The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  They made more rappels, checking and rechecking anchors and knots, until at last they could pick their way wearily down snowfields and across wet rock slabs to an easy snow-filled gully. It led them past a hut where they might have spent the night in safety but they staggered on to arrive at the Hotel Montenvers in time for red wine and spaghetti. They ate their meal and got a little drunk, and stumbled outside in the cold darkness to find their way to their hut on the outskirts of the town. They unrolled their sleeping bags on the wooden floor and crawled into them and lay at ease, consumed by the pleasure of lying prone on the flat hard wood. It was behind them; they had climbed the Bonatti Pillar.

  Chris and his three compatriots in particular were struck by this fact. They were the first of their countrymen to make this climb or one like it, and they knew this counted for something, but didn’t know quite what that might be. Chris felt the fear of the past days leave him—or rather, he felt himself leave his fear, as a spirit might cheerfully depart a corpse. He enjoyed for a moment a sense that he would never again be afraid. He fell asleep with the others; above them, the mountains remained wrapped in storm.

  3

  CHRIS BONINGTON, NOW twenty-seven, arrived in Chamonix at the start of July 1961. He had come directly from Kathmandu, making the 5,000-mile overland journey in a rickety van with two other members of a successful expedition to Nuptse (7,861 meters; 25,790 feet), one of Everest’s satellite peaks. Chris had climbed the mountain, but he hadn’t enjoyed the expedition. The various climbers hadn’t known each other well going into the expedition, and the team had never really taken shape. Chris was looking forward to seeing Don Whillans again.

  Chris had approached the Bonatti Pillar three years before afraid of what might happen. Trouble had come, and he had survived it. The experience had reassured him; had drawn him further along a path that led to more ambitious and more dangerous climbs. It had also made him eager to learn what he could from a climber like Whillans.

  Don in turn had been impressed by Bonington’s performance. Chris was young—and fussy about a bit of cigarette smoke—but he had not fallen apart when his friend Hamish got hit on the head. He had stamina; he was surprisingly bold on rock; he was no fool—he’d had the sense to let Don take charge when things looked bad on the Bonatti. He had that posh accent, but he wanted to know things; he would take direction.

  Don also knew that Chris knew something of the climbing establishment, that other world with its school ties and its accents, its lists and invitations, its committees and grants. Don needed that crowd—they still ran most trips to the Himalaya. But he didn’t like them or their ways, and they didn’t appear to think much of him, either.

  Don’s old partner, Joe Brown, was another story. Joe was a diligent, low-key character, quiet but fiercely intelligent; he had become an establishment favorite. Joe knew how to make the right impression—was willing to do it. He’d had his first chance to break into that circle—they both had—in 1954. Joe and Don were just down from their triumphant ascent of the Dru’s West Face when former Everest climber Tom Bourdillon dropped by their campsite to congratulate them. Tom mentioned plans for an expedition to Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest peak. A trip might be in the works for 1955; would Joe or Don be interested?

  Don had treated the inquiry—it wasn’t quite an invitation—as a joke, half-believing it was. He told Bourdillon that he’d heard Himalayan climbing was all hard work. And anyway, Don couldn’t imagine what his father would think if Don threw up a steady job to climb some mountain halfway around the world.

  Joe kept quiet; he didn’t say much to Bourdillon, but apparently he made the right impression. A few months later, he received his official invitation to join the Kangchenjunga expedition. Joe had gone on the trip and he’d enjoyed himself, getting along fine with the educated lads who made up the rest of the climbing team and getting himself to the summit. They’d asked him on another trip, to Mustagh Tower in the Karakoram. Joe had climbed that one, too.

