The porters dumped their loads leaving me on my own. There was no sign of the others. Had they stopped further back? I rather hoped they had, as I basked in the silent beauty of the mountains. On the other side of the Gangotri Glacier ranks of rock and snow peaks, most of them unclimbed, were lit by the late afternoon sun. I erected our small bivouac tent, collected water and started preparing supper. I am not a solitary person, yet I find that I do need periods on my own. Just before dark, I noticed a figure plodding over the flat ground towards the camp. It was Laurie Skreslet. He told me that Wanda and John had left in front of him, so it looked as if they had got lost on the way and must be bivouacking.
The following morning we got away early to make our first recce of our objective. The East Face of Kedarnath Dome hides itself well, tucked into the back of the Ghanohim Bamak, a side glacier reaching up to Kedarnath itself. A subsidiary spur masked the face as we picked our way through a maze of rocky moraines and hills of ice at the foot of the glacier. Then it appeared round a bluff, a soaring wall of grey granite, so much bigger than on any of the pictures we had looked at – 2,000 metres of continuous rock wall, with the occasional snow ledge linked by crack lines. We lay back on a boulder and gazed through binoculars, trying to pick out lines on this huge upthrust of rock. It was the closest thing to Yosemite I had ever seen in the Himalaya. At least though, over on the left, there seemed a soft option. You could gain height on a subsidiary glacier, reach the crest of a buttress and then climb the left retaining buttress of the face. This would probably give a mere 1,000 metres of serious climbing.
The others, including Jim, had reached our camp by the time we got back. Jim, still feeling off-colour so tending to be cautious, preferred the softer option. The following day we employed our volunteer labour to carry in all the gear and food we were going to need for our climb. It took only three hours to reach our Advance Base on a little pile of moraine rocks set back from the face.
Two days later, Jim and I were ensconced in our camp. Our gallant helpers were on their way back to Delhi. Their assistance had been invaluable, their company pleasurable and yet it was only now that the expedition became real, in some ways, all too real. We decided to have a look at the easier left-hand option and climbed the hanging glacier that led round the buttress on the left of the face. The scale was all so much greater than it had seemed at first glance; crevasses that were invisible from below materialised as huge caverns once we started picking our way up the icefall.
At the top of the buttress we peered up at the route. There certainly was a line going all the way to the top but it looked by no means easy and escape was barred by a bristling line of corniced rock. We could only carry a limited amount with us. If we had more than two loads it would mean relaying sacks up the face and climbing it several times over. We certainly wouldn’t be able to do much sack hauling for the rock wasn’t steep enough. More basically, the psychological barrier was too great for the two of us. Had there been four, our numbers would have given us both an impetus and a forum for discussion which would probably have led us on to the face at least to have a try. With only two, the negative elements seemed all too dominant. Jim was worried about getting back to his practice on time; I was just plain worried by the sheer gigantic scale of the face, frightened that we might get part-way up, run out of steam, retreat, and then have neither the strength nor the time to try anything else.
We discussed alternative objectives; a traverse of Kedarnath and Kedarnath Dome, but that seemed even more committing than the face; or an ascent of a rocky buttress to the right of the face that resembled the North Face of the Piz Badile. But this seemed too limited an objective when we were surrounded by such magnificent unclimbed peaks, ridges and walls. We found a large boulder, climbed up on to it and looked at the route. It was uninspiring, a great whaleback of snow with the occasional rock step, undramatic, a nothing. I turned my frustration on to Jim.
‘There’s no way I’m going on that. It’s a lousy line. It’s just a bloody slog.’
‘It’s probably harder than it looks,’ Jim temporised, mildly.
‘But it looks so boring. How about the south-west summit of Shivling? At least it looks good and it’s unclimbed.’ We talked around it and Jim agreed. Shivling it was. The days of indecision were over.
