CHAPTER ONE
The sky was beginning to fade, and the brilliance of the African sun was being replaced by the warm glow of dusk. We huddled together in the small plane and my feet began to get cramp; I tried to tense them and get the blood flowing again. The parachute made a comfortable backrest, but you always felt nervous leaning on it in case you damaged anything or accidentally deployed it. I shuffled again. As often is the case, there was no eye contact with the others in the little plane as we climbed up to now nearly 16,000 feet. People were engaged in their own little worlds – the air felt electric with silent tension.
As the plane banked to make another steep ascent, I glanced out of the little window down to the African basin far below; at that height you begin to see the curvature of the earth at the edges of the horizon. I felt a warm peace come over me.
Squatting there, cramped and nervous, I sensed a part of the magic that is found in edgy situations – a certain calm, a sharpening of one’s senses.
The plane levelled out, people began to shuffle and become alert again, checking and rechecking equipment. We were all now crouching and someone reached for the door. As it slid back on its rails, the ferocious noise of the engine and 70 m.p.h. slipstream broke the silence.
‘RED ON’. All seemed strangely still as we stared at the bulb flashing at us. ‘GO’. It flicked to green. Andy reached out, looked far below, and then quickly fell away. Soon all the others had followed, and I was alone in the cargo area of the plane. I looked down, took that familiar deep breath then slid off the step. As the wind moulded my body into an arch, I could feel it respond to my movements. As I dropped a shoulder, the wind would begin to spin me and the horizon would move before my eyes. This feeling is known simply as ‘the freedom of the sky’.
I could just make out the small dots of the others in freefall below me, then I lost them in the clouds. Seconds later I was falling through the clouds as well; they felt damp on my face.
I should come out of these soon, I thought, but instead I just kept falling through the whiteout. I looked to check my altimeter but it was hard to read.
‘I’ve got to pull now and deploy; I’m too alone here.’
I reached to my right hip and gripped the ripcord. I pulled strongly and it responded as normal. The canopy opened with a crack that shattered the noise of the 120 m.p.h. freefall, as I slowed down to 15 m.p.h. As the buffeting ceased, I realized I should now be safely under canopy. I glanced up to check the symmetry of the chute as I’d often done before, to confirm that all its cells were open and working. They weren’t.
I just stared for two or three seconds before realizing what had happened. Instead of the smooth regular symmetry of the nine or so cells above me, I had a chaotic jumble of silk. The force of the opening had torn part of the canopy in two. It flapped nervously and irregularly like two badly reined chariot horses tugging in different directions. I pulled hard on both my steering toggles to see if that would help. It didn’t.
I tried to steer, but it responded slowly and noisily as if straining to stay inflated. I watched the desert floor getting closer and objects becoming clearer and more distinct. My descent was fast, far too fast. Desperately trying to predict where the wind was, I realized I was too low to use my reserve chute – I’d have to land like this. I was getting close now and was coming in at speed; I flared the chute too high and too hard, out of panic. This jerked my body up horizontal, then I dropped away and crashed into the desert floor.
*
I woke and sat bolt upright in bed, sweating and breathing heavily. It was the third time I’d had this recurring dream of what happened those moments just before my accident. I tried each time to shake it from my mind; but the memories lingered. The fall itself had broken two, and seriously chipped a third, vertebrae. The Scottish doctor who had first assessed me said that I had come within a whisker of severing my spinal cord, and paralysing myself for life.
My back ached worse at night; the doctors had warned me of this, but still I winced each time the pain soared through my body. I held my head in my hands, then lay back down.
As I lay in bed for those initial months recovering, friends would come and visit me. I would struggle to get up to greet them. I’d put on my back brace, strap myself in and try so hard. It wasn’t in my nature to be like this. I felt embarrassed. Part of me didn’t even want them to see me in this way. I even remember trying to throw a rugby ball with a friend – until the pain stabbed again. My parents then encouraged me back to bed.
They had lived through hell after they initially heard of my accident.
During the week in the local hospital in Africa, I had managed to speak to my mother on the telephone. I took off the oxygen mask that I was breathing through, and tried to reassure her. Her voice sounded fragile, all those thousands of miles away. I hated myself for the grief I was causing. Since the moment I had returned, she had nursed and ferried me around all the doctors and hospitals like a saint. She knew that she had almost lost me.
For three months I lay in bed. My plans, my dreams of the future, hung in shreds. Nothing any longer was certain; I didn’t know if I would be able to stay with the Army. I didn’t even know if I would recover at all. It seemed as if in an instant my world had been turned inside out. I feared that this stinging pain in the middle of my back, of the nerves rubbing bone, would never leave me. I didn’t want it to be like this.
Part of me feared that I would never recover well enough to be able to do all those things I loved. To be able to climb, to sail, even just sit in my favourite tree at home, high above the village and just think. It was this not knowing that worried me; nobody seemed to know – not even the doctors.
*
I was eight years old when my father gave me a mesmerising picture of Mount Everest. From that moment onwards I was captivated. I would sit there trying to work out the scale of the huge ice fields I saw in the foreground, and to judge how steep those summit slopes would really be. My mind would begin to wander, and soon I would actually be on those slopes – feeling the wind whip across my face. From these times, the dream was being born within me.
As a child, the tedium of the weeks at school was relieved by the thought of days ahead at home: climbing on the chalk cliffs in the Isle of Wight with my father. I was never back for more than a minute before I would be hassling him to come out with me.
I would clamber into my old hiking boots that were sizes too big for me; we would load up the car and the two of us would head for the hills. We would always take our two dogs with us, a Shetland sheepdog and a dachshund. The Shetland loved the scrambling on the slopes, but the little dachshund used to get thrown in a rucksack and carried along, viewing the world from out of the top buckles. And in such a manner were spent endless dreamy afternoons.
Winter was always my favourite time for these adventures, with the wind tearing across our faces as we strode out together through the fields. We would scramble up the cliffs with me fighting to stay close to my father. From a distance the cliffs looked foreboding and treacherous and my mother would refuse to allow my father to take me up them. It made the climbs even more exciting – they were forbidden.
‘You can never tell how steep something is until you rub noses with it,’ dad would say. He was right. Up close the cliffs were only steep walks. Small sheep tracks laced their way in tiers up the face, giving us the chance to sit and rest every ten feet. My father would reach down with his hand and heave me the last few feet to each ledge. We would tuck in close to the cliff and gaze at the views across the island. They were beautiful.
Eventually we would come out over the top onto the grass and lie there, often to the bewilderment of some old couple on a cliff-top walk. They would gawp in bemused amazement – then totter off, shaking their heads with disapproval. It made the adventure even more real.
During these times my father would tell me stories of his climbing experiences in the Royal Marines; he would teach me all he knew.
‘Always keep three points of contact on the face at any one time. Move slowly and always, always keep calm – however scared you are.’
When I see these cliffs now, the same feelings come flooding back. They make me smile. The cliffs look small and hardly very dangerous, but as an eight-year-old I always felt as if I was climbing the steepest face in the world. It made me feel different from the others when I got back to school. I had done something that I thought was really hard, and survived – and that made me feel special.
I remembered those days and managed a smile from my bed.
Lying, unable to move, inside all day and sweating with frustration, my way of escaping was in my mind. I felt I still had so much that I longed to do, and so many things left to see.
Suddenly all my dreams plagued me. I had taken my health so much for granted, but when faced with the reality of having it taken from me, those dreams, that before were neglected, came racing forward.
Lying in bed, strapped in my brace, gave me almost too much time to reflect on these things. I would rather not think about them. Forget them. Look at you, I thought, you’ve been in bed for months.
Time seemed to stand still.
I looked around my bedroom, and the old picture I had of Mount Everest seemed to peer down. I couldn’t decide whether it was looking with pity or whether it was sneering. I struggled over to it and took it down. There was no longer any point in having it up.
My childhood desire to climb Everest felt further beyond the realms of possibility than ever. During those months lying there, I remembered my love of climbing with my father; my secret longing to one day see the world from the summit of the highest mountain. I remembered, but tried to disregard it as mere fantasy – as kid’s stuff. It eased the pain.
CHAPTER TWO
‘That fine line between bravery and stupidity is endlessly debated – the difference really doesn’t matter.’
World War II British Air Force Pilot
After three months in bed at home, I was posted to an Army Rehabilitation Centre. I could move and walk around by now, but still the pain hounded me. Everything felt fragile and delicate. I winced if I turned a corner too fast. I felt pathetic.
For the next six weeks I spent all day every day being treated. Three-hour stints of stretching exercises under the close supervision of a medical ‘physical training instructor’ (PTI) would be followed by two hours of physiotherapy. Then we would start again. Slowly the movement returned, and I began to regain my strength. My confidence was coming back – I knew I was healing.
By the time I left the Centre, some eight months after the accident, I was recovering well. I had an almost full range of movement in my back and as long as I continued the exercises for the next four months, I would be – as the doctor said – ‘better – and the luckiest man around’. Feeling slightly uneasy and with the cheeky grin of a three-year-old who’s just been caught weeing in the paddling pool, I packed my bags and walked out of the main doors of the Centre. I had been very lucky.
This long road to recovery had taught me that life was precious. I had learnt this the hard way. I had come within an inch of losing all my movement and, by the grace of God, still lived to tell the tale. I had learnt so much, but above all I had gained an understanding of the cards that I had been playing with. This scared me.
*
It was a beautiful late summer’s morning and by all accounts I had no reason under the sun to have such a dose of the blues; but I did, and I had them bad. I poured myself a glass of Ribena and thought of all that had happened.
After three extraordinary and unrivalled years with the British Army as a soldier with the Special Air Service (21 SAS), I made the difficult decision to leave. The nature of the job I had done was very demanding; if I wasn’t lugging vast logs around some training area, I was tumbling out of the night-sky under a parachute. Whatever the field, the pace was always intense.
From the military point of view I had been given the ‘all clear’ to continue as before. For the present, I was declared ‘fully fit’ – the long term verdict though was a different story.
My parents insisted I sought the advice of various specialists, who in no uncertain terms told me that to continue such work would be ‘madness’. They assured me that if I continued to military parachute with heavy loads and sustained a few nasty landings, then it would lead to severe arthritis in my back in ten years’ time. There seemed to be a difference of opinion between the two camps of doctors. But it wasn’t a risk I was going to take; I had been too lucky already to throw it away for the sake of a few more years with the Army. Still it was one of the hardest decisions I had ever taken; some of my best friends were still there. Disappointed, I felt compelled to ‘hang up’ my Army boots.
I felt that I had little choice; if I couldn’t fulfil the fundamental requirement to military parachute, I was adamant that I didn’t want to stay on as a ‘non-active’ member. My accident had cost me everything.
I loved my time with the army and feel a huge pride in having served with the regiment. Their professionalism and humour was unlike anything else I have ever known; they were to me a second family. When I first joined at the age of nineteen, to have been trusted and encouraged like a man is something that I will always be indebted to them for.
The majority of my Army-orientated school friends had joined the Guards or Cavalry, as Commissioned Officers. I felt strangely determined, though, to see military life from a different perspective – from the other end.
I had applied to join as a ‘squaddie’, the lowest rank available. From here, I was at ground level, the place where the real soldiers were. Nothing smart, nothing fancy, with no rank to separate us; just good, honest and, at times, wild people. It was the best decision I ever took. I made as good a comrade there as I could have ever imagined. We shared something truly lasting – friendships, born out of being cold and scared together. It was these soldiers I would miss.
*
Having now left the Army behind me, I began the daunting task of trying to find a career to follow. Choosing, or even seeing something that felt right, was getting harder and harder. As frustration upon frustration set in, the likelihood of having to perform a sensible staid job was beginning to raise its ubiquitous head – and it hurt. Everyone knows that tearing feeling between necessity’s pull and your heart’s pull. That balance between needing to pay the bills and having a dream. It is a difficult road. All I knew was that I was determined somehow to follow my heart, and was scratching around frantically for a route.
Rumour is a nameless child, and how exactly this one came to me I can’t even remember; but it was one that was to have a profound effect upon me. I heard of an old friend planning to get a team together to try to climb Mount Everest. Neil Laughton was an ex-Royal Marines Commando: robust, determined, and as I came to learn later, one of the most driven men I had ever worked with.
Neil had been on Everest in 1996, the year that a storm hit high on the mountain, claiming eight climbers’ lives in the course of twenty-four hours. This was the highest death toll ever claimed at one time in the history of Everest attempts. Out of the eight that died that night, some had actually frozen to death fifty metres from their tents. The others had found themselves caught out by the great ‘goddess of the sky’, having run out of oxygen, too late and too high on Everest’s perilous slopes.
Climbing above 26,000 feet is unforgiving, and that night Neil had been pinned to his tent at Camp Four, cowering from the wind and fighting for his own survival – unaware of what was going on outside. Of the people to reach Camp Four, forty-eight hours earlier, Neil was among the few to return alive.
He was now getting a new team together to attempt once more to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain. What is it about a mountain with such fatal accolades that draws men and women to risk their lives on her icy slopes – all for the chance of that single, solitary moment on the top? Whatever it was, Neil seemed determined to go back, having got so close that tragic year. All I knew was that something deep inside me was stirring.
I thought of those days climbing on the hills at home as a kid. I had always climbed since then, and my love of the mountains had never changed; it was just the dream of Everest that I had suppressed. I had felt that I would never be strong enough after my accident, and I guess therefore, part of me had allowed the idea to die. Suddenly, and almost inexplicably, I was finding those long lost emotions were flooding back.
*
At the age of eighteen, an old friend and I were sitting around contemplating some sort of high jinks to get up to in the few months after having left school. The Indian Army became our target. Endless letters and pleas later, and the two of us found ourselves deep in the Himalayan foothills of North India, in the good company of a tall, elegant and turbaned General.
We spent a wonderful few months trekking through the valleys of Sikkim and Western Bengal, meeting eccentric expatriate gentlemen in the most unusual of places. At the end of the trek, after we had developed a hunger for civilization again, the General arranged for an evening of dancing girls to entertain us all – at his own ‘humble dwelling’. The two of us rather tentatively sipped our glasses of whisky as these girls flung themselves around to ripples of delight from the inebriated General.
Soon afterwards he decided to ‘retire’ for an ‘early night’. An hour later, exhausted by the visual stimulations, and apologizing for leaving the party a little early ourselves, we also ‘retired’. We felt it only courteous to pop our heads round the General’s door to thank him for his kind hospitality, before heading to bed.
As I peered round the door I was confronted by the extraordinary sight of the good General’s buttocks, moving rapidly up and down above one of the servant girls. With his turban off and clothes scattered unceremoniously across the floor, he was so engrossed in his business that he never noticed me. I scurried back out of the room, deeply embarrassed. From then on we observed the General in a new light, and believed him emphatically when over breakfast he called himself a ‘prancing stallion’. He, of course, was referring to his old cross-country days. We knew better.
During our last week with him, he escorted us to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, a climbing school set up to teach advanced ice climbing techniques. I walked round the museum in awe, gazing at the endless Everest memorabilia on display. My excitement was uncontainable. Here was the culmination of all I’d ever known about climbing. Here were the memories of the élite; I was totally entranced.
Some of the General’s final words to me out in India were an exhortation to ‘one day try and climb the great mountain of Everest. If you train and try with all your might, and have just a little luck, then you’ll succeed. And remember: take small steps; that is the key to climbing high.’
Sitting at home, remembering his encouragements, I slowly realized this was my chance. Here was an opportunity for embracing all I had ever dreamt of; I felt an irresistible urge to follow.
Maybe it had taken such a shave with death over the skies of Africa to allow this childhood fantasy to resurface; I didn’t know exactly. But the Army had taught me a few things. The words from a speech by Roosevelt, that we had read so often, remained powerfully etched in my mind:
It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or when the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails whilst daring greatly – so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat . . . for those who have had to fight for it, life has truly a flavour the protected shall never know.
Maybe now was the only chance I would ever get to follow this dream. This dream of one day reaching the summit of Everest – I felt it was now or never. I dug my old picture out from where I had hidden it over a year earlier, when I was recovering – and dared to allow myself the dream once again.
*
20 April 1997. After my second glass of home-brew cider at 10.00 a.m., designed to give me a little bit of extra courage, I dialled Neil’s number. The conversation was brief, to put it in the most diplomatic of terms.
‘If you’re serious I need to know by tomorrow – ring me then, I’ve got to go.’
Considering it had taken me most of the morning to decide whether or not to call him, and then subsequently twenty minutes to actually get round to saying I was interested in joining the team, I thought his reply had been remarkably succinct. I wish I hadn’t stumbled and tripped over my words so much. I wondered what he must have thought of me.
Like most of us, I have no shortage of weaknesses. One of my faults, which is probably a reaction to bureaucratic and procrastinating senior Army officers, is a far too eager willingness to accept things with absolutely no prior thought whatsoever. The conclusion I draw is that it’s far better to decide how good an idea something is after the event; and on such a rock has been founded a host of ridiculous mishaps and disasters. So, keen not to break the habit of a lifetime, I rang him back the next day.
‘Just give me the chance and I’ll put my everything into this. I’m deadly serious,’ I said.
He agreed, on the basis of how I performed on an expedition that October to the Himalaya. He wanted to have first-hand reports on how I coped at high altitude, and insisted I join a team that was climbing the great peak of Ama Dablam – known commonly as ‘the most beautiful mountain in the world’. Depending on how that went, I had now become the first member to join Neil in the British 1998 Everest Expedition. I decided not to tell him a word about my accident. I didn’t think that he would ever understand.
As I replaced the receiver, I had a sinking feeling that I had just made a commitment that was going to drag me far out of my comfort-zone; and I felt more than a little uncertain about the wisdom of what I had done. But I had to look forward, I couldn’t live in the memory of my accident; I wanted a fresh start. This was it and I felt alive.
My mother had always said, ‘Commitment is doing the thing you said you’d do, long after the mood you said it in has left you.’ She was absolutely right; the only problem was that I was now on the end of that commitment. For me, though, the decision had been made; the strength to stand by it was what I needed.
Subsequent moments of panic about the future were rapidly quashed by my fear of possible morning tube rides to an office job. I was going to throw my all into this. My toes began to tingle and I ran around the house making animal noises. I don’t think anyone heard.
