by Ed Viesturs
In K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain and The Will to Climb, I interspersed chapters evoking the most significant deeds and tragedies in the climbing histories of the two toughest 8,000ers, K2 and Annapurna, with my own expeditions to those peaks. I was lucky enough (and determined enough) to get up K2 in 1992 on my first try, but that complex adventure formed a turning point in my career, remains my closest brush with death, and taught me the most valuable of all the lessons I’ve learned in the mountains—to listen to my instincts rather than ignore them. Annapurna became my personal nemesis, the last of the 8,000ers whose summit I reached, and then only on my third try in 2005, after I’d begun to think there was no route or style of assault safe enough to justify attempting.
My eleven expeditions to Everest add up to eight more than I’ve undertaken to any other 8,000er. Everest in a real sense has spanned my entire career as a mountaineer. I won’t pretend that I returned to the world’s highest mountain so often because it intrigued me more than K2 or Annapurna did (or for that matter, Nanga Parbat or Makalu). My motives have shifted and changed over the years. At first I hoped simply to get to the top. Then I had my stab at going after a hazardous new route on the peak, as well as trying to climb it solo (my only solo expedition to an 8,000-meter peak). Later I returned to Everest as a guide, and still later to participate in filmmaking projects. The last time, in 2009, my ostensible motive was to help launch a brand of outerwear and equipment, called First Ascent by Eddie Bauer, that I had a hand in designing and testing myself. But I’d also come to think of Everest as an “old friend” I wanted to visit again, and, on the verge of turning fifty, I wanted to see if I was still up to its always stern challenge. It amazes me that because of the large number of climbers attempting Everest today, the general public seems to think that the mountain has gotten easier. It’s still 29,035 feet high, and it was just as hard for me in 2009 as it was more than two decades earlier.
It’s not surprising, then, that I learned a tremendous amount about climbing and myself on Everest, a mountain on which I’ve now spent a cumulative two years of my life. All the peaks I’ve climbed—including not only K2 and Annapurna, but Mount Rainier, whose summit I’ve now reached 210 times—were like master teachers who shaped the person I am today.
Moreover, no mountain in the world has a richer or more varied history than Everest. The follies and mob scenes of recent years are really only blips in that chronicle. Although other writers have written massive tomes devoted to that history—most notably Walt Unsworth, in his comprehensive 789-page Everest: The Mountaineering History—very few authors have combed the accounts of the last nine decades to glean the nuggets of heroism and self-sacrifice—as well as, on the other hand, obsessive ambition and raw rivalry—that are sewn into the very cliffs and glaciers of that imposing mountain. And although a number of other climbers, most of them professional guides, have gone on even more Everest expeditions than I have, none of them has yet sat down and tried to write about what that wealth of experience meant for them.
It’s only logical, then, to begin with the first three expeditions to approach and attempt that mountain, British teams that came in 1921, 1922, and 1924, and to focus on the driving force behind that drama, one of the most inspiring and enigmatic characters mountaineering has ever seen: George Leigh Mallory.
• • •
In 1852, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was busy mapping and surveying the virtually unknown wilderness of the Himalaya. It was one of those grand colonial British efforts dedicated to wringing every possible geographical truth out of the landscape. To measure the heights of towering mountains seen from great distances, the survey carried out an intricate series of triangulations by theodolite, starting from the shores of the Indian Ocean and leaping northward from one prominent point to the next.
As legend has it, a “computer”—a field worker charged with working out the numbers—rushed into the office of the surveyor general one day that year and announced that he had discovered the highest mountain in the world. This remarkable claim was the work of a Bengali man named Radhanath Sikhdar. Although he had been able to train his theodolite on the peak from a station no closer than a hundred miles away, and though he could see only the tiny upper pyramid of that mountain peeking over nearer ridges, Sikhdar had worked out a calculation of 29,002 feet above sea level. No previous measurement of any summit in the world approached such a height.
