ALEX: The first acclimatization climb wrought havoc with our team. Within a minute of leaving the Advance Camp Nick was ill, bringing up his breakfast. Fifteen minutes up our small rocky valley, below a steep snow and boulder slope that led up to the plateau 50 metres above, we stopped and waited for him to join us. The first major crisis was about to explode. White and ashen, Nick was approaching in slow zigzag up the incline, picking a forlorn path amongst rocks and snow patches, dictating a pace at which we could not expect to spend the next night – even should we care to – more than an hour above our Advance Camp. At these altitudes, illness is extremely debilitating and recovery difficult. The body is quickly drained of all reserves, exhausted, activity eats into the very soul. Nick was already higher than he had ever been before, and now the pace dictated by our acclimatization programme was presenting him with a hopeless task under a heavy rucksack. Fundamentally, Nick had not logged enough hours slogging through Scottish bogs in winter blizzards, lumbering through the frantic, non-stop 24-hour exhaustion of the Alps, to lend any foundation to the initial optimism that, somehow, it would ‘be all right on the night’.
Like a pack of pursued wolves with a badly wounded mate, the experienced climbers smelt the inevitable ‘Nick’s had it’. To go on was exhaustingly pointless. Any one of us would have cut loose and lost altitude as quickly as possible, but for Nick it was not such a simple choice, for he did not have the experience to be able to contemplate shaking the illness and catching up with our progress independently. Once he turned around he would be out of the reckoning with no partner with whom to attempt the lesser peaks, yet the more he tried to push on the more irrecoverable would be his exhaustion and the greater our lack of progress.
Cold calculations worked back from the recesses in my mind: how many days would it take to reach that goal, and how many more days did we have? We were hoping for four days away on this trip with three days’ rest afterwards, five out on the next with another three days’ rest, and all-told, the Face would, with luck, consume a week. Twenty-two days, which put us on to 26 May without any allowance for a particularly bad patch of weather or illness in the camp, and our acclimatization programme was already quite ambitious. In my mind it all added up to going now, and going without those unable to sustain the pace. Nick reached us.
‘How’re you doing, Nick?’
‘Not so well.’
We remained for another couple of minutes and then moved off, up the steep slope above, to wait once again at the top.
‘That slope will kill him.’
‘I wonder if he realizes we don’t normally acclimatize at this pace?’
Roger and I pushed on for another 10 minutes over a small, flat, snowy plateau and up on to some more moraine above, where we sat and waited again, hoping to show that Nick was dictating the pace and that we were not in the habit of making such frequent stops. The sun was strong today. From our boulder, looking back over the way we had come, we could see down the valley where we had struggled with the yaks and, beyond that, the Himalayan ranges to our east, Gauri Sankar and Menlungtse, a Tolkienesque beauty so shapely from that angle that an accurate painter would have been accused of misrepresentation. Tired of the waiting after nearly half an hour, Roger left his rucksack and descended to see what now was causing the long delay. A little later Elaine appeared at the top of the slope and came over to join me.
‘What’s happening?’
Elaine said little, sensing the cold edge in me and the sympathy towards it by the majority. How long before this self-made argument would revolve over her head?
Another 20 minutes passed until finally two more figures appeared, Doug and Paul, ‘Looking-Glass’ characters, the gentle, shuffling bear and the emaciated, strutting turkey, deep in conference.
‘What’s up?’
Paul told me that he and Doug had had a long chat with Nick. Not having been well that morning he would have liked a day’s rest but was unwilling to ask for it. ‘He won’t get very far, he’s knackered.’
‘Yes, but how far?’ I was looking at Doug. ‘Look, this is fast becoming ridiculous. It’s obvious that Nick’s had it, we haven’t got the time, we’re on a bloody tight schedule and at this rate of travel we are only going to get to the edge of the glacier today. A day’s walk, an hour’s progress, we may as well go back to Advance Base for supper! And anyway, you know how stubborn Nick is, if he was dead he’d only admit to a slight limp.’
‘Look, Alex, just relax and give him some time to sort this out for himself, let him make the decision.’ It was Doug.