*
A few days later, I announced the news to my family. My prior decision to leave the Army had come as somewhat of a relief to them, and I guess they all assumed that I would now take a definite turn for the quieter life. They were right, that had been the intention; they had been through enough heartache with me already. But something was ablaze within me, and this dream to climb Everest just wouldn’t leave.
I knew that only a tiny percentage amongst those who attempt this climb actually reach the top. Of those that do, I knew the numbers that achieve this on their first attempt is even smaller. Everest is no place to prove yourself. The likelihood of reaching the summit is so slim that you’re inevitably setting yourself up to be disappointed. But I also knew that mountains are the place to express yourself. It was this expression that I now needed after my accident.
The fresh air of the mountains has always strengthened me, and I longed for it again. Such a large proportion of my Army time had been amongst the hills, and I missed them. Here was a way back. The climb was a risk I wanted to take. There was more though. I still yearned to be able to look at my picture of Everest, and to know what those summit slopes were like, and to actually see the curvature of the earth from the top. It was a decision, I guess, I had already made long ago.
My parents and especially my sister, Lara, called me ‘selfish and unkind’, and then subsequently, ‘stupid’. My sister and I have always been fiercely honest with each other, occasionally to our great irritation. But this on the whole, putting aside the occasional black eye, has always been the strength of our relationship. I am closer to my sister than anyone else, and I think it was this intimacy which provoked the hostility to the Everest idea in the months ahead.
Even when my parents came to accept, in the loosest sense of the word, the idea, Lara’s loathing of that ‘E’ word remained. No amount of persuasion would win her round.
My parents weren’t exactly a pushover either. Their acceptance of it came with the condition that if I died, then my mother would leave my father as he had been the first to endorse me. I felt awful. I had never meant to cause such chaos amongst the family, and part of me wished that I had said nothing, except that I was thinking about possibly taking a Thompson’s coach trip for a few months around the British Isles.
Time, and my insistence that everything would be okay, eventually won through and my parents, and even my sister as well, came to accept the idea. Their initial resistance then turned to this fierce determination to help me. Numerous times in the months ahead when I fell flat on my face, beaten by the exhausting road of finding sponsorship and having to train so hard, their support would pick me up, encourage me, and keep me going. Without their help I would have probably ended up on that coach trip around the British Isles. All I had to ensure was that I was right, when I promised I would be okay.
As it happened, four people tragically died on Everest whilst we were there. Four good, strong climbers. A Russian and his American wife; a Briton and a New Zealander. In truth, it wasn’t within my capabilities to make these promises to my family. My father, I think, secretly knew that.
CHAPTER THREE
‘What is Everest without the eyes that see it? It is the hearts of men that make it big or small.’
Tensing Norgay
Legend has it that the Himalaya was formed in a violent struggle of the gods. While the Goddess Vishnu, known as the preserver of life, slept, the Demon Hiranyanksha leapt to earth and ravaged her with such severity that all her limbs were broken and contorted high up into the sky. From this struggle were formed the Himalaya, literally meaning ‘abode of snow’.
Geology tells a different tale. About fifty million years ago the Himalaya and Nepal were a large sea called Tethys. As the vast continent of Gondwanaland slowly crossed the Tethys sea moving north, it eventually met with the shores of Asia. As they collided with mighty force, the impact drove the soft sedimentary rock of Asia dramatically upwards, as the harder granite of Gondwanaland bit into it. This wrenching and tearing resulted in the stunning creation of the highest, yet youngest of the mountain ranges on earth – the Great Himalaya.
The Himalaya stretches without interruption for 1,500 miles all the way across the top of India. It’s hard to visualize the vast scale of this giant land, but if we were to stretch it across Europe it would run the entire distance from London to Moscow. Full of the most gigantic mountains on our planet, the Himalaya houses ninety-one summits over 24,000 feet; all of them higher than any mountain on any other continent. Amongst these are thirteen of the earth’s giants, standing over 26,000 feet, with Everest at the heart, the crowning glory of the physical world. Her summit lies, lonesome and wild, at just under nine vertical kilometres up – exactly 29,028 feet above sea level. A world apart.1
Numerous expeditions during the pre-war years took on the epic challenge of attempting to be the first to reach the summit of Everest. All failed, often with tragic results. These great men of adventure recognized the magnitude of the task in front of them. Mallory, who failed to return and was never seen again after his summit attempt in 1924, said beforehand: ‘The issue of Everest will shortly be decided – the next time we walk up the Rongbuk Glacier will be the last, for better or for worse . . . we expect no mercy from Everest.’ As time showed, he was tragically right; the mountain retained her secret.2
It was not until 1953, 101 years after the discovery that Everest was the highest mountain on earth, that she was eventually climbed. Just before noon on 9 May, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing ‘stamped to the top with their teeth in the wind’.
Hillary wrote: ‘My solar plexus was tight with fear . . . I wondered, rather dully, whether we would have enough strength left to get through. I cut around the back of another hump and saw that the ridge ahead dropped away and we could see far into Tibet. I looked up and there above us was a rounded snow cone. A few whacks of the ice axe, a few cautious steps, and Tensing and I were on the top.’
The news raced back down the valleys, reaching Queen Elizabeth on the eve of her coronation. The Times broke the story and the nation erupted at the British triumph. Morris, a young correspondent, wrote: ‘The moment aroused a whole orchestra of rich emotions among the British – pride, patriotism, nostalgia for the lost past of the War and derring-do, hope for a rejuvenated future.’
The eventual success had come at last. The cost? Fifteen expeditions, the lives of twenty-four men, and the passing of over a century in time.
One of the reasons, I believe, that Everest was never climbed earlier was the fear of the effects that exposure to those sorts of heights would cause. Nobody knew whether the human body would be able to endure such stress. Similarly, before Roger Bannister successfully ran the four-minute mile, doctors declared that it was a physical impossibility; if you ran that fast, they said, your heart would literally ‘burst out of your chest’. Likewise, the fear of what would happen to the human body so high on Everest was another unknown, waiting to be tested.
On the summit there is one third of the amount of oxygen that there is at sea-level. From about 18,000 feet the human body begins to deteriorate as it struggles for survival in the thin air. Above this height for weeks on end, you are on borrowed time. Your body, literally, is dying. Still today, forty-five years after the first successful ascent, the statistics of deaths on Everest remain constant. Out of every six climbers who reach the summit, one of those will die. Equipment improves, forecasts get more accurate, and technology changes, yet the mountain remains the same.
In all of Everest’s history, still only thirty-six Britons have ever stood on her summit; a shockingly low proportion of those who have tried. She doesn’t give her secret out easily, and she always has a price.
*
During the early 1990s, Nepal saw the emergence of commercial expeditions being launched to Everest. Climbers could now pay up to US$60,000 for the privilege of attempting the climb. This fee was intended to cover the logistical cost of the expedition, including all the oxygen, the permit to climb, as well as the cost of three months living on the mountain. The trouble was that advertising to get clients widened the market. Genuine climbers could rarely afford such fees. Instead the climb was opened to less fit and less capable clients, with little knowledge of the hills. The pressure upon expedition leaders to justify the cost often meant that these people found themselves too high on the mountain, dangerously tempting disaster.
It took until 1996, when the combination of a freak storm, and inexperience amongst certain climbers, resulted in that fateful pre-monsoon tragedy. On top of the eight lives lost that stormy night, the mountain took a further three lives the next week, bringing the toll then to eleven.
It wasn’t only the inexperienced though who died up there. Among the dead was Rob Hall, the expedition leader of Adventure Consultants, and one of the most highly acclaimed climbers in the world. He endured a night at 28,700 feet, in temperatures of –50°C. Without any further supplementary oxygen and severely weakened by the cold, the mountain was about to show that no one, not even the best, were infallible.
At dawn, Rob spoke to his wife in New Zealand via a patch-through from his radio and a satellite phone at Base Camp. She was pregnant with their first child, and those on the mountain sat motionless as he spoke his last words to her, ‘I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart.’ He didn’t survive the day, unable to find the strength to move any more.
Shock ran through the climbing fraternity and the world at large. Fingers were pointed and blame was thrown around. The fact is that it took the lives of so many, and the desolation of so many families left behind, to show the climbing world that mountaineering cannot be purely commercial. People thought that they had found a formula that was fool-proof on Everest. But, as is the nature on high mountains, such systems have a funny way of breaking down.
People of course still make money by running commercial expeditions, but now the vetting of climbers involved is much stricter. The motives of these expeditions has now, for the most part, reverted back from being financially driven to what the essence of climbing is really about – namely a love of the hills. It’s tragic that it took such a disaster to remind the world of such a simple lesson. Maybe it is a criticism of Western attitudes, and just showed a deep misunderstanding of the power of these mountains. Maybe it was just bad luck. In reality I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Whatever the answer, the fact is that mountains, like the sea, always demand a deep respect.
To the Nepalese and Tibetans who live under the shadow of the Great Himalaya, the nature of the mountains is well understood. Their force is a higher force, and their attraction is their beauty. Within Nepal, Everest is known simply as the ‘goddess of the sky’, or Sagarmatha. Even this name reflects their respect for nature. I guess that this reverence is the greatest lesson you can learn as a climber. You climb only because the mountain allows it. If it says wait, then you must wait, and when it allows you to go, then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might. Listening to the mountain and having patience on it are the keys to survival.
Everest is so high that she actually creates her own weather-cycles round her. The huge mass causes such gravitational pull that a micro-climate exists around the mountain. The weather here can change in minutes, as wind and storm clouds flood through the valleys.
The summit itself stubbornly pokes into the band of wind that circles the earth at around 30,000 feet upwards. This band of wind blows continually at about 200 m.p.h. and is known simply as the ‘jet stream’. The long plume of snow that pours off Everest’s peak is caused by these winds, blowing frozen snow across the sky. It is hardly surprising that the temperatures high on the mountain can reach as low as –100° wind chill factor.
Standing far above the clouds is this place, so wild, yet so beautiful, that I can so easily understand what Mallory meant when he described her as: ‘rising from the bright mists, vast and forceful . . . where nothing could have been more set and permanent – more terrific – more unconquerable.’
At first sight, Everest is awe-inspiring beyond belief and holds a certain magic over the entire Himalaya.
For some reason, human nature through the decades is still irresistibly drawn to Everest, and I suppose always will be. The challenge, the beauty, the simplicity of nature, or maybe all three. I don’t really know. All I know is that I am now sitting at my typewriter and looking at the picture of Everest in the glow of dusk beside me – the same picture that I used to look at as a wishful eight-year-old, and as a recovering patient. But now, having been so privileged to have crouched briefly on her summit, I view it in a new light; with an even greater awe. The mountain holds me entranced and still I burn with excitement when I see it. Sagarmatha is so much more than just the highest mountain in the world.
CHAPTER FOUR
Blake wrote in the eighteenth century that:
‘Great things happen when men and mountains meet, That is not done by jostling in the street.’
For the time being, though, I was doing my fair share of jostling – madly charging around, trying desperately to find sponsorship for the expedition. The sum of US$25,000, when compared to the savings of a bottom ranked soldier, seemed as elusive as a pork pie in a rabbi’s kitchen. Painting pictures to large corporations of the benefits of sponsorship and getting companies to catch the vision is the first and one of the hardest challenges of high-altitude climbers, and after 203 rejections it was beginning to take its toll.
Apparently it took Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken 1,009 ‘No’s before anyone would support his idea of fast-food chicken. Most of us would have thought that maybe we needed to change our recipe. Like Colonel Sanders, though, this was my only card, so I kept plugging away.
Admin is most definitely my worst point, and I remember on one occasion dialling a number and speaking to someone who I thought was the marketing director of ‘North Face’ equipment. After twenty minutes of exuding down the telephone about the expedition, they informed me that I was through to a Sheffield industrial cleaning firm, and could I please hurry up with my booking.
I soon found that sitting at my desk with piles of proposals, numbers and names, was beginning to addle me in no uncertain terms.
I managed to escape from all this for two months during the build-up to Everest to join the team that was attempting to climb Ama Dablam. This was a commitment that I had promised Neil I would undertake; he would be eager to hear how I performed. For me, this trip was also a chance to clear my head a bit amongst the madness of the preparations for Everest, and to put in some valuable training.
Fitness was going to be fundamental on Everest, and I was now spending as much time as possible climbing and going berserk in the hills of Wales and Scotland. But I needed also to be training at greater heights. The other objective therefore of climbing Ama Dablam was to train at these higher altitudes and to see how my body would react.
Despite climbing with the Army and friends in European ranges, I had never been exposed to the extreme heights that Everest would present. If my body shut down, as can easily happen to people at those altitudes, there would be no point pursuing the dream any further. It was how I would react that Neil wanted to see.
In the 1960s Sir Edmund Hillary, on seeing the great peak of Ama Dablam in the Everest valley, described it as ‘unclimbable’. Looking at her from the bottom, one can understand his sentiments; she stands impressively and majestically pointing straight up into the sky 22,400 feet above sea-level. Climbing it successfully would be an essential step on the road to Everest, both physically and mentally. This brought with it, though, a degree of pressure.
I spent five weeks living on this peak, pushing my body harder and higher. I was now testing my climbing skills to their limits, in situations where, rather uncomfortably, my life depended on them daily. A lifetime of concentration became crammed into the intense hours on her face each day – it left my body drained of energy and strength. I could hardly even think about Everest now. It was too large a step away. This climb itself was demanding my all. Unless I could perform here, what was I doing aspiring so much higher? Over and over I found I was telling myself, Just concentrate on the now. This is where it counts.
*
Finally, by the grace of God, I was huddled on the summit of Ama Dablam. As I squatted there, I glanced left through my goggles, and through the haze of the mist and howling wind I saw the peak of Everest slowly reveal herself. Strong, detached, and still two vertical kilometres above where I was now, Everest suddenly filled my mind all over again.
It had taken my all to be one of the few from our team to reach the summit of Ama Dablam, and now cowering there against the wind, feeling unable to take another step further, the sneer of Everest way above scared me. But something was drawing me. I couldn’t explain it. It just somehow felt right. I knew that I would see the mountain again. For me, that time couldn’t come fast enough.
Ten days later, back in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, the mass of Everest photos for sale in the market had me captivated again. More so now than ever before. To the commercial tourist, the pictures were just pretty postcards on the stalls. To me, though, each one seemed to jump out.
I know it’s possible, I told myself. I’ve tested the formula, and it’s worked. Put up with the discomfort and the pain, keep going and never give up, and understand that if you’re moving up, then you’re always getting closer.
Encouraged by how the climb had gone and this gut feeling that felt so strong inside, I returned home for the real phase to begin.
*
I was soon back in the ‘jostle’ of preparation. The team was gradually coming together now. Geoffrey Stanford, a Grenadier Guards Officer, aged twenty-seven, had joined Neil and me. He had climbed a lot in Europe and had done some high-altitude research in the Himalaya before – spending six weeks at 19,000 feet studying how the body copes and adapts to those sorts of heights. This, though, was to be his first attempt on Everest. His perfect manners and English exterior covered a grit determination; he was like a dog with a bone – a bone he wouldn’t let go. A veritable British bulldog – but in black tie.
The final member of the team to join us was Michael Crosthwaite. I had grown up with Mick since I was a boy, and had climbed extensively with him over the years. Physically and mentally he was exceptionally strong, and because I remember him having hairs around his willy at the age of eight (whilst I didn’t) I had grown up with an inherent respect for him.
Straight out of Cambridge University, and fresh into the City Stockmarket, Mick felt he was rapidly going stale. In his own words he felt he had been ‘swimming underwater for too long and needed to come up for fresh air’. Of ‘fresh air’, we assured him, there would be no shortage. Thus the pull of Everest had her enigmatic way with him; he made the brave decision to leave the City and join the team. The team was better off for it, and I was greatly relieved to have the company of a soul mate. With Neil and Geoffrey as such openly driven people, maybe the two of us could be a more ‘relaxed’ dilution for any tension in the future. Time would tell.
And so the team was finalized. It was small, strong, and despite consisting of very different characters, was bonded by a deep desire to climb this mountain. Neil had had the foresight to keep it small, the idea being that each member was to be capable of forming part of a summit team. We would need to work together, supporting each other constantly, and helping each other when required. I suppose, in some respects, this is similar to how a troop of gorillas operates in the jungle – picking nits out from each other’s hair. In fact, thinking about it now, and remembering the state in which we cohabited a lot of the time on Everest, I don’t think that this is too bad an analogy.
They say familiarity breeds contempt, but in the intensity of the relationships that we were to have, there was no room for this to be the case. We would be spending every day together for three months, living, eating, sleeping and crapping in some of the harshest conditions this world offers. Such experiences make or break friendships. As a team we were well aware of the need for trust and tolerance between us in the months ahead, and this needed to start now.
Three days after I had raised my first few hundred pounds for the expedition – a sum that felt like a drop in the ocean towards the total – I was loading some climbing equipment into Neil’s car. My ice-axe accidentally scraped against the paintwork. Although my car is battered and covered in scratches which never really bother me, I knew Neil’s TVR was first of all worth a lot more than mine and, secondly, was important to him. The next day, those precious few hundred pounds went towards paying for the repairs. This was somewhat depressing, but it was little things like this that I felt would make the difference later on. Neil appreciated it, and remembered.
Over the years the Army had sponsored a considerable number of Everest attempts. Out of all of these, only one had ever successfully reached the top. ‘Brummy’ Stokes and ‘Bronco’ Lane, in the 1970s, reached the summit in atrocious conditions. The bad weather then drove them back. In escaping, they suffered very severe frostbite and lost several toes to the cold; but they had heroically survived. Apart from this expedition, all the other military attempts had been turned away empty-handed; and much lower down.
One of the fundamental reasons, we believed, for this run of military sponsored teams not reaching the top was the size of their expeditions. They had always taken tens of people and mounted huge assaults, with the intention of eventually choosing just two or three to actually go for the top. Within a military framework, this inherently bred excessive competition rather than mutual support. In an environment such as Everest, this all too often spelt disaster.
Another mistake, I believe, was having too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Mountains are great levellers and care nothing for hierarchy – least of all ‘chiefs’. From my time in the hills I have learnt a fundamental lesson: mountains are only ever climbed by ‘Indians’.
