Home from Everest, Wendy and I drew closer. The memory of those bitter nights at high altitude, the stress and worry of a big expedition were fresh enough to make me welcome the warmth and domesticity of family life. The months of my absence, with two young sons aged five and three, had also driven Wendy to her limit. As our attempt had pushed towards winter, doubts about our fate and then news of Tony’s death had taken their toll on her morale. The final straw was a female journalist with television crew appearing in our little front garden just as Wendy was taking Joe to school. She always struggled with the more intrusive elements of the media; close to breaking point, she turned on her heel and fled back inside. The journalist pursued Wendy up the garden and literally stuck a foot in the door when she tried to close it. Wendy collapsed in tears, close to breaking point.
What kept her sane through my long absence in 1972 was a mixture of meditation and weekends at Badger Hill, the little cottage in the Lake District we’d bought the year before. It nestled at the foot of High Pike, a rounded hill forming the north-eastern bastion of the Lake District’s Northern Fells, just to the south of Caldbeck, a deeply traditional Cumbrian village. The huntsman John Peel is buried in the churchyard. A winding lane leads up onto the open fell-side where two farmhouses crouch to one side and on the far edge, part-hidden by a young ash and overgrown hawthorn, stands a low slate-roofed cottage. Its secluded garden, knee-high in unkempt grass when we first saw it, is still a haven. There was a warmth and serenity about the place.
Neither of us much enjoyed living in the suburbs. Bowdon, with its big Edwardian houses, had a rather melancholy feel. While there was open country within walking distance, the rivers were polluted and you were never free from the noise of traffic. I would often say grandly that you should never become too attached to a house: it didn’t really matter where you lived. Perhaps that came from the sudden changes of address I experienced as a boy. But while I had the promise of the next adventure just round the corner, Wendy had no such escape. She felt trapped somewhere she didn’t belong, removed from the network of friends she had spent years building. It’s only now, with the hindsight of fifty years, that I have come to realize how obsessed I was with my passion for climbing and my own career – and how lucky I was with Wendy’s unselfish love.
We were at Badger Hill that Easter after Everest. Working in the garden, I thought about packing up that evening and the tedious drive south. My heart sank. It felt like such an anticlimax. Before I had time to think about it, an idea popped out of my mouth.
‘You know, love, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t live up here, is there?’
Wendy hadn’t allowed herself to imagine us living back in the Lakes full-time. But she was delighted. At first we considered finding somewhere bigger but the atmosphere at Badger Hill had soaked into our bones. With a little bit of imagination we could extend the cottage sympathetically. We would spend the rest of our lives together nestled on the side of our hill: so much for not caring where I lived.
Even though I didn’t have a big expedition on the horizon, I was full of plans. That summer Nick Estcourt and I climbed in Kishtwar, at the invitation of Narendra ‘Bull’ Kumar. Located in Jammu and Kashmir, Kishtwar, like other parts of the Indian Himalaya, was closed to foreigners so it was a golden opportunity. Our objective was a peak called Brammah and we drew on information provided by exploratory expeditions led by a young doctor, Charlie Clarke. Among the Indian contingent was an army colonel called Balwant Sandhu; both would become close friends. Nick had been a great friend on the big expeditions I’d organized and I’d come to rely on him. He was always prepared to do the awkward jobs that no one else would do or else would do badly. Brammah was far more relaxed, more like an Alpine holiday, and we snatched the summit on our second attempt in a spell of bad weather.
The following year I had another invitation to a remote Indian peak, this time to the Garhwal, close to the western Nepali border. Changabang is a beautiful tooth of white granite almost 7,000 metres high that I had come across as a boy in the writings of W. H. Murray. Tom Longstaff, another great explorer from before the Great War, called it the ‘most superbly beautiful mountain I had ever seen’. The region it lies in is just as beautiful, with Alpine pastures and fir trees that remained remote for much of the twentieth century. Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman had explored nearby Nanda Devi from the west, unlocking a route via the Rishi Gorge to the beautiful flower-filled sanctuary at its foot. Travelling as co-leader of a joint Indian and British expedition, I now had the chance to follow in their footsteps.
Arriving in Delhi, I met my Indian co-leader, Balwant Sandhu, who commanded a battalion of paratroopers. First impressions were of a caricature pre-war British Army officer, a tall and dignified man with a keenly intelligent face and rather hooded eyes. In fact, Balwant, known to everyone as Balu, was a free spirit, liberal and highly cultured, one of five farmer’s sons from outside Lahore. He was obsessed with mountains and became a great servant of Indian mountaineering. Balu wanted Indian alpinists to learn more about technical climbing and lightweight expeditions.