It was the evening of 12 September. Jim was due back home in a week’s time. We had achieved little, had just changed our objective to a peak we knew practically nothing about, except that it was steep and obviously difficult, and yet I felt a sense of excited anticipation, a confidence that had no basis of logic. We cooked a lavish meal, washed it down with the last of the wine, set the alarm for three in the morning and crawled into our sleeping bags. We hadn’t bothered to erect the tent and I lay on my back staring at the blue-black vault of the sky glittering with myriad stars.
– CHAPTER 13 –
A Fairy tale Summit
It had cleared during the night and after a quick breakfast we set out in the dark of the pre-dawn, plodding up the slopes above the camp. The beam of my torch picked out the purple gentians peeping through the lush grass. I felt a delicious sense of joy at the prospect of our adventure and the beauty of our surroundings, about the fact that there were just the two of us, that as far as we knew, there was no one else in the entire valley at that moment, that no one even knew where we were, though we had left a note of our change of plan among the boxes at our previous night’s campsite.
We were skirting the southern slopes of Kedarnath Dome above the Kirti Bamak and as the sky lightened with the dawn we could start picking out features on the black mass of Shivling. The mountain was like a gigantic fishtail jutting into the sky, the two fins being the two summits. The main one to the north-east, higher by around a hundred metres or so, had first been climbed in 1974 by an Indian paramilitary expedition. They had climbed from the north, using a large quantity of fixed rope. Since then Doug Scott, with Rick White, Greg Child and Georges Bettembourg had climbed the spectacular North-East Ridge. Nick Kekus and Richard Cox had nearly achieved the North Face, when Cox was killed by a falling stone. Earlier that summer a Japanese team had made a route up the East Face, reaching the summit ridge of Shivling just above the col between the two summits.
The South-West Summit remained unclimbed. The Japanese had also tried the South-West Summit from the north but had turned back. The route that attracted us was its unclimbed South-East Ridge, an airy rock spur that ran up to the South-West Summit. It looked feasible. The problem was how to reach it, for the mountain was guarded on its south-eastern flank by a series of huge bastions of crumbling granite, split by gullies leading into blind alleys of overhanging, probably rotten, rock.
Jim and I walked across the hoar-frosted grass in the early dawn, seeking the castle gate. We found it after about an hour. A broad gully swept down from a high basin cradled by the arms of the south-east and south-west ridges of our summit. The basin obviously held a glacier that spewed in a sheer tumbling icefall down the head wall of the gully. It would be suicidal to try to climb this, but a gully or rake seemed to slip across to the right and would perhaps bypass the barrier. At least it gave us a chance.
We crossed the Kirti Bamak, a wide expanse of smooth bare ice, and climbed the moraine wall on the other side. There was a little grassy nook with a small stream running through it, tucked amongst some boulders. The sun had now risen above the Bhagirathi peaks and it was agreeably warm. We got out the stove, made a brew and a second breakfast. But what to do? The icefall at the head of the gully was already in the sun. It was obviously an avalanche trap and caution dictated that we should laze away the rest of the day in this idyllic spot, then in the cold of the night, when stones would be frozen in position and the snow would be firm and hard, we could try to get round the danger area. It made good sense but we were impatient, felt we had already wasted too much time and, therefore with hardly any discussion, because both of us instinctively wanted to get moving, decided to climb the gully tha
t morning.
We repacked our sacks taking food and fuel for six days, a light tent, sleeping bags, cooking gear, ropes and climbing hardware. The loads felt heavy and must have weighed about fifteen kilos each. We climbed a talus slope beside the long tongue of avalanche debris. At the base of the cleft we put on our crampons. The snow was packed hard, worn smooth by the passage of avalanches and stone-fall. The walls on either side were sheer, scored by more falling rocks and stones. The gully was about twenty metres wide, but we hugged the right-hand side, getting an illusory sense of cover from the solid wall beside us.
Jim drew ahead. I was feeling the altitude and the weight of my sack, was becoming increasingly aware of the threat posed by the icefall that now seemed to hang over us. There was no sound except the crunch of our crampons. We were about halfway up when a huge boulder, the size of a car, broke away high above us. It came bouncing down the gully, ricocheting from wall to wall. There was no cover, no point in moving, because you couldn’t tell where it would bounce next. I just stood there and tried to shrink into myself as it hurtled down. It passed about two metres from my side and then vanished below. Everything was silent once more.