So we didn’t leave to any resplendent military fanfare. On the contrary, the Army understandably thought that we would go the same way as all the previous attempts. All we received from them was a promise of a party if we returned alive. I guess that is the way the world works.
With the team established, we started to train together as much as possible. My old motto of ‘two steps at a time up the stairs’ wasn’t going to wash here. For months, day in, day out, we’d train, focusing hard on what lay ahead. Weekend after weekend was spent in the hills of Brecon, climbing for hours at a time with rucksacks loaded with rocks and thick dusty old books from home. I would then run for whole evenings during the week, along the miles of coastal hills in Dorset – cursing the British weather as I stomped across the steep fields.
Doing this endlessly, even when it was pissing with rain, cold and dark, and when all you really wanted to do was go out in London and be ‘normal’, was what would make the real difference later on. This is simply self-discipline. I had lived this sort of life before whilst training for the SAS selection, and swore I would never live it again. Yet three years later, here I was once more.
Mick and I worked a lot together, swimming countless lengths of the local pool – one underwater, then one on the surface, for hours at a time. This boosts one’s ability to work without oxygen, making the body more efficient. Swimming in any rivers or seas was also fair game, but as it was winter, the excursions were rarely more than about three and a half seconds long, before we would be seen running frantically back to the relative warmth of the car’s heater.
We would bicycle everywhere, run everyone’s and anyone’s dog round the woods in all weathers, until the ageing animals passed out with exhaustion. Even in dinner jackets, hills were rarely passed unclimbed as we scrambled to the top of them – often resulting in us being obscenely late for the party.
Despite sounding a little bananas, it was in fact the only way we stayed vaguely sane in the middle of the struggle of organizing all the equipment and sponsorship, prior to departure. My training was my secret escape, and, I guess, my chance to let go of all the tension that was accruing.
*
Time seemed to tick away with unusual speed. By now I had found one main sponsor, the Services charity, ‘SSAFA Forces Help’ (Soldier, Sailor and Airmen Families Association), who backed part of my costs for the expedition. They proved great fun to work with, as well as being outrageously efficient. Yet despite having got some of the way with SSAFA, I was still a whopping amount of money short.
Robert Louis Stevenson said that ‘to be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity’. Obviously I was lacking this identity in the last month or so before we departed, as I roared around on my bicycle, trying desperately to raise the rest of the money.
All avenues were thoroughly explored, and on occasion Mick and I found ourselves in some quite bizarre situations, as we hungrily sought out the elusive ‘financial remedies’ that we hoped would satisfy our Everest fever.
This eventually led to us both standing on the pavement outside Richard Branson’s house one cold and blustery evening, tucked behind a tree arguing over who was going to ring his bell.
‘We’ll do it together,’ we finally agreed. It was 10.30 p.m. and we both felt like novice cat burglars as we grinned nervously in the street outside.
‘On the count of three . . .’
We approached the door and rang his bell. The intercom crackled.
‘Yup?’
‘Ah, good evening, we’ve just popped round to leave a proposal for you, to see if Virgin might be interested in . . . click . . . Hello, hello?’
So before he had even heard what we had to say, Branson had rung off, assuming we were obviously there to sell him some toothbrushes or crimson dish clothes. But as he rang off, he made a fatal error: by mistake he must have leant against the ‘door open’ button. Mick and I looked at each other inquisitively as the door buzzed away in front of us. A quick glance around and without any further hesitation, we gave it a gentle nudge.
Seconds later, we found ourselves standing in Richard Branson’s hallway, looking sheepishly around at each other, as if going to see the neighbour to announce that you’ve just run over their cat. We coughed loudly. And then a bit louder.
‘Hello, hello . . . um, Mr Branson? Hello.’
Seconds later a furious house-assistant skidded round the corner of the landing and charged down the stairs, rather like the head mistress of St Trinian’s. The two of us needed no further coaxing; we dropped the proposal in the hall and legged it out, as the front door was slammed ferociously behind us.
The next morning we sent the Branson household some very expensive Scilly Isle flowers, accompanied by profuse apologies with a PS saying that we hoped he had had a chance to read our proposal. We never got a reply.
But not all of our ‘sponsor hunting’ was so stimulating and generally the routine went something like this . . . ‘Rummage for a clean shirt, and struggle into my grandfather’s old suit. Venture halfway across London to endure a terrifying meeting with a frumpy PR woman with hair on her upper lip. Try desperately to maintain composure, but fail miserably and invariably manage to spill coffee down my front. Go home, peel off my suit and begin again.’ God I hate suits.
This went on depressingly long, and I soon began to wonder if maybe there was something wrong. I bought some Clorets breath fresheners and kept trying.
Having dozed off, I was woken at my desk to the sound of Corporal Jones on the television, ‘Don’t panic, Captain Mainwaring, don’t panic!’ I yawned and turned it off. It was all too close. I picked up the telephone and carried on with the struggle.
A month later and still out of luck, I found myself in the unfortunate position of now being three weeks away from our departure date and still US$16,000 adrift. It was a cold February morning, and I was bicycling off to have a quick sandwich with a friend in the City. As I flew along the pavements, wearing only shorts and an old woolly jersey, covered with mud, I saw a firm called ‘Davis, Langdon and (to my surprise . . . ) Everest.’ They had to be worth a try.
I skidded to a stop, tried to flatten my hair and went in. A giant-sized photo of Everest adorned the wall of the reception. I gave one of my sponsorship brochures to the receptionist and asked if she would be kind enough to ‘send it up to either um . . . Mr Davis or Mr Langdon.’
The lady then leant forward and pushed her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose. As if annoyed to have been disturbed by this scruffy ‘thing’ in her reception, she told me that Messrs Davis and Langdon were the two people who had founded the firm in the early 1900s, and that therefore my request may be a ‘little difficult’. I stood my ground and insisted, and eventually arranged for my brochure to go to the ‘current’ Senior Partner, then sauntered out and thought nothing more of it. I had done this a thousand times before, to no avail.
That weekend I spent at home with my parents in the country. Desperation was beginning to kick in. If something drastic didn’t happen soon, then the expedition, for me, was off. I felt as if I was on this diddery old tight-rope and it was beginning to wobble.
‘Why don’t you pray?’ my mother warbled from the kitchen. It had got way beyond that, I thought. But, in despair, I agreed. So my mother and I knelt in the field, with donkey droppings all around, and said a short prayer for some help. I was all too aware that if I couldn’t find the remaining funds, I would have to withdraw from the team.
Forty-eight hours later a phone call came in for me. It was the Senior Partner of Davis, Langdon and Everest (DLE); they’d received my brochure and wondered if I would have a moment to come in for a meeting.
‘Let me think . . . this afternoon you say? Hmm, yep, I think I’m free, but I better just check . . .’ I calmly said, almost unable to even sit on the chair with excitement.
I raced up to London, squeezed into my suit once more, swallowed a breath freshener and hoped for my last shot to work.
The Senior Partner informed me that the founder of their firm had been a descendant of George Everest, the Surveyor General of India in the 1830s. George Everest had been the first man to properly study the height of this huge mountain in the Himalaya, and 160 years later and with the use of laser technology, scientists showed that he was accurate to within 0.09%. The mountain came to bear George Everest’s name, and his descendant had founded the company whose coffee I was now drinking.
The team of people I was chatting with seemed a world apart from the slightly sour fat cats I had been dealing with elsewhere. They were interested, friendly and had a vision for how this expedition could work for them. Rather than purely wanting the PR from any media coverage, what they saw in it was entirely different.
They wanted a unifying focus for their company. They recognized that a successful company becomes successful from the inside out, rather than the other way round. What they wanted was a project to focus and excite all who worked for DLE, something that everyone would feel a part of. It seemed that I was fast going to become that ‘something’. I swallowed nervously. I would have to start brushing my hair.
And so, with only fourteen days to go before we were due to leave, DLE came in as my main sponsor. The next day I went into the bank to pay in this huge cheque and the cashier’s eyes lit up with delight as he asked me what I was going to do with the money.
‘Get high,’ I replied grinning, ‘ – literally!’
*
The countdown from then on was a blur of organising equipment; getting the correct sized high-altitude boots, sending them back and forth to modify them, and then getting the most suitable crampons accurately fitted. We had to make sure all the medical kit was in order with large enough quantities of the right pills and creams. Then it would be on to checking and re-checking the clothing. Outer-garments, thermal inners, windproofs, fleeces, silk inners, ice-axes, slings, harnesses; the list was endless. Sorting them neatly into the correct piles at home was a delight to our cat, who was convinced the latest in high-altitude goggles was a dead rat. But slowly, and with much help, it all began to take shape.
At the same time though, the fitness training ceaselessly continued. On one of my training sessions some weeks earlier, that actually took place on New Year’s Day on the far north coast of Scotland, I was somewhat ‘briefly’ having my annual New Year’s dip in the wild surf of the North Atlantic. As I emerged, clutching my wedding equipment that by now was looking as if it might never return to its former self, there stood a beautiful, well wrapped-up girl with hair blowing in the wind.
‘Ah, sorry about this,’ I muttered as I hopped around on one leg, trying to put my trousers back on, before falling over on the seaweed. ‘I can explain everything.’ I’m not quite sure what happened after that, but the girl on the beach, very bravely, became my girlfriend.
Our relationship wasn’t exactly of the ‘regular’ variety, and Shara was thrown into the chaos of the final few months of preparation for an Everest expedition. They always say that if you want to terminate a relationship, then take up Himalayan climbing. Well I’d just started one, and it was good – I didn’t in the least want it to end. I wanted to believe in ‘if it’s meant to be, then it will be’, but when there’s a lot to lose, such a motto is really hard to trust. My fears were beginning to show. Keeping everything crossed, I then disappeared for three months and found it a miracle that she was still there on my return. From now on I’ll always swim on New Year’s Day.
*
Our planned departure date was 27 February 1998, and that time was fast approaching. Because our team was relatively small, we had arranged to link up with a larger team who were also to be climbing on Everest. The aim was to benefit from the logistical ease of a larger group, whilst still enabling us to maintain the autonomy of a small, close-knit unit.
This larger expedition was being led by Henry Todd, a very well-known Scottish climber with huge experience and skill. It was with him that I had climbed on Ama Dablam, some months earlier. Rather like the Nepalese load-bearing yaks, Henry is huge, shaggy and matted, but in his case, somewhat better looking. We had been extremely lucky to have been able to join Henry’s team, and without doubt were in the most capable hands around today.
The plan was that we would be climbing on the Nepalese side – the South-East Ridge. This was the original face that Hillary and Tensing climbed, and in the less than inspiring words of Kurt Diemberger, the famous high-altitude climber, ‘this will always be one of the most dangerous routes.’ Of the total 162 deaths on Everest, 101 of those have occurred here – on the Nepalese side.
The climb would lead us up from Base Camp into what is known as the Khumbu Icefall, a tumbling cascade of ice 2,500 feet high, that guards the way up to the first camp, Camp One. From here, the route follows along the crevasse ridden Western Cwm Glacier to Camp Two. The route then goes to the end of the Cwm, over the Bergschrund ice bulge, and then up the sheer ice walls of the Lhotse Face to Camp Three, 3,300 feet higher still. The climb then traverses the ice over the Geneva Spur, and then rises up to the South Col, Camp Four, our last camp.
From here the summit would be attempted in one final push. The route leads to the Balcony Ledge, and then up the South-East Ridge to the South Summit. Once over this and the famous Hillary Step ice-wall, the summit lies 200 metres ahead. We planned it would take about seven weeks of climbing to reach – if all went smoothly.
The first ascent by Hillary and Tensing had used nine camps during their climb. We were to use only four. The planning even at this stage, especially by Henry, was meticulous. Strategy and the effective allocation of resources is crucial in any attempt, and the four of us studied the maps and books like hungry students.
Henry was dealing with all the logistical side of the expedition, such as arranging the oxygen, the portage to Base Camp, the food, and more importantly, the Sherpas. The Sherpas, who are the local Nepalese climbers of the Everest region, would assist with the logistics on the mountain. Different expeditions would employ different Sherpas, but as with most factors on a mountain such as Everest, everyone would mingle and work together. This, in many ways, is the strength of the climbing fraternity.
For the Sherpas, climbing runs through their blood, and because of having been born at a high altitude, they climb with the strength of ten men. They became close friends by the end, and are truly some of the most wonderful people I have ever met.
Organizing these logistics though was a massive undertaking, but what would have taken all of us months of negotiations, Henry had a knack of being able to arrange in his sleep. He just quietly got things done.
*
The last weekend before leaving I went down once more to the Brecon Beacons with some friends. We walked all day, threw a rugby ball around in the evening, and slept in a sheep pen during the night. It was bliss.
A few days later we had a send-off party, for sponsors and journalists to attend. Throughout the whole evening though I began to feel this anxiety. It was all happening very fast now, almost too fast. Part of me wasn’t even sure that I really wanted to go at all. The champagne flowed, speeches were made, but as I sat through it all, looking at all my friends chatting away and laughing, I felt hollow. I’d never experienced this sort of loneliness. Even though here I was surrounded by all those I loved, part of me felt so alone. In forty-eight hours’ time I would leave all of this far behind.
A radio station rang me the next day and asked for an interview. They said that they would like to do it on the morning show at 6.05 a.m. I gulped. I’m bad in the mornings at the best of times, but at 6.05 . . .
Early the next day, the phone rang; I sipped my morning cup of tea, and prepared myself for the questions. They ran thick and fast, and soon it was over. ‘Easy.’ In fact I even thought that I had done rather well. Ten minutes later though, the phone rang again. They said that I had sounded fast asleep and would I mind waking up and doing it again in twenty minutes. I apologized profusely, slurped two strong cups of coffee, and tried again – a bit more coherently. All was OK, and I consoled myself with the thought that first time round it must have been a crackly line.
The interviewer, though, had raised an issue amongst his many questions that I had been asked over and over again. He had commented that he always believed it wasn’t possible for people in their twenties to be able to cope with the adverse effects of high altitudes; hence all well-known climbers tended to be in their thirties or forties, and never much younger.
I couldn’t argue against this. It did always seem to be that the stereotyped climber was bearded and haggard. Well, I might have been haggard but I certainly wasn’t bearded; in fact all I could really grow was a couple of grandma’s whiskers on my chin. Maybe their assumptions were right. Maybe Everest was only for the hairy and older climbers. But there seemed nothing I could do about this, apart from believe Mallory when he said that ‘climbing Everest is all about heart.’ It seemed that this was the only card I had to play.
My last evening, I promised to go and have a drink with a friend. I bustled along on my old 1920s Dutch push-bike to a seedy bar in the depths of night-time London, and joined the queue to get in. It was heaving with people. The queue stretched right round the corner, and hardly seemed to be moving at all. I joined the end and waited in the chilly night. Eventually as I got closer to the door and was standing against the window of the bar, I spotted my mate inside. He was swaying from side to side, with beautiful girls draped all over him. I shivered in the cold.
He spotted me in the queue, and sidled over to the window. We tried to talk through the fogged up glass, but I couldn’t hear. I then saw him gesturing something with his fingers. I squinted through the window. With a broad grin he held out his two fingers, and twisted them up the inside of the glass – symbolizing a man climbing up a mountain. He reached up as high as he could, then mimicked the man tumbling off. As he put his hand back in his pocket, he laughed out loud. I smiled at him from outside.
‘I’ll see you in three months, all being well; I’m not waiting in this queue any longer,’ I shouted. Tim was then swept back from the window by the crowds inside, and was gone from view.
I turned and went home. I slept little that last night.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘All men dream, but not equally, those that dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act upon their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.’
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
DIARY, 27 FEBRUARY:
Sitting in the plane finally on our way, at the end of a long, very busy, emotional rollercoaster of activity – raising the funds, organizing equipment, getting fit, staying healthy and strong, and saying our goodbyes.
Peace at last. But also anticipation. It’s time now to focus on what’s ahead – yet a nervous gulf hovers over us, as to what the future holds.
Mick and I were travelling out about four weeks before Neil and Geoffrey, the idea being to get a bit of extra time at high altitude before the climb itself would start. We wanted to really begin to focus on the job ahead; away from the ‘busyness’ of before.
One of the pieces of research I had done before leaving was to contact a few of the British climbers who had successfully reached the top of Everest. I hungered for any pieces of advice that they could offer. One of the recurring patterns that emerged amongst those who had achieved this and those who hadn’t was that the former had often spent a few weeks beforehand training at an altitude of around 12,000 or 13,000 feet, in preparation. ‘A time of focus before the battle’ was how I heard it described.
And so the two of us found ourselves 30,000 feet up in the Qatar Airways first class section, heading for the Himalaya. Ironically, from a team of four ‘tough’ men, I now found myself alone with Mick, with whom I had shared rugby boots and maths books since the age of seven. Rather than feeling part of this hardened mountaineering team, off to wrestle with the extremes of cold and fatigue, I felt more as if we were going back to school at the start of term; as snotty, homesick kids.
But no one would have guessed it, as we reclined in our huge first class seats and ordered another drink.
Qatar Airways had very generously agreed, as sponsorship, to fly the team there and back. Having only ever flown crammed into cattle-class squashed between two sweaty squaddies, or with my parents, buried under piles of luggage, first class was a treat. I would love to be able to say how we drank the plane dry of complimentary whisky and champagne, and then needed to be wheeled off at the other end with Moët poisoning. But unfortunately that didn’t happen, and the journey passed more or less in quiet anticipation.
Seeing this young couple in the row next to me, kissing their way across the skies, made me heinously jealous. I thought to myself how I would be able to do that soon; well relatively soon; like three months soon. Just a bit of discomfort along the way beforehand, then back to England and long kisses. I was annoyed with myself for feeling like this already.
The pilot brought us up to the cockpit and pointed out Mount Everest through the window, as we passed over Northern India. I pressed against the glass and there, as if piercing through a blanket of cloud on the horizon, stood that place of dreams. The frozen snow poured off the summit, streaming miles across the sky, as the jet stream pounded her upper slopes without remorse. I was transfixed as I stared at her – lonesome in the sky.
‘Outside temperature’s now reading — 55°C,’ the pilot commented. He looked at us and smirked. I tapped him on the shoulder, thanked him and went back to my seat.