Balwant introduced me to his team, including Tashi Chewang Sherpa, who had got to know Tom Frost when Tom and Tashi had been involved in a secret CIA operation to place a listening device on a ridgeline of Nanda Devi. Tashi had carried its small atomic-energy power pack, called a ‘SNAP’ generator. (‘Very heavy but it kept me warm and went bleep-bleep,’ he told us.) I introduced the Indians to the other British climbers: Dougal Haston, Doug Scott and Martin Boysen. Travelling with us was Alan Hankinson, who had been on Annapurna as the man from ITN. He normally did the obituaries, appearing alongside Reginald Bosanquet when someone notable died. (‘Yes, my dears,’ he told us. ‘You’re all on file.’) ‘Hank’ would be collating our stories for an expedition book.
I felt much happier and certainly more relaxed as part of a small team than on a big expedition – and we had a great deal to discuss. In the autumn of 1973, a Japanese team had made another attempt on the south-west face of Everest. As before, they also had a team trying via the South Col. Their attempt on the face failed in roughly the same place that we had, but they did succeed in reaching the summit on the normal route. For the first time, Everest had been climbed after the monsoon. Then, that December, I heard a Canadian expedition with permission to climb during the post-monsoon in 1975 had withdrawn. I wasn’t immediately sure whether I could face another Everest expedition but the idea of a lightweight ascent hadn’t gone away. After a few days, I put in my application. When I arrived at the Officers’ Club in Delhi, there was a telegram for me. I had my permit.
Walking up the Rishi gorge and exploring the Rahmani glacier, looking for a route up Changabang, the conversation turned to Everest. Travelling with such a small group reminded me of what fun it was. I was still attracted to the idea of a small group trying the standard route without all the heavy logistics. On top of that, raising money for the 1972 attempt had been a nerve-racking experience. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through that again. Doug and Dougal, on the other hand, were keen to solve the riddle of the rock band. ‘You couldn’t just walk past the south-west face,’ Dougal said. ‘Anything else would seem second best.’ I knew he was right, but said that if we were going back, then it would only happen if I could find a single sponsor.
Our expedition to Changabang proved a great success. We thought of attempting the west face, the route eventually climbed by Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker, but it looked too hard for our mixed party and anyway, the mountain was unclimbed. It made sense to find the easiest way up. So we found a route over the Shipton Col and relocated to the Changabang glacier, below the peak’s south face, part of the inner sanctum of the Nanda Devi Sanctuary. Bad weather kept us tent-bound for three days but the skies cleared just as we were running out of food. We left our high camp at two in the morning and reached the summit after a fourteen-hour push.
Dougal and Doug, the advanced guard, were sitting in the snow when I arrived at the top. The view from the ridge, bathed in evening light, was stunning, the Tibetan plateau stretching endlessly to the northern horizon. ‘We’ve decided that this is the summit,’ Dougal said with his usual pragmatism. I looked across at the other summit, a hundred yards away. I was sure it was higher. ‘We can’t claim this,’ I told him.
Dougal looked exasperated. ‘Bloody hell, I’ll go and do it myself.’ Martin and I agreed to go down with the two Indians, Balwant and Tashi, while Doug and Dougal carried on. They had caught us up before we’d descended a quarter of the way.
Back in England, Wendy was happier and more relaxed than I had ever known her to be after one of my long absences, despite spending seven weeks in a caravan with the boys while Badger Hill was being refurbished. The weather had been perfect and she couldn’t have been closer to the quiet beauty of our environment. Joe and Rupert were settling in well at their new school. The house was still not finished, but it didn’t really matter. We both could now let ourselves gently take root in our quiet corner of the Lakes.
Our first houseguest was Pertemba, one of the strongest Sherpas supporting our Everest climb two years before. It was a delight having him to stay and getting to know him better. Now in his mid-twenties, Pertemba had been one of the first Sherpas to benefit from an education at the school in Khumjung that Ed Hillary had built. Taking the chances offered them with both hands, the younger Sherpas employed in mountaineering were starting to take much more control of their working lives. I took Pertemba climbing on the Lake District crags and he played patiently with Joe and Rupert, even helping me lay out a new lawn. When he came to leave, I knew we had the foundation for an enduring friendship. I also knew he would be a powerful force in our attempt on Everest.