Roger came into view, carrying a rucksack, and then Nick, unburdened, meandering, almost stumbling, painfully slowly in our direction, like an actor trying to imitate the last steps of an exhausted person lost in a blizzard but without the props. When he reached us no one seemed willing to say anything, but the sight of Roger carrying the sack was, for me, the final straw. If it must be me, then so be it.
‘Nick, as far as I’m concerned you’ve had it, you might as well go down now.’
He told me about his stomach, how all he needed was another day.
‘Nick, you’re just clutching at straws. You don’t have all the years of slog necessary. I’m sorry, but charity ends at 5,000 metres.’
I thought back to the same argument underneath Makalu the previous spring, when a friend had slowed perceptibly and fallen behind. Then, on a barren moraine, I had shouted to a colleague: ‘Look, you stupid Pole, give him a couple more hours!’
That time it had been me demanding time for a friend, but I knew him well enough to realize that he would have already reached his decision; he only had to catch us up to tell us. With Nick, I sensed too much optimism, too little grasp of what I saw as reality. What about the others?
‘What do you think, Paul?’
Unknown to me, Paul was on the verge of a shattering decision of his own. He agreed with me; charity did end at five thousand metres.
‘Roger?’
‘Well, I agree with you but Nick’s got to reach his own decision.’
‘Bloody hell, Roger! Don’t be such a bloody amateur. These are mountains you know. They kill people.’
ELAINE: I looked down the valley; wisps of cloud filtered between the peaks, the distant ranges were blue and hazy. Down below, in the green and purple shadows, people were living and working, weaving tales, seeing their world in a way very different from ours.
The arguments were still buzzing back and forth, crowding and pushing against the timelessness of the mountains. Why was it not enough just to be here, feeling the energy of this place? I was living in a different world; images of mountains, snow and sun, that subtle touching of minds sharing exhilaration and dangers in the thin air. But somehow the dream had turned into a military exercise with no room for dreamers. I knew I was questioning why I climbed at all. I knew I was climbing here because of Doug, because I could pick up on his enthusiasm and love of challenge, in the same way that his sensitivity allowed him to share my perceptions of the people we had met.
The valley beckoned, filling my head with the tales Namgyal had told me as we followed the yaks along the ridge, of traders and smugglers, adventures in the mountain passes, of lamas and hermits. It was only my stupid stubbornness in wanting to finish a job once started that was keeping me going.
I turned and walked up the moraine before even that evaporated.
ALEX: Elaine left, worried for her future. She would not be able to match our pace if we moved quickly, and then the same questions would be levelled at her. Her departure made me even angrier. Why did she have to melt off at the first hint of trouble; why did she have to be such a pained, quiet and bloody martyr! Doug and I fell at each other.
‘If I was the leader of this trip I’d tell Nick to go down.’
‘Well, fortunately, Alex, we are not all like that. Why don’t you just calm down and let things take a natural course? Why do you have to push it?’ He was speaking in his schoolmasterly manner.
‘But it’s so bloody obvious, man; if Nick can’t see this now, how the hell can you expect him to see it later? I’ve a lot of respect for you, Doug, but I also reckon that some of your trips have failed to realize their potential because of your happy-go-lucky approach.’
Poor Nick, what did an hour or so matter – why not let the situation become irresistibly obvious? Now his personal trauma was becoming nothing more than a battleground over which Doug’s character and my own could skirmish.
NICK: In the spring I had been too busy with organization to visit the Alps for my final pre-expedition training, and by the time I got to Nyalam I was wiped out from recurring sore throats and spent most of the time there laid up. I had been lucky to recover quickly enough to go up to Base Camp with the others and had been trying to make up for lost time by doing as much as I could. But I was not fully attuned to pacing myself at high altitude and was still thinking of Himalayan as being just super-Alpine, not allowing for the recovery time needed between bouts of exercise in the early stages of acclimatization, particularly when I found myself slow to acclimatize.
