The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  Disheartened but not ready to give up, Mallory and Bullock retreated to the lowlands to rendezvous with the rest of the team. The frosty relations between the two serious climbers and the team leaders had not improved during their monthlong separation. And here, Mallory made a devastating discovery. All through the reconnaissance of the Rongbuk, he had taken large-plate photographs of the ridges and faces of Everest, but now he learned that he had put the plates in the camera backwards. Every one was blank. This “hideous error,” as Mallory later called it, compounded the frustration of finding no way to get to the North Col. Although he spent two days retracing his steps to expose a new set of photographs, he still failed to recognize the East Rongbuk as the key to the approach from the north.

  Mallory would be the only climber to go on all three of the British Everest expeditions in the early 1920s, and on all three he was the driving force. But he was never the expedition leader, and there were, unfortunately, sound reasons for this. As brilliant as he was at climbing and route-finding, Mallory all his life would prove to be mechanically inept to a shocking degree, and extraordinarily absentminded as well. One of his later teammates would pithily characterize Mallory as “a great dear but forgets his boots on all occasions.” Another remarked, “Mallory is a very good stout hearted baby, but quite unfit to be placed in charge of anything, including himself.”

  In the miserable monsoon weather, it would have been tempting to pack up and go home. But Mallory had sunk his teeth into the challenge and would not let go. In early August, he and Bullock, still supported by the Sherpas, set out from a village twenty-five miles to the east of Everest, as they ascended the Kharta Glacier. In this unknown region, the maps were utterly useless. The effort almost turned into a wild goose chase, as a Tibetan tribesman directed the team southward toward “Chomolungma,” which he said lay five days’ march away. Mallory soon guessed that the information was wrong. (It turns out that the Chomolungma to which the tribesman referred was actually Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain.)

  The monsoon was now at its peak, with snow falling eight to ten hours a day. Buoyed, however, by the addition of two more young team members, Henry Morshead and Edward Wheeler, the party pushed steadily up the glacier. But when they reached a pass at its head, they were stunned by yet another setback. The Kharta headed not against Everest itself, as Mallory had hoped, but on a disconnected ridge still five miles east of the great mountain.

  Yet from the Lhakpa La, as they named the pass, the men could see an easy route across the eastern branch of the Rongbuk Glacier, the tributary key to the puzzle that they had failed to notice from below months earlier, leading straight to Everest’s North Col. By now, the Sherpas were on the verge of mutiny. But Mallory was frantic to close the gap. On September 24—almost five months since the team had left Darjeeling—Mallory, Bullock, Wheeler, and three Sherpas set out to close the gap. The going was easy but tedious, postholing in deep snow. Mallory cut five hundred steps in the ice leading up to the North Col, at 23,000 feet. They reached the top of the saddle at 11:30 a.m. At last Mallory had set his feet on the prize he had identified in early July as the key to the puzzle.

  As soon as they stood on the col, however, the men were exposed to a fierce wind lashing their faces. Wheeler urged turning around at once; Bullock, though exhausted, agreed to push ahead a little ways. Mallory later said that he felt fit enough to have climbed another 2,000 feet. The six men stumbled only a short distance up the north ridge before even Mallory admitted the effort was doomed. They took shelter in the lee of the col and tried to warm their freezing feet. As Mallory later wrote, “The wind had settled the question.”

  All the way back to Darjeeling, Mallory was haunted by the conviction that he had failed. It took the exhortations of friends such as Geoffrey Winthrop Young to give him a bit of heart. “This end of the world is only using the word success,” Young wrote to his protégé. Despite the divided ambitions of the team’s leaders and other personnel, Young hailed Mallory’s “colossal effort of lifting an entirely unsuitable party, on a single pair of shoulders, not only onto the right line but well up it.”

  Back in England, the Everest Committee was already talking up a 1922 expedition. Mallory argued that such a venture must take place in April and May, before the onset of the monsoon season, but pessimistically added, “It’s barely worth while trying again . . . without eight first-rate climbers.”

