The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  John and Dougal visited the lower reaches of the North Face together in the winter of 1965. They floundered in snow that came to their waists to arrive at the start of a low band of rock—the first real obstacle for climbers attempting the new route. It looked hard. They resolved to return the following winter.

  They fell out soon after. Dougal had grown sick of John’s basement and fed up with the American’s big talk. He returned to Scotland and went to work in a climbing shop. He went climbing with friends on Easter Saturday. Eley Moriarity was with him. Rain drove them off the rock and into a pub. They drank for a time and decided to make the thirty-five-mile trip to Glencoe—there was a party at Ian Clough’s house; there was a dance somewhere; there were more bars to visit.

  A small group piled into the van Bev Clark had lent to Haston and Moriarty for their climbing school. Moriarty drove. The group dropped a couple of friends in Glencoe, and the main party stopped to drink at a climbers’ bar. They left that bar and traveled another ten miles to the Clachaig Inn, and drank there until closing time. Dougal was still learning to drive, and when the party left the bar and went out to the van he insisted on taking the wheel, fending off the protests of Moriarty and another friend.

  He set off in the dark down the winding, single-track road. He had been drinking most of the day; it was raining. The walkers were invisible until he was upon them—James Orr, eighteen, a student from Glasgow, took most of the impact, suffering severe head and chest injuries.

  Dougal got out of the van and drifted away from the horrible scene. He wandered through the rain to a friend’s cottage and spent the night there. Moriarty, his friend and protector, stayed behind with two of the van’s other passengers—one was a nurse—and tried to help the injured teenagers. Moriarty tracked Dougal down the next day, and convinced him that he must turn himself in to the police.

  James Orr died of his injuries the following week. Jimmy Marshall, who with his brother Ronnie had played a role in Dougal’s climbing development, believed that Dougal was essentially unmoved by the consequences of his carelessness; that he cared only about himself and the trouble the accident brought upon him. But something had changed in the moments after the collision. Dougal’s wish to hide had blossomed in him as though some vessel had ruptured. He surrendered to his need to make up stories, to retreat, to fend off the real.

  Even so, his shame gained traction and momentum. Dougal fled through the wet dark and his mind filled with notions he couldn’t contemplate. He saw things from a distance during the weeks that followed: the blurry fact that he had killed another young person, that he had cut himself off from the community of men who had not done murder. He felt his claims to happiness or success permanently compromised. He was young, not far removed from the newness and sheer surprise of childhood, but now these disasters: Robin Smith, and now this young stranger; loss, and now this sin.

  His early dealings with death would define Dougal’s future relationships. His loss and guilt drew him deeper into a life of extreme climbing even as he drew apart from other ties and pursuits. His confusion and shame helped draw him to certain other climbers; he recognized their wish to be clean, to be insignificant; to leave the web of desire and consequence in exchange for a life that promised absolutes, clarity. He told himself that certain climbers wanted to know the nature of things; that they kept each other company in this. And he nursed the whispering fear that such a life wasn’t possible; that he and his chosen companions were in retreat from life, not in pursuit of it.

  Dougal was sentenced to sixty days in jail for his crime. He entered Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison in July of 1965. He served his time quietly, working in the prison library. He left prison in September, and almost immediately got drunk and wrecked a Ferrari that belonged to Jimmy Marshall’s business partner. Harlin called to patch things up—they hadn’t spoken since parting the previous winter. He wanted to know if Dougal still wanted to climb the Eiger Direct.

  HARLIN’S TEAM BY now included Chris Bonington. Chris had returned from Patagonia in early 1963 with his vague notions of building a career as an adventure photojournalist. He still had his memoir to write—he was far behind schedule—but the advance had been modest, and his financial prospects seemed hazy at best. Meanwhile, he needed a place to live with Wendy; something cheap but cozy, near good climbing. They went looking for a cottage in England’s rural Lake District and were dismayed at the rents.