Funding the expedition had been the issue that made me hesitate most in trying again. Yet it proved almost childishly easy. George Greenfield knew I might be going back to Everest, but only as a small team at a cost of around £12,000. He flinched when I told him we now needed around £100,000, but he had powerful friends, one of whom, Alan Tritton, was a director of Barclays. Alan had sat on the organizing committees of several notable expeditions over the years, including that of Sir Vivian Fuchs across Antarctica. George suggested I meet him. A week later, I was ushered into his Pall Mall office and I showed him my plans. He was friendly but non-committal and I went home to the caravan to write an article on Changabang to help pay off the last expedition.
Then I got the news that Barclays were going to back us. It seemed a miracle. I will always be grateful to Alan Tritton for putting forward our case, and to the chairman Anthony Tuke for making the decision. Tuke had a reputation for going with his gut instinct, supporting my theory that when large companies support such enterprises it’s because the project caught the imagination of someone very senior. The commercial justification usually comes later. Tuke’s general managers had recently turned down his wish to back a cricket tournament and the story goes they didn’t dare turn him down again.
Despite their confidence in the expedition, I suspect Barclays were shaken by the voices of dissent questioning the wisdom of supporting such a quixotic project during a time of economic hardship. This was 1974, the year of the three-day week and stagflation, so the notion that a major bank was paying for a group of hairy mountaineers to go on holiday was intolerable to some. There were letters in the press from disgruntled customers and the Labour politician John Lee threatened to ask a question in Parliament. Closer to home, Ken Wilson, from his pulpit in Mountain magazine, asked about the wisdom of spending that much money on an expedition with so little chance of success.
In fact, Barclays hadn’t given us the money: they had, from their advertising budget, underwritten loans to the expedition, to be recouped from sales of the expedition book, lectures and television rights. As it turned out, Barclays got their money back, although of course they weren’t to know that and I might have got my sums wrong. Their support was a key factor in the expedition’s success. Whether the expenditure was justified is impossible to judge. All I can say is that over the years thousands of people have told me that following the expedition, through the papers or on television, or else reading our accounts, has brought them a lot of pleasure and perhaps a little inspiration as well.
First on the agenda was finding a secretary. I knew very few people locally, so I put an advert in the Cumberland News. By great coincidence, Louise Wilson had known my mother, having worked at the same advertising agency, but had then applied to be secretary to Lester Davis, head of Ullswater Outward Bound School to be closer to the outdoors. There she met her husband Gerald, the chief instructor. Since then she’d been a secretary at BBC Radio Cumbria. She was incisive and efficient, yet also had a twinkle in her eye. She warned me that she could be bossy: I hired her immediately, without even asking for references. She stayed for twenty-five years and she and Gerry became dear friends to all of us.
I’ve been immensely lucky over the years with my back-up team. Margaret Trinder took over from Louise in 2000, though she had worked part-time a year or so earlier than that, so knew the job. She was a wonderful PA: very thorough, unflappable with a great telephone manner and a quiet sense of humour, finally retiring in December 2015 well into her seventies and handing over to Jude Beveridge. Frances Daltrey took over my picture library, which Wendy had started to get in order in 1988. She has done an amazing job organizing slides and taking us into the digital age. They all became very much part of the family.
Having the money from Barclays in place so quickly gave me a year to plan the expedition, compared to the eight weeks of the 1972 attempt. I could afford not to cut corners. More importantly, we had hard-won experience of the route itself and what it would take to climb it. I narrowed my focus on three main problems: time, or rather the lack of it, before winter set in; getting enough supplies to the high camps and, perhaps most importantly of all, our choice of route. The Japanese expedition of 1973 had arrived at base camp on 25 August, the date in 1972 our team had left Kathmandu to start the trek. We had arrived at base camp on 8 September, a fortnight later. The advantage the Japanese had enjoyed seemed to outweigh the risks. As for logistics, the answer was more support climbers and Sherpas. In 1972 there were times when we had needed to delay our progress in order to build up supplies at a lower camp. We’d had six lead climbers and five in support. In 1975, after juggling numbers, I came up with a figure of eight of each, totalling sixteen. Still not convinced, I later added two more.
