The Call of Everest Page 12

  Chris Bonington led an unsuccessful attempt later that fall and returned in 1975 with a carefully chosen team. Dougal Haston, a Scotsman living in Switzerland, was a driven, ambitious alpinist. Martin Boysen was an old climbing friend of Bonington’s, and Doug Scott had already made an attempt. Nick Estcourt, Tut Braithwaite, and Mick Burke filled out the roster of this well-financed and superbly organized team. Peter Boardman described the effort best: “For a mountaineer, surely a Bonington Everest Expedition is one of the last great Imperial experiences that life can offer!” The key to their success occurred high up on the face. Previous teams had been defeated by the rock band when they had chosen a right-slanting ramp that dead-ended. This time they went left.

  JIM WHITTAKER POSES with the American and National Geographic flags at the summit in this image taken by his climbing partner, Nawang Gombu.

  Dougal Haston and Doug Scott reached the summit at 6 p.m. on September 24, almost 16 hours after leaving their Camp VI. The photographs show a lovely—and ominous—sunset. Doug Scott enthused: “The view was so staggering, the disappearing sun so full of colour that the setting held us in awe.” “Disappearing” is the pertinent adjective: It was much too late to return to their camp, so they ended up spending the night on the South Summit at 28,700 feet (8,750 meters), a new record for the highest bivouac.

  Two days later Martin Boysen, Mick Burke, Peter Boardman, and Pertemba Sherpa headed up. Boardman and Pertemba reached the top. While Boysen turned back, teammate Burke continued on alone. He was last seen by Boardman and Pertemba resting just a few hundred yards from the summit. He seemed confident, but then the weather closed in, and Mick Burke disappeared forever.

  Over on the Southeast Ridge, a diminutive piano teacher, only five feet tall and weighing well under 100 pounds, Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to climb the mountain. Just 11 days later, Phantog, a Tibetan mother of three, reached the summit with a Chinese expedition. Two women in two weeks! Another woman would not grace the summit of Everest for another five years.

  THE CLIMBERS BATTLE strong winds.

  VOICES

  AND MILES TO GO

  As we descended, the falling snow gave way to a fine drizzle. There was nothing to see; just one foot, then another. But slowly a change came, something that no matter how many times experienced, is always new, like life. It was life. From ice and snow and rock, we descended to a world of living things, of green—grass and trees and bushes. There was no taking it for granted. Spring had come, and even the grey drizzle imparted a wet sheen to all that grew. At Pheriche flowers bloomed in the meadows.

  Lying in bed, Willi [Unsoeld] and I listened to a sound that wasn’t identifiable, so foreign was it to the place—the chopping whirr as a helicopter circled, searching for a place to land. In a flurry of activity Willi and Barrel [Barry Bishop] were loaded aboard. The helicopter rose from the hilltop above the village and dipped into the distance. The chop-chop-chop of the blades faded, until finally the craft itself was lost in the massive backdrop. The departure was too unreal, too much a part of another world, to be really comprehended. Less than five days after they had stood on the summit of Everest, Barrel and Willi were back in Kathmandu. For them the Expedition was ended. Now all that remained was weeks in bed, sitting, rocking in pain, waiting for toes to mummify to the time for amputation …

  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

  We were finished. Everest was climbed; nothing to push for now. Existence knew only the instant, counting steps, falling asleep each time we stopped to rest beside the trail. Lester, Emerson, and I talked about motivation; for me it was all gone. It was a time of relaxation, a time when senses were tuned to perceive, but nothing was left to give …

  We’d climbed Everest. What good was it to Jake [Breitenbach, who had died earlier on the climb]? To Willi, to Barrel? To Norman [Dyhrenfurth, AMEE team leader], with Everest all done now? And to the rest of us? What waits? What price less tangible than toes? There must be something more to it than toiling over the top of another, albeit expensive, mountain. Perhaps there was something of the nobility-that-is-man in it somewhere, but it was hard to be sure.

  Yes, it satisfied in a way. Not just climbing the mountain, but the entire effort—the creating something, the few of us moulding it from the beginning. With a lot of luck we’d succeeded. But what had we proved?