  One Sunday they stopped at a pub for a meal, and Chris chatted with the bartender—a young climber named Mick Burke. Mick knew something about living on the cheap; he made a living at manual labor and tending bar, jobs that left him time to climb. He had spent the previous winter in a room over a farmer’s garage. He suggested that the Boningtons might wish to drop by and speak to the farmer.

  They did so. The room had bare plaster walls and rotten linoleum floors; the toilet was an earth closet set behind a pigsty—but the door to the room opened upon a view of fields and hills and forest. Chris and Wendy lived there for three months; in early 1963, they became tenants of a small lodge on another Lake District farm. They stayed friendly with Mick Burke. Chris did some routes with him, and the two climbers got on well. Mick was a bit like Whillans; he had a sharp, down-to-earth wit, and he had ambitions. But there was more warmth and less violence in Mick; then again, he didn’t climb as well as Don.

  Chris had begun to chip away at his book; he also continued to pick up income from lecturing on the Eiger climb. He spent part of the summer in Zermatt with his old friend Hamish MacInnes. The pair planned to make a low-budget film about climbing the Matterhorn’s North Face; they hoped to sell the film to television. The weather didn’t cooperate. They managed to climb the normal route on the peak, but the film came to nothing.

  Wendy by now was pregnant. She gave birth to the couple’s first child, Conrad, during the final hours of 1963. She had strong domestic instincts, and settled in to mother the new child. Chris was amazed at the strength of his own attachment to Conrad. Fatherhood also intensified his wish to make some sort of career.

  He was now thirty. He had accomplished little as a climber the previous year, and 1964 was no better. He made a few minor climbs that summer in the Alps, with Joe Brown and the Scottish climber Tom Patey. He returned home that fall to give still more Eiger lectures, and to try to finish his book; the manuscript was now more than a year overdue. He still had no clear sense of how he would support himself and his family. He suffered bouts of anxiety; the possibility of outright failure frightened him deeply.

  Things began to look up during the first weeks of 1965. A young television producer invited Bonington to participate in a climbing documentary. Chris starred that spring in a televised ascent of a new rock climb in Somerset’s Cheddar Gorge. The I TV paid him a little money; meanwhile, he managed to finish his book.

  Chris and Wendy celebrated by moving again, this time to an unfurnished cottage in the northwest of the Lake District. Tom Patey had invited Chris to a conference of international climbers in Chamonix, and Chris left in July. Wendy followed a bit later with Conrad, arriving at the end of the conference. The party drove to Leysin to meet Rusty Baillie, the young Rhodesian who had climbed the Eiger with Dougal Haston two years earlier.

  The three climbers composed a list of potential objectives for the season. The list included a Direct Route on the Eiger’s North Face. Patey knew of John Harlin’s designs on the route, and suggested that as long as they were in the neighborhood, they should pay the Blond God a visit. John had left his position at the American School to found his own establishment, the grandly named International School of Modern Mountaineering. He had recruited several prominent climbers—including Don Whillans and the American big wall expert Royal Robbins—to work with him as part-time instructors.

  Bonington didn’t expect to like Harlin. He had heard—by way of Whillans, among others—that the American was an insufferable poser. Chris also saw Harlin as a potential rival for the Eiger Direct. But John
surprised him; Chris was struck by the American’s vitality and by his impulsive generosity. Harlin proposed joining forces on the Eiger Direct, and Chris, acting on impulse, agreed.

  Harlin was in fact finding it hard to assemble a team of first-rate climbers for the route. His resumé was impressive, but at least some of the credit belonged to his partners. There was some feeling among other alpinists that Harlin’s vision and his promotional talent exceeded his considerable abilities as a mountaineer. This latest venture, the Eiger Direct, sounded extremely ambitious and potentially very dangerous.

  Chris and John agreed it would be wise to postpone the Eiger attempt until the end of the season, in hopes that cooler nights would reduce the risk of rockfall. Meanwhile, Chris and his party set up camp on the grounds of the climbing school. John taught Chris to use jumars—handheld devices that would slide up a rope and then grip it when weighted; they made it easier for a climber to ascend a fixed rope. The weather grew cooler, but it wasn’t settled enough for the Eiger. The Boningtons departed for home, with Chris promising to return for an attempt on the Eiger Direct during the coming winter.