When it came to the route, the argument was all about where to cross the rock band. The 1969 Japanese reconnaissance and the 1970 attempt had focused on the left-hand side, aiming for the deep-cut gully I had looked at on my way down in 1972. In the spring season, this had been much more awkward, with the threat of falling rocks. The four subsequent expeditions had moved to the rock band’s right-hand end. From there, as Don Whillans had seen, it was possible to make a long traverse rightwards to join the southeast ridge or climb the snowy gully Dougal had spotted in the spring of 1971. Yet we discovered in 1972 this gully was stripped of snow post-monsoon. Doug and I agreed that trying to the right was a blind alley; we should try instead to climb the deep-set gully on the left. Even better, we could climb it from camp five, speeding up our progress and boosting morale. For the first time, thanks to Ian McNaught-Davis and his company Comshare, I had access to a computer to run through the logistical permutations; it appeared that establishing more than six camps would be beyond us.
We already had a core of experienced high-altitude climbers who knew each other well. Dougal was the likely arrowhead of the expedition, having been twice to the south-west face. Doug seemed a good partner for him. Martin Boysen was a natural choice, perhaps not as single-minded as the first two, but he had that strong drive to do great things, despite the laid-back manner. Nick Estcourt and Graham Tiso had been down to come on the lightweight Everest attempt I had originally conceived but Graham wouldn’t come for the south-west face. I understood his decision. In 1972 he had carried the burden of organizing equipment and carried loads to camp five in support of the lead climbers. The lightweight attempt had offered him a chance of the summit. Dave Bathgate, who had worked so hard to push the route out to camp six in 1972, also withdrew, with plans for a small expedition to a lower peak.
Hamish MacInnes, among my oldest friends, agreed to come as deputy leader. If Don was a genius at equipment design, Hamish was the ultimate engineer. As well as overseeing our oxygen equipment, he created a new series of box tents to withstand the savage storms that had wrecked our camps in 1972. I think at first Hamish doubted our chances but the lure of Everest proved too much, and as he got deeper into his work, his pessimism dissipated. The same was true for Mick Burke: ‘I mean, just think how ropey you’d feel if someone got to the top this time and you weren’t mixed up in it?’ Mick’s position was complicated: having trained as a cameraman he was now working for the BBC. Did he want to go as a filmmaker who climbed, or a full member of the team but carrying a camera? He chose to be a climber and in the years since I have often wondered about that decision.
One of the remaining two places went to a friend of Doug’s, Paul Braithwaite, known universally as Tut and one of the leading alpinists of his generation. A former art student, Tut had dropped out to go climbing, working as a painter and decorator to pay the bills. Tall and willowy, he was a naturally talented rock climber, with plenty of hard first ascents, but had also recently climbed at altitude in the Pamirs. We soon became good friends and over the years I have developed a great respect for his judgement. The other new boy was Peter Boardman, at only twenty-three something of a stripling for an Everest expedition. Despite his years, Pete already had a highly successful expedition to the Hindu Kush under his belt, climbing the north face of Koh-i-Mondi, a peak that’s almost 7,000 metres high. I was immediately struck by his maturity and obvious strength.
There were other key roles to fill. Jimmy Roberts was struggling with a bad hip and was happy for me to ask his deputy Mike Cheney if he would fill the role of our man in Nepal. I’d known Mike for years. A former Gurkha, he had retired to take up tea-planting in India only to be diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was given two months to live, and so, resolving to get the most from life, drove to Nepal in his Land Rover in defiance of his doctors. Like Francis Chichester, he defied his diagnosis and, finding himself still alive, got a job working for Jimmy. Mike, a fluent Nepali speaker, would manage base camp and recommended another Gurkha, Adrian Gordon, to manage camp two in the Western Cwm.
Replacing Graham Tiso was another priority. Thankfully, I recalled that an old friend of mine, Dave Clarke, had written to me just before the 1972 attempt offering his services as an unpaid Sherpa. Dave was a civil engineer I’d known since the early 1960s; we’d climbed together in the Lakes and shared adventures in the Alps. Having worked at a quarry in the Lakes for a few years, he’d left his profession to open a climbing shop in Leeds. He seemed the ideal person to take on Graham’s role but it was a huge job, equipping not just the eighteen climbers of various kinds, but thirty-eight high-altitude porters, thirty icefall porters, four BBC crew, a Sunday Times journalist and various base camp personnel.