I sat and thought of all that had happened in the last few days before leaving. Already it felt an age away. I wrote in my diary:
My best memory of all that I now leave behind is of that last weekend at home, when all the animals broke out. We put the Shetland pony in the field with the donkeys to see if they’d get on. They didn’t. Olly, one of the donkeys, charged through the fence, through the trees, and vaulted a four-foot gate. The Shetland must have had something, as I’d never seen Olly so much as trot before – let alone jump. The pigs then got wind of the excitement and broke out of their sty. Hyacinth, the big female kune-pig, who can hardly walk as she’s so large, did the 100 metres in about five seconds flat. The other donkey then tried to trample Hyacinth, and chased her eagerly along the river. By this stage Abraham, the cock, was flapping furiously, the ducks and chickens were fleeing in all directions from the chaos of the moment, and Mum and Dad were running round trying to make amends.
In many ways it was just another day ‘at the ranch’, but I guess it sums up all that I already miss about home.
Dad drove me to the airport, and looked ten times sadder than me, and I wondered if he knew something that I didn’t. He lingered and lingered, until eventually we had to go through the departures gate. It was horrible. If something happens and I don’t come back, I just want you to know how much I love you both. Thank you for so much.
‘Tough soldier?’ – My foot!
And so we left England, praying that we would see her green grass again, three months later. All that now lay ahead was the mountain and how she was going to treat us.
*
The smog and diesel fumes of the ancient British-made buses engulfed us as we frantically loaded bags of equipment into the minibus. Kathmandu seemed exactly the same as it was four months earlier on my way through to climb Ama Dablam. The same hustle and bustle of Nepali officials claiming luggage tax duty, the same kids running around trying to assist in moving kit – all for a rupee or two.
The horns of the taxis hooted incessantly, as they fought their way through the mayhem of the rickshaw-infested traffic. We piled the last of our bags in and joined the flow, in search of a little backstreet hotel called the Gauri Shankar. Placed in the middle of the old part of the city, it is a small oasis of calm in the midst of raging chaos. The hotel is used almost exclusively by climbers, and they didn’t bat an eyelid as we unloaded the mass of equipment. They were used to this sort of thing.
The rest of the day passed with a bit of shopping in the bazaar, a cold shower to wash off the grime of the city, and a huge Nepali-American supper. After a pretty restless night, our minds buzzing with all that was beginning to happen, we made our way at 5.00 a.m. to the domestic airport to pick up a small helicopter, bound for the foothills of the Himalaya. It was a relief to put in the earplugs, hear the rotors start, and lift off from the bustle of the city below.
I closed my eyes, leant against a sack of ginger, and breathed deeply. Forty minutes later, the rush of Kathmandu was far behind and we were flying across stunning valleys, rich with rhododendrons, with tiny mountain villages scattered intermittently along the hillsides. As we rounded the head of one of these valleys, we saw our destination: a small dirt landing strip perched on the side of a mountain at about 8,500 feet. The village of Lukla was nothing more than a tiny gathering of huts, clustered around a precarious runway.
The helicopter hovered above the ground, sending dust everywhere as the locals crouched from the blast. As we touched down, the Nepalese clambered round helping us drag the bags off the chopper. It then throttled hard and lifted off, disappearing from view as it dropped away down the steep hill, to return through the valleys to Kathmandu. We wouldn’t see such technology again for a while.
Already deep into the foothills of the Himalaya at a height of around 8,500 feet, the village of Lukla is where we would start our trek in towards Base Camp. It would be a journey of some thirty-five miles. This distance would take us about twelve days to cover, partly because of the way one has to cross and recross infinite valleys and gorges that meander through the hills, but also because of the altitude difference that our bodies would experience. Base Camp is at 17,450 feet, and to reach this height safely requires giving the body enough time to adapt.
The strict acclimatization pattern that we’d have to follow would begin now. From this point upward, we would feel the strain of high altitudes. Acclimatization is all about allowing the body to adjust to having less oxygen to function with; and the key to this is being patient in how fast one ascends. The effects of altitude sickness can kill very quickly if this is ignored.
I had been told that the statistics of those who reach the summit of Everest successfully on their first attempt is something like one in twenty out of those climbers that try. We were both well aware therefore of the necessity to acclimatize well, as early as possible. This was to be essential if we were to have even a chance of the top. The struggle to stay healthy and to adapt to the thin air had begun.
DIARY, 1 MARCH:
It has taken all my energy and resourcefulness to raise the finance to organize this expedition for myself; I doubt if I could do that again. Because of this, I’m well aware that I’ve only got one chance up here.
Along the way will be harder work than I have ever known before, but I’ve got to throw my everything at this; and then it’s home to fireplaces, the animals and hot chocolate. We’re in the Good Lord’s hands.
The little village of Toc-Toc was three hours’ walk along the valley side, crossing wooden bridges over small streams and skirting round tiny batches of huts that lay along the route. The sounds of the yak bells ringing in the terraced fields and children fighting in the mud was all that broke the silence of the hills around us.
As we came round corners and glanced up through breaks in the trees, we would catch glimpses of the mountains far above us. Then they would be lost again from sight, and replaced by the immediacy of the flora all around. Glades of blue pine and juniper adorned the valleys, and their aroma reminded us of the refuge that these foothills provide from the cold and raw nature of the huge peaks far away and above.
Our first night in the valleys was spent at Toc-Toc, where we washed in the waterfall outside a little farm hut. A small family lived here, and fed us majestically on their homegrown vegetables and rice. We read by candlelight until 9.00 p.m., before settling down to sleep. The cushions were full of fleas and the wooden boards were hard on the body; but it felt good in its simplicity. Listening to the noises of the night, I dozed off to sleep.
I was woken abruptly in the depths of darkness to the heaving and retching sounds of Mick throwing up into a boot. Maybe the altitude was beginning to affect him, or maybe those vegetables had been just a little too fresh. Whatever it was, though, was sure making itself heard in Mick. The situation only got worse when, in the light of dawn a few hours later, I discovered that the boot Mick had grabbed had in fact been mine. Many apologies and a few cups of lemon tea later, Mick looked a better shade of green than he had at sunrise, and we slowly began to pack up our gear.
That day we were to reach the market village of Namche Bazaar, perched in the bowl of a hill at about 12,000 feet. This is the local trading place for the little villages scattered throughout the Khumbu Valley region. It is the last post of any vague civilization on the route through the hills, towards the Base Camp of Mount Everest.
Mick was weakened by his bout of food poisoning and was slightly concerned about making such an inauspicious start to the trek. He remembered hearing of some famous climber who had been intending to scale a peak out in this region, being forced to abandon the attempt after slipping a disc, chewing on a chapati – a local unleaven bread. I tried to reassure Mick that a bit of food poisoning wasn’t quite the same and the two of us then set off, contouring along the valley edge before beginning the steep path up towards Namche Bazaar – avoiding at all costs eating any chapatis along the way.
After crossing a spectacular but precarious old rope bridge spanning a 300 feet deep gorge, we started up a long path through the trees towards Namche, two hours in the distance.
DIARY, 2 MARCH:
Steep terraced houses and plots of cultivated land form this little market town, high up in the forested foothills – it is the most developed place I’ll see for the next three months. It has a generator to supply the few houses with electric lights, and a primitive drainage system, covered by slabs of wood and stone, that runs through the streets. The place is full of small stalls selling endless amounts of old climbing equipment that expeditions have left behind on their return journeys.
Mick and I both bought a few final bits and bobs, or ‘monkeys and parrots’ as my old sergeant would say, that we might need as spares. We also took the opportunity to eat our last bit of vaguely decent food. We both know that from when we leave here tomorrow, the conditions will worsen, and the food we’ll eat will be food that has been carried in – hence not quite ‘Savoy-esque’.
A plump, middle-aged German lady, who is out here trekking, asked Mick if she could have his autograph, as she’d never met anyone who was attempting to climb Everest. I went and hid in the loo, chuckling away, as Mick floundered about trying desperately to escape this formidable woman’s grasp.
The loos here are pretty primitive, and are generally just a hole in the floor inside a tiny wooden hut. Plenty of ‘misfires’ ensure that the wooden floor around the hole is well soiled, and that the pile of poo pokes through the hole like some sort of decaying pyramid. Because of being at 12,000 feet, it’s pretty difficult to hold one’s breath for very long, as you enter the little hut and desperately try to do what you need to do without inhaling. Inevitably you end up gasping for breath as you give up, and are left squatting there, puffing in the rancid smell. We hear a rumour of a loo further up, with a natural drainage system from a stream, making it beautifully clean. Maybe I’ll try and hold on until we find it.
I told Mick that I was going to have an early night and was going to change and go down to pyjamas. Mick, slightly confused, asked me where ‘Pyjamas’ was, as if it was some Nepalese village he hadn’t heard of. I chuckled – must be the altitude, I thought.
It is now snowing hard in Namche. This is the first snow we’ve seen. I wonder what it’s like further up the Khumbu Valley.
It snowed all night, and at 7.00 a.m. we left Namche. We headed out into the mist, following the yak-trail towards the village of Deboche, five hours’ walk away. As we started up the steep track, towards the Buddhist monastery at Thyangboche in the distance, the sun reflected off the muddy snow around us. Three hours later, approaching the monastic village, we could hear the monks’ meditative chants. The sound seemed to waft over us like some soothing balm, as we climbed the last few hundred feet through the wooded slopes.
The monastery dominates the entire valley; and having been built laboriously by hand, chipping the rocks one by one, you could almost feel the solace of the place. The lama of the region, believed to be the living reincarnation of an ancient Buddhist deity, chanted from a parched scroll as we discreetly sat in the shadows at the back. After the ceremony we went outside the monastery and into an adjacent hut, where we sipped soup around a fire with some of the villagers. A couple of hours later, we headed out into the snow again, towards Deboche, half an hour further on.
DIARY, 3 MARCH:
Deboche turns out to be a cluster of only three houses and, as expected being higher up, is even more basic. The hut we are in is wooden, as are the beds; cushions now seem a luxury of the past. We all huddle round a fire as night brings with it the cold.
Two Buddhist monks are having a ceremony next to us, and are busy chanting and tossing rice around. They offered Mick and I some of their local alcoholic brew, called ‘chang’, which we sipped tentatively, having seen them coughing ferociously into it seconds earlier. Sharing drinks here is always a bit dodgy, as many of the locals suffer from tuberculosis, but being ‘British’, we felt it important not to appear rude.
We have found a lovely kitten here, which now follows us round the hut. The local name for cat is ‘biralou’, but this one seems alive with fleas, so Mick renamed it ‘bira-fleas’. I wish that we could take it with us as our ‘high-altitude’ cat, but he says that it will make everyone scratch. I tried to tell him that I’d had fleas for years, but he wouldn’t listen. The cat had to go.
The lady who runs the place here is apparently an old girlfriend of Edmund Hillary. She laughs beautifully, despite showing her only three black, rotten teeth. She seems to have chronic tooth decay though, and to be in real pain. She clutches her jaw and grimaces, smiles briefly, then carries on moaning. I feel pretty hopeless, as all I have to give her are some painkillers. So I have given her a large dose and told her to sleep. I’m suddenly a little worried that I’ve given her too much, especially considering the altitude that we’re at. We haven’t seen her again, I hope I haven’t killed her!
That morning after a considerably colder night, the lady, who to my huge relief was still alive, woke us. It was dawn and she took us out through the trees to a clearing fifty yards away. There in the still of morning, some fifteen miles away, and five kilometres vertically above us, we saw the summit of Everest poking out from behind the huge mountain of Lhotse Shar. The early glow was catching the top, and she seemed so beautiful and remote as the wind drove the snow off her summit. Completely stuck for words, we both strained our necks and watched the sun rise behind her; then she was hidden again by the mist of day – gone.
I knew what Mallory meant when he said: ‘Higher in the sky than imagination had ever ventured to dream, the top of Everest itself appeared.’
The sight of the mountain, so elusive, high, and impossible, filled my mind for the rest of the day. I had imagined that I would feel an excitement when I first saw her, but instead I just felt this dread.
*
Later on that morning, having each been given a cord necklace that had been blessed by the head Buddhist priest of the region, we left Deboche. The landlady, who had lived in the shadow of the mountains all her life, beseeched us to be safe; she assured us that the necklaces would bring protection. We thanked her and, deeply moved, headed on. We weaved our way through the snow-covered forest tracks, further into the heart of the mountains. From this height onwards, the flowers and trees would stop growing and the snows would really now begin.
DIARY, 5 MARCH:
This morning I had the treat of washing my hands in the freshly fallen snow. It’s wonderful to see their real colour after the grime of the last few days. Everything gets much cleaner the higher up we go because it’s colder, and bacteria and germs are less prevalent; it makes me feel much safer biting my nails!
Spent much of our rest-day today reading a book detailing the disaster on Everest in 1996; the disaster that Neil so narrowly escaped. I find it all too near. It’s kind of hard to ‘armchair’ read a book that goes into graphic detail about how so many lives were lost in a storm high on Everest, when you’re actually on the way out there yourself – and you’re scared enough as it is. Still I guess the key is to learn from what happened. In many ways it boils down to being courageous when the chips are really down, and not just acting courageous when you’re all safe and cosy. Courage should always be softly spoken. I must remember these things now.
A few hours later, we had arrived in the little village of Pangboche, the home of many Sherpas who live and climb in the Everest region. The houses were perched on the steep slopes of the valley, overlooking the gorge below. Many of these were full of climbing memorabilia, heralding past triumphs or disasters, and famous names lined the walls.
In this village, we were to meet Henry our expedition manager, who had been up here getting acclimatized, before having to head back to Kathmandu to arrange the collection of the oxygen cargo. Mick and I headed off to find him. He was staying with the head-Sherpa, or Sirdar, as they’re known – called Kami. Kami’s job was to organize the Sherpas who would help us carry supplies on the mountain.
The house Kami lived in was a beautiful, traditional Sherpa house. We entered through a tiny wooden door that led into a stable where the yaks lived. This was a small low room, with a packed mud floor, covered with straw. Through the darkness, a shaft of light revealed a wooden staircase going up into the main living area of the house. As the stairs creaked under us, we emerged into a large single room, where the whole family would live, cook, and sleep. A mud stove gently burnt in the corner, and the sun shone through the smoke that leaked from its side. Great yak furs lined the floor and beds, whilst yak droppings dried in the corner. These would eventually provide fuel for the stove. Tucked up in the corner of the room, grinning from ear to ear, twiddling his beard and sipping on a lemon tea, sat Henry.
We spent the afternoon with Kami and Henry, rummaging through barrels of equipment and checking all the supplies, so that Henry would know what had gone missing and be able to resupply it in Kathmandu. Everything came out; from tents to ice-probes for finding people under an avalanche, aspirins for thinning the blood and helping acclimatization higher up, to even mayonnaise. Hundreds of ice-screws, kilometres of rope, and a mountain of Mars bars. Once at Base Camp, resupply would be almost impossible, everything had to be checked and double-checked now.
Later on that day with Henry, whilst chatting to the Sherpas who had just come back down the valley, we heard our first piece of tragic news. A porter had been killed in the ice approaching Base Camp. Neither of us knew him, yet that evening there was a soberness amongst the three of us as we sat and heard what had happened.
The porter had been ferrying equipment up to Base Camp – a long trip that many of them do as an extra source of income. This time, though, he had been climbing over the glacier towards Base Camp too late in the afternoon, the time when the ice is least stable. Base Camp is perched at the head of the glacier, at the foot of the mountain, and the route is found by snaking one’s way across the ice, amongst the huge glacial pinnacles that line the trail. As the climbing season approaches, this trail becomes better and better trodden – but in the early days, such as now, it was still pretty much virgin territory.
During the afternoon the ice is always weaker after a morning of sun on it. Apparently this porter had become disorientated, then lost, and they believe that an ice-bridge must have given way beneath him, sucking him away down the ice-smooth glacial streams that run beneath the surface.
Henry was returning the next day to Kathmandu, and warned us seriously against travelling to Base Camp at any other time than early morning – especially before any safe route was established. I prayed for the porter’s soul and his family that night, and heeded Henry’s advice carefully.
We spent much of that evening after Henry had left playing with some of the kids in the village. I lent a little girl of five the only pack of cards we had, hoping they wouldn’t get too ruined. They were an important item for the times ahead. Secretly, though, I wasn’t that hopeful, and pretty soon there were cards everywhere. Fifteen minutes later, it was wonderful to sit and watch this girl carefully tidy them all up, put them in their box, and place them back neatly alongside my diary. I smiled. I had learnt more about gentleness watching this than I would in months of charging around London. Funny really . . .
DIARY, 7 MARCH:
We walked for three hours today, up towards the last village before Base Camp – Dingboche, at 14,500 feet. We contoured along and up this huge wide valley that surrounds the beautiful and majestic peak of Ama Dablam.
I sat on a rock and studied the route I had climbed four months earlier. It felt good to see the peak, and to think that I’d stood on its summit. The mountain, though, still seems exactly the same as before – it’s as if the climb has changed only me, and not it. As if only I’d been affected. I wonder whether, looking down, it even remembers me struggling, gasping for oxygen up those last few hundred feet to the top. Looking at it from this angle, part of me wonders how the hell I ever got up.
We passed the spot where Kami’s sister was killed a few years ago in a landslide. It’s strange seeing the torn scar in the hillside where the landslide happened; climbing over huge boulders of rubble that cover an entire village deep beneath them. Tentatively we made our way along the narrow path, with the ravine dropping away steeply to our right.
Two hours later we reached Dingboche. This village is situated at the foot of the huge mountains of Nuptse and Lhotse, with Everest behind them. Both Mick and I are tired today, and I think the altitude is now really beginning to have an effect. We’ll rest here tomorrow, to try and recover a bit. It’s this careful balance of rest, exercise and sleep, in preparing ourselves to be in the best possible state for the rigours ahead.
The tedium of such a strict routine is alleviated by the raw beauty of our surroundings. Vast mountains, the biggest in our world, rise straight up all around us, and when the wind blows through the valleys where we are, it feels as if the giants are stamping their heels.
A wonderful lady with a huge smile and only one eye, runs the lodge here. We piled up all the straw cushions and rested like the ‘Princess and the pea’ – a treat after the wooden boards of before.
I’ve just seen my face in an old cracked mirror, it was quite a shock – I hope it wasn’t me who cracked it. Mick confirms that I look pretty rough, having not had a wash since . . . England. I can’t say, though, that he looks like any Casanova!