  THE SIMPLE LIFE

  Existence on a mountain is simple. Seldom in life does it come any simpler: survival, plus the striving toward a summit. The goal is solidly, three-dimensionally there—you can see it, touch it, stand upon it—the way to reach it well defined, the energy of all directed toward its achievement. It is this simplicity that strips the veneer off civilization and makes that which is meaningful easier to come by—the pleasure of deep companionship, moments of uninhibited humour, the tasting of hardship, sorrow, beauty, joy. But it is this very simplicity that may prevent finding answers to the questions I had asked as we approached the mountain …

  It had been a wonderful dream, but now all that lingered was the memory. The dream was ended.

  Everest must join the realities of my existence, commonplace and otherwise. The goal, unattainable, had been attained. Or had it? The questions, many of them, remained. And the answers? It is strange how when a dream is fulfilled there is little left but doubt.

  —THOMAS HORNBEIN Tom Hornbein, a member of the 1963 American team, scaled the difficult West Ridge with Willi Unsoeld. This passage comes from his book Everest: The West Ridge, published in 1965 and reissued in a 50th-anniversary edition in 2013 by The Mountaineers Books.

  WITHOUT OXYGEN

  Rumor has it that when Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner and an Austrian, Peter Habeler, were flying home in 1975 after climbing Pakistan’s Gasherbrum I (26,469 feet/8,068 meters) without supplemental oxygen, they toasted their success with a gin and tonic and declared, “To Everest—without oxygen!” Three years later, they trained hard in order to climb quickly and efficiently on Everest, spending as little time as possible above 8,000 meters. Although Habeler expressed misgivings about dispensing with the O2 while on the actual climb, Messner remained adamant. To save their breath, they scratched messages to each other in the snow rather than talk. At one point, Habeler’s etched arrow pointed down. Messner’s pointed up. Messner recalled the Herculean effort later in his Expedition to the Ultimate: “I am nothing more than a single, narrow, gasping lung, floating over the mists and the summits.” Habeler was terrifyingly near the end of his limit when they reached the top: “It was a very personal, lonely victory in a struggle which each of us fought alone … In spite of my euphoria, I was physically completely finished.”

  Many believed their brains would be fried by the lack of oxygen, but they appeared quite lucid upon their descent. The Sherpas at Base Camp were astonished that they had done it. In fact, a strange situation arose in Kathmandu following the climb when a group of Sherpas called a press conference to denounce Messner as a liar. They didn’t believe his claim to have climbed without oxygen, asserting that he had hidden tiny bottles of oxygen under his down jacket. If they couldn’t do it, nobody could.

  That same year, Wanda Rutkiewicz, Poland’s first lady of climbing—and role model for the entire community of female Himalayan climbers—became the first European woman and the first Polish mountaineer to climb Everest. This beautiful, charismatic, and eagerly ambitious alpinist hated almost every moment of the climb due to some nasty interactions with her fellow climbers, something she attributed to male chauvinism. But her triumphant summit moment made up for the hardship, and her historic ascent coincided with Pope John Paul II’s ordination day, Poland’s greatest moment in the history of the Catholic Church.

  A year later another Eastern bloc victory occurred: A strong Yugoslavian team led by Tone Skarja, the Chris Bonington of Yugoslavia, made a breakthrough on Everest when it climbed the entire West Ridge Direct. Never varying from the actual ridge, the team climbed overhanging rock above 8,000 meters—the
hardest technical climbing on Everest to this point. Andrej Štremfelj and Nejc Zaplotnik finished the historic route and descended by the Hornbein Couloir. Their climb signaled the emergence of Yugoslavia (and later Slovenia) as a Himalayan powerhouse.

  EVEREST IN WINTER

  From time to time, a visionary turns his attention to Everest. In the winter of 1979–80, that visionary was Andrzej Zawada, Poland’s most charismatic expedition leader. Zawada had already established himself as a high-altitude winter specialist in the Hindu Kush as well as nearly ascending Lhotse in winter. Yet no 8,000-meter peak had yet been climbed in winter, and Zawada set his sights on Everest. With welding goggles to protect their eyes and homemade equipment to protect against the crippling cold and the screaming winds, his team had still not placed a climber on the summit when its permit was scheduled to run out in mid-February. Then Zawada managed to negotiate two more days, and two of the youngest, Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy, reached the top on February 17. All of Poland rejoiced.