I had been running out of puff very easily, which was predictable enough, and also my stamina was very low so that I recovered very slowly and needed a lot of sleep. I was still groping around in the dark and in my own mind relying on others to tell me what to do. Sensibly enough they refrained from doing so. The most encouraging thing was that I was sleeping very well, though I was feeling the cold, which is a sign of slow acclimatization. None of us could ever match Doug for not feeling cold. It was a very cold spring.
My diary for 30 April reads: ‘29th was coldest night yet’. It was on the 1st that I began to show signs of overdoing it and acclimatization slowed down again. My diary reads: ‘I arrive back from Advance Base Camp feeling whacked and sick. Early to bed with chronic wind followed by diarrhoea in the night.’ The night before records that Paul and Roger had stomach trouble. I had seemed to recover but should have waited at least another day before going climbing.
But I was worried that the others would not wait for me and I would get no climbing done. The situation reads very clearly, but mountains are all about decisions – the climbing is the easy part! When I got back to Advance Base Camp I would start sorting myself out. My diary reads here: ‘very dehydrated’. No wonder. I must have emptied out the contents and linings of my stomach and guts behind every 20th boulder over the last half-mile stretch of mountainside.
ALEX: Finally, Nick said he would go down.
‘Is it your decision, Nick?’
‘Well, it seems to be “our” decision.’
‘It’s not good enough. It must be your decision.’
With that I gave up in disgust and stomped off after Elaine, muttering darkly about the ridiculous and the obvious. Over the rise I saw her moving straight on and tried to catch her attention, knowing that her way would soon be blocked by a glacial wall and that we had to turn right here to get on to the glacier at its nearest point. I shouted several times, but she didn’t hear me. Perhaps she didn’t want to hear me?
‘Oi, woman!’ I screamed in my most deprecatory tone; surely she would hear that. She turned and I beckoned her in my direction. The glacier was quiet and smooth, falling gently from a col above us on the right, between Nyanang Ri and the smaller six-thousander we had originally hoped to climb on.
It looked so safe, but we had not been on it and it had a comprehensive covering of snow that could be obscuring a potentially lethal crevasse, so for our first passage we would want to go roped. I don’t think Elaine was very happy at the thought of being roped to me.
ELAINE: Alex was uncoiling the rope.
‘Better tie on for this one.’
He was smiling, the aggression gone and replaced by an instant boyish charm. It was too sudden. I groped for excuses not to go with him, but even as I did so, I realized it was pointless. By the very fact of being there, I had become a very small rung on his ladder of success which would take him to the summit of the mountain as quickly as possible.
I was slow, perversely and deliberately so.
His dry sarcasm reached me from the other end of the short rope. ‘Did they teach you to kick the snow off your crampons like that?’
I changed the subject. ‘You thinking of climbing that?’ pointing to the steep rocky ridge above us.
‘Yes, that’s the kind of Himalayan climbing we do. But you have to remember there’s only a few world-class climbers who are capable of that kind of thing. Just because we talk about it as if it’s easy, you shouldn’t think it is easy.’
We untied at the far side of the glacier and Alex disappeared over the moraine without a word.
ALEX: It had been our intention to make a rising traverse across the steep boulder slopes of the rognon that forms the lower part of the ridge leading up towards the summit of Nyanang Ri, and then to continue in the same fashion over the wide snow and ice slopes beyond, aiming eventually to reach a col on the ridge between Nyanang Ri and Pungpa Ri, from which we would try to work our way back towards Nyanang Ri. At the far side of the boulder slopes we found ourselves peering out into space, struck dumb by the presence of a sheer rock wall that plunged down to the icefields over two hundred feet below, very comprehensively obstructing our path. The four of us were now together. Paul had gone down after Nick. Doug and Roger were subdued, describing their friend’s demise brought on by the pain in his lungs.
