Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.
Robert Macfarlane
IN 1988 I made my first visit to Nepal to attempt a peak called Mount Pumori, which sits immediately adjacent to Mount Everest. Pumori means ‘beautiful daughter’ and, despite being completely dwarfed by the matriarch of the Himalaya, Pumori is a significant mountain at 7161 metres. It is a striking peak with a quintessential pyramid shape. I was twenty-six years old, and this was my first trip to a non-Western country. I was in for a shock.
In the streets of Kathmandu I saw horribly disfigured beggars sitting metres from the opulent hotels where foreigners scurried, trying in vain to avert their eyes. But at the same time there was no better place to experience the hectic, bustling madness of an Asian city, with overloaded rickshaws, their horns constantly blaring, racing wildly through market streets packed with pedestrians, somehow avoiding dogs, children, chickens, cows and monks. I was quickly won over by the peaceful, friendly nature of the people and their acceptance of life, whatever their status, in this richly cultural but financially stricken country.
There was one aspect of Asia, though, for which I was completely unprepared: the hygiene, or rather the lack of it. I picked up a succession of stomach ailments that stayed with me for the whole two months we were in Nepal and for some time afterwards. I have never been so sick. Course after course of antibiotics treated first one affliction, then another. By the time we started climbing, I’d lost more weight than I’d expected to lose over the course of the entire expedition. I spent most of my time at base camp, throwing up or bent double with stomach cramps.
Another new experience for me was the expedition puja ceremony, where a Tibetan Buddhist monk is engaged, either at base camp or at a monastery en route, to seek from the gods safe passage for the climbers during their expedition. This was my first real experience of another culture’s beliefs. Food and drink were offered to the gods, and our ice axes and crampons, which would come into contact with the mountain, were blessed. For almost an hour the monk recited chants from an ancient handwritten prayer book, enclosed in slim, timber slats tied with string. I felt powerfully linked to the spirituality of the ceremony and that feeling has increased over the many puja ceremonies I’ve attended since.
The south ridge of Pumori is very steep and provides few locations for campsites. Our first camp, at 6000 metres, was a tiny ledge hacked out of an ice ridge at the top of a near-vertical ice face. It was so narrow that the edges of the tent hung over each side, with a 600-metre drop to the glacier below. It was exciting stuff, although we were careful not to toss and turn too much in our sleeping bags in that tent.
To progress beyond the tents, we climbed along the ridge, but the way was soon blocked by 3-metre cornices—great mushrooms of wind-blown ice that accumulate on exposed ridges and dislodge easily—and we were forced to drop over the edge, onto the steep face below. Within a short distance, that way was also blocked and we had to dig a tunnel for several metres straight through the ridge to the face on the other side. The ice wasn’t too hard here and it only took a few hours to hack through the ridge. But it was hugely exposed on each side and very intimidating to gaze down to the glaciers below. This was real alpine climbing and I thrilled at the adventure.
A couple of weeks after we’d started climbing, we were joined at our Base Camp by a small Norwegian–English team, whose four members were hoping to climb the same route as us. There were so few locations for tents on our ridge that we told them they’d have to wait until we were finished—potentially a month or more—or else climb another route. They chose the latter and found a steep and very challenging line on Pumori’s south-west face.
For a while it was fun to look across and watch them, mere specks on a massive expanse of rock and ice as they worked their way up the mountain. Then one day we couldn’t see them. A few days later we learned that the leading pair of climbers had disappeared. Their teammates organised a Nepalese army helicopter to search the mountain face and the glacier below, but no sign of the two was ever found.
Somewhat sobered, my team continued, and a bold dash to the top saw four of our seven members reach the summit. Their descent was successful but not without cost. One teammate, Armando Corvini, had suffered from cold feet during the climb and had added extra layers of socks to compensate. This complicated the issue, compressing his feet inside his already tight boots. The restricted blood flow and the freezing temperatures caused both frostbite and trench foot. As we peeled off his blood-soaked socks back at base camp, the entire soles of his feet fell away. He had to be carried back to civilisation by yak.
Matt Godbold and I made our own summit attempt a few days after the others, but I was again struck down by a gastro attack at Camp 1. I lay curled up in the foetal position for hours as waves of cramps swept over me. The next day I had neither the mental nor the physical strength to continue, so we descended to Base Camp, our expedition over.
While my first Himalayan summit attempt was unsuccessful, I had learned much about climbing at high altitude and on steep ground, and my enthusiasm for the mountains was undimmed. Being so close to Everest had brought home to me the intimidating reality of an 8000-metre mountain. I had climbed to around 6000 metres and been defeated. I knew that to achieve my goal of climbing to the highest place on Earth, I would have to be better prepared, both physically and psychologically.
I had seen the potential cost of high altitude, too—death and serious injury. Despite this, and despite my illness, I had felt the thrill of the high mountains. I was captivated by the spirituality and majesty of the Himalaya and I knew I would return.
*
The next year, 1989, I set out to climb Pik (Mount) Korzhenevskaya in the Pamir ranges of Tajikistan with a friend from the Sydney Rockclimbing Club, Ian Collins, and a couple of other guys. The climbing was technically easy and we soon made our first summit attempt, which turned out to be another lesson in the dangerous effects of altitude.
Ian, who was suffering from altitude headaches on the summit day, waited in the tent at our highest camp while I made a bid for the top. After making him a cup of tea and leaving another pot full of snow on the stove to melt, I set off.
‘Good luck,’ Ian said as I left the tent. ‘I’ll have a cuppa waiting when you get back.’