  ITALIAN REINHOLD MESSNER, one of the world’s greatest mountaineers, solo climbed to Everest’s summit in August 1980 without using supplemental oxygen or a radio. He collapsed in his tent after the feat, utterly spent. Messner is the first person to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks.

  One of Poland’s finest climbers, Jerzy Kukuczka, had missed the expedition because he had stayed home for the birth of his first son. Luckily, the insatiable Zawada had negotiated not one but two permits for Everest, and the second took place in the spring of 1980. Not content to repeat an earlier route, he plotted a new line on the South Face between the South Pillar and the Southeast Ridge. High on the mountain, above 8,000 meters, a formidable rock band tested the very best: Jerzy Kukuczka and Andrzej Czok. Kukuczka recalled: “To climb this at that altitude took so much out of me that at one stage the effort made me simply wet my pants. At times my vision blurred.”

  VOICES

  THE REASON FOR DANGER

  The most important thing to know is that mountaineering involves risk. If we go to the mountains and forget that there is risk, we make mistakes. Mountains are dangerous! But they are only dangerous if people are there. A mountain is a mountain. It only exists. It is a piece of rock and ice, a beautiful piece maybe, but it only becomes dangerous and beautiful if we are there …

  Danger is a filter that stops people from going where, perhaps, they should not go. Danger has to do with managing fear, gaining experience, and learning hard-won lessons. Without making our own decisions, without accepting personal responsibility for our own actions, we cannot learn to achieve big things.

  —REINHOLD MESSNER The first person, with Peter Habeler, to summit Everest without supplementary oxygen, Reinhold Messner was also the first to climb all of the planet’s 14 8,000-meter peaks.

  ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE

  Reinhold Messner chose a spell of calm weather following the monsoon of 1980 to launch himself onto the North Face—alone. But the weather wasn’t the only reason he opted for this particular time. In a casual conversation with Himalayan chronicler Elizabeth Hawley back in Kathmandu, he had learned that Japanese climber Naomi Uemura had plans for a solo climb of Everest. Messner advanced his schedule to ensure he would be there first.

  He spent a month on the Tibetan Plateau, training his body to be content with little oxygen. But within several hours of setting off from his advance base camp at 6,500 meters, he almost lost his life when he fell into a crevasse. After extricating himself, he continued up the North Ridge and the next day traversed the massive, avalanche-prone North Face to gain the Great Couloir, where he bivouacked one more time. At 1 p.m. the following day he collapsed in the snow beside the Chinese tripod on the summit. He made the entire ascent without bottled oxygen, and this time alone. Dreadfully, frighteningly, alone. On his way down to his Canadian girlfriend, Nena Holguin, who was waiting at advance base, Messner realized that he had reached an apex in his career that none of the remaining 8,000-meter peaks that he would climb would ever match.

  VOICES

  SPRING MADNESS

  On May 19, 2012, Canadian Shriya Shah-Klorfine added her body to the 200 or more corpses that litter the flanks and ice fields of Mount Everest. Three others died that day, old and young, men and women, a German, a South Korean, and a Chinese. Urged by her Sherpa guides to turn back, Shah-Klorfine insisted on reaching the summit, which she did, though it meant her death on the descent. Still, undeterred by the tragedy, that season another 200 climbers from a dozen nations strapped on their boots and eagerly walked to heights where the air is so thin that humans cannot long survive. Each season, the pattern remains the same. Most will return. Some may not. For every 30 climbers who have reached the summit of Everest, 1 has perished in the quest.