At 6.00 a.m. we moved on from Dingboche, heading higher up still, towards Base Camp. We hadn’t gone far, when we came across a great sight that I don’t think I will ever forget.
Tucked into the side of the trail, stoically enduring the morning chill, sat two seventy-year-old English gentlemen enjoying some early morning breakfast. Seated at either end of a table that seemed to loll at a somewhat precarious angle on the rough ground. They both seemed lost in the ecstasy of spam and eggs at 14,500 feet.
We soon found out that these British eccentrics’ ambition had been, for years, to walk through these valleys and to be able to see the ‘Great Everest’, as one of them said, ‘in the flesh’. His eyes lit up with delight. We couldn’t resist staying a while, and soon found ourselves, at their invitation, dining like ‘kings’ in the company of two fine ‘queens’.
Whilst we sipped our tea at the end of the meal, the two of them became deep in conversation, arguing everything from the role of the Queen to the falling standards of British Rail sandwiches. Only when a punch-up over which was the quickest way from Salisbury to Bodmin seemed imminent, did we think it might be time to leave. Greatly inspired by seeing such extraordinary people in such an extraordinary place, we wished them luck and carried on – feeling much uplifted.
From there we followed a yak-trail, until we came up over the lip of the valley. Ahead was a vast plain that stretched away into the distance, under the looming shadow of Mount Pokalde. We walked all morning through this plain, past the remains of old stables that had been used to house yaks. Soon we began to turn north, towards the foot of the glacier, upon which Base Camp is situated – still a day’s walk away.
The path wound its way up through the mass of rocks that form the terminal moraine of the glacier. Buddhist shrines, called chortons, stand scattered along the route. Old prayer flags adorn these, and flutter away incessantly, beckoning you on your way as you pass them. The going had become progressively slower these last few days, and the thinner air was very noticeable now. Mick and I would stop every twenty minutes to rest, drink, and take the chance to savour the views of this barren land.
At mid-afternoon, we found a small hut with some Nepali porters inside, and joined them in drinking some tea. We then set out to try and reach Lobuche, before nightfall came. As we came over the moraine onto the glacier, we found ourselves in blazing late-afternoon sunshine. The main trail petered out into a small snow path, and the sun reflected strongly against our faces. A warm glow came over me; we were nearing the end of this long walk through the valleys to Base Camp. It wasn’t far now. We’d be there tomorrow, God willing. We could just see in the distance, where the mountains met the end of the glacier – the place where it would be.
I wrote as we sat and rested:
We now can’t see Everest at all, as it is hidden by the vast mountain of Nuptse, on our right. Even from Base Camp we won’t be able to see her – not until we’re 5,000 feet higher up, and well into the climb itself, will she reveal herself.
Two hours later we reached Lobuche, a clearing along the glacier with a few huts that accommodated those heading up to Base Camp. It was a foul-smelling place. Because of the nonchalance that the cold and altitude caused, people couldn’t be bothered to keep the area clean, and they spent most of their time in the huts, drinking and complaining about the bleak conditions.
The loo here had degenerated into a seething mass of faeces, and nobody any longer even bothered to use it. Instead people crapped in any clear place they could find. The cold ensured that this place was never far from the hut. That night as I sneaked out to try and go myself, negotiating a route through the stinking minefield, I realized that hygiene was now a distant blur of the past.
That evening, as we sat wrapped up in our down jackets, round the tin stove that burnt the dried yak dung, we talked with the Nepalese who were there. Soon the chang was produced, followed not long after by an old guitar they had. None of them could play, and they were excited to hear that I did; that was until I actually did play, and then their enthusiasm somewhat waned. Well ‘American Pie’ isn’t easy with six strings, let alone four. The next day, though, they agreed to let me borrow the guitar for the time I would be up at Base Camp.
As a lot of one’s time is spent there mentally preparing for what lies ahead, I felt that to have a guitar was a real coup. Although I’m not sure the rest of the team quite saw it like that over the next few months. Heathens.
At 6.30 a.m. I strapped the guitar to my rucksack and we said farewell to the Nepalese. They grinned and bade us good luck in what the Tibetans call the ‘poisonous gas’: the thin air of high altitude. We lowered our faces to the morning chill, and headed off for the last five-hour stretch that would bring us eventually to Base Camp.
We hadn’t got far, though, when the first effects of the food we had eaten began to kick in.
‘Won’t be a second, Mick,’ I announced as I scurried off behind a large rock on the glacier to get rid of the better part of me that morning. But it wasn’t all of me by any means. Frequent stops every ten minutes along the way followed, to the great amusement of Mick.
Getting the ‘runs’ though, is part of life when climbing in the hills of Nepal. The locals never wash much, and their food cannot be kept fresh for long – so their resistance to bacteria is therefore higher. I had been brought up on picking my pork chop up off the floor at home if I had dropped it, but, even for my stomach, some of the food we had at Lobuche was proving a bit much. The best and only way to cope with these ‘part of life’ occurrences was just to allow the body to work its course naturally. When it expels whatever is reacting against you, you feel instantly better. Bunging yourself up with Imodium or other diarrhoea tablets just delays the whole process.
By mid-morning I was much better, but a little dehydrated. We were slowly contouring our way along the side of the glacier, winding through the ice and debris of rocks that had been deposited along the route. These piles of rocks create a vast wasteland, and we followed an old yak-trail to avoid becoming disorientated. We were exhausted though by this clambering up and down huge boulders, and rests became more and more frequent.
Part of me felt maybe only now was I beginning to realize the ‘enormity of the task ahead’, to quote Mallory; the enormity of this challenge that maybe should have remained just a dream. I was struggling at even this height. How on earth was I going to be able to go up into the extreme altitudes that we knew lay ahead, kilometres vertically above where we were now, when I was currently worrying about the 100 feet or so of height change that day?
My goals at this time were so small, and I couldn’t really focus on much more. But maybe that would be the key. I remembered hearing that to eat an elephant one has to start with a small bite. But at present I was having difficulty digesting even that.
As we continued along the route, we came to a cluster of stone memorials. These had been built in honour of some of the men who had died on Everest. Each one being about eight feet high, with a photograph wedged in the middle. These served as a chilling reminder of the authority of the mountain. Rob Hall’s memorial stood quietly there, with a few prayer flags billowing on top of it. The tragedies keep happening, yet people still come back. I wondered if that showed bravery or recklessness; and couldn’t decide. The numbers though tell the story simply – 162 lives lost on her slopes.
The final three hours towards Base Camp took us right into the glacier itself. From this point on, being so early in the climbing season, there was no established route, and we weaved our way along, heading in the direction of Base Camp. At certain points in the glacier, we would glimpse the Sherpas’ tents in the distance. As we then descended back into the mass of rocks and ice, the tents would once more become hidden from view.
Dramatic drops that led down to frozen lakes below endlessly blocked the route. We would then be forced to try another route, winding through the maze of glacial rocks. Going up and down huge scree slopes and scrambling over these vast boulders the size of trucks soon left us both anxious and tired. We knew this was how that porter had got lost only a week earlier.
There was an entrancing quality to the surface of the glacier. Much of it was covered in loose snow and rocks, but in parts we could see far down into the depths – beneath us were hundreds of feet of shimmering, glassy ice. On occasions the ground would groan as the glacier shifted below.
At this stage in the season we expected to find Base Camp empty, save for a small group of our Sherpas sent by Kami, who were starting to prepare the ropes and other equipment. It was them that we were hoping to meet. The majority of what we required for the climb, along with more clothing, would arrive by yak in ten days’ time. So at the moment we had nothing more than just basic trekking equipment. I tucked my old chef’s trousers into my socks to keep the draught out, and pulled my tweed cap down tight to avoid losing it to Tibet.
Everyone should permit themselves certain luxuries in life. Stan, for example, a very old friend, consistently made a point of stowing his pyjamas in his bergan on field exercises – to the bewilderment of his sergeants. But for me, my pair of tatty old chef’s trousers and ultra-hairy Richard Hannay tweed cap filled my needs nicely. I think certain other climbers in due course showed a slight distress at the British attire around Base Camp, but as I’d once heard said: ‘Beware: strength is often hidden in absurdity’; although in our case I’m not sure that was entirely true, but it was worth a try!
The wind began to get up over the glacier, and it got considerably colder. I wished now that I had some of my proper climbing clothes with me. I just wanted to reach the tents; it had been a long few weeks for the two of us out here, and we were both desperate to get there and start settling in. An hour later, though, we were still floundering around in the glacier, and not appearing to get much closer. We didn’t talk, but rather just numbly dreamt of the sanctuary we hoped Base Camp would offer.
By the time we reached the tents it was blowing hard, and we were both cold and tired; but at last we had arrived. We went round to the flap of one of the tents, undid the zip, and peered in. The dirty faces of four Sherpas broke into welcoming grins. They were sitting round a tiny stove, clutching steaming mugs of hot tea.
‘Why so late? We worried much. Come drink.’
We looked at each other and smiled.
We were now at 17,450 feet.
CHAPTER SIX
‘Well here’s another fine mess you’ve got me into.’
Oliver Hardy to Stan Laurel
DIARY, 12 MARCH:
Mick has a throbbing headache, and I can hear him throwing up outside his tent. He has hardly spoken a word in the last twenty-four hours since arriving here, and seems to be suffering quite a bit from the altitude at Base Camp. I’m putting on a semi-brave face, but feel pretty crap myself. It’s all a bit worrying sitting here, and already feeling like this.
Early reactions of the body of not having enough oxygen in the blood are headaches and lethargy. The latter is never normally a problem; but when I’ve got to be helped in just getting a simple tent erected, it makes me feel pretty pathetic. Especially as I collapse in it afterwards and then look out of the flap, up to the vast mountain of Nuptse above, knowing that she hides the monster of Everest behind her.
I put down my diary, and thought that I would try to sleep a bit. Night had already come, and it was only 6.30 p.m. It felt bitterly cold – colder than I’d ever known. I saw on my temperature gauge that it was — 20°C.
It was still winter time at the moment, and I knew that it would slowly begin to get warmer as the weeks went by, and spring arrived in the mountains.
I snuggled down into my sleeping bag, and closed my eyes. A bit of sleep should sort my headache out, I hoped.
Thoughts flooded my mind: I remembered the famous Everest climber Hornbein’s description of Base Camp. He’d called it a ‘world not meant for habitation’. I was beginning to understand. It made me question just how bright all of this really was. I wondered also how Mick was feeling and soon, bereft of any answers, I dozed off.
I woke up at 1.00 a.m. with a deep pounding in my skull. The literal ‘bear with a sore head’. The stuffy air in the tiny, enclosed tent wasn’t helping, and it was a toss-up between letting the harsh chill of the night frost come in, or enduring the headache from the less oxygen-rich, trapped air. I spent the rest of the hours until dawn with the zip closed, sipping at the lukewarm water in my thermos.
One of the factors of living at high altitudes is coping with condensation inside the tents. All one’s exhaled breath freezes on the inner layer of the tent and around the top of your sleeping bag, and as the sun rises, this begins to drip. By 7.00 a.m. each morning your bag is damp, and you’re invariably woken up by ice-cold water dripping on your face.
My first morning at Base Camp I spent half an hour trying to dodge these drips, and then reluctantly scrambled out of my bag, struggled into some warm clothes, and got out of my tent – squinting because of my headache.
Mick was still no better, and his tent was ominously still all zipped up. Little birds chirped round the front of his tent flap, and I sat there watching them, wondering jealously why they were only congregating outside his. It took a few minutes of observing this to realize that the birds were only there because they were feasting on Mick’s sick that he had deposited there during the night. I grinned, and breathed in the cold crisp air as the morning sun began to shine on my face.
DIARY, 13 MARCH:
I’m trying to drink as much as possible to help the headache, but I certainly don’t feel like eating anything. A small bit of rice was all I managed for breakfast with the Sherpas. Luckily the food will improve here dramatically when all the others arrive in a few weeks’ time, but in the meantime we’re strictly on ‘Sherpa’ rations.
I watched them all go off early this morning to begin work on the ropes, and to have a look at the first part of the climb. They seem so strong and at home at this height. I can only look on, ‘sick’ with envy – literally.
This morning I spent much of the time unpacking and sorting through my equipment. The guitar now seems a bit of a burden and I can’t find any room for it in my tiny tent, now that it’s full of kit. On top of that, it has broken a string during the night – it must have been too tight and have snapped in the cold.
Base Camp is already over 1,600 feet higher than the summit of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Western Europe. Tucked away at the top end of a glacier, it sits in a barren landscape of rocks that are strewn like marbles across the ice. Often likened to the moon in its harsh and uninviting surroundings, pinnacles of glassy ice reach up, twisted and chiseled amongst the rocks. At this height nothing can grow.
When you first arrive, you struggle for hours to build a level platform for your tent, forging a base out of tiny stones amongst the ice. Glacial boulders balance precariously on pinnacles of ice, and as the glacier groans and moves beneath you, these shift and slide randomly about.
As the weeks go by, and the ice around moves, so does your tent. Soon you find yourself perched on a contorted bit of ground and you need to start again – repitching your eighteen square feet, of what becomes known simply as ‘home’.
Mountains soar upwards on all sides, thousands of feet above. You can imagine the mountain gods peering down and viewing the tents as tiny orange specks amongst the miles of rock and ice far below. These mountains form a natural amphitheatre around Base Camp, and huge hanging glaciers are draped along the vast walls on all three sides. These collapse at all hours of the day and night, causing thunderous avalanches. Sitting here, you hope that your camp is situated far enough away, so as to avoid these terrors.
The noise of these avalanches shatters the silence of the place. As the weight of snow can no longer sustain itself, large sections break off and tumble like ‘white thunder’ down the sheer faces. The noise echoes around the mountains, shaking the foundations of the glacier as the avalanches plummet to earth.
These are extraordinary moments, as you hear the initial crack of the snow coming loose far above. We would scramble to the edge of our tents and stare out as the cloud of snow picked up momentum. We knew that we were far enough away from the danger; but still in the dead of night when we first heard those rumbles and saw the moonlight glistening on the tumbling mass of snow, our hearts stayed still.
These serve as a sober reminder of what lies ahead on the mountain, outside of Base Camp’s ‘safe’ zone. In the mountains, avalanches kill more people than the cold and the altitude put together – here you’re never allowed to forget this.
During those first few days Mick and I struggled to get used to this new environment. An environment that consisted of the cold, extreme altitude, and a wilderness of rock and ice. The occasional groan of the glacier moving beneath us at first frightened me. I was finding it hard not to be able to find refuge in anything familiar. No trees, no flowing water, no earth below us. The only comforts now seemed to be a second roll mat to pad out the sharpness of the stones beneath us and a battered old three-stringed guitar to strum.
I wrote in my diary:
I think that the fear of what lies ahead accentuates the harshness of this place. I’ve never known an environment quite like it. I must learn though to think of this as ‘home’, as one thing is absolutely certain – Base Camp will be the tamest place on this mountain.
That afternoon, like many afternoons later on, I sought the solitude of my tent and whiled away the hours reading the letters that my family had given me before leaving. Tucked into one of the side pouches of my rucksack I found a note from my mother. It said simply, ‘Angels are watching over you.’ I folded it and carefully put it away.
*
I knew a couple of the Sherpas at Base Camp from the climb on Ama Dablam, namely Nima and Pasang; it was good to see them again. They are both great characters who live for the mountains, and take great pride in their climbing. They laugh ferociously at almost anything, and then can keep laughing at the same joke for hours. You couldn’t help but like them. It was good to be spending time with them now, before the pressure started. Later on, we knew that we would be together in much less pleasant situations.
A couple of days later, Mick was feeling much better and was more his usual self. He is fiercely resilient, and recovering like this was typical of the way he overcame obstacles throughout the expedition.
Whether he was ill, or had taken a nasty fall whilst climbing, or was just feeling the frustration of endlessly waiting for suitable weather, he would always calmly ride through it. This would often involve him just quietly retreating to his tent, and sitting things out; coping with it in his own way. But he would never be beaten. Mick knew how to cope with hardship, and always seemed to emerge from it fighting. It was of no surprise therefore to see Mick, who had hardly been seen now for three days, climb out of his tent – smiling and fit again.
Because our families were very close, we had grown up as kids together. I will never forget his mother telling me before we left that she was confident Mick would be okay, as long as I was with him. But I felt the same reliance towards him. I sensed that I was stronger when I was with him, and he inspired me to work to my limits. Our partnership together, even at this stage, kept me going; and my respect for him grew daily. They say that if you see someone’s vulnerability, then you realize their fallibility; but with Mick it was the opposite. In the weeks ahead I saw him almost daily at his physical limit, and this has left me with a deep admiration for the man.
Now that we had spent a few days at Base Camp, and Mick was feeling healthy again, we planned to pack a small rucksack of equipment and head back down the valley to about 14,000 feet, to train. We still had ten days before Neil, Geoffrey, and Henry’s team would arrive at Base Camp, and we hoped to do a last week of climbing before they got here. We decided to leave the next day.
DIARY, 15 MARCH:
Another very cold night here, but I’m slowly learning the tricks of the trade. The most fundamental one being that to fill a waterbottle with boiling water before going to bed keeps the toes warm for hours, and evokes all sorts of good emotions.
The coldest hours are between 4.00 and 5.00 a.m. and by that stage the water bottle is cold and lies uncomfortably in your bag. This morning I took mine out at 5.00 a.m. and it was frozen solid within forty-five minutes. During these early hours I just seem to curl up and hide away in my own little world – the world of my sleeping bag.
When the sun comes up, it burns so strongly because of the high altitude. Less particles to diffuse the rays makes the burning effects pretty obvious. Mick’s already got panda eyes and we’re both going this dark, dark brown. Rather than looking golden and sexy though, we just look this ‘dirt’ colour. Not that there’s anyone to look sexy for, apart from three yaks. Talking of which . . . I wonder what the yaks like best, brown or golden . . . Hmm!
The sky also looks this wonderful deep blue colour, which seems to fade at the edges into a darker shade. I guess though that’s to be expected – after all, we are 17,450 feet closer to space.
We headed back out of Base Camp the next morning – equipped with our rucksacks and fifty feet of rope. Once across the glacier, we were to head down to Dingboche, rest there and then climb the next day. But we found getting across the glacier from Base Camp harder than we had expected. The absence of any path meant that we wound our way through the ice in the rough direction we thought the edge of the glacier to be.