Finding more support climbers was a challenge. It meant asking strong mountaineers to make an intense effort with no chance of going to the top. Happily, Mike Thompson couldn’t resist and agreed to the mammoth task of organizing twelve weeks’ food for a hundred people. Doug suggested Ronnie Richards, a climber he had met in the Pamirs who lived in Keswick near me, a suggestion endorsed by Graham Tiso. When Graham also said: ‘You must have Allen Fyffe,’ I agreed, somewhat impulsively, creating for myself a small problem, since Allen was very much a lead climber, being among the best ice specialists in Scotland. Barclays also had their own man along, an easy-going, enthusiastic young rock climber called Mike Rhodes.
Barney Rosedale, our doctor in 1972, now had a practice in Marlborough and a second child on the way. To fill his place, I invited Charlie Clarke, a very different character from Barney. At first I thought him almost too smooth, a registrar neurologist at Barts with boyish good looks and an elegant house in Islington. So much for appearances: Charlie proved himself on Everest with his steady strength of character and professional judgement. At the suggestion of Sir Jack Longland, one of our committee members, I also brought along a second doctor, asking Jim Duff, with a strong recommendation from both Doug and Mick, already working in Nepal.
Working backwards from our start date in late August, we needed to arrive in Nepal in late July. Mike Cheney warned us that to be safe, we should get all the equipment and supplies to Kathmandu in early May, before the monsoon. I opted for the overland route, finding support from my friend Bob Stoodley, who ran a garage group in Manchester. Through him we hired two sixteen-ton trucks at nominal rent. With Ronnie’s help, he plotted his way through all the problems of documentation.
In early April, at a chilly warehouse in Leeds, a dedicated team of volunteer scouts helped us sort forty tonnes of equipment and supplies for the mountain into weather-proof sixty-pound loads, the maximum a porter could carry to base camp, and packed them into standard-sized boxes. My long-suffering secretary Louise spent an entire night typing out the manifest and on 9 April the two lorries rolled out of the warehouse on their way to Nepal with Bob, Ronnie and two professional drivers on board. They reached Kathmandu in twenty-four days, having driven 7,000 miles. The loads were flown to Lukla and carried to Kunde, the Sherpa village above Namche Bazaar, to be stored in a barn.
With so much done in advance, I found myself in a much stronger state of mind when we arrived in Kathmandu, partly because I knew Wendy was better placed to cope with my absence. A week into the expedition, and walking towards Everest, I wrote to Louise: ‘So far so good – Mike Cheney has done a wonderful job of the organization out here and our Sherpa cook is ace . . . It’s all much more relaxing than last time. This is good, for when the going gets rough, as it surely will, I think I shall have the reserves to cope.’
Things immediately got rougher. I came down with my usual early-expedition flu and then got a letter from Wendy quoting excerpts from Keith Richardson’s first dispatch for the Sunday Times. It made awkward reading. According to Keith, some of the team felt we were ‘over-organized’ and our logistical planning would crumble under the pressures of the mountain. ‘If [Bonington’s] team fails it will be a long time before British climbers organize on this scale again.’ He wondered whether the team was too experienced and if the youngsters, Tut and Pete, might ‘waltz up and embarrass the old sweats’. Finally, he asked why Mick Burke got the best girls, a distressing thing for Beth to read, waiting at home for news of her husband. Wendy wrote: ‘God knows how one can give a bloke a crash course in tact and sensitivity . . . Beth is so vulnerable at the moment, she was really taken aback and very upset. It gives a poor bloody impression of the expedition that has cost so much – George [Greenfield] is very unhappy about it all.’
Keith was a forthright Yorkshireman and his blunt refusal to show anyone his articles rather alienated the team. I found myself caught in the middle, but events overtook the problem. Keith failed to acclimatize well and Charlie Clarke became increasingly anxious about him as he struggled to breathe while sitting down in the medical tent to bash out his articles. (‘My skin was turning blue . . .’ was the pull-quote from his last article.) An examination of his eyes, a new diagnostic procedure in those days, revealed retinal haemorrhages. Keith’s expedition was over.
Managing a large group of highly individualistic climbers was undoubtedly a challenge, one I sometimes failed to meet. Doug told a BBC team that there was a hierarchical element to the expedition, of ‘them, the leaders, the foremen, bosses, and us’. A decision I took to split the team didn’t help. This was simply a method of keeping the trekking party to a manageable size, particularly at meal times. ‘Perhaps unwisely,’ Mike Thompson wrote, ‘[Chris] labelled these the A team and the B team.’ A lot was read into how the climbers were split: was the summit team with me planning the final assault? Or, as Mike described, were the two groups divided between ‘chaps’ and ‘lads’?
