Dear All,
In the unlikely event of your ever reading this, I’ve gone down to try to catch up with Tut and the porters so that we can come back and look for you. We saw you come down off the summit on the 14th and assumed you‘d be back down next morning. The porters had already arrived and we had neither the food nor the money to keep them. Tut and Aleem therefore went down with the porters and all the gear while I waited with six of them to help carry your stuff.
I can only assume something has gone badly wrong but I couldn‘t come up to see for myself as I’ve sent away all my hill gear. Tut and I will get back up as quick as we can.
Nick
There was another note in Mo’s handwriting at the bottom:
I’ve pushed straight on to try to catch up with Nick. I’ll go down with him to get the porters back up here as soon as possible to help you all down.
Mo
We were still on our own. Would Doug be able to crawl all the way to Base? It was a good four miles. I should go back to help Clive but I was too tired, too tired even to eat. I had had no solid food for five days yet did not feel particularly hungry. I just lay down and felt the soft warm blades of grass against my face, could smell it, pungent with the scent of life; I could hear the buzz of flies and rustle of the wind in the reeds of the lake. I was alive and knew that I could hang on to life. I just had to be patient and soon I’d be home.
I summoned the energy to fetch some water from the stream and lit the stove. Soon I was sipping soup and nibbling at some biscuits. But I really should go back for the others. Just a little rest first. I pulled out my sleeping bag, crawled into it and dropped off to sleep. It was dark when I woke. Nine o’clock. I had been asleep for several hours. Still no sign of Doug and Clive. Full of foreboding, I pulled on my boots and, taking a head torch, slowly retraced my steps back up the glacier. To my immense relief I saw a little pool of light in the distance. It was Clive. Just behind him was Doug, slowly but steadily crawling on his hands and knees over the sharp and broken rocks of the moraine. Clive pushed on to the camp to start a brew while I walked with Doug the last few yards back to the boulder. We’d made it. We were alive and now, whatever the delays, whatever the discomfort, it was just a matter of time.
I might not have waxed so philosophical had I known just how long this would take in my case. It was four days before Nick arrived back with porters who carried Doug on a makeshift stretcher down to the Biafo Glacier where he was collected by a helicopter. Nick had had an appalling time waiting for us at Base Camp, seeing us intermittently near the West Summit, trying to guess what had gone wrong, and then not seeing us at all and having to decide what to do next. I had experienced the same emotion on Everest, waiting for Pete Boardman, Pertemba and Mick Burke to return, but I had only a matter of hours to wait, sharing my anxiety with friends, while Nick had suffered seven days in effective solitude. For he could barely communicate with the few porters who had stayed behind with him. His diary recorded his growing despair:
19 July: Fine morning. They must come down today.
Still no sign of them at 5.30 in spite of fine weather all day. Preparing to go down to Askole tomorrow to collect Tut and form a search party.
Beginning to give up – thinking of Wendy and other wives and how to get news to them. Spent whole day looking through binocs. Every stone on the glacier seems to move until you examine it. Also if you listen hard enough you can hear human voices in the sound of running water or falling stones.
Summit appeared for half an hour in early afternoon – snow cave now invisible and no sign of tracks.
20 July
Hardly slept a wink – in the early morning I have hallucinations, or were they dreams? In the middle of the night I thought I saw a green flare up the glacier – also a distinct shout of ‘Nick’. No further signs, though.
After the evacuation of Doug the rest of us plodded on down to Askole where Mo and Tut were waiting. That night had a good party atmosphere. An American expedition, on their way back from climbing the Trango Tower were also in the village. We had a campfire, chupatties, apricots and endless cups of tea. But the following morning they were all anxious to get on their way, unhindered by me.
‘Don’t worry, Chris, the helicopter pilot promised to come back for you today.’
They wanted to get out quickly, walking long days. They reminded me how painful the jeep journey would be with my broken ribs. I had no choice but to resign myself to waiting for the helicopter.