Twelve hours later, after being defeated by a blizzard a short distance from the summit, I returned to camp, looking forward to that cup of tea. Instead, the door of the tent was wide open and Ian was buried under half a metre of snow inside the tent.
God—he’s dead! I immediately thought. I guess that means no cup of tea, then. But to my great relief, Ian sat up, the snow falling off him in a wave. It turned out that after I’d left the tent, he’d fallen straight back to sleep. With the door open when the blizzard hit, the tent had soon filled up with snow and buried him in his sleeping bag—all without disturbing him, such was the coma-like state of his altitude-induced stupor.
While Ian was okay, there would still be no tea because our stove had been ruined and it was a tough descent over the next few days as we struggled to melt enough snow to drink. Undeterred, we re-equipped at base camp and ascended again, reaching the summit a few days later. At 7105 metres, it was my highest peak to date.
In December that year I joined another AAA expedition, this time to Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America, and in fact the highest mountain in the southern and western hemispheres. As one of the so-called Seven Summits—the highest peaks on each of the world’s seven continents—Aconcagua is very popular, but it’s quite easy and so the normal route can be crowded. We chose instead to climb the Polish Glacier route, which was less visited and more challenging.
From Base Camp, we made speedy progress as far as Camp 2, where we were disconcerted to find the body of a climber wrapped in plastic—the man’s corpse was slowly mummifying in the cold, dry air. We later learned that he’d been injured high on the mountain several years earlier, but when a rescue helicopter had attempted to extract him it crashed, killing the crew. A second helicopter crew had apparently retrieved the bodies of the first helicopter crew but were so angered by the death of their comrades that they abandoned the climber to his fate. He died there and has been enjoying the view ever since.
Several weeks into the expedition, we were ready to make our summit attempt. The slope above the high camp looked bare of snow, exposing steep and treacherous ice. Our team was not highly experienced on that terrain, so rather than follow the true Polish Glacier route to the top, we decided to traverse around the mountain to the normal route and finish the climb that way. As I picked my way carefully across the slope, I found an old ice axe with a wooden shaft. The pick at the top was almost dead straight, indicating that the axe was quite old. Its owner clearly didn’t need it any more, so I put it into my backpack and continued the climb. I still have that axe at home today.
After reaching the summit, I started my descent to Base Camp. I wanted to get down quickly, but en route I passed a Japanese team on its way up. It was immediately obvious that one of its members, a young woman, was seriously attitude sick—she was lurching and falling and could barely speak. I wasn’t overly experienced at high altitude at the time, but I certainly knew that she needed to descend, and quickly. I advised the leader to take her down straightaway, offering to accompany her.
He refused and said, ‘Some will summit; some will die.’
‘Are you serious?’ I asked. He grunted and pushed past, so I spoke to the young woman directly.
‘You must go down or you will die.’
‘No, no. Summit,’ she mumbled as she lurched onwards.
Interesting approach. I’m all for pushing oneself to the limit of one’s ability but climbing is about identifying and working within the limits of acceptable risk. The girl had long since passed that limit. At that point she was just competing for a Darwin award. And her leader was encouraging it! It was the first of numerous examples of bizarre leadership that I would see on the high mountains. I don’t know if any of that team summitted, but I suspect the leader was right about the second part of his comment.
From Base Camp I made my way to the nearest major town, Mendoza, where I met up with the rest of my team and celebrated the summit in good style. After that, I split from the group and headed off for eight months of backpacking around South America. I’d taken the whole year off from the police, so I had plenty of time to engage with the South American culture. I also wanted to explore some of the continent’s wilderness areas and mountain ranges.
I had been in a serious relationship for several months before I’d departed and Joanne and I had agreed to keep our relationship going while I was away. We missed each other a lot, though, so after a couple of months Joanne took leave and flew across to join me. Together we travelled, trekked and backpacked through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and parts of Brazil. We were on a shoestring budget—by the end of it, we could only afford one meal per day—but it was fabulous fun to be young, together and without a care. It was one of the most enjoyable holidays I’ve ever had. Actually, it was one of the only non-climbing holidays I’ve ever had.
*
Joanne and I returned to Australia in August 1990, and she went back to work. I still had several months of leave, though, so in September I took a job leading a trekking group to the Karakorum Mountains of Pakistan, in which stands K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. It was at once hugely intimidating with its steep, black, rocky faces and its massive cliffs of ice—known as seracs—but it was also powerfully magnetic. By the end of the trip I knew I would one day return to climb it. First, though, I had to develop my technical climbing ability and gain more high-altitude experience.
In April 1991, I returned to Mount McKinley to attempt the difficult and very challenging Cassin Ridge. My climbing partner was Piotr Pustelnik, a Polish climber I’d met in Tajikistan in 1989. On McKinley, we first set out on a very fast ascent of the West Buttress route for acclimatisation, successfully reaching the summit just eight days after arriving at the mountain. I’d left my warmest clothing at Base Camp to save weight, with the intention of picking it up before we moved around the mountain to climb the Cassin Ridge to the summit, so when we decided to go for the summit on the West Buttress route I had only a lightweight down jacket and gloves. I had to line my jacket with a garbage bag and put plastic shopping bags over my gloves to help block the wind. It worked, although I was more than a little chilly on the top, given that the temperature was about minus 30 degrees Celsius with a strong wind blowing.
This time, thankfully, I didn’t suffer any brain explosions, but reaching the summit during our acclimatisation phase actually worked against us, as it robbed Piotr of his motivation to complete the Cassin Ridge. He didn’t say outright that he wouldn’t continue but I could tell he was having second thoughts.