Until this moment I had plodded slowly, regulating my breathing and saving my energy, but I now abandoned all economy of effort, kicked fiercely up the slope, lungs aching, sweat pouring down me, to escape the gun barrel as quickly as I could. As always happens, the point at which the gully forked, foreshortened from below, never seemed to get any closer. But at last we were on a slight spur to the side, the gully had opened out and we could see up the right-hand fork. It was more a rake than a gully, leading up to an overhanging head wall, but this in turn looked as if it could be bypassed by a traverse to the crest of the ridge on the right.
But the quality of the snow had now deteriorated. We waded through soft snow lying on shaly, slabby rock. I caught Jim up. He had decided it was time for a rope. A steep corner running with water blocked our way. I had no belay, so the rope simply meant that both of us would fall should Jim come off, but it somehow gave a psychological feeling of security as Jim straddled up the rock and continued above more easily. I led through another pitch, reaching a bunk-like ledge tucked beneath a huge roof overhang. Beyond, the angle became steeper, with wet snow lying thinly on smooth slabs. Jim flirted with them half-heartedly before retreating.
It was only midday, but the ledge provided a perfect bivouac spot and we could hope that after a night’s frost the snow on the slabs would have frozen, making the route out of the top of the gully both easier and safer. We settled down for the afternoon, clearing rocks and snow to give us two bunk berths, each about half a metre wide. We couldn’t do much cooking, for we had kept our fuel to the minimum, and had designed our diet so that the only thing we needed to heat was snow for our tea. All our food was to be eaten cold, a combination of biscuits, cheese, nuts, dried fruit, canned tuna fish, a Parma-type ham and Calthwaite Fudge prepared in Cumbria. We nibbled through the afternoon, snuggled into our sleeping bags, dozed and chatted.
But it didn’t freeze that night. The water dripped steadily from the overhang. In the cold light of dawn we assessed the situation. Jim, always realistic, questioned whether we should go on. But apart from hating the thought of venturing beneath the icefall once again, I had a gut feeling that we could do the climb.
‘I’ll just have a look,’ I said.
The snow over the slabs hadn’t frozen, but it was firmer than it had been the previous afternoon. About eight centimetres deep, it just took my weight. I tiptoed up to the base of the head wall; the angle eased slightly and the snow became deeper. I hammered in a piton and carried on for the full length of the rope. As Jim came up to join me, I was able to gaze down into the gully we had climbed the previous day. The hanging glacier looked not only nearly vertical but was eaten away by giant bites as if the entire tumbled mass of ice was ready to collapse. Our route was even more dangerous than we had judged from the bottom.
We picked our way over crumbling rocks and insubstantial snow, surmounted a small rocky peak and, almost two hours later, reached a col only twenty metres above where we had spent the night. This was a magical mystery tour indeed. A long traverse over snow-clad scree ledges and we were at last in the upper basin, a high cwm held in Shivling’s arms. But the sun once again had softened the snow that now clung to the steep icy slopes barring our way to the crest of the ridge. Another good reason for an early halt. We dug out a platform for the tent and settled down to a lazy afternoon.
We had gained about 300 metres and crept up into the freezing zone. The following morning the snow was iron hard. Crampons bit reassuringly and we were able to make fast easy progress across the bottom snow slope, choosing runnels of snow between the fingers of granite and hard black ice that ran down from the rocky cock’s comb above.
The sun had already tipped Shivling’s summit, lighting it with a golden sheen that now dropped quickly down its flanks. It was a race, for that sun with its rich strength-giving warmth would also soften the snow that provided our path to the ridge. It touched the crest of an arête just beside us, racing its thawing, melting fingers down the slope, but we had been cunning and had chosen a runnel that was protected from its rays for just a little longer. Jim was out in front, picking his way up the still-hard snow, reaching for the start of the rocks that would give us safe passage to the ridge.