  Privately, the man was not only deeply depressed by his “failure,” but psychologically spent. As he wrote his sister, “I wouldn’t go again next year . . . for all the gold in Arabia.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t Arabian gold that lured Mallory back to Everest, but writing the chapters of the expedition book, as he speculated just how men might strike out from the North Col, up the apparently straightforward slope of the north face, then along the ridge angling west toward the summit. And it was Mallory who persuaded the second British expedition to focus its efforts on April and May, before the monsoon arrived.

  Once more, the Everest Committee chose older, less accomplished climbers to lead the campaign. General Charles Bruce had spent much of his long career as an army officer in India, but he was fifty-six years old and in mountaineering terms a virtual novice. The climber leader, Edward Strutt, forty-eight years old at the time, would later become a virulently reactionary president of the Alpine Club, in the 1930s decrying the German and Austrian attempts on the north face of the Eiger as suicidal lunacy devoted to glorifying the Vaterland.

  Besides Mallory, only Henry Morshead returned from the 1921 team. But the party was rounded out by a number of strong and ambitious climbers, especially Howard Somervell, E. F. “Teddy” Norton, and George Finch. Born in Australia and educated in Switzerland, Finch had applied for the 1921 expedition, only to be rejected on spurious medical grounds. The real problem was that, in the staunchly patrician culture of British mountaineering, he was not quite the “right sort”—not only had he not graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, but he spoke English with a faintly German accent. As it would turn out, Finch had something of a chip on his shoulder, and stuck to his often contrarian views in the face of opposition by his teammates. But in 1922, he would prove the equal of Mallory as the strongest men on the mountain.

  The plan was to arrive at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier by the first of May and to reach the summit before the end of the month. Even by today’s standards, that was a perilously narrow window of opportunity. Most expeditions approaching Everest from the north now arrive at base camp in early April, or even earlier, in late March, as we did in 1987. But Bruce’s 1922 team realized that they need waste no further time exploring Everest’s defenses—they would head straight for that half-hidden tributary of the East Rongbuk and charge up it to the North Col.

  The central disagreement among the party had to do with the idea of using bottled oxygen to aid in the ascent, a practice that had been sparingly employed on other high peaks and by pilots in the British air force. In the end, the committee approved the purchase of ten oxygen sets and several dozen bottles. The leading advocate for the use of bottled oxygen was Finch, and the vehement opponent was Mallory. It’s fascinating to me to look back and recognize that Mallory’s feelings about supplementary oxygen in 1922 were almost identical to mine from 1987 onward. As Mallory told his first biographer, David Pye, “When I think of mountaineering with four cylinders of oxygen on one’s back and a mask over one’s face, well, it loses its charm.”

  But Mallory’s objections were also pragmatic: he didn’t think bottled oxygen would work. A rack of three tanks and the frame to carry them in 1922 weighed 32 pounds, a burden that he thought would more than offset any gain obtained by breathing richer air. Mallory instead believed that a “deep-breathing” technique he had perfected in 1921 would suffice to cope with altitude. Artificial oxygen as an aid, Mallory declared, amounted to “a damnable heresy.”

  What’s so ironic about this business is that on the 1922
expedition, Mallory would become a reluctant convert to Finch’s viewpoint, and in 1924, bottled oxygen would be an integral part of the team’s plan of attack. But in believing that a man could climb to 29,000 feet without supplemental oxygen and survive, Mallory was way ahead of his time. As late as 1978, many experts were still convinced that anyone trying such a feat would die or suffer severe brain damage, until Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner proved the skeptics wrong.

  The 1921 team had been splintered into factions from the start, but the 1922 party got along remarkably well. And at first, everything went like clockwork. Supported not only by Sherpas but by Tibetan porters, the team reached the North Col on May 13, and by six days later had all the gear and food in place for two separate attempts on the summit. A good two weeks of decent weather before the monsoon promised to be in the cards.