After returning to Base Camp and collecting our equipment, we trekked up the north-east fork of the Kahiltna Glacier. We marched for several hours under massive ice cliffs that threatened to release from thousands of metres above and crash down upon us. We made it through unscathed and set up camp in a bergschrund—a crevasse that separates the mountain face from the glacier it feeds—at the base of the Japanese Couloir—the start of the Cassin Ridge route. By then it was late in the afternoon, so we decided to start our ascent of the couloir the following morning.
We settled into our tent and melted snow for tea. Sitting in our lofty lookout, we marvelled at the immense ice faces all around us. Then we spied another two climbers following in our tracks way below. They looked absolutely insignificant compared with the massive blocks of ice above them.
Suddenly the ice cliffs broke free and tumbled down the face of the slope. As they fell and bounced, they broke into smaller but still enormous chunks, some the size of fridges, others as big as houses. The two tiny figures made a vain attempt to escape the path of the avalanche, but within seconds they had disappeared from our view as the blocks of ice crashed in front, behind and over them.
Piotr and I, some 500 metres away, could do nothing but retreat into our tent, hurriedly zipping closed the door. A massive blast of wind hit us moments later. Our tent poles flattened and the shelter was crushed by the force of the air for about thirty seconds. Once it passed our tent sprang back into something resembling its original shape and we peered down into the valley, waiting for the snow cloud to clear. Incredibly, we spotted the two little figures still running for their lives. How they survived I have no idea, but someone or something was looking after them that day. Half an hour later they reached our camp, still so high from adrenaline that they could barely speak.
That night passed slowly, as avalanches reverberated around the mountain. The next morning Piotr declared that he didn’t want to continue the climb. The two climbers—who were British, it turned out—didn’t want a third person on their team, and the Japanese Couloir was too technical for me to solo. My expedition was over. Great! I thought. That was time and money well spent. Our frosty trek back to base camp, had nothing to do with the temperature, and I collected my gear and walked out of the mountains alone.
*
In mid 1991, having returned frustrated after the lost opportunity on McKinley, I was invited by my friend Ian Collins to join him on an expedition to the big one, Mount Everest. This was it! After six years of climbing around the world I now had the opportunity to realise my dream.
At that time, the normal process if you wanted to climb Everest was to apply to Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism two or three years in advance. But a Russian team had cancelled their permit at the last minute and Ian had managed to secure it. In a short time we’d formed a team comprising Ian, me, Michael Groom and expat New Zealander Mark Squires.
I’d rock climbed with Ian and Mark for several years but hadn’t met Groom, who lived in Queensland. He was the only one on the team with 8000-metre experience, having twice climbed on the world’s third-highest peak, Kanchenjunga. He’d also made two unsuccessful attempts on Everest. He was best known for his second attempt on Kanchenjunga, when he suffered severe frostbite on his descent from the summit and subsequently had to have the front portions of both his feet amputated, including all ten toes.
Everest’s history is well known. It was identified as the highest point on Earth during the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in the nineteenth century and received its western name from the Royal Geographical Society in 1865, in honour of Sir George Everest, a surveyor-general of India during the survey. The locals, of course, had known it by a quite different name, and for quite some time. To them it was, and is, Chomolungma, meaning ‘Mother Goddess of the Earth’.
As with several other 8000ers, the border of Tibet and Nepal runs up and over its summit. During the 1920s and 1930s, the British launched six attempts to its north side, several of which came within just a few hundred metres of the summit, despite the climbers’ rudimentary clothing and oxygen systems. The disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine close to the summit in 1924 left an as yet unsolved mystery as to whether they may have reached the top twenty-nine years earlier than the first official success.
The Second World War interrupted proceedings, as did the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1947, and the subsequent closing of Tibet’s borders to foreign expeditions for many years. Attention switched to Nepal, which until that time had kept its own borders locked but had relaxed its restrictions with the coming of democracy to the kingdom in the early 1950s. Some preliminary exploration identified that a route might be climbed through the Khumbu Icefall, and up the mountain’s south-east ridge to the summit. Success finally came to the British on 29 May 1953, but not before the Swiss almost stole the crown in 1952 when they reached the south summit, just 100 metres from the top.
Mallory and Irvine weren’t the only climbers to make Chomolungma their last resting place. Around 250 have now perished in pursuit of summit ‘glory’. The two worst incidents were in 1996, when fifteen climbers died on the mountain (eight in a single storm), and 2014, when a single avalanche crushed sixteen High Altitude Porters in the Khumbu icefall.
Everest has two main climbing seasons: pre-monsoon, which runs from late March to the end of May, at which time the monsoon starts, and post-monsoon, which is officially defined as September to November. Pre-monsoon presents a mountain that has largely been swept clear of excess snow by the winter jet-stream winds that pound the mountain at over 300 kilometres per hour. It becomes warmer as the season progresses towards the beginning of summer in June, so the risk of frostbite is reduced. In the post-monsoon season, the mountain is covered in snow, which actually makes the climbing easier. But the avalanche danger is much greater and the temperatures become colder as the season progresses. Most expeditions prefer to climb in the safer, pre-monsoon, season.
Our Everest expedition, however, was scheduled for the post-monsoon season because that was what the Russians’ permit had dictated. In early September, Ian and Mark travelled to Kathmandu to start the preparations, while I stayed for a few more days to marry Joanne in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Jo was a real homebody and desperately wanted to be married, but I confess that it wasn’t high on my list of priorities. The pull of the mountains was getting stronger and stronger, and I was about to have my first real taste of thin air. I knew that, ultimately, trying to satisfy both commitments would cause conflict. Fittingly, it snowed on our wedding day, so I was well acclimatised to the cold when I arrived in Kathmandu, sans wife, a few days later.