The sun had now reached us but we were nearly there. The rock was already warm to the touch. It was grey granite, rough under hand, revealing cracks and holds as I clambered those last few feet to the crest. The view opened out. We could now gaze across the Gangotri Glacier to the Bhagirathi peaks and could see beyond them an endless vista of shapely jagged mountains. Time for a brew. We lay back on a rocky ledge absorbing the morning sun while the stove roared beneath a panful of snow. Soaring upwards, the ridges swept in a crescent towards the summit some 700 metres above. It was all rock, yet such a light grey that it was almost indistinguishable from the snow. The concave curve meant that we could see all the way to the top. The start looked comparatively easy-angled, comprising great blocks, dovetailed together, piled like gigantic building bricks in a crazy staircase towards the summit.
We climbed carrying our sacks, running out pitch after pitch under a cloudless sky, until in the late afternoon we reached the crest of a huge boulder. It was like a flying buttress leaning against the main structure of the mountain. Ahead the angle steepened; the rock appeared to be more compact and the way less obvious. It was a good place to stop for our third night. There was some ice down behind the boulder and I dug this out for our evening drink. We didn’t bother to put up the tent but found two level areas on to which we would curl in our sleeping bags, tied ourselves on and dropped off to sleep in the dusk.
I was woken by the wind. A great cloud was blanking out the starlit sky. Suddenly our situation seemed threatening. I woke Jim and we decided we had better erect the tent. In the confusion of doing this in the dark I dropped my head torch. It slithered crazily down a wide crack at the back of the chimney. But the storm didn’t materialise. The following morning there was no trace of cloud. We waited for the sun to warm the tent before starting to cook, made a leisured breakfast and got away from our bivouac spot by eight o’clock.
Now the rock was steeper, the holds smaller. The sack was too serious an encumbrance for the leader, so whoever was out in front left his behind. We tried hauling the sack but the angle was too easy. So it kept jamming and was being torn to bits by the sharp rock. We therefore devised a system by which the leader anchored the rope on completing each pitch, abseiled back down to pick up his sack and then jumared back up to his high point, followed by the second who would also remove any nuts or pitons. It was a slow and tiring process.
The ridge was flattening out into little more than a rounded buttress, losing itself in the upper part of the South-East Face. The rock was becoming more compact, there were few cracks and the holds were becoming increasingly round
ed. It was my turn to lead. I couldn’t get in any runners and was faced with a move that would have been very difficult to reverse. I couldn’t afford a fall.
I retreated, picked out the line of least resistance, and made a long traverse on to the face, over easy-angled but smooth slabs, for a full rope-length. Jim followed, leaving his rucksack behind. We planned to abseil back down to rescue them both once we had completed our dogleg. It took us two hours to get back on to the crest of the ridge about thirty metres above our starting point. The morning had slipped away. The rock was now more broken but pitch followed pitch towards the crown of a small spur. We were becoming worried about a water supply. We needed snow but the rock had been bare for some time. We found some ice in the back of a crack on the crest of the spur, enough for a few brews, but it was hardly a luxury bivouac spot. There was barely room for both of us to sit down, yet it would have to do, for there seemed neither ledges nor snow above us.
It was only three in the afternoon, so we resolved to run out our two rope-lengths before trying to construct a bivouac site. It was my turn to lead up a rocky prow that was rich in holds, but above the ridge merged once again with the face in a steepening of slabs. Jim set off following a series of grooves. The cracks were blind, the holds sparse and his progress slow and hesitant. All I could do was watch the rope and gaze at the clouds boiling over the high walls of Meru and Kedarnath. Big thunderheads were forming to the west. Could this be a break in the weather, and, if there were a storm, how would we fare on the last of our rations, with the choice of a desperate retreat or smooth difficult rock above, leading to unknown ground on the other side of the mountain? I glanced across the face to the east. We were below the level of the col between the two summits and must be at least 200 metres from the top.
The Everest Years Page 19