What should have taken two hours took us four, but eventually we found our way onto the ridge. The two of us sat exhausted and looked at the vast expanse of rock and ice that we had crossed. We didn’t say anything as we stared, each of us lost in our thoughts – grateful to be on solid ground.
That afternoon, as we approached Dingboche, 3,500 feet lower down, we were relishing the prospect of sleeping in a hut with a warm fire, in the thicker oxygen. But when we arrived, the place was full of trekkers, now that the trekking season was fast approaching; and there wasn’t room. We pulled out our little tent and put it up outside. It was a bit colder than being in the warmth of the hut and we didn’t get our fire, but at least we could be in peace, and were able to hear the sounds of the night clearly.
The next day we walked for two hours, through strong wind and hail, down to the village of Pangboche. When we arrived we were starving and we tucked into a hearty lunch of rice, stewed vegetables, and yak cheese. We wanted to climb the ridge that led to the foot of Ama Dablam that afternoon, and to spend a night there acclimatizing; but now, curled up round the fire after a good lunch, we felt reluctant to head back into the weather and start climbing.
We both wanted to stay put, but we knew that we were due to meet a couple of friends in a few days’ time, who had come out to see us. When they arrived it would be harder to train. We therefore felt it important to do some climbing these couple of days beforehand. So, reluctantly, we put on our thick clothing and rucksacks, and headed out into the snow, leaving the fire still burning.
*
We got rid of any superfluous stuff, and left it in the village. After crossing a small wooden bridge over a swollen stream, we began the ascent onto the ridge that would lead to Ama Dablam. It was hard work fighting against the wind and hail, and we tightened our fleeces around us to keep warm. I remembered the path we were on from when I had been here the year before; then it had been just rock and scree, but now it was covered in thigh-deep drift snow. After two hours we were beginning to tire. Even at these lower altitudes, the body becomes tired so quickly, as it tells you it needs more oxygen.
I led the way, kicking steps into the snow; but because of the thick mist that had now moved in, it was almost impossible to keep on the right line of path. The higher we got, the deeper the snow became, and at times, because of carrying forty-five pounds of rucksack, I found myself up to my waist in drift snow. Time and time again we would fall, as the crusty slabs gave way under our weight. The weather was worsening as the wind drove the snow ferociously across the slopes. My leather hiking boots had now frozen, and we were getting irritated by the slow going.
Eventually, three hours later, we reached Ama Dablam’s Base Camp. We rested for a few moments. I was amazed by how different it appeared from when I was last there. The post-monsoon warmth of October had now been replaced by a stark icy cold, and the grass that I had lain on then, as I contemplated the climb ahead, was now snow-covered and desolate.
We had an hour and a half of daylight left, and decided to go a little further above the ridge before nightfall came, when we would be forced to pitch our tent. Minutes after setting off though, we found ourselves in even deeper drift snow. Mick was now leading, and soon found himself floundering in the loose powder. We kept going, but forty minutes later we had still only gone about 200 metres. We soon realized that we were getting into dangerous avalanche territory and decided to retreat the few hundred metres back to the mountain’s Base Camp. We were tired; it had been a long day.
On our way back, part of a large slab of snow behind us groaned and cracked open. We hurried to the side, out of the danger. It stayed silent and still. We watched it carefully and then began to make our way tentatively back down, treading a fresh trail.
Back at the Base Camp, we found a site safe from avalanches, and tried to put up our tent in the howling wind. When we eventually got it up, we clambered hurriedly inside, cowering from the cruel weather. It was dark by now. My gloves and boots were frozen solid; I put them in my rucksack and stuffed the whole lot down my sleeping bag, in an attempt to thaw them out. We shuffled and tried to get comfortable.
The tent we had was known as a ‘Himalayan Explorer’, but it was so small that there wasn’t exactly a lot of room for exploration; and the two of us, almost wedged on top of each other, tried to sleep.
At 8.00 p.m., we both woke up, gasping for breath. The tent was so well sealed that we had been breathing the same air over and over again. It felt as if we were at 114,000 feet instead of 14,000 feet. We cursed the tent and decided to rename the ‘Himalayan Explorer’, the ‘Himalayan Suffocator’; we undid the flap a bit, lay back down and told each other stories late into the night. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the crowning glory to us both falling deep asleep, exhausted by the day.
We woke at 6.30 a.m. It was now a beautiful clear day outside the tent, but still icy cold in the pre-dawn frost. We crawled out, grimacing as we put on our damp boots, and began to pack up our equipment. We found that the tent poles had frozen together, and refused to budge. Our hands were becoming freezing cold as we tried to free them.
Without the pressure of bad weather, though, everything seemed remarkably calm. We jumped up and down, trying to warm our feet up, and relished the fresh air. Soon I was busying myself trying to find some juniper under the snow, as Mick rummaged for his lighter. Five minutes later we had a lovely fire burning. We warmed our hands and our feet by the flames and thawed out the poles.
The warmth and smell of burning juniper made us feel glad to be alive. Alone in the hills on this stunning crisp morning, we waited for the sun to rise over the mountains.
As we left Ama Dablam’s Base Camp and started down the ridge, the warmth of the new sun strengthened. For two hours we walked down in silence, lost in the joy of the moment, and revelling in the thought of the fresh omelette that awaited us back in Pangboche, only a few kilometres away.
That day we felt tired but happy. We just ate and wrote our diaries, and watched our kit steaming as it dried over the fire.
DIARY:
I’m feeling stronger now and I think our training is paying off. We have much to look forward to. Tomorrow we’re meeting Emma and Alex, who have come out from England to trek in the valleys. Just the thought of them seems to lift our spirits. I hope they aren’t shocked by my mountain smell.
We sat in the sun during the afternoon, and enjoyed the good hospitality of the Sherpa who ran the lodge. He was now elderly, but recounted stories to us of his days in the ‘Great Mountains’, as he fried rice over the mud stove. The day slipped by in such a manner, and we soon found that sleep swept over us.
*
The next day, with great excitement, we raced down the valley some four kilometres to the village of Thyangboche in order to meet the girls. We had arranged before we left England to meet them at 12 noon on that date, in the main lodge of the village. Nothing more had been said, and part of me wondered if they would be there. I hoped they would.
It had been a while since we had seen anyone we knew, and I was so excited by the thought of seeing friends. One of the joys of the hills for me is the way that life is so simple. One’s focus is on living and expressing rather than keeping up or keeping on time. One of the downfalls of normal life is that you hardly have time to remember who you have seen in the past few days, let alone savour that time together. Out here, though, we knew these days together with our friends would be precious, before we began to wrestle with the mountain. I wanted to savour every moment that they were here.
We went into the lodge and looked around. There, curled round a fire, smothered in jerseys and rugs and grinning from ear to ear, sat Emma and Alex. It was as if a small part of England had arrived in these valleys to encourage us. It brought back feelings that I had never expected to feel. We sat up late that night and talked.
I fear that as the days went on, and we guided the two girls up towards Base Camp, I became more and more reclusive. I knew that soon they would be returning down the valleys. The higher we went, the harder work the girls both found it. I didn’t want them to go. It spelt the point of no return for me, and I knew that the climb would start soon afterwards.
They had both struggled bravely up these vast hills and valleys in a determination to see Everest and to reach Base Camp. They had seen Everest now in the distance, but were still a few miles short of Base Camp and were beginning to struggle. They both felt dizzy and had bad headaches, and it was becoming obvious that they weren’t enjoying this last bit. They would have to go back down the next day.
We had one last night all together. They both slept in a small wooden cubicle in the corrugated hut at Lobuche. Mick and I didn’t even bother sleeping in the cubicled part. Instead we curled up as we were, still fully clothed, round the fire in the centre of the room. Early the next day, we helped them pack. They both felt awful. I was so impressed with their determination to have got this far, but for safety’s sake they now needed to go down. Alex slipped me a note that said, simply, to be wise on the mountain.
If it’s not right, then be brave and make those hard decisions. Come down.
The words sounded empty, but I tried desperately to acknowledge them. I knew she was right, and prayed that I would have the courage to do this, should the decision arise. And so, at 8.15 a.m. that clear morning, left two of my good friends.
Later that day I read her note. I reread it hundreds of times in the months ahead.
It must be extremely tough knowing what’s ahead, when there are so few people around. But keep your faith strong. It’s times like this that it counts. I know the struggle that it’s been for you to get this far, and I know you dream of the summit, but don’t jeopardize everything else you’ve ever worked for. Nothing is worth losing your fingers or toes for, and remember, you’re only twenty-three!
Go with all my luck, and keep safe; I have this funny feeling that all will be okay.
I hoped she was right. I needed her to be right; but part of me doubted.
That afternoon we returned quietly to Base Camp, walking those last few hours along the glacier that had eluded the girls. The climb would now begin.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘We are the pilgrims, Master, we shall go
Always a little further it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Beyond that angry or that glimmering sea.’
Special Air Service Regimental verse
From the peak of Everest, the land of Tibet lies sprawled out across the horizon to the north, as far as the eye can see. To the south, the summit looks over the vast range of the Himalaya, all the way down through the foothills to the Nepalese plain in the distance. No other bit of land stands above this point on the entire planet. Below the summit, though, lie days of treacherous descent, through a labyrinth of snow and ice that marks the way out of Everest’s ruthless jaws.
The descent down the South-East Ridge is lined by faces of sheer rock and blue ice. These lead to a couloir of deep powder snow, and eventually on down to a col, some 3,000 feet below the summit. This col, the site of where our Camp Four would be, sits between the two huge peaks of Lhotse to the south, and Everest to the north.
From the South Col, the gradient drops sharply away, down a 5,000 feet ice wall, known as the Lhotse Face. Camp Three would be carved into the ice, a quarter of the way down this. At the foot of this ice wall starts the highest and most startling valley in the world. At one end of this would be our Camp Two, and at the other end, 2,000 feet lower, our Camp One. This extraordinary and vast ice glacier is known simply as the Western Cwm – or the valley of silence.
Pronounced ‘koom’, this huge hidden valley was named by George Mallory during the first Everest reconnaissance climb in 1921, doubtless from affection for his Welsh climbing haunts. The name has remained ever since. This glacier, hidden from view on all sides, slices its way through the centre of the surrounding giant mountains. Then, at the mouth of the valley, the ice begins to fall away.
As the glacier is funnelled through this mouth to the west, the glacier begins to rupture violently. Unable to sustain its own weight, the ice breaks up into a tumbling cascade of frozen water, with blocks of ice the size of houses, slowly shifting down the face. This is constantly moving at a rate of about one metre a day, breaking and collapsing its way down; thus making the mountain dangerously unpredictable. Similar to when a flowing river narrows through a ravine, turning the water into frothing rapids; likewise here, as the ice is squeezed and forced down, it begins to ‘froth’. It is this gushing frozen river that is called the Khumbu Icefall; one of the most dangerous parts of the ascent.
At its feet lies Base Camp, a safe distance away. The noise of thousands of tonnes of ice, constantly shifting and wrenching, breaks the silence of every night there. The Icefall never rests.
The late Lord Hunt, in his account of the first ascent of Everest in 1953, describes this moving mass of ice like this:
A sheer precipice, overhung with thick slices of blue ice more than 100 feet in depth, which peel off in massive slabs at intervals during each day. As you look at it, you might expect to hear the roar of that immense volume of foaming water which, after flowing peacefully to the brink of the cliff above, is now plunging down with terrifying power. But it has been gripped by the intense cold, frozen into immobility, a silent thing, its force restrained. But not quite. For this labyrinth of broken ice is moving, its surface changing, making it the most perilous of problems to surmount.
Sitting at Base Camp, some forty-five years after Hunt wrote that, the Icefall didn’t seem to have changed a bit. Holding my mug of sweet tea that had been made by Nima Lamu, the young Sherpa girl, I shielded my eyes from the early sun. Only 400 metres in front of us, shimmering and detached, lay the Icefall. At that moment, all was quiet.
The responsibility this season for building and maintaining a route through the Icefall was borne by Henry and our team of Sherpas. These Sherpas had now been up here for two weeks, preparing the ladders and ropes that would be used extensively in the ice. Already they had created a route through about three-quarters of the Icefall, roping ladders together in order to cross its yawning crevasses. They had been working fast. This morning was no different, and at 5.00 a.m. they were at the foot of the Icefall, putting on their crampons, and preparing for the risky work ahead. The smell of burning juniper wafted over my tent, as the last bit of branch crackled into flames.
Each morning the Sherpas would burn this as an offering to the ‘goddess of the sky’, to pray for their safety that day. In the future you could tell the days when climbers were in the Icefall, by the amount of juniper that was smouldering around Base Camp.
I wrote that morning, in the cold of dawn:
29 MARCH, 6.15 A.M.:
Base Camp is now a lot more busy. The Singapore expedition arrived yesterday, plus about three-quarters of the entire Nepalese yak population, needed to carry all their equipment. I’ve never seen so much stuff, and we’ve even heard rumour that they have the facilities to carry out advanced dentistry. This makes Mick and I look like true amateurs as we argue over who’s got the tin of plasters. I hope all our equipment arrives soon, so that I don’t have to feel quite so pathetic as I sit here freezing in these ruddy old chef’s trousers that flap like flags in the wind. Even I’m looking forward now to a pair of long johns.
The Sherpas, during our absence down the valley, have constructed a stone building out of the rocks around Base Camp. It is covered with a tarpaulin and has a table of carefully balanced stones in the middle. It’s very impressive, and reflects their quiet but strong character. It has all been built with no fuss in just a week. Back in sunny Dorset we’d still be arguing about who was going to be the ‘foreman’.
Most of our time at Base Camp will be spent in this ‘mess tent’, as the Sherpas call it. It is a key part of Base Camp, and all our little tents surround it.
Mick and I started flattening some more tent sites yesterday for the rest of the team when they arrive, and we hope to finish these today. It’s good to take some exercise and throw some rocks around, in an attempt to level out some ground. I’m feeling much stronger now.
Supper last night was blooming ‘dal-bat’ again. The standard Sherpa food – rice and lentil soup. Delicious once; okay twice; but desperate the twentieth time on the trot. We can’t wait for the arrival of the others, plus the better grub.
Mick sat in the mess tent last night in his ‘Base Camp’ shoes – namely his trainers. At night though, it is still bitingly cold, and is made even parkier by wearing trainers on an ice floor. He looked in envy at my snug moon-boots. Halfway through supper he announced that he was in grave danger of losing his toes from frostbite before he’d set foot on the hill. Mick ended up eating supper whilst suspending his feet six inches off the ice; it kept me amused all evening.
By now, though, Mick and I were beginning to get itchy feet. The girls had left two days ago, and the others were due to arrive sometime soon. We wanted to keep up our strength, and asked the two climbing Sherpas over supper if we could follow them up into the Icefall the next time they went. We wanted to get a feel of the place, and to help our acclimatization. It would only be a climb of some six hours but we knew that time spent above the height of Base Camp could only give us an advantage when the others arrived, as our bodies would be more adapted to the higher air. Nima and Pasang agreed to it, and carried on eating. Tomorrow would be a rest day. We would start with them the morning after that; an hour before dawn.
DIARY, 30 MARCH:
This morning was spent with the two of us sitting in the sun on our roll-mats, chatting and preparing our equipment. We measured harness lengths, adjusted slings, taped up ice-axe handles with foam to prevent the frozen metal sticking to your gloves, and then endlessly rechecked everything we had done. I’ve never felt on the one hand so prepared, and on the other so unprepared. However fit and experienced you are, the moment you enter the Icefall you’re plain ‘gambling’. And in my experience, I’ve never come out of a casino yet in credit.
As well as the Singapore team, a couple of other climbers had also now arrived at Base Camp. The first of these was a pleasant but slightly brash climber from Denmark, called Michael. This season was to be his second attempt on Everest. He was determined to climb the mountain solo, and without any supplementary oxygen. So far it had eluded him. On his previous attempt, the months of climbing lower down, carrying huge amounts of kit, had drained his body too much of those vital energy reserves needed to enable him to climb higher up. At the crucial time, he had been too exhausted to carry on.
This year he was trying again. He had Sherpa support at Base Camp, plus a radio communications officer with whom to keep in contact higher up. Their camp, like the Singaporeans’, was also a hive of the latest modern advances. This time though, instead of being medical advances, they were nutritional.
Michael would begin each day by stirring up these colourful and glutinous concoctions of high-energy, high-protein, high-everything drinks. He guaranteed us that these would propel him, as he said, ‘like a rocket with bad wind, up the mountain’. We felt somewhat disadvantaged eating normal food, rather than any exotic blend of pills and shakes. His friendship with us started off badly when he sauntered into our tent to announce what was on his food menu that night. It consisted of lasagne and pizza. The two of us hadn’t heard those words for a while and instantly hardened to him, as we continued nibbling on our rice and dal-bat.
In due course, though, as we shared experiences together, he became a friend and confidant; but it took some time. Such a driven character was often hard to stomach at Base Camp, when you just wanted some space and a bit of quiet time alone.
The other new person that had arrived at Base Camp was a kind-faced Bolivian climber called Bernardo. Standing only five foot something, with a grin that was as broad as he was tall, Bernardo was gentle and full of laughter. Over the next eight weeks he became a close friend. Born and bred in the Bolivian hills outside La Paz, he was a true mountain man, with a wealth of experience. In 1994 Bernardo had been attempting to climb Everest from the north side. After two months of climbing, and only hours from the summit, Bernardo heard of a German climber in trouble. He turned back to assist in the rescue of this climber, and managed to save his life; but it had cost Bernardo the summit. He had made the right decision, but in the blur and haze of high altitude, such decisions can become hard to take. It was a credit to his strength and will-power that he had so bravely turned around.
After four years of trying to raise the sponsorship to climb again, Bernardo was once again at the foot of the great mountain. He was hoping to be the first South American Indian to reach the top of our world’s highest peak. Bernardo spoke very limited English, and once he discovered that I spoke Spanish, the floodgates opened. I was drowned in a barrage of conversation. I think Bernardo had missed the banter, having walked in silence through the valleys for over two weeks. I just sat and listened, enjoying his clear South American accent, as we discussed the climb ahead.