Sikhdar’s calculation, and the network of readings that spiderwebbed across India to buttress it, was a triumph of brilliant surveying. The official altitude of Everest today, worked out by Bradford Washburn in 1999, is 29,035 feet. Other surveys had wildly miscalculated the heights of great peaks ranging from Pakistan to South America, but Sikhdar’s measurement was off by a mere 33 feet.
Three years before that calculation, other members of the Great Trigonometrical Survey had pointed their own devices at the remote mountain and given it the prosaic name of Peak XV. That for centuries native Tibetans living to the north had admired the great mass of ice and rock and bestowed a worshipful name on it—Chomolungma, or “Goddess Mother of the World”—may have been known to the Brits, but struck them as irrelevant. Likewise for the Nepalis on the south, who called it Sagarmatha—“Goddess of the Sky” (or perhaps more literally, “The Head of the Great Blue Sky”). Ignoring local and traditional usage, in 1865 the survey changed the name from Peak XV to Mount Everest, in honor of Sir George Everest, the surveyor general who had preceded the functionary to whom Sikhdar announced his electrifying claim.
Having perfected their skills in the Alps in the second half of the nineteenth century, the best British and European climbers turned their sights to the Himalaya and the Karakoram in what is today Pakistan. Everest would have been the ultimate prize, but the first serious expedition to one of the highest mountains in the world was directed instead at Nanga Parbat, in 1895. The leader of that small British team, the superb alpinist A. F. Mummery, vanished on the mountain with two Gurkha porters. K2, the world’s second-highest peak, was attempted by an Anglo-German party in 1902 and by an Italian team in 1909. A Swiss expedition that went after Kangchenjunga, third-highest in the world, in 1905 ended in tragedy when four climbers were buried in an avalanche.
The reason no mountaineers attacked Everest during the first two decades of the twentieth century was that during those years both Nepal and Tibet remained adamantly closed to foreigners. With the end of World War I, the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and the Alpine Club started lobbying energetically for permission to approach Mount Everest. Most of the diplomatic efforts were aimed at the government of India (under British rule, of course), which at its greatest extent, in 1909, included present-day Pakistan, Burma (or Myanmar), Bhutan, and Nepal. Yet fiercely insular Nepal remained resolutely opposed to foreign travelers. The small country was really a semiautonomous kingdom, with its own maharajah making the final decisions.
Further vexing the situation was that Everest lay smack on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Although Tibet had remained independent for centuries, the high, sparsely populated tableland was covetously eyed by British India, Russia, and China, each of which hoped to enfold it in its domain. Tibet was the ultimate prize in the Great Game for control of central Asia.
Bold explorers in the second decade of the twentieth century had reconnoitered toward Everest in the course of other expeditions. In 1913, John Noel, who would become the photographer and cinematographer on the British teams of the early 1920s, had reached a pass north of Kangchenjunga and watched as the clouds dispersed and the top thousand feet of Everest came into view. Noel stood forty miles from the mountain—the closest any Westerner had yet gotten.
In 1920, an emissary named Charles Bell received permission to travel to Lhasa for an audience with the Dalai Lama. And to everyone’s surprise, the spritual and political leader of Tibet decided to allow the British to travel across his country to try to climb Everest. In January 1921
, the first Everest expedition was announced by the RGS, to be carried out that spring, summer, and early autumn.
All along, a debate had raged both within the RGS and the Alpine Club, as well as in the British media, as to whether it was humanly possible to climb to 29,002 feet. But in a sidebar to that debate, some skeptics wondered whether climbing Everest might rob the wilderness of some of its essential romance. There is an oddly twenty-first-century ring to these premonitions. A writer for the Evening News of London (quoted in Unsworth’s book) dismissed Everest aspirants for attempting “a very foolish thing. . . . Some of the last mystery of the world will pass when the last secret place in it, the naked peak of Everest, shall be trodden by those trespassers.”