*
I knew from my experience on Pumori that Nepalese customs officials would inspect my bags and find some ‘technical issue’ with the amount or type of equipment that I was bringing into the country. They would either delay me extensively or confiscate something, which would disappear into the great black hole of their impounded-goods warehouse, never to be seen again. It was all a scam, of course, as the inspectors were simply seeking some minor bribe to complement their lowly wages. But I wasn’t prepared to give up any of my essential equipment, nor did I know what the appropriate financial ‘incentive’ was. To overcome this, I purchased a bottle of duty-free spirits at the airport and put it into my luggage while waiting to be inspected. When my bags were opened, the expected topic was raised.
‘Actually, sir, you have too much equipment here. It is not possible to take all this equipment into Nepal.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, you know, I really don’t need that bottle of alcohol at the top of my bag. Could you help by disposing of that for me? And would that bring my equipment back to an acceptable amount?’
‘Oh, yes, sir,’ came the very pleased reply. I was soon out of the airport with all my equipment, and back in the hustle and bustle of Kathmandu.
It was with a certain trepidation that I was returning to Nepal—the memory of that disastrous intestinal experience during my expedition there in 1988 was still agonisingly strong—I was desperate to get into the mountains healthy so I could take on Everest. Accordingly, I took great care that every bite and every sip of liquid I consumed was as hygienic as it could be. At least one restaurant owner was well aware of the needs of tourists like me, cleverly displaying a sign that read, ‘We soak all our vegetables in 2% iodine solution’. His restaurant was packed solid every night.
We spent several days purchasing what we needed for our climb—food, rope, propane/butane gas canisters for our stoves, a couple of bottles of oxygen (we would be climbing without oxygen but still wanted a bottle or two for emergencies), snow pickets and other necessary expedition paraphernalia. We had engaged a local trekking agent, who liaised with the authorities on our behalf, and employed a cook and a sirdar (much like a foreman). The sirdar then hired and managed the porters who’d carry our equipment to base camp. The agent also provided us with a kitchen tent and cooking equipment. We would fend for ourselves while up high on the mountain, but while we were resting at base camp and recovering from our climbing sorties, it would be wonderful to have someone else do the chores.
Prior to departing for the mountain, we had to undergo the arduous briefing process required by the Nepal Ministry of Tourism, which involved hours in a musty office filling out numerous documents in triplicate, all of which needed laborious and rather snooty consideration by the responsible official—and extended tedium while we waited for his benign consent. After a full day spent battling our way through bureaucracy of which any civil servant would be proud, we finally received his approving decree and were free to start our journey to base camp.
The first leg was a thirty-minute flight from Kathmandu to a remote mountain airstrip at a village called Lukla in an ancient twenty-seater Twin Otter aircraft. Lukla’s airstrip is one of Sir Edmund Hillary’s many extraordinary achievements. It is literally perched halfway up a mountain—its runway has a fifteen-degree slope. Our little aircraft clawed its way over successively higher mountain passes until we skimmed over the highest gap just above the treetops, then dropped steeply towards the dirt runway. As we plunged through the clouds, I saw through our plane’s windscreen, on either side of the landing strip, the wreckage of aircraft that had previously landed poorly. Now, that makes you fasten your seatbelt!
Thankfully, our pilot was better than those from the various wreckages and, after a siren had sounded at the airstrip, motivating the locals to usher their grazing cattle out of the way, we landed with a thud before going to full revs to drive uphill to the top of the strip. We quickly disembarked and our luggage was tossed out after us, then the little plane roared back down the hill, dropping out of sight into the valley until it gained sufficient airspeed to start the climb back to the high pass, en route to Kathmandu. That flight is surely one of the world’s classics. Since my first visit, they have tarred the runway, cleared away some of the wreckage and built a fence around the airstrip, if only to keep the cattle safe.
From this high mountain village (altitude 3300 metres), deep within the Sherpa region of Nepal, we commenced our trek to Everest. Over ten days we moved through progressively smaller and more remote villages, until we left the last shacks behind and crossed the Khumbu Glacier to reach Everest base camp.
The camp was pitched somewhat haphazardly on the rock and ice moraine of the Khumbu Glacier. Many hours of labour were required to hack relatively flat spots for our tents and to build our home for the next two months. As necessary as it was to focus on the work at hand, I could barely concentrate. In front loomed the world’s highest mountain, its cloud-enshrouded summit an overwhelming 3.5 vertical kilometres above us. It was absolutely monstrous. The years of training and climbing around the world I’d done to prepare for this very moment seemed worthless. I felt very small indeed.
We decided that the best way to succeed, and survive, would be to tackle the challenge in the traditional way of climbing at high altitude, known as siege style. This meant that we’d acclimatise as we climbed, rather than acclimatising elsewhere and then trying to ascend the mountain in a single push. At 8848 metres, Everest reaches well into the ‘death zone’, where a human body can spend only a limited amount of time before its internal mechanisms start to shut down, leading devastatingly quickly to death. The death zone is what makes Everest—and indeed all the 8000-metre peaks—so dangerous.
The world’s atmosphere, the air, has weight. At sea level, all that atmosphere weighing down on you creates pressure. Measured in millibars, it is around 970 to 1030 millibars, depending on the weather systems. The higher into the atmosphere you climb, the less of it there is above you, and therefore the less weight, or pressure, there is bearing down on you. Atmospheric pressure impacts on your ability to absorb oxygen from the air. At 8000 metres, the pressure is around 250 millibars, just a quarter of the pressure at sea level, so from each breath the body gets only a quarter of the oxygen that it needs. That’s why we call it ‘thin air’.