  On May 20, Mallory, Somervell, Norton, and Morshead set out from the North Col on the first attempt. Whenever we modern climbers look back at the photos from the British expeditions in the 1920s, we’re amazed at the inadequacy of the clothing those tough, brave men wore as they tackled the mountain. There were, of course, no down jackets or sleeping bags in those days, no plastic double boots, not even balaclavas to cover the face and neck. Instead, Mallory and his teammates set out from the North Col wearing several layers of silk shirts and wool sweaters, topped with tight-woven cotton coats. They even wore knickers made of cotton, with long woolen socks. Instead of a proper hat to protect his face, Morshead simply wrapped a wool scarf around his neck. The men’s single leather boots had metal hobnails attached to the soles, which, though they gave good purchase on ice, conducted the cold straight to the feet. Yet as they set off that day, Mallory claimed, “I feared no cold we were likely to meet.”

  Cold, however, was the party’s brutal enemy. On a steep, icy slope, Mallory realized that he and his partners “sorely needed” their crampons, but they had left them at the North Col because they had already recognized that simply tightening the straps that bound crampon to boot would cut off circulation and inevitably lead to frostbitten feet. Somehow, the men pushed on to 25,000 feet, where they spent hours piling rocks to make level platforms for their tents. Even today, the necessity of a high camp on that spur, where there’s no such thing as a natural level shelf, makes for one of the most unpleasant challenges of an ascent by the north face and northeast ridge. Over the years, teams have piled stones and gravel to craft platforms that subsequent parties reuse. Adding to the discomfort are the incessant gales blowing from the west, battering bodies and searing faces with windburn.

  After an all but sleepless night, the four men started out at 8:00 a.m. on May 21. Almost at once, Morshead, who was already feeling the onset of frostbite in his fingers and toes, turned back. The other three plugged on. In the first several decades of attempts on 8,000-meter peaks, virtually no team ever set off before sunrise. It was simply too cold. In addition, since headlamps had yet to be invented, those early climbers had to carry handheld flashlights, which would have made for awkward and dangerous movement in the dark.

  But the key to getting up a mountain like Everest today is to set out from your highest camp in the middle of the night. I’ve even left camp as early as 11:00 p.m., just to get a jump on the deterioration in the day’s weather that usually starts in early afternoon, to build in slack time for unexpected delays, and to ensure that I’ll reach the summit before 2:00 p.m., my personal and inflexible turnaround time.

  In light of these circumstances, I’m impressed that Mallory, Norton, and Somervell gave themselves a 2:15 deadline to reach the summit or turn back. By 2:15, they had reached an altitude that Mallory calculated with his barometer as 26,895 feet. If his reading was correct, the summit lay only 2,140 feet above. It must have been tempting to push on, for the weather was holding fine, but Mallory had measured their progress so far at only 400 vertical feet per hour. As he would later write, “We were prepared to leave it to braver men to climb Mount Everest by night.”

  Still, it was an extraordinary performance. No one else had ever been so high on the surface of the earth. The men ate a quick lunch of Kendal mint cake, chocolate, raisins, and prunes, sipped from a pocket flask of brandy, and started down.

  It was then that a catastrophe came close to wiping out the team of four. They were all roped together, with Mallory in the lead, cutting steps for purchase (always an awkward business going downhill). Norton was the anchor, last on the rope. Suddenly Morshead, third on the rope, slipped and fell. He pulled Norton off his stance, and as the two men slid downward, they plucked Somervell off his feet.

  Anticipating the disaster, Mallory performed the only thing he could do, driving the pick of his ice axe into the slope and belaying the rope over it. As he later wrote, “In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred either the belay will give or the rope will break.” (The ropes of the 1920s, made of hemp, manila, or cotton, had a far lower breaking strength than the nylon ropes that first came into use two decades later.) Mallory clung to the head of his axe with all his strength, watching as the rope “gripped the metal like a hawser on a bollard.” It was fortunate that the jerks came piecemeal, as each falling man in turn came to the end of his stretch of rope. Mallory’s belay stopped them all.

  This heroic act deserves to be better known than it is. It’s reminiscent of Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay” on K2 in 1953, when in a similar situation one man held the interlinked falls of five of his teammates with a rope looped around the shaft of his ice axe. But Mallory was so modest about his brilliant deed that in the official expedition book, he did not even name the climber whose slip had launched the near-disaster or the man who saved four lives. The protagonists were identified only as “the third man,” “the leader,” and so on.