  Chris and Wendy settled in back at their cottage in the Lake District, where Chris soon began to worry about the wisdom of his promise to Harlin. The American’s relentlessly demanding presence had worn on Bonington. One incident in particular rankled. John had neglected to mention that climbers who use jumars to climb a free-hanging fixed rope generally tie a knot in the bottom of the rope; the knot prevents the climber from sliding off the end if the jumars slip. Chris in his ignorance had failed to take this simple precaution—a potentially fatal mistake. The incident bothered him.

  He worried about the weather, too. John had estimated that climbing the Eiger Direct could take ten days. There was every chance that a winter storm would catch the climbers high on the face, where retreat might be difficult or impossible.

  Chris shared his doubts with Wendy; having done so, he felt compelled to withdraw from the venture. The decision threw him into one of his periodic funks. His climbing career had stalled, and so had his writing—apart from his book, he’d written only one short piece for the Daily Telegraph magazine. But now the magazine’s editor called with another assignment. The Telegraph had negotiated exclusive rights to cover John Harlin’s Eiger Direct climb. They had assigned a reporter—a young fellow named Peter Gillman—but wanted Bonington to go along as photographer.

  It seemed the perfect compromise. He would take part in the venture, but as an independent observer. Chris flew to Zurich on February 8, and took the train to Kleine Scheidegg. John Harlin was already there, with Dougal Haston and an American rock climber, Layton Kor; the three climbers were installed in the attic of a hotel outbuilding.

  Chris knew Dougal Haston slightly, but they had not climbed together. The Scot somehow put him in mind of a cowboy. Layton Kor—a gangly 6' 4" bricklayer from Boulder, Colorado—made Chris think of a puppy. John had met Layton during a visit to the United States, and had invited him to join the Eiger Direct Team after Chris backed out.

  The young men seemed barely adequate to their task. For starters, there were just the three of them. Dougal had a strong record in Scotland and the Alps, and had made a few winter alpine climbs. Layton was famous back in Colorado for climbing hard rock routes (sometimes at night), and he had made a handful of hard alpine ascents in Colorado and the Alps. Still, he had limited winter climbing experience, a considerable handicap given the party’s objective. Harlin had significant alpine experience, but was by most accounts a less gifted climber than the other two.

  John had designed the expedition to make the most of limited manpower. His initial plan ruled out fixed ropes and established camps. He believed that the team could expect several ten-day windows of settled conditions during the winter. He meant to wait for such a window, and take advantage of it to power up the face in good alpine style; the three climbers would carry all of their gear and shelter on their backs.

  That vision began to fade almost immediately. The team had accumulated huge amounts of gear—far too much to lug up through the deep snow on the Eiger’s lower slopes. Dougal and Chris caught a train up to the Eiger Station, where the track tunneled into the North Face. They left the train, and lowered bags of food and ropes out of the window to the snow below the first Rock Band. That done, they took the train back down to Kleine Scheidegg and retired to their rooms to wait for better climbing conditions.

  The weather improved, but John—showing off on skis—dislocated his shoulder. The three official expedition members retreated to Leysin. Chris agreed to stay and keep an eye on things at Kleine Scheidegg. He was having breakfast at the hotel one morning when a waiter called his attention to a group of tiny figures in the distance. The figures were engaged in some sort of activity at the bottom of the face.

  A TEAM OF eight Germans had begun a siege-style assault on the Eiger Direct—a huge threat to Harlin’s hopes for a first ascent of the route. The new team’s size would allow them to stock a series of camps, linked by fixed ropes. They could use the ropes to ferry gear and climbers up and down the steep face—in effect borrowing the tactics of Himalayan climbers, adapting them to much steeper ground. It made sense: the Germans could make steady progress during brief periods of good weather, and use the fixed ropes to beat a temporary retreat at the onset of a storm. They might even be able to ride out bad weather on the face, leaving them in position to resume the climb from their high camp as soon as conditions improved.