DOUG: All of us were feeling quite depressed at Paul’s decision. I felt an enormous sadness for him and some responsibility too, for having encouraged him to come on this expedition when I knew that underneath his confident exterior there lurked a nagging doubt as to whether his involvement with Shishapangma was worth the sacrifice that such a trip entails. I felt so miserable for him, made worse perhaps by how well he was taking it. There was plenty to do in the Alps, he said, and he could look forward to a season of show jumping. I could have burst into tears for him. He explained how he had been using an inhaler to relieve the congestion in his lungs. It had worked fine to start with, but day by day its good effects diminished and by the evening the lower parts of his lungs were giving him a lot of pain. It was obvious that he could no longer treat the symptoms but had to do something about the cause of this problem. That meant a descent to lower levels out of the cold, biting winds, where he would not have to breathe so hard in an effort to wring out from the air all the oxygen the body needs. As Paul staggered off down to catch up with Nick I plodded on in the steps of Alex and Elaine wondering why it had to be that first Jimmy Duff, then Georges and now Paul, the three people I have enjoyed being with most in the mountains, were no longer with me on Shishapangma. I knew that for me it was to be a hard trip.
Rather than descend we opted to continue up the ridge, scrambling along it until we met ice. At this point we bivouacked. We chose a small, narrow, snowy col just behind a rocky gendarme that marked the end of the scrambling. We were now enveloped in cloud and exposed to a wind which was increasing in intensity and threatening snow. We scrabbled amongst the rocks, rejecting the larger ones and packing the prized, flatter slates into small, gravel-packed ledges on which we would sleep. To our left steep mixed ground disappeared over sharp rock walls; to our right a smooth, concave ice slope petered out of sight. Once the self-made ledges were large enough and smooth enough to contemplate sleeping on, the bivouac sacs (tents) were dug out of rucksacks, billowing and unruly in the wind. With no back wall of rock or ice to pitch them, we had to string them awkwardly off ice axes and guy lines like slack, square-rigged sails, and then open one of the side zips to pass in our rucksacks before crawling in ourselves.
My first bivouac of the year. A tired and sluggish mind began groping for a memory of the routine required to make of this curious pastime the disciplined, second-nature routine that it would have to become. Boots, socks, gloves, sweaters, cameras, batteries, Gaz cylinders, sleeping bag, duvet, food, snow, stores, rucksack and Karrimats. Hunched up in that wildly flapping red cocoon, by the light of a torch, some order had to be made of all this. Wet gear had to be removed and dried; dry gear put on and protected. Sleep? Just a few moments of precious sleep, and it would be all right. No, you must fight that desire, there can be no sleep now, it is hours away. Above all we must organize and cook, melt the snow and ice outside for the precious water that it is imperative we drink in order to maintain any fitness at all at these altitudes. The non-stop battle against dehydration cannot be won; the trick is to lose it slowly.
A snow-encrusted head thrust itself through the zip on the far side, followed by a body and an unwelcome volume of snow. The feet, vigorously banged together to remove packed snow from the soles, came in last. For a moment, Roger and I relaxed in the luxury of being out of the wind, but with the desire to sleep creeping on it was time to work again.
A valiant attempt was made to clear the snow out of the sac. Karrimats were laid on the floor and rucksacks unpacked. Havoc reigned within our cocoon. Neoprene overboots were peeled off the plastic double boots and, folded inside out, placed under a Karrimat. Boots were removed and damp socks changed for dry ones. The damp socks were then placed inside the outer layers of clothing for the night and all the following day, whereupon they would be dry enough on the next bivouac to go back on the feet. After a couple of days you begin to smell like ripe Gorgonzola! Gloves used that day were also placed next to the body to facilitate drying. The plastic boot outers were put into a stuff sack to keep them free from snow. Later they might serve as a pillow. The Alviolight inners were replaced on the feet. The one-piece windsuit was removed and duvets (or one-piece duvet suits) put on if they had not already been worn during the day. Finally, you can squeeze into the sleeping bag, along with batteries, Gaz cylinders, torch, lighters, spare gloves, etc. … and try to cook! This whole contorted, restricted programme can consume up to three hours.
The food on our first acclimatization run was not good, consisting in the main of herbal teas, chocolate bars and tinned fish. We had, by force of circumstance, come superlight to Tibet and had only a limited amount of good climbing food which we were unwilling to commit in any quantity to this climb.