  Don had been furious at missing the Kangchenjunga trip. He resented the climbing establishment for passing him over, and he was jealous of Joe. And Don was angry with himself for turning away from what he suddenly feared was the opportunity of a lifetime. He knew very well the difference that chance could make in a workingman’s life. His knowledge traced back to memories of his first encounters with climbers, when he’d gone as a schoolboy to the Peak District for solitary weekend rambles. He’d seen the fellows who rode the bus to Derbyshire and back with their ropes and their rucksacks. He’d forgotten their faces—he had no memory for faces—but he would remember for all of his life certain pairs of nailed boots. He’d gone later with his Scout troop to the Lake District, and he’d seen more climbers there. Never in all of that time did he think of becoming a climber himself. He believed—without knowing he believed it—that it wasn’t for him to imagine such a life.

  He quit school to clean and fix and haul boilers for forty-six hours a week. And then one weekend out walking alone in the Peak District, he bumped into a school friend, a boy named Eric Worthington. Eric wanted to climb, so the two of them found a rope and tried one of the easy routes and somehow survived it, and that was the start of the life Don knew now.

  The regulars had taken them up and taught them rudiments of mountaineering: how to manage the rope, how to place protection, how to rappel from a climb. Don found himself climbing serious routes almost immediately, without trouble or fanfare. He was a natural climber, strong and centered. He was decisive; he didn’t ask himself questions that most new climbers ask. It helped that he knew nothing of climbing tradition or history. He soon acquired information, but he wasn’t daunted; descriptions of a climb’s difficulty were just language—he had no context for the words, and he left them on the ground when he climbed.

  He had loved the climbing and his own easy mastery of it. Here was something new, something free of family and neighborhood and school. It was a stunning surprise, one at odds with the bleak future that had begun to unfold for him. He had no words for it, but setting off up a hard new route he felt like a wingless angel—apart from ordinary things, off into something fresh and distant.

  His love for climbing had taken him where he wished to go until that morning in 1954, down from the Dru with Joe. And then the climbing establishment in the person of Tom Bourdillon—as tactful and gracious an emissary as Don could have wished—had offered him another new world, and Don had retreated out of clumsiness or fear. He understood that this retreat was his choice and it shamed him. He worked at his plumbing job that winter, but he quit in the spring of 1955. That was right before he got word that Joe and the others had climbed Kangchenjunga.

  Don climbed in the Alps that summer. He worked during the following winter as a laborer on a hydroelectric project near Glencoe in Scotland. He earned enough money to buy a motorcycle, and rode south to look for plumbing work in Manchester. He found none, so he wandered back up to Scotland; after a time he went south again to England with a bricklayer friend named Pete Whitell. They were hard up—utterly broke—when they finally found work in the Lake District, signing on as laborers on an excavation for the Manchester Water Board. The work was wet, dark and dangerous; it was loud too, with incessant drilling and blasting in the freezing, muddy tunnel. The rock cut their hands, and the cuts became infected from dust and chemicals.

  Whillans was twenty-two. He could leaf through his memories of climbs or walks or bivouacs: his first sight of the Grandes Jorasses towering above Montenvers, or the fields of Derbyshire, where he had walked away much of his solitary childhood. And yet he was attached to the darkness and the difficulty of his work in the tunnel. He shared his labor with men who were like men he’d known all of his life. He would later recall those men and their circumstances—how they lived—and his recollections would help set him apart from climbers who were younger or more privileged. For now, the tunnel offered him a vision of his life without climbing. He did not exactly fear it, but he
felt it as a possibility that could claim him.

  He waited almost two more years for his first Himalayan expedition. He did a few routes with a Cambridge-educated climber named Bob Downes. They hit it off, and Downes got Whillans invited on a 1957 trip to Masherbrum (7,821 meters; 25,660 feet) in Pakistan. Don performed well, but no climbers reached the summit—and Don’s friend Bob Downes died of high-altitude pulmonary edema.

  Don’s second chance at the big mountains didn’t come until 1960, two years after his meeting with Chris and Hamish on the Bonatti Pillar. He’d joined an expedition to Trivor (7,577 meters; 24,859 feet), an obscure but challenging peak, also in Pakistan. This time, he’d gotten sick himself on the mountain—he suspected an attack of polio. Once again, he failed to summit.