The truth was a little more mundane; mostly I had with me those who were in charge of different aspects of the approach to base camp: Mike Cheney, our Sherpa co-ordinator and base camp manager; Pertemba, the expedition sirdar; Dave Clarke, our equipment organizer. On the other hand, I did try to split up good friends on the approach so that all the climbers could get to know each other. And I was thinking ahead of different pairings. Dougal and Nick were superb climbers who in theory could make a strong summit pair but their temperaments weren’t complementary. ‘Tut,’ as I told my diary, ‘is a very easy-going kind of person, I think he’d get on well with Nick; they’ve climbed together before.’ I fretted about whether Hamish still had ambitions for the summit and what Dougal thought about that. Doug’s drive and strength were immense but his personality was equally strong. Dougal, I thought, wouldn’t be worried about that. ‘By getting the team as big as this,’ I told my diary, ‘I have given myself the reserves I felt that I needed, but at the same time this means that those reserves will be sitting around at times and that I can have idle hands . . . this is something I’m going to have to try to watch the whole time.’
I relied heavily on Wendy’s letters, which were full of support and love without ever glossing over news from home that might worry me. ‘The big double bed has felt very empty as I’ve got into it each night – but twice in the early hours a small Rupert-sized body has been sidling in saying he’s had bad dreams or was scared – I suppose it might well be a bit of a subconscious reaction to your disappearance.’ She was a great support in practical ways too, managing the reels of film arriving back from Nepal, and acting as a liaison for the wives and girlfriends of the team.
More than a week after reaching base camp, I could record in my diary that ‘so far we’re up to schedule and the thing seems to be running well. And when it’s running well, it’s very satisfying and when things start going wrong it can be very nerve-racking indeed.’ I was delighted with Adrian Gordon, who had taken on managing camp two. He was incredibly steady and intelligent. Mike Cheney, whose health was always fragile after his struggle with cancer, was a tough old bird, highly intelligent and full of compassion. Pertemba made sure that the inevitable problems with his team of Sherpas didn’t get out of hand.
On 13 September, two days before we’d even arrived at base camp in 1972, Dougal reached the site of camp five, our jumping-off point for the rock band. I had come to rely on his shrewd mountain judgement, and the tents were located in a sheltered spot on the right of the main gully, just before the traverse left to the crux of the route, the deep-set gully. A few days later I moved up to camp five and stayed there for eight days, sharing with Doug the job of pushing the route up to the rock band. Leading from the front had its advantages but there were problems too: Ronnie Richards, a qualified electrical engineer, looked on in amusement as I shook a malfunctioning radio set, yelling into the mouthpiece, before taking it off me and patiently restoring it to full working order.
While Tut and Nick moved up to tackle the rock band, Mick and I followed behind with loads of rope for them to fix. It proved one of the crucial days of the expedition. The route was like a Scottish gully in winter, curving up between sheer walls of black rock, spindrift cascading down the walls. Tut was in the lead, his first obstacle a huge chockstone smothered in snow. It would have been easy at sea level, but at 8,300 metres it was a desperate, lung-bursting fight. Above, the gully steepened, and Tut was perched on a narrow rocky gangway when his oxygen ran out. Tearing at his mask, on the verge of falling, a warm trickle flowing down his trouser leg, he clawed his way to a resting spot and took a belay a hundred feet above Nick. Had he fallen, he would most likely have died.
Tut had stopped where the gully widened slightly and a fork led off to the right beneath a leaning yellow wall of rock. Nick had also now run out of oxygen and Mick and I were too befuddled to offer him ours. Instead, he gasped his way up the ramp, constantly thrown out of balance, using every inch of skill and experience to fight his way up, goggles misting up, panting helplessly. He brushed snow off a rocky lump with his fingers and hung on, refusing to give up, even though we feared watching from below that he might fall. For Nick, this was his summit and he wasn’t going to admit defeat. Between them, Tut and Nick solved the crux of the route.
