by Clint Willis
The expedition was a terrifying experience. The explorers traveled 500 miles of unknown gorge, encountering huge rapids. Chris was thrown from his raft and nearly drowned during the first days of the trip. One team member—John McLeod—did in fact drown during a river crossing. The expedition also came under attack by local bandits, who fired rifles and hurled rocks at Chris and his companions.
The trip marked the end of Bonington’s attempt to make a living by covering other people’s adventures. He returned home badly shaken in the fall of 1968, firmly resolved that henceforth he would take his chances in the mountains, where he knew what he was doing. And he would go as a participant—a decision-maker—and not as a more or less helpless observer.
Builders were still at work on the Bowden house. The Estcourts invited the Boningtons to move in with them while the workmen finished. Chris, Wendy and Daniel crowded into the Estcourts’ two-bedroom apartment in late October and stayed for two months. The arrangement worked surprisingly well; the two couples became very close.
Nick was almost a decade younger than Chris. He came from an upper middle-class background, unlike most of his contemporaries in the climbing community. Nick had climbed in the Alps as a schoolboy with his father, and had served as president of the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club. It was a background that might have gotten him invited on the Everest trips of the 1920s and ’30s, but he didn’t look the part of an aristocrat. He was a wiry character, with smallish eyes and vaguely impish features framed by a dark beard and a head of unruly hair. He was capable of astonishing flights of vulgarity. He had a wild, somewhat clownish streak, and his behavior at parties or pubs was at best unpredictable; for example, he often threw things.
And yet even at twenty-five, Nick was entirely reliable in certain ways. Unlike Chris, he had a conventional career: he’d started as an engineer before switching to computer programming. He was ambitious and self-confident; he was intelligent; he was fair-minded to a fault. And Nick was by nature a skeptic. He resisted Chris’s patented flights of fantasy as well as his countervailing bouts of pessimism. He listened to Chris’s ideas and meanderings, consistently asking the right sort of question.
The two of them spent the weekends climbing. They talked about mountains in the car on the way to the crags around Manchester. They continued their conversations at night after Daniel and the women had gone off to bed. They were soon deeply involved in plotting the most ambitious expedition in British mountaineering history.
CHRIS HAD NOT participated in a serious climbing expedition since the Eiger Direct, almost three years before. He now began to kick around ideas with Nick and another Cheshire climber, Martin Boysen. Martin was twenty-six, a superb rock climber—better than Chris or Nick—but he’d never climbed in the Alps, let alone the Himalaya.
Chris by early 1969 had known Martin for almost a decade. They had met at Harrison Rocks near London. Boysen back then was a sixteen-year-old prodigy, ticking off the test-pieces of the previous generation. He’d been born in Germany during the war, and his earliest memories included a scene in an air raid shelter in his native Alsdorf—the adults and children huddled together while the Royal Air Force bombed the city. His father, a music teacher, had been drafted to serve in the Wehrmacht; the Russians had taken him prisoner. Martin’s mother, a native of England, worked for the American occupation forces just after the war. She found her name and her children’s names in a Gestapo file; they had been slated for the concentration camps. She took the children to England and worked as a teacher. Martin’s father rejoined the family after his release from Russia, which came seven years after the war’s end.
Martin was tall—6' 1"—and gangly and bespectacled. He had not done well in school sports; instead, he’d wandered the landscape on foot and bicycle. He’d taken up climbing almost by accident—he was watching some climbers one day and they invited him to rope up—but by his midteens he was following the great Joe Brown up some of the hardest routes in Wales, displaying a dazzling mix of drive and an almost lazy physical grace. Don Whillans allowed that young Martin Boysen, with his long arms and legs and his disgracefully shaggy haircut, was the nearest thing Don himself had to a peer on rock.
Martin as he grew older was also known for his low-key wit and his rare but impressive outbursts of temper. He was a bookish sort, a teacher. He generally held himself aloof from the climbing scene—the clubs and social gatherings where reputations were burnished or inflated—but other leading climbers knew and respected his abilities.