The human body is, to a certain extent, adaptable. Over time it can adjust to lower pressure. That’s what acclimatisation is. One thing the body does is develop more red blood cells (haemoglobin) in order to better absorb the oxygen. Up to around 3000 metres, there is little need to acclimatise, but above that the general guide is that you should ascend not more than 300 metres per day to allow your body to adjust. The base camps of the 8000-metre peaks are at altitudes of between 4000 and 5100 metres, which means the journey in requires a minimum of four to five days, and up to two weeks, to achieve the appropriate acclimatisation en route. For that reason, we’d deliberately taken ten days for our trek to Everest base camp.
Acclimatising to the base camp altitude simply means you have adjusted enough not to drop dead right then and there. Of course, as you proceed up the mountain you must continue to acclimatise, and even that will allow you only the briefest moment on the summit. It is a long, slow process, taking about a month at 4000 metres or higher to be sufficiently acclimatised to make an attempt on an 8000-metre summit.
Nobody, including the Sherpas, can acclimatise enough to live at high altitude permanently. Above about 4000 metres, you are on borrowed time—and that time reduces exponentially as you go higher. So acclimatisation is about spending the appropriate amount of time up high for your body to adapt to the altitude, but not too long, because your body starts to shut down from the moment you reach base camp.
With that understanding, we spent a couple of days setting up our Base Camp and acclimatising to its altitude, then started the assault by climbing each day for about six hours up the 800 metres from Base Camp to Camp 1, through the infamous Khumbu Icefall. This is a jumble of massive ice blocks, some as big as multistorey buildings, which have broken away from the face of the glacier above and tumbled partway down the steep slope towards Base Camp. They balance precariously on top of each other, threatening to collapse without warning. It is the most objectively dangerous part of the entire climb.
The route winds its way beside, between and over these ice blocks, and we frequently felt the entire icefall rumble and shunt as a block collapsed somewhere, dropping hundreds of tonnes of ice onto the path. On one occasion I saw a massive ripple sweep from one side of the icefall to the other, around 500 metres in width, as the glacier below settled. It made for nervous climbing and we stopped only when desperate to catch our breath, and even then only for the shortest time necessary.
At the top of the icefall, we found a suitable site for our Camp 1. On a level patch of ice surrounded by crevasses we erected two tents, to store all the provisions and equipment, then, given we’d climbed more than the recommended 300 metres per day, descended to base camp that afternoon. A typical load was around 15 to 20 kilograms, and consisted of a tent, four days’ worth of food and gas, a sleeping bag and also our everyday items—a couple of different jackets, water, a couple of snack bars, mittens, gloves, glasses, goggles, pen knife, balaclava, sun hat, radio, sunscreen, camera, climbing equipment for the route, ice axe and crampons. For several days, we repeated the process until we had sufficient supplies stored at Camp 1 to enable us to occupy that camp and commence carrying loads to Camp 2.
Simultaneously we were enhancing our acclimatisation by climbing up to the higher altitude of Camp 1 each day but returning to sleep in the thicker air of Base Camp each night. The high-altitude acclimatisation mantra is ‘climb high, sleep low’, which is precisely what we were doing. By the time we’d fully stocked Camp 1, we’d also enhanced our acclimatisation sufficiently to be able to stay at that camp without serious ill effects. This is siege-style climbing.
The route to Camp 2 was much less intimidating than the Khumbu Icefall but had its own challenges. Rising from 6100 to 6500 metres, we trudged our way up a long glacier known as the Western Cwm (pronounced Coom). The cwm is littered with giant crevasses, some as wide as 10 metres. To cross them, we tiptoed carefully over aluminium ladders lashed together and laid across the black voids below. That glacier is several hundred metres in depth—not the place to lose your balance.
From Camp 2 the route rises steeply up an ice slope known as the Lhotse Face. This is absolutely enormous. It stretches from around 6500 metres to the very summit of Lhotse, almost 2 vertical kilometres above. It is a huge concave expanse of ice, wider than it is high. From a distance, climbers look like fly specks against its vastness. This is the part of the mountain that sorts the pretenders from those with the motivation for the summit.
Hour upon hour, climbers must haul themselves up this slope with their loads balanced on their backs, the steep angle stressing their ankles, calves and thigh muscles to exhaustion, every step into ever-thinning air. At 7300 metres, about halfway up the face, ledges are hacked from the ice for Camp 3, and tents are positioned among small, stable cliffs of ice that, at best, provide scant protection from the threat of avalanches. This camp is so high that you look down at the summit of Pumori. And Camp 3 is barely halfway up Everest.
Above Camp 3, climbers ascend steepening ground, before traversing leftwards up and across the entire Lhotse Face towards Everest. En route, they must overcome a cliff of slippery limestone rock known as the Yellow Band, and a final steep and shattered cliff called the Geneva Spur before staggering onto the South Col to place Camp 4 at 7950 metres. A saddle between Lhotse and Everest, the South Col is enormous and would accommodate several football fields. It is relatively flat and provides a great point from which expeditions can launch their summit attempts. But it is fearfully cold and almost constantly windy, as it provides a convenient passage for weather systems to move between the mountains.
We followed the same process of ferrying loads to higher camps, acclimatising as we did so, until all four camps were in place. It was exhausting work and we frequently returned to Base Camp to rest for a couple of days, as physical recovery is much better there than at higher altitudes.