The Americans had a doctor. He dug his hand into his pocket and produced a handful of multi-coloured pills, giving me half-a-dozen striped ones as antibiotics, some little white ones for sleeping and red ones for pain. He also gave me a paperback to help pass the time while I waited to be evacuated.
I couldn’t help feeling desperately lonely as they shouldered their rucksacks and all strode away down the path, leaving me propped against a tree just outside the village. Still, I was only going to have to wait an hour or so and I would be picked up and whisked into Skardu while they were still plodding down the Braldu Gorge.
I waited through the day but there was no sign of the helicopter. A few youngsters played in the dust around me but the rest of the village seemed to have forgotten my existence. As dusk fell and it became obvious that the helicopter was not coming back that day, I went in search of shelter, knocking on the door of one of our porters’ houses and trying, with sign language, to show that I had nowhere to sleep. Hadji Fezil, a middle-aged Balti, with a thin face and large very dirty, gap-teeth, took me in and let me lay my sleeping mat under an awning on the flat roof of his house.
The helicopter didn‘t come the next day. Nor did it come in the next five. I was weak and still felt very ill. I just lay in my sleeping-bag, dragging myself once a day down through the house and along the path in search of a quiet spot to relieve myself. The village youngsters would follow me, whistling a whirring noise, grinning and calling, ‘Helicopter no coming, helicopter no coming.‘ The cry reverberated round my brain, accompanied me back to my rooftop and crept round my head at night.
I became quite paranoid. ‘They’ve left me. The whole bloody lot of them have just pushed off home.’ It was just as well that the American doctor had given me a thick book. It was Centennial by Michener, one of those bumper chronicles about a patch of Colorado from the beginning of time to the present day – a good easy read for an invalid marooned on a flat mud roof in the middle of the Karakoram. The only other events of the day were meal times. These consisted of chupatties, a spinach-like vegetable and boiled eggs. I had to brush the flies away as I took each mouthful. Hadji Fezil and his family were very kind. I had no money, was unable to communicate, except by signs, and seemed to have been abandoned.
On the sixth day, I was so desperate I set out to walk accompanied by the faithful Hadji Fezil. If anything I had become even weaker in the intervening days. Walking was purgatory. That day we reached Chongo and stayed in the house of one of his relatives. We had now to get through the steep section of the Braldu Gorge. The river was in full spate, tearing at the boulders of the path. In places we had to wade through it or its subsidiary streams. I just hugged my ribs, terrified of the pain that the slightest stumble or sudden movement created. That night we reached the village of Kunul. The following day we should be at Dasso where we could get a jeep but I dreaded the thought of the jeep ride.
We had just started breakfast when the distant whine of an engine alerted us. It could only be a helicopter. I rushed out of the hut, followed by Hadji Fezil. We were in a grove of apricot trees at the side of the valley. The helicopter could not possibly see us. I dashed down into the flat valley bottom, the pain of my ribs ignored. The helicopter was already overhead, flying purposefully up to Askole. Would it see us on the way back? We lit a fire, made a marker of yellow foam mats and waited, full of a desperate uncertainty. An hour went by. And then the distant roar. It was flying down the valley floor. It dropped down beside us, and the smiling pil
ot flung open the door. My ordeal was over.
The pilot, a major in the Pakistan army, explained that the helicopter which had evacuated Doug had had a crash landing in Skardu that could easily have proved fatal, and there had been a delay in getting a replacement. He had flown up that morning from Islamabad.
‘I might as well take you straight there if you want. I’m going back anyway.’
And so we flew all the way to Islamabad, down the great gorge of the Indus and across the foothills to Pakistan’s capital.
‘Where are you staying? Might as well get you as close as I can.’
‘At the British Embassy.’
‘I can’t land there. The closest I can get is the golf course.’
We landed on the eighteenth green. A group of golfers eyed the helicopter respectfully, no doubt expecting to see a general descend. They must have been surprised to see the filthy, skeletal apparition that I had become climb out. My hair and beard were unkempt and tangled. I was wearing dirty red Lifa long-johns and vest and had one arm in a sling.