  Badly shaken, the four men limped down to the North Col. An exhausted Morshead saw his fingers swell with frostbite and start to turn black. He would later suffer the amputation of one toe and six fingertips. Somervell was so dehydrated that on reaching camp, he promptly drank seventeen cups of tea, one after the other.

  Two days later, Finch set out on the second attempt, using bottled oxygen. His only partner was Geoffrey Bruce, Charles Bruce’s nephew, who, though fit and willing, had never before climbed a real mountain. Nonetheless, Finch had so much faith in the oxygen apparatus that he was sure the two men would make the first ascent of Everest. At Camp V, they endured a sleepless night, holding on to the tent poles as a gale threatened to rip their shelter from the mountain. Undaunted, they got off at 6:30 a.m. on May 25.

  By late morning the two men had passed the high point their teammates had reached three days earlier. They pushed on for another 500 vertical feet. Despite his passion and his optimism, Finch had to give in to the inevitable. Bruce was already suffering badly from frostbitten feet. He would later have to be sledged partway down from the North Col. At about 27,400 feet, the men turned around. Finch later wrote, “I knew that if we were to persist in climbing on, even if only for another 500 feet, we should not both get back alive.”

  So the 1922 expedition tasted defeat. Yet theirs had been a brilliant thrust into an unknown world, where Finch and Bruce had set a new altitude record. The team believed they had paved the way for the first ascent of the apex of the globe. By all rights, they should have returned to Britain to a heroes’ welcome. But fate had a cruel trump in store for them.

  During the first days of June, the monsoon continued to hold off. Mallory convinced his teammates to rally together for one more last-ditch attempt. From a low camp, four men set off with fourteen Sherpas to reestablish the depot and camp on the North Col. Finch gave it his all, but the effort of May 25 had worn him out, so he threw in the towel at Camp I. That left only Mallory, Somervell, and a young teammate, Colin Crawford, to push the attack.

  On June 7, with the Sherpas in tow, Mallory led the way up the steep slopes beneath the North Col. An abundance of new snow had fallen during the previous week, but Mallory, delighted at the firmness the su
rface gave him for step-kicking, surged upward. Just below the col, Somervell took over the lead.

  Ninety-one years later, it is impossible to judge whether Mallory and Somervell ignored evident signs of avalanche danger that the new snow had created. In 1922, no science of avalanche prediction had yet been developed. As we now know, however, the prevailing west-to-east wind piles up heavy loads of snow on the lee side of the North Col, which form windslabs—lighter snow layered over the older, firmer surface beneath. All it takes is a trigger—a falling rock or the footsteps of a climber—to break loose the slabs, unleashing massive avalanches.

  Suddenly the men heard a sound, as Mallory later put it, “like an explosion of untamped gunpowder.” From a hundred yards above Somervell, a huge slab of snow had broken loose. It engulfed the three Englishmen and the lead Sherpas, but their ride was short and they managed to dig themselves out of the debris. Not so the Sherpas following lower in the line of kicked steps. They were hurtled over an ice cliff at least forty feet high. By the time their would-be rescuers reached them, six Sherpas lay dead, killed apparently by the impact of the fall rather than smothered in the avalanche. The body of a seventh Sherpa was never found.

  So the party retreated from Everest not with a gallant attempt in their wake, but burdened by a terrible tragedy. It was the first time any Sherpas had been killed serving Western climbers in the Himalaya, and though their surviving comrades bore the loss stoically, the impact of the disaster on the close-knit Sherpa culture can hardly be reckoned today.

  Mallory and Somervell bore the heaviest guilt. On the hike out, Somervell agonized, “Why, oh, why, could not one of us Britishers have shared their fate?” Mallory never ducked his responsibility in putting the Sherpas in the path of fatal harm. Tom Longstaff, a respected veteran who had left the party earlier, wrote censoriously to a friend, “To attempt such a passage in the Himalaya after new snow is idiotic.” Back home, Mallory wrote to his mentor, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, “And I’m to blame. . . . Do you know that sickening feeling that one can’t go back and have it undone?”