While chilling out at base camp, I met the Kazakhstani mountaineer Anatoli Bukreev, who was climbing with a French expedition. Ethnically a Russian, Anatoli was powerfully built, and he soon proved that his reputation as a very strong climber at high altitude was no myth. He had been a member of the 1989 Russian expedition that had completed the first traverse of the four peaks of Kanchenjunga. Technically, a mountain may have only one summit, but Kanchenjunga has four distinct peaks, all above 8000 metres. Traversing all four was a superb mountaineering achievement. Before coming to Everest in 1991, he had just completed a new route on the West Wall of Dhaulagiri, another 8000er.
A few weeks into our expedition, I had the opportunity to observe him in his element. While I was climbing from Camp 2 to Camp 3, at around 7000 metres’ altitude, I was stunned to be overtaken by Anatoli, who was carrying twice my load. Even more amazingly, though, he was wearing only a pair of sneakers on his feet, while I was clumping my way up in a pair of heavily insulated mountain boots.
Clearly unflappable by nature, Anatoli had a quiet temperament and a ready smile. Most evenings at Base Camp he’d play his guitar and sing mournful Russian folk songs in the French team’s dining tent. I didn’t understand the words but loved the melodies. One night I asked him what he was singing about. In heavily accented English, he said, ‘I sing that the winter is cold, the snow is deep, the cattle is dead, the crops is failed, my wife is leave me and my children is in the war, but … life is okay.’
I soon discovered that the expedition cooks were also doing their best to amuse us, mainly through their interpretation of westerners’ diets. They developed the idea, probably after we showed them how to cook a pizza, that we liked cheese melted over the top of everything. On more than one occasion our cook served us a chocolate cake or apple pie with melted yak’s cheese on top. The quality food in Base Camp, though, was a far cry from our diet on the mountain.
I’d been on several expeditions to mountains with summits that rose above 6000 or 7000 metres. On those trips I’d found it easy to eat most things, because the altitude of our camps had not been too extreme. But Everest introduced me to the harsh realities of living at the altitudes of those summits as we struggled towards a far higher peak. Eating above Base Camp was almost impossible, as was sleeping. Cooking food and melting snow to drink meant using precious canisters of gas. The human body can’t digest protein at altitude, and does a pretty poor job of absorbing nutrients generally, so we ate mostly biscuits and saved the gas for tea. The recommended fluid intake at these altitudes is 8 litres per day, due to the extremely dry air and constant exertion of six to eight hours of climbing. At best we were able to melt around 3 litres each per day. We were constantly nauseous, with splitting headaches from the altitude and dehydration. On the odd occasion that we did eat, more often than not we threw it straight back up. We could literally see our bodies withering.
The other new experience for me was the intense cold of high altitude. Not having sufficient oxygen to survive meant that we couldn’t generate adequate body heat to stay warm. To compensate, we wore numerous layers of clothing—long heavyweight thermal underwear, then a layer of fleece and then a down vest. At the lower altitudes we wore a windproof suit over the top of these layers, but above 7000 metres, substituted it with a massive, down-filled suit. It was like climbing in a sleeping bag. Yet still we were chilled to the core.
Despite all the obstacles though, we were focussed and loved the experience. We were on Everest!
We made steady progress up the mountain as we acclimatised. One day, however, Groom was working with the French team high on the Lhotse Face, fixing ropes from Camp 3 across the Yellow Band towards Camp 4, while Ian, Mark and I were at Camp 2, around a thousand metres below. With binoculars, we could just make out the tiny figures on the massive mountain face. Suddenly an avalanche let go from the slopes above them. We watched, fascinated but helpless, as a wave of snow rolled inexorably down to the climbers, who were frantically trying to run across the slope to avoid the onslaught.
Most of them made it to safety, but one climber did not. The river of white hit him with such force that his rope snapped like string, and he was swept the full 1000 metres down the face, to the glacier below. Down at Camp 2 we waited, hearts in our mouths, as the snow cloud slowly cleared, revealing two black dots amid the ice debris at the base of the Lhotse face. We didn’t know who’d been avalanched, but it was a climber, or climbers, so we raced to help.
In the rarefied air it took us twenty minutes to get to the face. We shuffled and struggled as fast as we could, filled with dread at the thought of what we’d find. Incredibly, as we approached, one of the black dots started moving. We soon realised it was Groom. He was battered, bruised and concussed but okay. The other black dot turned out to be his backpack. Groom was able to walk, so we escorted him back to Camp 2, wrapped him in a sleeping bag and tended to his many grazes and bruises. After a couple of days’ rest he descended to Base Camp, his expedition over.
Groom’s survival was unprecedented. Everyone else who has fallen so far down that face has been killed, and usually ended up inside the massive bergschrund between the bottom of the Lhotse Face and the Western Cwm. He probably survived because we were climbing in the post-monsoon season, which meant that the Lhotse Face had a good covering of snow. He had a relatively soft ride. The bergschrund was filled in, so he tumbled right over the top of it. By rights, he should have been broken into little pieces but, miraculously, he had survived. Some Sherpas said that he’d left one life and begun a new one.
Groom’s injuries were not even the worst from the incident. While he had been caught in the middle of the face, other climbers, who’d made it to the side of the slope and out of the path of the avalanche, had nonetheless been attached to the same rope that had snapped. The violent jarring of the rope caused them to lose their footing. One was knocked from his stance and fell several metres, landing on the leader of the French expedition. The twelve steel points of the falling climber’s crampons, so effective at penetrating hard ice, sliced neatly through the Frenchman’s skin and bone, badly injuring him. What followed was a long and difficult evacuation, as his team lowered him down the face.