  THE RISKS ON EVEREST

  What are the ingredients of this perfect storm that brings death to the mountain every spring? First, there is the pressure of time. The climbing season on Everest is short, a mere two months squeezed between the end of winter in late March and the onset of the monsoon in early June, with the optimal window for summit attempts being but three weeks in May. Second, there is the structure and geography of the mountain. The highly technical routes on Everest—the North Face, West Ridge, the legendary Kangshung Face—defy all but the most accomplished of Himalayan climbers. For commercial expeditions, and for the vast majority of climbers, there are only two viable options. Those who climb from the south follow the tracks of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who in 1953 trekked through Nepal, made their way through the notorious Khumbu Icefall, and climbed the ice face of the Western Cwm to reach the South Col before enduring a brutal final ascent that famously took them to the summit of the mountain. From Tibet, climbers follow the footsteps of George Mallory and Oliver Wheeler, the first Canadian on Everest. It was Wheeler who in 1921 discovered the doorway to the mountain from the north, up the East Rongbuk Glacier to the North Col, and from its crest a long slog up the shoulder of the North Ridge to the Northeast Ridge and ultimately the base of the summit pyramid.

  Neither conventional approach is easy, and each has unique perils. In 1922 seven Sherpas, swept to their deaths in an avalanche, became the first of many to perish on the face of the North Col. On the Nepal side the Khumbu Icefall is a maze of giant seracs that collapse randomly in the heat, crushing climbers with disturbing regularity. These hazards aside, the challenges of both popular routes are for the most part less technical than physical. Few of those strung out along the length of the Western Cwm, plodding their way to the South Col, would consider attempting K2, Nanda Devi, Kangchenjunga, Chomolhari—all far more difficult Himalayan peaks. On Everest, raw endurance counts for more than skill with a belay. Long before any client sets out for the summit, the guides in support establish a continuous ribbon of fixed lines stretching the entire length of the route; the client need only clip in and trudge up a well-trodden track. Easier said than done, of course.

  The danger is the very wrath of the mountain, the extremes of elevation and weather. Frigid nights give way to blistering days, and with the scorching sun, there is a constant danger of dehydration. As Charles Howard-Bury, leader of the 1921 expedition, famously quipped, on Everest “your feet can be suffering from frost-bite while you are getting sunstroke at the same time.” Then there is the matter of oxygen. At 8,850 meters, atmospheric pressure at the summit of Everest is a third that of sea level. For the early British explorers, this distinguished the challenge of Everest from the quest for the Poles. It was one thing to face conditions of extreme cold and bitter exposure. It was quite another to do so while moving not laterally across landscape but vertically to heights where the very air itself could not sustain life. Climbers call it the death zone. Every minute one spends there weakens the body and increases the likelihood of injury or death.

  OVERCROWDING

  Hence the tragic events of that weekend in May that led to the death of four climbers. Each of the approaches taken by commercial parties has on
e serious impediment. The Northeast Ridge is blocked by the Second Step, a formidable pitch of vertical rock that must be scaled even as the climber peers down to a knife-edge of ice and rock—exposed on one side to the Kangshung Face, a drop of 10,000 feet, and on the other to the North Face, a mere 9,000 feet. On the southern route is the Hillary Step, equally daunting with similar exposures. Today, fixed ropes on the Hillary Step and a ladder on the most difficult section of the Second Step make things easier, but neither obstacle can be turned, and on each there is room for only one person at a time. With as many as 300 climbers making their summit attempts in a single day, both routes take on the feel of traffic jams. The Hillary Step and the Second Step become bottlenecks, literal choke points where climbers can end up spending hours in the death zone, exposed at high altitude, waiting their turn. According to reports from the mountain, on the day that Shriya Shah-Klorfine died, delays stretched to over three hours even as the weather turned, leaving exhausted climbers exposed to severe cold and winds gusting to 80 miles an hour. It is remarkable that only four were lost.

  I often wonder what the early Brits would have thought of today’s rather sordid commercial scene. In 1921, Mallory and Wheeler had to walk 500 kilometers off the map across the Tibetan Plateau just to reach the base of a mountain that no European had embraced at close quarters. When Wheeler first crested the North Col, he encountered a wind unlike anything he had known. Scarcely able to stand, fearful of suffocating in the swirling eddies of snow, he focused on his breathing, drew his hands around his face, and with a discipline long ago honed in the terror of shellfire on the Western Front slowed down the world until a new rhythm could be found and air inhaled during the lulls between the blasts of the gale.