The helicopter took off and I walked over to the clubhouse. People shrank away from me as I approached the desk and asked if I could phone the British Embassy. Half an hour later Caroline, with whom we had stayed on our way out, came to pick me up.
It’s easy to talk of heroism in describing a near-catastrophe. Doug had shown extraordinary fortitude and endurance in crawling back down the mountain but that was a matter of survival. Mo and Clive, who had lost their chance to go for the summit, had risked their lives in helping Doug and me to get down, though they couldn’t very well have left us and certainly the thought would have never entered their minds. But if one wants to talks of heroes, I believe that Nick came the closest to that role. He was landed with the grim task of sitting it out, of taking desperately difficult decisions armed with inadequate information, of organising first Doug’s evacuation and then mine. This kind of role demands greater moral courage and fortitude than direct involvement in a crisis where the struggle for personal survival has a stimulus of its own.
As for the villain, that was the Ogre himself. He was to leave us all with wounds that were going to take a long time to heal. He had played cat and mouse with us. He had had his fun and then, having battered and mauled us, had let us go.
– CHAPTER 8 –
K2
‘Going to hang up your boots now, are you?’ had been a recurrent question in 1976. The layman tended to assume that having led a successful expedition to Everest there were no other challenges left. This, of course, was far from the truth. The Ogre was to prove able to provide enough alternative challenges for a lifetime, but even before Doug’s invitation, I had been looking for another big long-term challenge and had put in my application for K2, second highest mountain in the world. Only 237 metres lower than Everest, steeper and more dramatic, towering in splendid isolation over the other peaks of the upper Baltoro Glacier, it is one of the most magnificent mountains in the world and, in 1976, had only had one ascent – by an Italian expedition in 1954.
I wanted to tackle a new route, but to do it with a small expedition. My original invitation to five members of the 1975 Everest expedition had been reduced by the tragic death of Dougal the previous year. I was left with Doug, Nick and Tut, Pete Boardman, and Jim Duff as a high-altitude climbing doctor. But then came the question of the route. I certainly didn’t want to repeat the Abruzzi Spur, the route of the only ascent. An American expedition, led by Jim Whittaker, had attempted the formidable North-West Ridge in 1975 but had barely gained a footing on the bottom of it. The entire western aspect of the mountain seemed very testing, being both steeper and more rocky than the South-West Face of Everest. More attractive to me was a nearly successful Polish route on the North-East Ridge. For this was mainly on snow and seemed more suited to a small expedition than any of the western routes.
But I came under the same pressure that had occurred in 1972 and 1975. I had originally preferred the concept of a small Everest expedition going for the technically easier and better-known South Col route but then it had been Doug and Dougal who had persuaded me to go for broke on the South-West Face. This time it was Pete, his confidence boosted by Everest and even more by his impressive ascent of the West Face of Changabang with Joe Tasker in the autumn of 1976. We were having a K2 expedition meeting at the Clachaig Hotel in Glencoe in February 1977. Pete put up a strong case for an attempt on the West Face. Inevitably he was backed by Doug. My own imagination was caught, and so I agreed, but on the proviso that the team was increased to eight and that we would plan on sieging it. But which route to go for? Discarding the ridges attempted by the Ameri-cans and the Poles, we turned our attention to the West Ridge.
On the Ogre my eyes had frequently strayed over to K2, a perfect pyramid shape that cut the eastern horizon, dominating the jumble of peaks around it, but now in the summer of 1977, I was nursing my wounds. I had lost over ten kilos, my ribs still ached and my left hand was part paralysed. I couldn’t walk more than a few hundred metres without needing to take a rest. It was the end of August before I felt up to working on the K2 expedition. Time was slipping by and we hadn’t even started looking for a sponsor or getting together the gear and food we were going to need.