Our much smaller team was soon reduced to two because Mark hadn’t acclimatised well. This meant that only Ian and I would attempt the summit. We climbed to Camp 4, rested for a few hours, then set out at midnight, without oxygen. It was cold, dark and intimidating. At around 8200 metres Ian’s headlamp failed. We continued by the light of my headlamp, but at around 8300 metres Ian complained that his hands were freezing and that he had to go down. Without a headlamp, he couldn’t see the way.
I had no choice but to give up my own summit attempt and escort him down. We descended all the way to Base Camp over the next few days because, having climbed so high without auxiliary oxygen, I hadn’t the strength to launch a second summit attempt without a rest. After a couple of days at Base Camp, I started out again by myself and climbed to about 7000 metres. But by then the mountain had sapped all my strength and I had to face the reality that my expedition was over too.
Still, I reflected, it wasn’t a bad first attempt. Without the headlamp issue we might actually have made it. I was disappointed but not put off, and I resolved to return and complete the challenge.
*
Soon after I returned to Australia, Tashi Tenzing, a Sherpa who was working for an Australian trekking agency, asked me to help him put together an expedition to Everest for 1993. I learned that Tashi had been approached by two expatriate Macedonians living in Australia, Trajce Aleksov (known as ‘Alex’) and Dimitar Todorovski, who wanted to go to Everest to recover the body of a friend who’d died high on the mountain a few years earlier. Both were very strong climbers but were unsure how to initiate an expedition from Australia. They’d approached Tashi because they’d seen his name in the media somewhere and assumed he was an experienced climber.
Tashi was a maternal grandson of Tenzing Norgay, who’d made the first ascent of Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953. Tashi wasn’t an experienced climber, but he had worked for an Australian trekking company and had later married one of the Australian trek leaders. He’d graduated to working as a trek leader and adopted his grandfather’s Christian name as his surname.
As he had never actually participated in an Everest expedition, Tashi came to me for help. He proposed that we create a joint Australian–Macedonian expedition. The Macedonians would then be able to achieve their goal, and a few Australian climbers would be able to make their own bids for the summit. Fresh from my recent disappointment, I agreed. It turned out to be a big mistake. It would be the most dysfunctional expedition I would ever go on, and would deteriorate into a sordid episode that ultimately ended in tragedy.
We achieved some minor sponsorship, but the majority of the funding for the expedition came from the Macedonian community in Australia, whose members worked tirelessly to raise the money. While they were doing that, we learned that Tashi had independently approached the watchmaker Rolex and organised sponsorship for himself. I was our expedition treasurer, and after this I started to get a bad feeling about the whole enterprise.
The team comprised Tashi, a friend of his, Mike Wood, and me, together with the two Macedonian climbers and a friend of theirs, who would come to Base Camp. We agreed the Macedonians would recover their friend while the rest of us climbed to the summit, and we would share resources and logistics and work together to achieve both outcomes.
I agreed to Tashi being the expedition leader, on paper, as that was likely to attract more media attention and sponsorship. It turned out to be a disastrous move. Tashi, using the paper authority of his position, began making other arrangements without our knowledge. He invited Michael Groom to join our expedition for free, and then agreed to allow a very inexperienced climber, David Hume, to buy his way onto the expedition for about $15,000. Tashi also arranged for one of his uncles, Lobsang Bhotia, a Sherpa living in Darjeeling, to join the expedition as a team member.
I saw no reason to offer Michael a free trip when the rest of us were working hard to raise funds for the expedition. It was clear, though, that Tashi was hoping Michael would help get him to the summit. David was a different issue. Despite bringing some valuable income to the expedition, his inexperience meant that he would need careful supervision on the mountain. Only Tashi’s uncle Lobsang brought any real benefit to the group, as he was a strong and experienced climber. He would climb as a team member, not as a support Sherpa.
The dramas didn’t end there. We planned to use oxygen for the ascent, so I researched and found an American supplier of a new system called POISK. But before I made the purchase, Tashi advised me that an uncle of his in Nepal had a supply of the same oxygen, left over from another expedition, which we could get for a cheaper price. He guaranteed us that it was exactly the same system. When we arrived in Nepal, though, we found out that it wasn’t the same system at all. The bottles were too small and too heavy, meaning that it would be impossible to carry enough of them to get us to the summit and back on a continuous flow.
Despite all these issues, the expedition went forward and we travelled to Base Camp in April 1993. But our group remained disjointed and there was constant acrimony between the team members, particularly between Tashi and me. The team split into factions: Tashi, his uncle Lobsang and Michael Groom in one; me, David Hume and the two Macedonians in the other. I found the whole thing extremely distasteful and not at all in the spirit of mountaineering.
As expected, David struggled on the mountain. One day, after we’d carried loads from Camp 2 to Camp 3, he returned six hours after the rest of us, stating he’d never been on such steep terrain. In reality, that face was only 30 to 40 degrees. This is not to speak ill of David; he was just inexperienced. But that inexperience meant that he needed constant supervision, which affected everyone else’s climbing ambitions. Tashi and Michael weren’t interested in watching over him, and so it was left to me and the Macedonians to keep him alive.
As with all things, though, there was good among the bad. The Macedonians were great guys and David, in particular, provided some rich entertainment at base camp. One day he decided to have a haircut. Several of us offered to do it for him but he insisted on doing it himself. What could go wrong? I found the first-aid kit and we sat down to await the inevitable, which came soon enough when he tried to cut through a particularly thick clump of hair, only to find out that it was his ear. Luckily, he hadn’t cut it off, but he had snipped it in half.