Bernardo, having just reached Base Camp, needed to rest for a few days – but wished us both luck for our preliminary climb in the Icefall. He said he would be watching us through his binoculars, and finished his mug of tea by saying, ‘Vaya con Díos’ or ‘God’s speed.’
DIARY, 30 MARCH, DUSK:
We had fried spam tonight for supper. A treat the Sherpas had been reserving for this last meal, before starting the climb. Despite the fact that we suspect spam has now been banned in England, as it’s so unhealthy, it was a great luxury to us both here. It tasted as delicious as anything I can remember.
All my kit is immaculately laid out ready for dawn, when we’ll start into the Icefall. I feel a real ‘spod’ with everything so neat and tidy. If Shara could see this, she’d be amazed.
I just seem to lie here, endlessly mulling over all the possibilities of what I’m about to do. The build-up and fear is so exhausting mentally, and those death statistics are so unhelpful. Ruddy statisticians; nothing better to do than worry those who are actually doing things.
Earlier this evening as I was getting into my tent, I heard this huge, shattering crack reverberate round the valley. A vast wall of snow from the side of a mountain behind us, known as the Lho-La Pass, collapsed. A thick cloud of snow, fifty feet high, came pouring down the sheer slopes. As it picked up speed, the roar grew with it, as the snow rolled down towards Base Camp. I was scared it might reach us in the middle of the glacier, but instead, as it plummeted to the floor at the valley’s edge, it billowed up like an explosion, hundreds of feet high. From here it took five minutes to settle slowly, and eventually left an eery silence hanging over the place. It was the most awe-inspiring sight I’ve ever seen, and a sober reminder of tomorrow.
I seem so full of fears about everything. The cold, the risk of death in the falling ice, the pain of the climb itself. There seems so much ahead. Nobody minds pain occasionally, but the prospect of being at my physical wit’s end for the next two months terrifies me, as I stand here at the starting gate. What happens if Mick dies tomorrow, on day one? Or if I do? I pray for the Good Lord’s protection over us. Taking gambles like this just isn’t healthy. I feel knotted up inside. All I seem to have to hold on to are my stuttering faith and my memories of those I love at home.
Sleep didn’t come at all that night, as I lay thinking about what was now only a few hours away. The cracks and rumbles of the Icefall seemed especially loud to me; or maybe it was just my ears being over-sensitive to their groans. I tossed and turned, looking every half would be an hour at my watch to count the time remaining until my alarm would sound. I just wished for deep sleep, so that I strong the next morning. But it never came.
*
Leaving the warmth and security of a sleeping bag for the cold chill of night is one of the worst parts of climbing. The cold that the night provides, ensures greater stability in the Icefall. It is during these night hours that much of one’s climbing has to be done. By day, not only is the ice weaker, but the temperatures soar dramatically. Trapped in the ice, with the heat of the sun blazing down, has been known to literally sap the strength from a man. Skin becomes burnt in a matter of minutes if not protected, and temperatures that have an hour beforehand been in the minus 20s°C, can now rise to over 80°F.
Early starts, like this morning, would become matter of fact by the end; but in that pre-dawn chill, leaving my warm sleeping bag was, mentally, the greatest struggle. It was times like this, when I was still sleepy, that I felt the most vulnerable and alone.
As I sat up, the condensation that had frozen within my tent shook all over me, covering me with icy flakes. Struggling to get into my knee height, high-altitude boots shook the tent even more, and engulfed me again in icicles. These boots alone weigh more than most people’s entire shoe collection put together, and fastening them took almost ten minutes. Reluctant to actually unzip the flap of the tiny tent and allow the wind in, I dressed as much as I could in the confined space of the tent. I rolled over to put my harness on, and pulled it tight around my waist.
‘Morning Miguel,’ I stammered, in the direction of Mick’s tent.
‘Hola Oso (“Morning Bear”),’ the reply came. Mick was learning Spanish very quickly, now that Bernardo and I had been speaking it continually.
My sister had named me ‘bear’ as a baby, and I have no idea why. I certainly wasn’t hairy and rarely growled, but for some strange reason the name had stuck. I had hoped that by the mature age of seven and a half, I would have grown out of it; yet here on this frosty morning at the foot of Mount Everest, at the age of twenty-three, the nickname still remained. I shook my head and smiled.
And so went our standard early-morning greeting. Whether it was at Base Camp with our tents only inches apart, or higher up the hill, with our bodies only inches apart, the greeting each time that we had to get up was the same. Said with cheerful irony, it invariably made one feel better. It made you feel that you weren’t alone in being cold and miserable.
We both emerged from our tents; it was 5.30 a.m. As Mick sorted out his rucksack, I went to try and crap behind a rock. Dawn was always the best time for this, as all the faeces were frozen and didn’t smell. As the sun warmed Base Camp each day, the stench of the makeshift stone hole, smeared with misfires, was pretty rancid.
The challenge I found that early morning was undoing an all-in-one windsuit, whilst trying to keep it off the ground, then squatting, wiping and trying to keep my hands warm, all at the same time. That first time of doing it all dressed up was a shambles. But practice would make perfect; and of practice, I knew, there would be plenty.
We tried to force down some Sherpa porridge, but only really managed a few mouthfuls. I was nervous, and felt sick swallowing the stodgy mess. In hushed voices, as if not wanting to awake the Icefall, we said goodbye to the Sherpa cook, Thengba. We then gently lay a small branch of juniper on the fire and watched it crackle into life. We put our rucksacks on and followed Nima and Pasang through Base Camp, to the foot of the Icefall.
For twenty minutes we snaked our way through the rock and scree, heading for the entrance to the ice. The trail of bootprints left in the slush of yesterday afternoon had now frozen solid, and showed us the route. The entry-point was marked with a bamboo cane that the Sherpas had left. I looked back at Base Camp, and could see the smoke of the juniper still smouldering away. I hoped the prayers would work.
We were the first Western climbers to be entering the Icefall this year. So far only the Sherpas had been into her depths. We sat on the ice at the bottom, with jagged pinnacles rising up above us on all sides. As the Icefall flattens at its end, it fluctuates along, rolling in these crests of contorted ice. Hidden amongst the pinnacles, away from the view of Base Camp, we sat and began for the first time in months to put our crampons on. A mixed feeling of excitement and trepidation flooded my body. At last we were beginning the task that had been a dream for so long. I yearned just to get started, to get my teeth into it. I felt that once the bit was between my teeth, then it would be easier to hold on to. But with it came that nervous, sick feeling. Ahead was the unknown.
We began to weave deeper into the maze. Our crampons bit firmly into the glassy ice, with their fresh, razor-sharp teeth. It felt good. As the ice steepened, and we began to climb further into the frozen labyrinth, the ropes started. The days of hard work by the Sherpas showed us the route, as the ropes snaked away into the distance. We clipped our karabiners that were attached to our harnesses on to the fixed line. The rope twisted up and over the walls of ice in front of us. A few strong pushes and we would clamber over their lip, lying there breathing heavily in the ever higher air.
There ahead would then be the next contorted ice face that beforehand had been hidden. As we went higher we began to see Base Camp below us, getting smaller in the distance.
I was getting used to wearing crampons again and stepped carefully to avoid tearing my windsuit on the sharp teeth. I was rusty, and twice the blades sliced a gash in the material as I tried to kick a crampon into the ice.
The dawn brought with it some haze and soon Base Camp was obscured from sight. We checked our equipment again, and kept moving on. The pace behind the Sherpas was steady and manageable; I was feeling good. Despite now going higher than I had been since we had arrived in Nepal, I was coping okay in the thinner air.
Soon we came to the first of the aluminium ladders that spanned the yawning chasms that appeared amongst the broken ice. Elaborate systems of ropes secured these ladder bridges, but still occasionally we would reach a point where the crevasse had shifted. Here the existing ladders would be suspended, twisted in the air, ropes torn apart as the weight of the moving ice wrenched the structures asunder. We would wait and watch as Nima and Pasang, who were also known as the Icefall ‘doctors’, would get to work repairing and fixing the route across.
All work in the Icefall was undertaken in silence. It was safest like this. During the regular breaks that we would take, the Icefall doctors would quietly smoke, leaning against the ice walls all around. Smiles would be exchanged. As sections were repaired, we would continue on up. We would change onto the new rope, clip in, and start across the precarious ladders, with the crevasses stretching away into the blackness of the abyss below us. The Sherpas believe that some of the crevasses are so deep that they come out in America. Looking deep into them, I could understand their reasons. There was something sinister about the nature of these silent tears in the ice.
We would focus carefully on each step across. Our spiked crampons would slide on the metal ladders until they gripped in a groove and held fast. Only then would you step again, your eyes keenly focused on the ladder and not the drop below. That was the key to crossing these safely.
We didn’t want to have to test the strength of the ropes that we were clipped into. They were a precaution rather than a lifesaver. Because of the amount of rope required in the Icefall, the standard of the rope was low. They were designed really just to support you as you climbed, rather than be able to cope with the strain of a long fall. It was thin multi-purpose rope, and you would not want to rely on it in an emergency. Instead, we would just have to be cautious with each step.
Once across, we would be panting heavily; we would unclip and clip into the next rope ahead, and move away from the danger of the crevasse edge. Then we would rest and recover our energy.
Four and a half hours of this slow progress, and we were getting right into the heart of the Icefall. Tucked under the shadow of an overhang, we drank and rested. It wasn’t the safest of places, but then again nowhere was on this frozen waterfall. The sun was now getting stronger. As we rested, we covered our heads and faces with our hoods to protect ourselves from the glare and reflection all around us. We knew the danger of the sun in this place, and carefully reapplied the thick sunblock.
We started moving again, following the ‘doctors’ up through the broken mass of ice. We would shuffle over giant ice cubes and frozen bridges that lay at 50° angles, right under the face of a dark overhang. I knew that what we were standing on had, a day ago, been part of the overhang now above us. We could see where they had peeled off.
Soon we reached a flat area of plateau, about halfway through the Icefall. We thought we could see the top of the Icefall, far above and in the distance; but we weren’t sure. It was noon.
The Sherpas then announced that they were going to remain on this plateau, to finish repairing a section we had just crossed. The two of us agreed to carry on for a couple of hours, to try and reach the three-quarter point before returning to meet them, and all descending together. They told us to turn around before 2.00 p.m. at the latest. We had now been in the Icefall for six hours.
We set off alone. I led the way, feeling still relatively strong. It was wonderful and freeing to be alone here with Mick, climbing together, communicating silently, and working our way up the Icefall, where only the Sherpas had been before.
It was good to have that focus of concentration where your mind is uncluttered and thinks only of the job in hand. Our minds felt sharp as we kicked into the ice and secured ourselves to the next rope. The air felt fresh as it filled our lungs. Your body needed all the oxygen it could get from each breath and it seemed to savour the moment as the air rushed in. It felt good.
The route now steepened and a series of ladders strapped together leant against huge forty-feet vertical ice blocks. The overhangs became bigger and more sinister. We were careful to be precise in what we did, and became acutely aware of our surroundings. We didn’t talk. At 1.45 p.m. we could go no further. The route ahead had collapsed the night before, and a jumble of vast ice blocks lay strewn across the face. The rope shot vertically down below us, drawn as tight as a cable, as it stretched under the weight of the ice around it. I looked at Mick behind and he pointed at his watch. We were at our time limit and needed to turn around.
I was just ahead, and noticed that I was standing in a particularly vulnerable part of the Icefall. I felt suddenly very unsafe and started down towards Mick. Suddenly, 200 metres to my right, I heard a large section of ice break off. The block tumbled, like a dice across a board, down the Icefall. I crouched, just staring. As the snow settled behind it, I got to my feet, then hurried my pace down towards Mick. I wanted to get out of here now, I felt too exposed.
The colour of the ice where we were was dark blue, and pinnacles reached over us, 100 feet high. It seemed unstable and flaky, and was beginning to drip from the heat of the sun. It is at this time, in the mid-afternoon, that the Icefall is most dangerous, as it melts, and parts begin to collapse.
Racing all in one go under these overhangs that cast menacing shadows was impossible; the body wouldn’t allow it. Repeatedly we would be halfway through, then would be forced to stop and recover our breath, still deep within the jaws of the overhang. But there was nothing we could do; the body had to stop and get more oxygen.
Once safely out the other side we would sit and recover and encourage the other to follow quickly. We were new to the Icefall and were trying to learn its tricks.
Soon we were out of the nasty section and back among more familiar territory; ahead we could see the plateau where we had left the Sherpas. We passed through the part that they had been repairing. We could be no more than 100 metres from the Icefall doctors now. I was looking forward to seeing them, and then getting down. We had been in the ice for almost nine hours now and were tired. Little did I know that the day was far from over.
As I came round the corner of a cornice, I could hear the whispered voices of Nima and Pasang nearby. Energy flooded back and I leapt from ice block to ice block down towards them. Ten yards later I needed to stop and rest; they were close now. I smiled at the sound of their hushed and tentative tones.
I unclipped, and clipped into the next rope down, and leant against the ice, recovering. Suddenly the ground just opened up beneath me.
The ice cracked for that transient second, then just collapsed. My legs buckled beneath me, and I was falling. I tumbled down, bouncing against the grey walls of the crevasse that before had been hidden beneath a thin veneer of ice.
The tips of my crampons caught the edge of the crevasse walls and the force threw me across to the other side, smashing my shoulder and arm against the ice. I carried on falling, then suddenly was jerked to a violent halt, as the rope held me firm. The falling ice crashed into my skull, jerking my neck backwards. I lost consciousness for a precious few seconds. I came to, to see the ice falling away below me into the darkness, as my body gently swung round on the end of the rope. It was eerily silent.
Adrenalin soared round my body, and I shook in waves of convulsions. I screamed, but can’t remember what. My voice echoed round the walls. I looked up to the ray of light above, then down to abyss below. Panic overwhelmed me and I clutched frantically for the walls. They were glassy smooth. I swung my ice axe at it madly, but it wouldn’t hold, and my crampons just scraped along the ice. I had nothing to lean against, no momentum to be able to kick them in. Instead the flimsy stabs with my feet hardly even brushed the surface of the ice. I clutched in desperation to the rope above me, and looked up. ‘Hold, damn you. Hold.’
I grabbed a spare jumar device from my harness. (This is a climbing tool that allows you to ascend a rope but won’t allow you to slip down.) I slapped it on to the rope as added security. Suddenly I felt strong pulls tugging on the rope above. They wouldn’t be able to pull me out without my help. I knew I had to get out of here fast. The rope wasn’t designed for an impact fall like this. It was a miracle that it had held at all, and I knew it could break at any point. The pulls on the rope above gave me the momentum I needed to kick into the walls with my crampons. This time they bit into the ice firmly.
Up I pulled, kicking into the walls, a few feet higher every time. I scrambled up, helped by the momentum from the rope. Near the lip, I managed to smack my axe into the ice and pull myself over. Strong arms grabbed my windsuit and hauled me with great power from the clutches of the crevasse. They dragged me to the side, out of danger, and we all collapsed in a heaving mess. I lay with my face pressed into the snow, eyes closed, and shook with fear.
Nima and Pasang sat with their heads in their hands, breathing heavily; then glanced furtively around. Known to be two of the bravest, most hardened men of Everest, the Icefall doctors now looked visibly shocked. They knew that it had been close. Mick was still trapped on the other side of the crevasse that had collapsed. Nima laid a ladder down and Mick shuffled tentatively across. He put his arm round my shoulder and said nothing. I was still shaking.
My confidence plummeted. Mick had to escort me the two hours back down the Icefall. I clutched to every rope, clipping in twice. I crossed the ladders a different man; one who had experienced that thin line between life and death. Gone was the brash certainty of before, when I had confidently shuffled over them. Instead each one now took me what felt like an eternity to cross. My breathing became harder, and all my strength seemed to leave me.
My elbow was stiff and swollen, having been smashed against the hard ice walls of the crevasse. I tried to use my good arm to descend with, but I knew it didn’t bode well.
Lying in my tent alone that night back at Base Camp, I found I was shaking as it began to dawn on me just how lucky I had been. Undoubtedly I owed Nima and Pasang my life.
I wrote:
31 MARCH, MIDNIGHT:
My whole body feels drained. The emotions of today just overwhelm me. I feel dehydrated and worn out by nine hours’ hard climbing in the intense heat of the Icefall. It’s also beginning to dawn on me just how lucky I was. It could have so easily gone the other way. I can’t quite fathom how the rope held my fall. I have this vision of the crevasse below me that fills my mind – it scares me.
Over supper this evening, the Icefall doctors spoke in rapid voices, using vivid gestures, as they recounted the episode to the other Sherpas. I received treble rations from Thengba, but found I couldn’t eat anything. I needed company but at the same time felt this thirst to be alone.
My tent that before was so organized and tidy, with everything in pristine condition, is now a jumble of ripped windsuit, gaiters and boots, from where my crampons tore them as I fell. I’ll start repairing them tomorrow. Thengba has said that he’ll help me with this. His smile as he said this warmed me like nothing else. Never has a mouth full of black teeth been so attractive. He’s a kind man.
It’s now midnight and all is strangely quiet outside. I long for rest, but my mind is too busy thinking the same thing over and over. I dread going back into the ice.
I really miss Shara, and my family. I long for the company now of friends; of Charlie, Trucker, and Ed. I wonder what they are doing right now. Maybe if I pray for them then they’ll pray for me; I really need it now.
I dozed for an hour earlier, but the crevasse dominated my dreams. Falling is this helpless feeling, where you are powerless against it. It strikes those same emotions of my parachuting accident. I pray for protection against these nightmares, please.
Through all my experiences with the Army, and breaking my back like I did, I have never felt so close to dying. It leaves me with this deep gratitude for all the good and beautiful things in my life. I don’t often think about it, but the bottom line is that I don’t want to die. I’ve got so much I want to live for. It makes me question why I’m even taking these risks at all.
Despite the immediacy of the fear, it still somehow feels right to be trying. My expectations are maybe becoming lower, but I’m going to stay. I just pray with my whole heart never to go through such an experience again. Tonight, here alone, I put in words, ‘Thank you for helping me, my Lord and my friend.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘He who has a “why” to live, can bear almost any “how”.’