In retrospect, the 1921 expedition to Everest can be viewed as both a colossal mess and a brilliant reconnaissance. The RGS and the Alpine Club convened a joint Everest Committee to sort out applicants. In the end, the committee made Lt. Col. Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury the leader of the expedition. The man had compiled a record of daring travel and vigorous big-game hunting in India, but he was not even a climber, and he would turn forty during the trip. Two other principals on the team, though competent climbers, were fifty-six and fifty-three years old, well past their prime. One of them, Alexander Kellas, would die suddenly of dysentery on the early stages of the approach march.
Rounding out the team, but assigned to distinctly secondary roles, were younger men. The only one who was a preeminent mountaineer, with first ascents in Britain and the Alps under his belt at age thirty-four, was George Mallory. He was probably the finest climber of his day in Britain, and one of the best in the world—legendary for his speed and grace. His mentor and partner Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the best British climber of the previous generation, described Mallory’s catlike technique on rock:
It contradicted all theory. He would set his foot high against any angle of smooth surface, fold his shoulder to his knee, and flow upward and upright again on an impetuous curve. . . . The look, and indeed, the result, were always the same—a continuous undulating movement so rapid and so powerful that one felt the rock either must yield, or disintegrate.
The makeup of the 1921 expedition set a pattern that, strangely, still crops up today on Himalayan expeditions. The leader, appointed by a committee of graybeards, is an older man whose own climbing credentials are either minimal or long in the past. The rationale is that only experienced veterans have the wisdom and judgment to organize expeditions, as they dictate which “troops” will be sent to the front line and when. Sometimes, if the man in charge is a tyrant, he ends up completely at odds with the best climbers on the team. One thinks of Ardito Desio, leader of the 1954 Italian expedition to K2, hanging its self-sacrificing hero, Walter Bonatti, out to dry. Or Karl Herrligkoffer, leader of the German-Austrian Nanga Parbat expedition in 1953, suing Hermann Buhl, the only member who reached the summit, for disobeying his orders.
Early in my own career, I found myself on a couple of expeditions run not by Herrligkoffers or Desios, but by men who had left their best mountaineering behind them to opt into the role of leading younger climbers and dictating their movements on the mountain. This situation can create a lot of stress and conflict. I’ve always admired guys such as David Breashears, who led our 1996 IMAX expedition from the front, rather than leaders who sit on chairs at lower camps, study the movements of climbers through binocs or telescopes, and give them orders over the radio.
The announced goal of the 1921 expedition was to try to climb Everest. But the graybeards on the committee also insisted that the team carry out various kinds of “research,” from collecting rare botanical species to studying the region’s geology and exploring unknown side valleys. We know today that that sort of divided agenda is a recipe for failure. The only way to make the first ascent of a high, difficult, and unknown mountain is to devote all the team’s energy to that single purpose. Nearly all the early Himalayan expeditions underestimated their objectives. Mummery died on Nanga Parbat because he approached that 26,660-foot giant as though it were merely a slightly larger peak than Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn, at a slightly higher altitude, rather than a mountain embodying a whole new scale of alpine challenge.
In sheer logistical terms, just getting to Everest in 1921 was a major undertaking. At the beginning of May, the team set out from Darjeeling on horseback. Ahead of them lay a trek of more than three hundred miles north through Sikkim, over a series of high passes into Tibet, then west across the Tibetan plateau. The maps of the region were so erroneous that they proved nearly worthless. In lieu of known trails, the team members climbed various hills along the way, from which they tried to sort out the jumble of snow-capped ridges and peaks they saw in the distance.
Only weeks into the journey, the climbers were at serious odds with one another. Mallory had formed a strong antipathy to Howard-Bury and to the fifty-six-year-old deputy and climbing leader, Harold Raeburn. From the trail, he wrote to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, “Relations with Bury have not been easy. . . . He is a queer customer.” And to his wife, Ruth: “I can’t get over my dislike of [Howard-Bury] and have a sense of gêne [annoyance] when he is present.” Mallory’s poor opinion of Raeburn was solidified even before the team left Darjeeling: “Raeburn unfortunately was put in charge of the mountaineering section and is quite incompetent.” The one member with whom Mallory got on well was Guy Bullock, a former classmate at Winchester School, with whom Mallory had climbed often in Britain. Bullock, to his credit, seemed to get along with everybody. The other saving grace for the expedition was a contingent of Sherpas (Mallory, in the diction of the day, called them “coolies”) hired to carry loads and communicate with the locals.