Outside our tents that night nearly a foot of fresh snow fell. By morning it had ceased. The valley floor below had taken on a very wintry hue but the ridge above was relatively clear of the worst effects of the fresh snow, having been blasted by the wind throughout the night. Gradually the two teams gathered themselves and emerged, blinking, from their hibernations. After a brief discussion we chose to continue up the ridge. The alternative was a traverse from our spot on to the snow slopes beyond, via a delicate mixed ramp of loose rubble that looked decidedly Matterhornish.
ELAINE: We made brews and drank them for the next two hours, lazily discussing different ideas which had come to us in past climbing experiences. I had never before had such a strong awareness of Doug’s feelings about climbing. Although his strength and experience were so far beyond mine, our ideas were so close and he no longer had the need to prove himself, being quite content to carry some of my gear and slow his pace to mine; trimming his style to fit mine became just another dimension to the way he climbed.
Tomorrow, it seemed there would be small chance of my continuing. This would leave Doug caught between conflicting loyalties.
ALEX: We set off independently up the ridge, crampons on, scrambling over rock steps, steep snow and hard green ice, pleased to be making upwards progress over Alpine terrain at last. Roger, away first, set a good pace. Doug set off next but found himself forced to tarry, waiting for Elaine. I overtook him a hundred metres above the bivouac site, waiting astride a rock just above the first appreciable snow-ice bulge. Having had to help Elaine pack that morning and carrying the majority of his team’s gear, Doug was not happy. I climbed on, but after some 50 metres a shouted conversation got under way between Roger, who was by now sitting waiting a little further up the ridge above a second steep little ice bulge out of my sight, and Doug below, out of my hearing.
‘Doug says can you go down and collect the technical gear from him.’
Dumping my pack in the snow, I bundled off down, quickly losing the laboriously gained ground, to reach an unhappy, unmoved Doug. We sat and waited for Elaine, who was moving slowly towards us, forced to resort to the front point technique where, on the first bulge, the rest of us had passed quickly using the more relaxed French style.
‘What are you going to do, kid?’ Doug asked.
‘Look, I’m OK. I’m not having any particular problems. I can carry on like this for the rest of the day, but I can’t possibly go on at your pace. If this was a plodding day I’d be OK, but it obviously isn’t.’
I spoke. ‘Well, it’s not going to be a plodding day for Roger and me. We want to push on as far up the ridge as possible today. It’s up to you and Doug what you do.’
ELAINE: The first effects of altitude soak into you like heavy treacle, slowing body and mind until the sense of time becomes distorted. I had experienced this with my friend Judy Sterner during our explorations of the Andes, and we had spent such days resting or casually exploring, glad of the excuse to enjoy the mountain without the guilt of feeling lazy.
Now I was forced to haul my sluggish limbs up a small step, the pack pressing me into the ice. Alex’s angry voice came from somewhere above.
I thought, ‘Well, this is it.’ There was no decision to make, really, but still it was hard to give up, although I was not really sure why.
‘You gave it a good try,’ said Doug, looking at his boots.
As we redistributed the gear, I saw with sudden painful clarity that he was waiting for me to ask him to rope me across the glacier, steeling himself to do it, knowing it would put him out of the acclimatization climb, and set him back seriously when he came to tackle the Face with the other two. He had already done so much to keep us all together.
I took a deep breath. ‘If you can come with me down the exposed part of the ridge for a few hundred yards, I’ll be fine the rest of the way.’
Thirty minutes later, I was alone at the edge of the ice, watching three tiny figures moving slowly into the mist above.
ALEX: Eventually Elaine decided to descend. Doug accompanied her down the ridge past the bivouac site to the end of the ice, while I plodded up the slope once again, with his rucksack this time, and Roger dropped down to pick mine up. Eventually we reassembled over a brew on Roger’s small, rocky knoll.
Doug had rejoined us quickly, without the impediment of rucksack: ‘I’d just like to say one thing. It’s a great pity that we ambitious, strong climbers can’t make a bit of room for the others, rather than cut them out.’