Nietzsche
The morning of 1 April was glorious. Sitting on the ice in the warmth of the morning sun, I started to stitch my ripped kit. My elbow was still swollen and ached annoyingly whenever I bent it. Mick sat beside me and we talked of the mountain and everything that lay ahead. It was all that was on our minds.
‘At least I don’t have to explain to Neil and Henry that you’re no longer with us,’ Mick said jokingly. ‘Although it would have meant I could have your roll-mat, I suppose.’
‘Thanks for that, Miguel,’ I replied. ‘Anyway if I had copped it, then you’d have nothing to do today – talking of which, can you give us a hand stitching this gaiter?’
We felt happy as we peacefully sat and worked. The others were now only two days away.
That afternoon, as we reclined in our separate tents, sprawled out like two Pompeiian philosophers contemplating the wonders of the great outdoors, we suddenly heard the voices of two females; we came alive at once. Only minutes earlier we had felt so lazy that we had argued over whose turn it was to go and refill the waterbottles ten yards away; now, inspired by the sound of two girls, we both leapt out of our tents like primed gladiators.
‘Hi, are you an expedition climbing here?’ one of them asked.
‘Ah yes, um, that’s right,’ I replied. ‘You look tired, can I get you . . .’
‘Yeah, come on in and grab a cuppa,’ Mick replied, bustling past me, and beating me to the mark.
The afternoon was spent in happy abandon as we whiled away the time, chatting in the mess tent. It turned out that the girls were out in Nepal for three weeks, with a party of trekkers. They were the only ones from the team to reach the goal of Base Camp. The rest of the team had given up, too exhausted.
‘All the boys were so gung-ho, and called us “slow coaches” the entire way, but we’re the only ones to have made it in the end,’ they said.
It was a familiar tale. Altitude is a great leveller, and time invariably proves that the tortoise up high always beats the hare. These two tortoises were the prettiest we had seen in a while. The yaks didn’t get so much as a passing glance for the rest of the day.
The afternoon, though, was soon coming to a close.
‘Look, you guys better get going before it’s dark. You’ll need three hours at least to get back to Lobuche down the valley,’ I said with great pains. Mick looked like a homesick boy, saying goodbye to his parents for the first time; but only I could tell.
They filled their flasks with hot tea, and began to wrap up warm. As they did so I scribbled a note to Shara, and wrapped it in a home-made envelope, addressed to her home, back in England. It read: ‘Don’t forget me while I’m away. You have my word I’ll come back. I love you. Happy belated birthday. Bear.’
They carried it back with them, promising to post it on their return to civilization. I said I would have to owe them the postage, and longed more than ever to see Shara. I had told her nothing about my fall, I thought it better that way. I just hoped my note would reach her. Three weeks later, Shara picked up a tatty envelope that had just flopped through the letter-box to the floor; she picked it up, opened it and smiled.
*
That night, the two of us were alone again. The wind blew gently across the glacier; I lay curled inside my sleeping bag, listening to its rhythm, until eventually sleep swept over me. My body needed this rest, and I slept until just before dawn.
Lying in those early hours between four and six in the morning, I allowed my mind to drift. I was getting used to this place now. I felt safe in the seclusion of my tent; and was coping better with the low temperatures at night. My confidence was slowly coming back.
By the time we emerged that morning, the two Icefall doctors had already left to work in the Icefall. They had had their rest day and were eager to try and push the route through to the lip of the glacier; all the way to Camp One. They had started early. Our day carried on in the blissfully slow pace that characterizes so much the reality of mountaineering – the ‘rest’ times.
The human body has to rest in between bouts of extreme physical exertion. The altitude means that the body is already under pressure as it tries to cope with the lack of oxygen in the air, and thus these periods of recovery up high need to be longer than at sea-level. The body is fighting two battles: the thin air, and then the recovery. It takes time and patience, but because you are away from the hassles of ‘normal’ life, you feel free to soak up the energy that the hills around you provide. There is time to just be.
Late afternoon, an increase in noise from the mess tent meant that something was wrong. We went to find out what was happening – more from curiosity than anything else. We weren’t prepared for what had happened.
‘It getting late. Where Icefall doctors?’ Thengba mumbled. ‘Normally back two hour now. Dark not so far way.’
He was right. At 6.30 p.m. most nights now, it would get dark and the stars would begin to appear in the night sky. It was already 5.30 p.m. and the sky looked somehow different and menacing; something felt not quite right. ‘Why were the doctors so late?’ I could find no answers.
Mick and I scanned the Icefall through the binoculars; we could see nothing that resembled tiny figures on the ice above us. The wind had been slowly picking up all day, and as dusk fell, the Icefall became hidden in a swirling mist. The other Sherpas and Thengba were frantic. The doctors were still not back.
Thengba, five foot and a tiny bit tall, with knotted, dirty black hair, cut untidily round his ears, fiddled nervously with the stove. It wouldn’t light. He shuffled on his worn Reebok trainers with no laces in them, and tried to fix the pump of the petrol burner. He licked the end of the plunger and squeezed it back in, and then started vigorously pumping pressure into the tank. Eventually the petrol ring crackled, then burst into flame.
All the Sherpas huddled around the stove, chatting nervously in low fast whispers. For the third time in ten minutes, everyone hurried out of the tent into the darkness to scan the Icefall, hoping to see a light or some indication of the Icefall doctors. Still there was nothing, and the wind was getting up by the minute. The Sherpas looked to Mick and I for help. We had been the only other people at Base Camp to have gone into the Icefall; but we could offer no answers. As the minutes dragged on, the options available to us dwindled.
Mick and I talked together, desperately trying to assess what we could do.
‘Okay, let’s look at this logically,’ Mick said. ‘They have either become trapped by the ice or alternatively one of them could be injured and is trying to make it back down slowly. If it’s not one of these, then . . .’
We were both well aware of the dangers up there and knew that there was a strong possibility that they might have been killed. Why else were two of the most experienced Sherpas out so much later than ever before, with no sign of any light up on the mountain to indicate they were alive and moving? They were up there now in treacherous conditions. The Icefall was being blown by ferocious winds that were whipping snow across the ice. The wind cracked against the canvas of our tents and the noise carried across the glacier. The situation was worsening.
As we tried to reassure the Sherpa cooks, we knew secretly that the two Icefall doctors could either be dead or fighting for their survival. They were not equipped to last a night in these conditions. They always climbed with the minimum of personal equipment, so as to allow them to carry more rope and ice screws. Dressed only in thin clothes, designed for six hours’ work in the heat of the day, the cold could claim their lives all too quickly.
We seemed helpless. What can we do? I thought. Come on. In these conditions we would be unlikely even to find our way though the maze of ice, in order to find the start of the ropes. The frozen footprints that showed the way before, would now be covered in six inches of snow. The ropes would also be buried, and climbing in such conditions in the depths of the Icefall would be virtual suicide. Unable to see crevasses that lay hidden by thin layers of freshly fallen snow would be like walking into a death trap. The chances of surviving it would be slim, and the likelihood of finding two dead men would be high. The frustration this brought was untold, as we sat and waited. It was now 10.00 p.m. We knew time was running out for them up there.
Bernardo sat with us in the tent, the strain of the last few hours written across his dark brow. We had lit a strobe light at Base Camp for the Icefall doctors to see if they were alive; to give them hope. I doubted, though, that they would be able to see it, as the beam seemed to get swallowed by the mist and swirling snow. All we could do was make hot flasks of tea in case we heard anything, and then just wait and pray. The minutes dragged on like hours.
*
By midnight there was no change. We agreed that all we could possibly do was try to sleep for a few hours then get up before dawn, and set off in hopefully better weather into the Icefall. Heading up, even in those conditions would be extremely unwise, but it was our only chance of finding them – alive or dead. It was a hopeless situation, and the prospect of the Icefall in those snow-covered conditions terrified me. I went to my tent, and knew that we had no other choice – we would leave at 4.00 a.m. I dreaded finding the two men, who had hauled me to safety only days earlier, dead. It confused me; it was all happening too fast.
As I lay in my tent, I could hear Mick shuffling inside his. He was getting his boots and harness ready, and sorting out any other kit he would need. It was cold and pitch black outside, and his flash-light flicked busily round his tent.
We were together in the thick of it, a million miles from the safety of home. Everyone at Base Camp looked to us both. Even the Sherpas from the Singaporean team had refused to join us, when we had asked for their help. They had not had their Buddhist ceremony yet, where they pray for protection on the mountain. To venture into the Icefall beforehand would be tempting the goddess’s anger to the extreme. They would not do it. The responsibility fell on us two alone. We were the only people who had been in there before and knew the route.
We lay and tried to mentally prepare. I wondered what the doctors were thinking at this moment, if they were still alive. They knew we would come as soon as the weather allowed us a chance; until then I prayed that they would have strength in whatever they were facing. I drifted in and out of sleep.
*
At 1.30 a.m. I heard the clanking of metal on metal. I knew the sound so well; your harness makes that noise as the karabiners and descenders hit each other. Someone was moving slowly, very slowly. I hurried into my boots and down jacket, grabbed my headtorch and scurried out into the night. Mick emerged from his tent as well, and there, moving towards us through the wind and snow was Pasang, shuffling at crawling pace. He was covered in snow from top to bottom, his cuffs had frozen solid, and icicles hung from his goggles and hood. He waved wearily in the direction of the Icefall.
‘Nima come long way behind. Very slow, tired. Need help, very tired,’ he stammered.
Thengba was up, spouting with excitement in very fast Nepalese. He was ushering Pasang to the tent. We sat him down, and filled a mug with tea. There would be footprints to guide us now – we had to get going to try and find Nima. We left Pasang with the other Sherpa cooks, and hurried out. Thengba refused to let us go without him and raced off into the darkness following the prints, muttering to himself under his breath. I knew that Nima was his best friend.
Thengba was completely under-dressed; he wore his same old holey trainers and had no gloves. He was too scared to think, and had rushed off. He wanted to find Nima. We caught up with him and tried to persuade him to turn back, otherwise he would get frostbite. He refused and insisted on following us into the Icefall. The footprints were becoming covered again but we could still make out the vague impressions through the fresh snow. We shouted and waved our lights into the distance as we went. We had to find Nima soon.
Thirty minutes later and only 500 metres further on, we were in the middle of the flowing ice, at the foot of the Icefall. The wind was atrocious and it was bitterly cold at this time of night. Thengba shuffled along behind.
Suddenly round an ice pinnacle emerged this figure, stumbling drunkenly through the snow. He moved like a man of a hundred years old. Hunched and weak. He collapsed to rest in the snow. We hurried to him.
‘You’re okay, Nima. You’re safe. We’ll be home soon,’ we reassured him. Mick gave Nima his headtorch so that he could see where he was going more easily. It brought some life to his steps. He wanted to show us that he was strong; he didn’t want to let us down. He soldiered on with great effort a few more stubborn yards, until we forced him to rest and drink from the flask. Then he collapsed.
We tried to help him undo his crampons, now we were out of the steep ice. It would help him move freer. He wouldn’t let us initially; he was too proud. Even though his fingers were stiff with cold, he tried to free the buckles on his crampons. But his fingers wouldn’t work and he reluctantly allowed us to help. When we got them off we noticed that Thengba was silent.
A quick glance revealed that he was shaking with cold having rushed out into the storm so ill-equipped. It was Thengba who now needed the help. Even Nima in his depleted state recognized this. They were the oldest of friends. Nima was the mountain man, Thengba the cheerful cook; Nima knew that his friend was not used to coping in these conditions. We struggled to get Thengba wrapped up and Nima to his feet, and then all slowly began to get moving. We must have looked a sorry sight as the four of us staggered into Base Camp; but by grace, these two extraordinary men, who epitomized man’s ability to resist the forces of nature, were still alive.
As we drank tea and ate noodles round the petrol stove in the tent, the smiles began to appear. Thengba had his dearest friends back again; he felt safe now. As we warmed ourselves and sat huddled around, the story of what happened slowly emerged.
They had got so close to completing the route to Camp One, that they decided to work a little longer, to save having to return through the Icefall again the next day. They wanted to complete the job that had taken three hard weeks of work to put in.
As they reached the last part, they saw ahead a sheer thirty-feet wall of ice that would lead up to the lip of the Icefall. Working together, Nima climbing and Pasang supporting the end of the rope, they started up the face. It took time to ascend and secure the route, as they screwed pitons into the ice, through which to feed the rope. Neither had watches and at dusk they were forced to turn around and return back towards Base Camp. Once it was dark it became a different battle.
They had been so busy that they had worked too late; neither had noticed the menacing weather coming over them. The clouds brought darkness with it earlier than normal, and with only one headtorch their progress became slower and slower as the battery gradually died. By 8.00 p.m. the battery was dead and they were still dangerously high. By now the storm was in full force; they could see no further than five yards. Crawling on their hands, they slowly descended through the Icefall.
Three times Pasang came within inches of being swallowed by the ice, as the snow-covered ground in front gave way to reveal perilous crevasses. Each time Nima behind had held the rope fast, and stopped him falling. It took five hours to descend the route in this manner. But they knew that they could not afford to wait until morning. The cold would not allow it. If they stopped moving in those temperatures, the mountain would cruelly claim another two victims.
At 1.30 a.m. Pasang had staggered past my tent – his karabiners clinking.
*
Lessons had been learnt: you have to watch the time in the Icefall, you must have sufficient equipment to cope with emergencies, and always a headtorch each. These are fundamental; but the doctors were masters, and all masters get lazy. It is their great determination and quiet strength that brought them back in those conditions. Conditions that would have devoured lesser men. Despite this, they knew they had been lucky. Smiling and much warmer, two slightly subdued Icefall doctors went to their tents to rest. It was 3.15 a.m.
The whole of Base Camp had been waiting with baited breath. Relieved, we sat with Bernardo and a couple from the Singapore team, sipping tea along with a bit of chang for ‘medicinal’ purposes! We were grateful for the strobe light they had placed at Base Camp – it had helped guide the doctors down. There had been nothing more they could have done; none of them had yet been in the Icefall.
Bruce, the Singapore team’s Base-Camp manager, who was as un-oriental as a Yorkshire pudding with his broad Scottish accent and mannerisms, cursed the taste of the chang.
‘It’s a Jack Daniels I need at a time like this,’ he joked, as he took one last swig before returning to his camp.
Soon we were back in our own tents – the wind was steady. The sound was soothing and I fell fast asleep.
*
At 4.30 a.m. I woke abruptly. I could hardly hear myself think there was so much noise. It was still dark, and the fierce howling of the wind shook my tent until I feared it would collapse. I felt instantly wide awake, and spreadeagled myself across the inside of my tent to hold it down. The wind came in gusts. A small lull of still, then . . . wham! The tent would be almost lifted underneath me and the sides whipped so ferociously I feared they would rip. Snow poured in through the vent at the back of the inner-lining, as it blew in waves under the outer canvas. It then swirled around my tent. I tried to jam some equipment against the vent to stop it, but it was in vain. It still poured in.
Mick was fighting the same battle. He had managed to build up some equipment against the lining of the tent, but still he was soon lying in about four inches of snow.
We both resorted to the only option available. We climbed deep inside our bags and sealed ourselves from the snow and cold air. For two hours the mountain goddess seemed to blow mercilessly, creating this fearsome howl of an 80 m.p.h. wind, screeching across the ice. Base Camp was being pounded.
‘Bloody hell, Bear, this is crazy, budge up,’ Mick shrieked, as he unzipped my tent and squeezed in. ‘No point us both losing our tents, we might as well make sure one survives. Mine’s even worse than this, I was in deep snow.’
We had to shout at each other to be heard above the wind.
‘Thank God the doctors got back. If they were still out in this they’d have survived about ten minutes – no more,’ I yelled.
‘Tell me about it. I almost got blown off my feet coming three yards to your tent,’ Mick replied.
I felt safer with Mick. We sat huddled together, wondering how long this outcry from the mountain would last. These were jet-stream strength winds. What the hell are they doing at Base Camp? I thought.
By 7.00 a.m. the wind seemed to be dying gradually. Still though, snow licked across the glacier at a frightening speed. All the Singapore team came and gathered in our mess tent. Mick and I, by now, had also abandoned my tent for the bigger communal mess one. About fifteen of us in total, including the exhausted Icefall doctors, whose hopes of a long-deserved rest had been shattered, gathered round the stone table.
The tent looked like some scene out of a holocaust movie, with pots of ketchup and sacks of rice covered in a layer of snow, resembling the fall-out dust from a nuclear explosion. Snow had blown in through every hole and tear in the structure, and the driving wind had whipped in loud claps against the tarpaulin.
As dawn came we assessed the damage. In the few days beforehand, Mick and I had ensured that our tents were tightly secured; we had done this almost out of boredom, rather than anything else. There had not been much else to do, except secure tents and prepare equipment. We were lucky, it had paid off.
The Singaporean camp had been hit on higher ground; tents had literally been torn apart. Out of a total of twelve tents, only two now stood. The others were scattered in shreds – poles and canvas having been blown across the glacier at the mercy of Mother Nature. Bernardo’s supply tent lay limp and in tatters. The magnificent blue structure of the day before was now a sorry combination of bent poles and ripped canvas.
The Sherpas seemed frightened, and nervously declared that this was the worst storm that any of them could remember at Base Camp for at least fifteen years. We looked on in silence at the carnage that the wind had left.
Like battle-weary troops, the Singapore team were now forced to leave Base Camp. Their tents were ruined; they needed a re-supply, and that would take time. They would wait for this in Lobuche, and train in the meantime in the surrounding valleys.
All of us, in some way, I guess, had arrived with swollen ambitions; we expected to control the way everything would go; we all assumed our equipment or our own strength would be enough; we thought we had a fool-proof system. Disaster is never far away when man assumes to have control over anything – never more so than with nature. As is the way with mountains, our puny systems have this funny habit of breaking down.
These thoughts dominated my mind as Mick and I found ourselves virtually alone again at Base Camp. I was viewing the mountain in a new light now. I felt as if we were trespassing by even being here. It was as if we were being given warnings. Maybe we weren’t meant to ever ‘climb the Great Mountain’, as the Indian General had said.
We were still here though, and were still alive. I almost didn’t dare look up in the direction of the summit. It seemed too far, too ambitious. But as is the nature of the human spirit, the flame somewhere still dimly glowed. I allowed myself a sneaking look up and quietly dreamt.