Dougal and Doug were at camp five when we got back, ready to establish the top camp above the rock band. I now had decisions to make and I announced a rest day before the final push. That night and the following morning I pondered the expedition’s future. I had decided Doug and Dougal, obviously my most talented pair, should make the first summit bid but hadn’t told them in case they weren’t going well. Originally, I’d planned on just two attempts, but thanks to good weather, our strong team and excellent logistics, we were now in a position for two teams of four to try after Dougal and Doug. They weren’t getting it on a plate. The day after moving up to camp six, I asked them to fix a line of rope across the snowfield towards the South Summit to safeguard their return and give subsequent bids a greater chance of success. The day after that would be their chance.
It was now that my team selection proved most difficult: I had too many lead climbers anxious for a chance at the summit. Nick and Tut certainly deserved their chance, but they were still recovering from the rock band, so I put them in the third summit team with Ang Phurba. It was important that there was at least one Sherpa on each team, to reward their immense effort, leaving four places for the other lead climbers. Mick Burke was with me at camp five and had earned his chance. Allen Fyffe hadn’t acclimatized well. Hamish had inhaled a lot of powder snow in an avalanche, and I felt he wasn’t capable. That left Pete Boardman and Martin Boysen, and I announced on the radio at the two o’clock radio call that these two would join Mick Burke and Pertemba on the next team. I would take the fourth spot on the third team, with Tut, Nick and Ang Phurba. I switched off the radio and spent the afternoon dozing, resting for the next day’s effort.
When I finished the routine afternoon call, Pertemba took the radio and issued instructions to his Sherpa team. Instead of signing off, he told me Charlie wanted to talk, but later and privately. In his reassuring bedside voice, Charlie suggested that from my slurred speech and sometimes muddled sentences it was likely I had spent too long at altitude and should reconsider my position on the third summit team. Then he put Hamish on. My old friend’s clipped Scottish voice crackled through the receiver: ‘I’ve decided to go home, Chris.’ I was shocked but understood his decision. Leaving him out of the summit teams had been a blow. Hamish had done so much for the expedition, keeping the team safe through the icefall and with his strong box tents on the face. I didn’t think Charlie was right that I was becoming muddled; I’d just done some of the most complex logistical planning of my life. But it would be another seven days before the third summit bid, and that was too long. I could do more for the expedition at advance base, so I decided to give up my place to Ronnie Richards. I also spoke to Mick who was facing the same problem, but he said he was fine and determined to stay to film their ascent.
The following morning, on 22 September, eight of us set out for camp six, Doug and Dougal going ahead, the rest of us – Ang Phurba, dressed only in ski pants and sweater, just behind the lead pair, Mick, myself, Pertemba, Mike Thompson and Tenzing – carrying the equipment and oxygen they would need for the summit. It was a great effort from Mike, far in excess of what he had expected of himself. For me too, there was a great feeling of fulfilment. I had played my part and now it was up to Dougal and Doug. Back in camp two on 24 September, trying to follow their progress through the telescope, there was nothing more I could do. We last saw them late in the evening on the little col between the south and main summits, still going up. Lying awake with worry in my tent, I kept the radio on through the night and felt huge when, at nine next morning, it finally burst into life and Doug reported their success. They had survived the highest bivouac in history, sheltering in a snow cave, and were somehow unscathed. Very few climbers would have endured what they had.
The joy was short-lived. The second summit team reached camp six that day and set off the following morning for the summit. Martin turned back with malfunctioning oxygen equipment but Pertemba and Pete Boardman reached the summit at one o’clock. They assumed Mick had returned to camp six with Martin so were amazed to meet him just above the Hillary Step as they descended. Mick even tried to persuade them to come back to the top so he could film them. They agreed instead that Pete and Pertemba would wait at the south summit. I’m sure Mick made it to the top, but by four-thirty he still hadn’t returned. A storm was brewing, growing stronger by the minute. Daylight would soon begin to fade. Pete and Pertemba were dangerously exposed. If they had waited any longer they would most likely have perished. It seems likely that Mick stepped through a cornice on his way down from the top.
The storm raged through the whole of next day and while I clung to the remote chance that Mick – cocky, funny, exasperating Mick – might return, in my heart I knew he was dead. Another expedition had ended with tragedy right at the end. There was now no justification for a third attempt. Despite our grief, despite wondering if I should have been firmer with him, knowing how hard he had pushed himself, I couldn’t deny the real satisfaction the whole team felt at our success. Even our most ardent supporters had given us only a fifty-fifty chance. Mick himself would have revelled in it. Any division in the expedition, what Mike Thompson had called the ‘underground and overground’, had long since disappeared. The most complex, demanding but rewarding organizational challenge I would ever face was over.