Through the middle part of the day we wound our way along the flatter, central section of the ridge, teetering over hard wintry ice, shuffling over cornices, a cheval up rock edges, peering to our right down the disconcertingly vertical wall that ran off in hard ice to the glacier over 2,000 feet below. Two gendarmes were negotiated on the left-hand side, rocky and loose, and a final abseil put us on a col above which the ridge rose steeply, challengingly, up compact rock to the summit of Nyanang Ri. From these close quarters we had to concede that further progress in this direction was unreasonable, and we were forced to turn left on to the open snow slopes in a rising leftwards traverse where the crevassed slopes ran up high towards the summit ridge connecting Nyanang Ri with Pungpa Ri. Eventually, Doug disappeared into the first substantial sérac on our route and announced it sound. We could sleep there tonight.
‘Bloody hell, Doug, no way!’
Over my head half a huge cathedral dome leaned crazily towards the daylight. It seemed inconceivable to me that such a vast and apparently unsupported ice mass could remain in place for the following 12 hours, even if it had managed to do so for the past 10 years. Doug, much amused by this wanton display of cowardice, took to leaping about in the back of the cavern, thumping the resounding roof above him with his hammer and exclaiming as to its indestructible qualities. I was not particularly reassured. I knew Reinhold Messner had spent one night in a crevasse with Doug on Chamlang and had sworn never to do so again, it having been in his opinion at the time, the most dangerous thing he had ever done!
But if it did stay put? Outside, a fair storm had kicked up, and the flat floor at the back promised an easily constructed, quick bed place. Roger joined Doug, took a mighty swing at part of the roof, and this collapsed with a resounding crack to even more rejoicing from Doug.
‘There you are, youth, it’s even safer now.’ Democracy being what it is, I had to stay.
Next morning, much to my surprise, we awoke. Doug, blaming old age, was in action first on the breakfast, which consisted in the main of tea and Mars bars. Outside there was no hint of last night’s snow, though in the mountain’s shadow it was bitterly cold. We continued our rising leftwards traverse until, after an hour, we found our way barred by a large bergschrund. The most promising point of access to the upper slopes was on our left, at a point where the bergschrund’s mouth narrowed to a gap over which it would be possible for a stretching climber to plant his ice tools and attempt to haul himself across. Carefully we traversed towards this point on unstable snow. Below, the slope fell almost immediately into another hole created by a large sérac and crevasse, while further down more of its brethren waited to swallow the unwary or unlucky. To the left large blue séracs blocked progress. Above lay hard green ice we wanted to gain.
Doug, the actual ‘rock-man’ of the party, worked his way down a snow ramp below the gap that barred our entry to the ice for about 10 metres, and then, standing on top of the ramp, reached, hit and hauled himself on to the slope above. The two ‘ice-men’ in the party maintained a discreet presence, away in the crevasse from which Doug had begun his descent, and their experienced hesitation was duly rewarded when Doug, finding the texture of the ice hard, suggested he might take a rope on up the rest of the way.
While we worked above, however, Roger began to suffer from inertia and hauled himself on to the slope at a point a little further along from that used by Doug in order to avoid falling ice chunks. As Roger set up after him I contemplated my navel in the freshly arrived sun and belayed Doug, who had now placed an ice screw. Suddenly, with a most desperate croak not dissimilar to that of a half-strangled crow, Roger’s much maligned throat and tonsils attempted to wrap themselves around that most descriptive and alarming of words.
‘Avalanche!’
Peering up from his ice slope, Roger had been perturbed to see a considerable and agitated white slurry heading in his direction. Doug, a fair way above his ice screw now, was directly in the path of the avalanche’s main mass. I dived into the ice gap, trying hard not to pull Doug off, waiting for him to drop in at any moment, while up above, for nearly 20 seconds, he hung on to his axes for dear life, one foot’s front points teetering on the ice, the other completely adrift.
DOUG: As Roger croaked his warning I looked up to see a frothy mass now cascading down towards me. Until that moment I had not been able to make much of an impression on the hard brittle ice with my ice axes – but then I did! First one pick then the other in quick succession went right in up to the shaft. I hung on by the wrist loops as the white tide surged over me, trying to present as low a profile as possible by pushing my body into the slope. I emerged spluttering, thanking my lucky stars there had been no ice and rock mixed up in the powder.