  Chris telephoned the news to John and the others, who rushed back from Leysin the next morning. Already, the Germans had fixed rope on the first 1,500 feet of the route. It was obvious that John’s team must change their tactics or give up their dreams of a first ascent. They would need to establish their own camps on the face, fixing ropes between them. That meant they would need at least four climbers—one pair to push out the route and create the line of fixed ropes; another pair to ferry more ropes and gear up behind them.

  Chris was an obvious candidate to join the expedition as its fourth climber. He hesitated. His concerns about climbing under Harlin’s direction had deepened. John on one or two occasions had struck him as unstable. There had been one moment in particular, with Chris jammed into a phone cubicle, on the line with his editors at the Telegraph, trying to relay to them John’s increasingly unreasonable demands. John had loomed over him, growing increasingly angry; the American had used his physical presence as a weapon, a threat.

  Bonington set aside his doubts. The climb was taking shape as something that mattered. He had a notion that the Eiger Direct was a sort of next step for climbers. He wanted to be part of that, whatever his doubts about Harlin. He told himself he’d be better able to photograph the expedition if he joined the climbing team. It made sense, and it made him a climber again.

  He wasn’t happy, though. He was scared.

  7

  DOUGAL HASTON AND Layton Kor left the hotel at three o’clock in the morning on February 20. They reached the bottom of the route and climbed the German’s fixed ropes for two pitches before abandoning them. The climbing here was easy, and they needed to come to grips with the face itself. They soon passed the German high point, and climbed more ice and snow to reach the slopes below the Eiger station window. Here they dug a platform, made tea and studied their next problem: the First Rock Band, a 300-foot rock wall laced with thin cracks.

  Layton spent the next four hours building a ladder up the wall’s lower reaches—tapping knife-blade pitons into shallow cracks; hanging etriers from the pitons; stepping cautiously up to gain a few feet; reaching high into the next crack to hammer in another knife-blade. It was delicate, painstaking work, entirely absorbing. He felt the cold and the exposure and the knowledge that a piton could pop and send him sprawling through the air to weight the next peg. He knew that such a fall might create a zipper effect as his momentum grew, multiplying the forces on each successive piton until he hit a ledge or his weight came directly o
nto the perhaps dubious anchor that held his belayer to the cliff. Layton did not fall; he made some 90 feet of progress, then drilled a hole and placed a bolt. He clipped a carabiner to the bolt, threaded a rope through the carabiner and rappelled from the new anchor.

  The wind rose and snowflakes drifted past the climbers’ faces; there were black clouds building to the north. Dougal and Layton spent an uncomfortable night on their sloping ledge beneath the Eiger Station window. They fended off powder avalanches, and listened to the wind; it gusted up to 100 miles per hour. They retreated to Kleine Scheidegg in the morning with a sense that they had undertaken something very difficult.

  The storm continued for two days. John Harlin meanwhile talked things over with the leaders of the German Expedition: Peter Haag, twenty-eight, and Jörg Lehne, thirty. The American and the Germans agreed that their respective expeditions would follow slightly different routes to the top of a feature known as the Second Rock Band. The two routes might converge after that, since there might be only one way to the top of the face.

  Chris had decided that he needed a climbing partner who could serve as a photographer’s assistant. Don Whillans, teaching at John’s school in Leysin, accepted the job; he arrived at Kleine Scheidegg on February 27. Chris and Dougal and Layton set off for the fixed ropes at the base of the route early the next morning. John and Don followed later with supplies. The team spent a week digging and improving a snow cave at the base of the First Band and ferrying food and ropes and other gear to the cave. They made more progress on the route, fending off the constant powder avalanches that poured down the face—the powder flowed or trickled soundlessly across the ice, reminding Chris of sand in an hourglass.

  Chris and Dougal reached the top of the First Band on March 4. They retreated to the snow cave to rest and to brew tea. John and Layton came up with more supplies that afternoon, and the four climbers plotted their next move—up a gully to the start of the Second Rock Band. It grew dark and it began to snow; the snow blew into the crowded cave, making it impossible to stay dry.