Despite a string of logistical snafus and Kellas’s death, the team arrived at Tingri Dzong, a trading village forty miles north of Everest, in late June, only a month after leaving Darjeeling. From that town the great mountain loomed majestically in plain sight to the south. By now, however, most of the team members, intimidated by the harshness of the landscape, were frittering away their energy collecting species and reconnoitering side valleys. They left Mallory and Bullock to form the two-man advance guard that would penetrate the great peak’s defenses and reach the foot of Everest itself.
On June 25, the two arrived at the even more remote town of Chobuk. They had entered the lower reaches of the Rongbuk valley, and during the next few days, with their Sherpas, they plodded up the valley and onto the glacier. Mallory was both stunned and exhilarated by this first close approach by Westerners to the highest mountain on earth. And though it would take another year to realize it, he and Bullock had discovered the key to attacking Everest from the north.
What they failed to appreciate, however, was that a seemingly minor tributary of the Rongbuk Glacier on the east, which entered the main stream of ice two and a half miles above the terminus, was the crucial piece of the puzzle. For a full month, Mallory and Bullock wore themselves out exploring every nook of the Central Rongbuk. Crevasses, towering seracs, and towers shaped by the sun and called nieves penitentes thwarted their every stab. “The White Rabbit himself would have been bewildered here,” Mallory later wrote.
No climber in the world had a keener route-finding eye than Mallory. Staring 10,000 feet above his camp on the Rongbuk, he recorded, “Last section of East arête should go”—thereby pinpointing the northeast ridge that he would be the first to explore three years later. And he recognized that a pass looming 4,000 feet above him on the left would be the vital way station from which to launch an assault on the summit ridge. He called that pass the Chang La, or North Col. But he and Bullock could see no way to climb to that col: the slopes leading directly up to it from the Rongbuk were too steep and too threatened by falling rock and ice. As for the true north face, the headwall rising above the end of the glacier—the very route we would attack in 1987—that seemed utterly impossible
Mallory would later castigate himself bitterly for missing the secret passage of the East R
ongbuk tributary. Yet I can see how easy it must have been to overlook that V-shaped side canyon apparently leading nowhere. From the main body of the Rongbuk, the tributary looks like a minor streambed entering from the east. What you can’t see from below is that the canyon opens up into a major eastern branch of the glacier, which serves as the key to the approach to the North Col.
During that month of butting their heads against the north side of the mountain, Mallory and Bullock did succeed in climbing to the Lho La, a low pass at 19,700 feet on the west ridge of Everest, separating it from the satellite peak of Lingtren. From the pass, the two men became the first Westerners to see the Khumbu Icefall and the basin just above it, which Mallory named the Western Cwm. (Cwm, pronounced “coom,” is a Welsh word for just such a basin.) The 1,500-foot drop to the Khumbu, however, looked to Mallory like a “hopeless precipice,” and the Khumbu Icefall appeared “terribly steep and broken.” In any event, the question of approaching Everest via the Khumbu was moot, since all the terrain the two men beheld lay in Nepal, still off limits to foreigners. Yet with his uncanny route-finding eye, Mallory stared longingly at the southeast ridge and guessed that it would afford the best route up Everest. Thirty-two years later, Tenzing and Hillary would prove him right.
Another accidental discovery made by the 1921 expedition was that June, July, and August were the wrong months to attempt Mount Everest. Very little was known about the effects of the summer monsoon season on traveling in the high Himalaya, but now Mallory and Bullock blundered into its endless cycle of smothering clouds and falling snow. Nowadays, virtually all expeditions to the Himalaya confine their attempts to the spring and fall seasons, and each year the struggle in May to get to the top of Everest is a race against the inevitable arrival of the monsoon.