At first I was quite relaxed, confident that after the single letter I had had to write to Alan Tritton of Barclays to get sponsorship for Everest, companies would now be queuing up to give us their support. I was soon disillusioned. It is much harder getting sponsorship for the second highest mountain in the world. It was no good describing it as more beautiful and the most challenging. The public relations industry likes only the biggest and best.
Eventually support came from perhaps a surprising quarter when my literary agent George Greenfield happened to meet the financial director of the London Rubber Company’s wife at a cocktail party. Best known for the manufacture of Durex, they were seeking a fresh image, and while they were not prepared to underwrite the entire cost of the expedition, which I had budgeted at around £60,000, they would give us £20,000 which took us a good way along the road to solvency.
I was now fully embarked on the organisation. We invited Joe Tasker, Pete’s partner on Changabang, to join us, and Tony Riley who had been on the Latok expedition and was a filmmaker. With no single sponsor taking over the complete financial responsibility of the expedition, George advised us to form ourselves into a limited company to give individual members some protection just in case things went wrong. It also had the useful effect of formalising our relationship and making it clear that each one of us had an equal stake in the enterprise.
We had a series of planning meetings at Nick’s house in Bowdon, since it was the most centrally placed for all of us. Some of the others found it all a little too formal with its agenda and minutes, yet it was this very formality that ensured that everyone had a say and that the decisions of the group were acted upon. Tut, helped by Joe Tasker, was looking after the equipment – they were both now running climbing shops; Pete was getting all the food, while Nick acted as treasurer.
Most of the team who had been with me before knew the form, knew too that they could bend things to suit their own purposes as the climb unfolded. Joe, being new to it all, found this less easy. He had an inquisitive mind, sharpened, perhaps, by the time he had spent in a seminary training to become a priest. He took nothing for granted and frequently questioned my proposals. The expedition contract was a case in point. We obviously needed a contract since we were obligated to a newspaper and a publisher for articles and a book. For my last three expeditions I had used a contract form produced by George Greenfield that originated from a 1960s services expedition to Greenland. In it the members of the team promised to obey their leader at all times. I don’t think any of us had taken much notice of this, knowing that on the mountain my authority would depend on the team’s respect for the way I was running the expedition at the time and that any signatures back in Britain would be irrelevant.
But
Joe did question this part of the contract. I remember feeling defensive at the time, the more so because I could see his point and yet resented my authority being threatened. In the end he signed simply because everyone else had done, but it left me feeling that Joe was a bit of a barrack-room lawyer – the classic reaction of any bureaucrat who has a comfortable system working and feels annoyed with anyone who questions it.
I was working as general co-ordinator and chief fund-raiser. I also spent a lot of time on logistic planning, once again using a computer, though this time I was able to bring it back home, a reflection of how much smaller computers were becoming.
We were trying to lay siege to a mountain wall that was almost as high and probably steeper than the South-West Face of Everest, with a team of eight as opposed to the sixty we had had on Everest in 1975. As I started playing through the logistics it very quickly became apparent that our team was too small. We simply couldn’t ferry all the supplies, fixed rope and oxygen we were planning to use for the summit bid without using up too much time and exhausting ourselves in the process.
It could be argued that we would have been better off trying to climb it in pure alpine-style – packing our sacks at the bottom and moving continuously until we reached the top, but the scale of the face and level of difficulty seemed too great. You can’t really carry more than ten days’ food for a single push and it looked as if we could easily take more than ten days to reach the summit.
Another possible compromise would be to establish a line of fixed rope linked by camps on to the middle reaches of the mountain and then go for the top alpine-style. This would mean doing without oxygen, since we couldn’t possibly carry the bottles even in a partial alpine-style push. I was worried by this prospect, since I had no illusions about my own high- altitude performance. I had serious doubts whether I would be able to get to the top of K2 without oxygen and I very much wanted to get there. On Everest I had been resigned to sublimating my own summit ambitions in the overall running of the expedition, but I didn’t want to do this again.
The Everest Years Page 11