around the Ogre’s middle. Doug’s line went on up a ridge of serried rock walls to the left, or western, summit.

  I didn’t like the look of it. The mountain appeared big and hard enough by its easiest route. You could climb a wall to its left by a series of snow and rock arêtes, traverse right over the cummerbund to cross Doug’s line, and reach a big snow slope that comprised the Ogre’s South Face. That would lead to its three heads. The middle one seemed the highest.

  I phoned Dougal, who had also received the picture. He felt the same as I did, preferring the most reasonable way up what looked an extremely difficult mountain. Without saying so specifically, we both took it for granted we’d be climbing together.

  In January of 1977 I drove out to Chamonix to join him for some winter climbing and to discuss Doug’s plans for the Ogre. I gave a lift to Mo Anthoine whom I had known for years, but only on a bumping-into-in-the-pub level. He is one of the great characters of the British climbing scene; an exuberant extrovert who dominates most conversations with his wit, capacity as a raconteur and, at times, downright vulgarity. His sense of humour has a Rabelaisian quality that can offend some people, particularly his targets.

  He is a complete individualist, little influenced by trends or the need
to keep up with his peers. His adventures reflect this approach. In the early sixties he and another climbing friend, Foxy, hitched to Australia before the hippy trail had become well-worn, various adventures later making their way back towards Europe as crew on a yacht, little worried that they knew practically nothing about sailing.

  On his return he and Joe Brown had started up a business in Llanberis making climbing helmets. Mo built it up over the years but was always careful not to over-expand so that he could maintain his freedom to go climbing and adventuring for several months each year. In 1973, with Hamish MacInnes, Joe Brown and Don Whillans, he climbed the Great Prow of Roraima, a huge sandstone wall in Guyana, festooned with creepers and infested by snakes, spiders and other creepy-crawlies. In 1976, with Martin Boysen, he reached the summit of the Trango Tower, one of the most spectacular rock spires in the world on the side of the Baltoro Glacier.

  I was looking forward to climbing with Mo and certainly our first few days in Chamonix below Mont Blanc were a lot of fun. With us was Will Barker whose wit was even drier than Mo’s. The weather was bad when we arrived and there was a surfeit of fresh snow. Dougal was polishing the first draft of a novel he had just completed, and therefore urged me to stay in Chamonix and ski so that he could get some work done while the weather was still unsettled. The three of us were about the same standard on skis, self-taught, with appalling technique, but quite bold. Mo and I had a great time and a lot of laughs, though the weather showed little signs of improving. On the third evening, I phoned Dougal and he decided that he’d come over a couple of days later to join us.