At base camp I met Michael Rheinberger, a veteran Australian Everest expeditioner. Mike was considerably older than me, perhaps in his fifties, and had made seven Everest undertakings over the years without ever reaching the summit. He’d tried different sides and different routes, but there had always been something to prevent him from reaching the top. He could see that our expedition was a complete disaster, and he kindly shared a cup of tea with me every now and then. He was the wise old man of the mountain, and our chats gave me enough motivation to continue with the climb.
Despite the disharmony, or perhaps because of it, I became determined to ensure that the Macedonians were treated as equals. Since we had the wrong oxygen system, there wasn’t enough of it for both teams. I located some spare tanks in a Russian expedition, which I bought for Alex and Dimitar, and it turned out to be a better system than the one we’d bought earlier.
I found myself climbing predominately with Alex and Dimitar. While Alex was strong at altitude, Dimitar struggled, and they reached a decision to abandon their attempt to locate their friend’s body, as Alex couldn’t manage it by himself. This was particularly disappointing for him, because Alex was a national mountaineering hero in Macedonia, and there was considerable expectation that he would recover his comrade’s body. It was the right decision in the circumstances, though.
Rather than give up on the mountain, Alex was still keen to climb. I’d come to like and respect him more and more throughout the journey. He was the most generous person and enthusiastic climber I’d met. We agreed to climb together for the top.
For the summit push, the factions climbed independently. Groom, Lobsang and Tashi were in the first group, to be followed the next day by me, Alex and David. Lobsang and Tashi used the oxygen system sold to us by Tashi’s uncle, but the bottles were so small and heavy that it was impossible to carry enough oxygen to complete the climb and return safely.
As the first group made its attempt on the summit from Camp 4 on the South Col, my team climbed from Camp 3 to Camp 4, so that we would be in a position to go for the top the next day. A couple of hundred metres above Camp 3, at around 7500 metres, we met Tashi coming down from the South Col, using oxygen. He told us that snow blindness had stopped him on his way to the summit in the middle of night. Somehow, it appeared, he was miraculously cured in the harsh light of day.
Tashi told us that he’d climbed with Lobsang to 8300 metres but that when he’d given up, Lobsang had continued for the summit, despite the inappropriate oxygen system.
Alex and I kept climbing and arrived at Camp 4 in the early afternoon, where we sheltered in our tent and spent hours melting snow to drink. Just as the pot was full of water, David arrived. We yelled at him not to enter but he didn’t seem to understand, perhaps because of the bandage on his ear. He dived into the tent, knocking over 3 litres of water, which soaked our sleeping bags, down clothing and everything else before freezing almost instantly. Frozen clothing does not insulate at all well, and I might have taken an ice axe to David’s head if Groom hadn’t returned to camp at just that moment, having successfully reached the summit.
Too exhausted to speak at first, he needed assistance. Disconcertingly, Lobsang was still high on the mountain but Groom didn’t know whether he was okay or not. As the day closed, a wind storm developed, which prevented us from going up to look for him.
The storm persisted into the next morning, so all the other teams, as well as Groom and Hume, descended to lower camps. Alex and I stayed at Camp 4, hoping for a break in the weather so we could search for Lobsang. We thought that he might have taken shelter in a tent on the Balcony, which was several hundred metres higher and hosted a rarely utilised Camp 5 that another expedition had installed.
It was now our second day above 8000 metres and we were feeling the effects of our long stay, but the storm eased a little and we took turns to go out and search. Late in the afternoon Alex found Lobsang’s body at the bottom of the face above the South Col. His oxygen mask and regulator were in his backpack, meaning that, as we suspected, he had run out of oxygen. He would have saved the mask and regulator because of their value. Once out of oxygen, it seemed likely that he’d suffered severe hypoxia and made some kind of mistake that led to him falling down the face.
What a waste. Lobsang had made his own choice to continue when Tashi had given up, but he did so with an inappropriate oxygen system. I wonder if his family in Darjeeling were ever told why the expedition had been using the wrong oxygen equipment?
It was too late in the day for Alex and me to descend, so we were forced to spend another night on the South Col, despite the likelihood that the altitude would incapacitate us. By morning, we were so fatigued from our long stay at 8000 metres that we literally crawled down the mountain to a safer altitude. Lobsang’s body was later recovered and cremated according to Sherpa custom.
After a few days’ rest at base camp, I made ready for another attempt, but David insisted that if I went back up, he would also try again. While I respected his tenacity, I believed that it could only result in another accident, so I abandoned my plan. Thus ended, thankfully, the worst expedition I have ever taken part in. The only good to have come from it was the friendship I established with Alex. We went on to become the best of mates, and still are to this day.
I returned home angry and disenchanted. I’d joined a disparate group of individuals, not a unified, functioning team. I made a decision that, from then on, I would only climb big Himalayan peaks with friends or climbers with whom I’d already climbed elsewhere. This may have been idealistic—perhaps too much so—but the events I’d witnessed fired my resolve to never allow such a tragedy to occur again.
Unfortunately, Mike Rheinberger failed to summit during his 1993 attempt on Everest. He returned yet again in 1994, this time with a professional guide, and together they made a documentary of their climb. Finally, after eight expeditions, Mike achieved his dream and stood on the summit of Mount Everest. On the descent, however, he succumbed to cerebral oedema and collapsed. He and his guide bivouacked high on the mountain, but by morning Mike was in a coma, and the guide had to be rescued. Tragically, Mike died and never had the chance to enjoy his summit.
In 1995, David Hume, against my strong advice, launched his own Himalayan expedition to climb another of the 8000ers, Mount Makalu. He reached the summit but made a basic mistake during the descent and was killed in a fall.