ALEX: Out on the left Roger, though blessed with a foot-ledge and being out of the main stream, was unroped and spent anxious moments wondering if he would be swept into the increasingly irresistible white tide that was rushing over him. Finally it stopped, and frosted white figures, registering their continued adhesion with whoops and exclamations, appeared once again on the slope. The pitch was finished, snow was reached and we continued on our way with half an eye cocked on another evil brew of afternoon weather boiling up over in the Langtang Himal.
Against this backdrop of a broody, stormy Himalaya we continued our rising leftwards trajectory unroped, again on firmer snow arching over the top of the highest bergschrund on the Face, unknowingly approaching the zenith of our orbit while the rock wall above constantly revised our opinions leftwards. And then, from above, came another rifle-like retort. Stonefall!
The redundant brain now burnt rubber. Ears, always alert, attuned to the sounds of danger by years of straining to decipher the sounds of the mountains, knew long before the eyes could confirm that the load was coming our way. Then the eyes picked up the oncoming missiles and plotted these surface skimmers, finely calculating trajectories in times only understood by nuclear physicists. We were open, bare on the slope, being strafed by grapeshot granite. We ducked and dodged and the emphasis of the fall passed some 20 feet to our left.
The danger passed, time resumed its normal speed and so did we. Roger was still keen to gain the ridge by a steep narrow gully line of ice above, but as I called out the hours of daylight left it soon became apparent we would not be further than a pitch up the gully before nightfall, and we could expect at least another two pitches before a chance of a bivouac.
‘Only four hours left.’
‘It’s going to be two, just to the foot of the gully.’
‘Surely it’s only one?’
‘No way, Roger.’
‘And anyway, it’s miles up there to the ridge; you won’t get further than a couple of hundred feet before night on that ice!’
We tried to go further left at our present height, but almost immediately hit hard ice again. Hard ice – every move strains the muscles, every muscle strains the mind. At these angles it is too time-consuming at high altitude to rope, but without rope security is tenuous, with axe and hammer picks and crampon points barely biting, forcing the climber to balance precariously, unwilling to move for the strain of another step yet unhappy to stay for the stress of remaining put – a sorry dilemma that did not appeal to our tired bodies. We decided to bivouac in the bergschrund, now 50 metres below us. Our capsule had reached the natural limit of upward progress. Tomorrow we would have to descend.
For the purposes of our acclimatization programme, we had achieved enough, though the climbing, strenuous, dangerous and without obvious reward, was not to our liking. Of the three of us I probably felt this the least, content to be able to consider one of our acclimatizing steps satisfied. Doug, who in spirit belongs more to ridges than to calculated altitudes and calendar-dictated pace, was not happy. Then, in our bivouac tent, with all the cooking finished and the team settling down for the night, the frustrations welled up. As the most vocal pusher of our current approach, I was rounded on. In the dark a bombshell exploded in the tent.
‘I’m just not going to operate in this cold, calculating manner, Alex, and follow your decisions which have been inflicted on this team by force of personality.’
‘What on earth are you talking about, Doug?’
Doug gave as an example the decision to drop the first acclimatization climb which had led to our struggling for adequate progress on the slopes of this mountain. At the root seemed to be an objection to my relentless calendarization of the climbing.
Angry, I refused to accept this. ‘Look, Doug, you’re talking crap. There is just no way I can go around dictating to the likes of Paul or Roger – or you for that matter. The problem is that for the first time you are not necessarily getting things done your way under the guise of democracy by the force of your personality!’
Doug pursued this point in the dark.
‘Look, Doug, there is absolutely no point in harking on to me like you do to officials. You’re not going to wear me down, so you might as well drop it until Base Camp.’