  Don’s failure on Trivor had been followed by still another disappointment. He’d traveled back to England on his motorcycle—a grueling six-week journey—and immediately plunged into planning for another expedition, this one to Nuptse. He’d managed to wangle an invitation for Bonington, who had climbed Annapurna II (7,937 meters; 26,040 feet) the previous year with an army-sponsored expedition.

  One night in January of 1961, Don left Manchester for nearby Stockport to help pack some gear for the Nuptse trip. He was riding his motorcycle with his wife, Audrey Whittal, on the back. Audrey was a plainspoken young woman, two years older than Don. She’d left school at fourteen to work as a cutter in the rag trade. She was a climber herself, and they’d been together since meeting at the crags in 1952, the day before Don’s nineteenth birthday. They’d been married since 1958.

  It was raining this night, and they were both cold and wet on the motorcycle. A lorry turned right without signaling, and the couple went under the truck. They survived the accident, but Audrey broke a leg and so did Don. His injury kept him off the Nuptse trip. Chris would be going without him.

  The leg healed quickly. Don managed a few rock climbs near home when the weather turned warm. He’d arranged to meet Bonington in the Alps at the start of July. Meanwhile, his mind at odd moments—before sleep, upon waking—turned to the route that would be their principal objective: the North Face of the Eiger.

  IT HAD BEEN three years since Chris and Don had met on the Bonatti Pillar of the Dru. Both men had changed. Chris in particular had become more experienced, narrowing the gap between them. He had stood on two Himalayan summits—Annapurna II and Nuptse—while Don had failed on both of his trips to the high mountains.

  Don may have counted on running things between them, but Chris had his own notions. Bonington was growing into his own ideas of how to be a British mountaineer. His insecurities stayed with him as he accumulated these early achievements; at moments, he could be a bit of a snob. All of this—especially the younger man’s growing success—galled Whillans and brought out the crank and the bully in him. Chris wanted to climb several low-key routes to get in condition for the Eiger. Don waved his objections aside, insisting that Chris could do his training on the Eiger itself.

  Don needed a success. He needed something to keep him on the lecture circuit and out of the daily grind of manual labor. He needed something to compete with Joe Brown’s success on Kangchenjunga and elsewhere—something to impress the mountaineering establishment, which still handed out invitations to the major expeditions. The North Face of the Eiger was the most notorious route in Europe, and no British climber had yet made the ascent. Whillans was not the type to advertise his wishes—he would go without something rather than ask for it—but he badly wanted to accomplish the first British ascent of the Eiger’s North Face. It would make up for a lot.

  Chris meanwhile looked back on his own early attempt on the Eiger—his first-ever alpine climb, with Hamish back in 1957—with dismay. He now had a more sophisticated understanding of the route’s dangers, and he knew the face’s reputation: eighteen men had died there, four of them since Chris and Hamish had visited the lower reaches of the wall four years earlier.

  The Eiger’s hazards included its sheer size—some 6,000 feet of rock, snow and ice—and sustained technical difficulty. The rock was mostly loose, so that holds were unreliable and the North Face often showered climbers with rockfall. Worse, the place was a magnet for sudden and severe storms. Many climbers had frozen to death on the route waiting for conditions to improve so that they could retreat or climb higher.

  The face was notorious even among nonclimbers in Great Britain and on the European continent. Readers on both sides of the English Channel had an appetite for newspaper features about the so-called “Wall of Death.” German, Austrian and Italian climbers had climbed the face. British climbers had stayed clear of it—but by 1961, a handful of them were at last ready to attempt the route.

  Whillans was a leading candidate—but he knew there were others, and it was important to be first. Chris was less committed. This summer was to be his last big fling in the mountains. He had resigned from the army to accept the invitation to Nuptse, but giving up the security of his military career had frightened him. He had immediately signed on as a management trainee at Unilever, where his job would involve selling margarine to various accounts. He would begin his work as a corporate trainee in September; after that, climbing would become a mere hobby.