Doug’s head was a foot away to my left, separated by the foot-end of Roger’s sleeping bag, his presence pinpointed by a small red glow of a cigarette end. His smoking is a fascinating ritual that begins with a determined rummaging through the top pockets of his pile jacket in search of stray tobacco strands which appear finally with a magician’s touch and flourish, rescued from past, crushed cigarettes that disappeared in their own smoke long ago. The search would then continue for suitable papers. Once into a climb, the focus of such combustible material almost inevitably centres on such wonders as the camomile tea-bags, heavily favoured for their gluing qualities. In contrast, the John West tinned salmon wrappers were a source of near-total desperation, being impossible to stick and almost as impossible to burn.
Following our dam-burst we entered slightly calmer waters, a longer, detailed calendarization of our climb. I was of the opinion that our present schedule was the only feasible one, given the time available. Roger agreed that it seemed sound. However, we ran back over the dates, searching for a gap to fit some other venture, such as a trip to Hagen’s Col, with Nick and Elaine, into our schedule, until, with Roger correctly insisting this was all a waste of time and we should leave it to Base Camp, we drifted off to sleep.
ROGER: This bivouac in the ice cave saw the birth of the timetable. Gone the freewheeling approach where we would climb around our chosen mountain until one day we sensed that permission was given and the final pilgrimage would begin. We had to be on top by 2 June. The climb would take six days so we should pass so many days at this altitude and so many days at that. This was logical but death to a certain spirit we sought in the hills. Only later did I realize that the Chinese bureaucracy had really taken control of our expedition; in resisting the System we had come to share it. I felt that my task was to show the Chinese that the anarcho-Alpine approach could also succeed. But in wanting to display this spirit I had already lost it.
ALEX: The following morning we left after just one cup of tea. There was little Gaz left. The wind had got up in the night and was now whipping snow directly into the cave. It was bitterly cold. We roped together, with myself, the lightest and consequently easiest to fish out of crevasses, in the lead followed by Roger and finally, at back stop, Doug. The slopes had been stripped clear of excess snow and our descent was marked by good snow and ice at an angle in the upper reaches of about 40 degrees. I turned my back tentatively towards the slope and faced away from it. The crampons bit well and I was able to zigzag down, fingers freezing in the wind, down, down, down at a fair pace with Roger behind. He was even more in his element over such terrain, watching the rope and sharing the sense of exhilaration that comes with descending quickly down unknown ground, guessing from above the correct line, a cunning line through and around séracs, a little left when the inexperienced senses would have sent you rightwards, all maintained at a stimulating pace in a savage wind.
Doug, the least experienced at descending the steepest slopes facing out, in the earliest stages found himself facing in towards the slope, and less able to watch the rope, which sneaked out and coiled close to Roger’s feet – a source of danger. Becoming agitated, Roger started shouting at Doug to maintain greater control. Doug was shouting back – what was the hurry? We had all day, we should take care. Finally, we reached the glacier below, a disjointed, disorientated team. Doug was worried. The spectre of another K2 venture haunted him, and I was apprehensive regarding what, to my mind, was his ‘irrationality’ on the last bivouac. We made our own separate ways back to the Advance Camp. Here the wind prevented us from lingering.
I left the Advance Camp first, moving down the valley and out on to the plateau. At a large boulder which marked the approximate halfway point on the journey between the two camps, I stopped and waited. Doug arrived five minutes later.
‘Show me this new route then.’
He did, and I couldn’t do it. In the traversing of our boulder-strewn plateau I had evolved the habit of going across a little lower than usual and had, in the course of such travels, discovered some excellent boulders. We now tramped together across the snow while I showed him the best ones. Roger joined us at an excellent low rock simply brimming with good problems. Doug was purring now.
‘From the ridiculous to the sublime.’
It was a happier, more together team that bounded into camp with the last of the evening light to a feast of jam pancakes, rice and that king of dishes – egg and chips.
The weather, in the meantime, remained awful at the Base Camp. Indeed, it had become apparent that it was worse here than further up the valley. Long tentacles of grey cloud would sweep up from Nyalam, engulfing the camp almost without fail, while further away, at the foot of Shishapangma, the sun could shine for hours yet. The early exhortations not to wash or swim in the upper lake, as this would pollute the drinking water, were mocked by a foot of ice.
Paul summed it up. ‘The only other place I know like this is Delph in winter – misty and miserable!’