  It was not simply that his courage had failed him. He saw something of himself in the men who wore suits to work in London office buildings. He believed he was willing to join them in exchange for what they could teach him about their world and for a share in that world’s business. But this belief existed alongside a vague notion that getting up the Eiger might save him from such a life. If it didn’t, it might at least prove that he wasn’t leaving the mountains because he was afraid of them.

  Chris and Don made camp about 100 yards from a small hotel in the village of Alpiglen, near the base of the climb. They needed a period of good weather to bring the climb into condition. They didn’t get it. Rain—it would be snow high on the face—would give way to a day or two of sun, but more rain would follow.

  Chris did most of the cooking. Don simply left it to him; Whillans’s selfishness around camp was becoming part of his lore. The menu consisted largely of potatoes and vegetables (curried, fried or boiled), with large quantities of cheese. The two young men after supper would stroll across to the tourist hotel to split a single beer in the bar.

  Chris felt his strength return. He put on some of the weight he’d lost on Nuptse. Once again, he proposed tackling an easy climb or two. Why not get in some routes while they waited for the Eiger to come into shape? Whillans refused, maintaining somewhat pompously that he wished to climb only routes that appealed to his imagination. Don did tend to be choosy about the lines he’d climb at a particular crag; others, including Joe Brown, would plaster a wall with routes of wildly different quality. Still, Chris thought Don in the present case was simply being lazy and stubborn. This was to be Bonington’s last fling in the mountains; in a matter of weeks, he’d be stuck in England trying to learn to sell margarine. They were in the Alps to climb. Why not climb?

  They waited. The weather improved—a little. A party of four Polish climbers arrived and camped near them. The weather and the Poles’ presence and their own growing boredom convinced Don as well as Chris that it was time to take a stab at the face, if only to have a closer look at the difficulties.

  They left camp on the first clear morning and walked up through pasture, and Chris as he walked realized that he was not afraid. His visit to the Eiger with Hamish four years earlier had been a terrifying experience; he’d known that he wasn’t ready. But he’d since survived the Bonatti Pillar and two Himalayan expeditions—and this time he was going on the face with Whillans.

  The two men climbed easily up the Eiger’s lower rocks. They encountered hard-packed snow, and stopped to put on crampons. They set off again, moving quickly, unroped, and were soon a thousand feet above the start of the route. The valley, still in shadow, seemed far away.

  The difficult climbing began at a band of overh
anging rock. Here they roped up. The leader climbed while his second belayed from an anchor. Bonington led the first pitch, using his axe to chip at the ice that coated the rock, clearing tiny slots for the front-points of his crampons. He found no protection—no ice deep enough for a screw, no crack that would take a piton, no place to slot a stone or pebble or a knotted piece of webbing. If he fell, he’d fall past Don, tumbling twice the length of the rope he’d run out. He didn’t think Don’s rudimentary anchor would hold.

  He kept his head and reached the bottom of a section known as the Difficult Crack, and built an anchor and put Don on belay. Don followed him and then led through. He took more than an hour to climb the next 80 feet—he had to use his piton hammer to clear ice from handholds. Chris followed, and the climbers moved across a snowfield to the base of a chimney below a steep wall. They had reached the famous Hinterstoisser Traverse—a point-of-no-return in Eiger lore.

  The feature was named for Andreas Hinterstoisser, the first climber to lead it. He had been twenty-three years old in 1936, one of a party of four, the second group to make a serious attempt to climb the face. The other three climbers followed Hinterstoisser across the traverse, but then a falling rock injured Willy Angerer—at twenty-seven, the oldest member of the party. The climbers retreated. They weren’t able to get Angerer back across the traverse, so they roped up and attempted a more direct descent. Hinterstoisser fell to his death. Edi Rainer became tangled in the rope and died; the same rope strangled the already injured Angerer. Only Toni Kurtz, twenty-three, survived the fall. The accident left him hanging from a sling, some 150 feet above a ledge.