Chris and Nick and Martin agreed that they would try something big together. They wanted to do something hard, but their options were limited. Western climbers had been largely shut out of the Nepalese Himalaya for most of the 1960s, due to political tensions between countries that relied upon the mountains as military buffer zones. Tibet was off-limits, and so were many of the ranges in Pakistan and India. Such restrictions helped to explain why young British climbers like Nick and Martin had little or no experience at high altitude. Chris himself hadn’t been to the Himalaya since the Nuptse expedition in 1961—now more than seven years ago. A British expedition had visited Nepal to attempt the remote Gauri Sankar (7,134 meters; 23,405 feet) in late 1964; the party had included Don Whillans and Ian Clough. Those two had accomplished some of the hardest technical climbing yet done in the Himalaya—but even that trip, now four years gone, seemed a rather distant episode.
Chris and Nick and Martin had turned their attention to Alaska when they got the news that Nepal had reopened its doors to climbers. Nepal’s highest peaks had been climbed—and Chris, recalling his experiences on Annapurna II and Nuptse, wanted something that offered a greater technical challenge. He talked it over with the other two, and they considered an alternative. The winter ascent of the Eiger Direct had proved that the right team could climb a big mountain face in extreme conditions. What about trying something like that again—only this time in the Himalaya?
Chris recalled seeing a photograph of the South Face of Annapurna (8,091 meters; 26,545 feet). The mountain had been the first of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks to be climbed—the French had done it back in 1950. Chris knew the Annapurna region of Nepal from his 1960 expedition to the mountain’s satellite peak Annapurna II.
More recently, a British expedition to Machapuchare (6,993 meters; 22,943 feet) had climbed directly across from Annapurna’s South Face. Several of the expedition members had gotten a good look at the face, and Chris contacted them. Two of the climbers spoke of the face’s awe-inspiring size—it was 12,000 feet high—and the near-constant barrage of avalanches that swept down it. Jimmy Roberts, the leader of Chris’s 1960 expedition to Annapurna II, also had been on the Machapuchare trip. He had photographed the South Face of Annapurna, and he offered Chris a more measured response. Roberts maintained that the face would certainly be more difficult than the existing routes on Everest, and would require supplemental oxygen to support hard technical climbing above 24,000 feet. He didn’t say it was impossible. Chris found his former mentor’s comments encouraging—and he liked the notion of doing something harder than Everest.
Chris and Wendy by now had moved into their new home in Bowden. Nick and Carolyn Estcourt had bought a new home as well. It was the Estcourt’s turn for renovations, so they moved in with the Boningtons. Someone had sent a color slide of Annapurna’s South Face. Martin Boysen came over, and the three friends projected the slide onto six feet of the Boningtons’ living room wall.
It looked immense.
They gazed at it, each climber responding to the image in ways at first impossible to organize or voice. They began to pick an imaginary line up the face, engaging the image before them; in doing so they began to commit to their notions of trying to climb it. Each man imagined possible outcomes—Chris saw himself climbing a snowfield or stepping onto a slab of rock. The climb no longer existed as merely one alternative among an almost infinite number of possible routes on possible mountains. It existed now as work t
o be taken up or left undone. They had in effect begun the climb. They felt dimly that they should continue; if they did not, this might become an opportunity they had glimpsed and rejected—it might torment them. The face was beautiful, too. There was only one reason to stay clear of it: They were afraid.
The photograph showed a glacier leading to a snow ridge—a buttress that leaned against the lowest reaches of the face. That led to a thinner, steeper ridge of ice; after that, a maze of ice cliffs reached to a towering rock wall, beginning at 23,000 feet. There was more steep snow above the wall. And then mixed climbing—a tattered quilt of rock and ice and fields of snow—to the summit. There’s a line, said Boysen. But it’s bloody big.
They had initially planned a small, alpine-style expedition—the three of them and perhaps one other climber. They saw immediately that the size and difficulty of Annapurna’s South Face would require something of an old-style siege. They would need to establish a series of camps and stock them with gear and food, as well as oxygen for the hard climbing near the summit. They would need a bigger climbing team—Chris upon reflection figured that eight was the minimum number—with a huge supporting cast.
Dougal Haston’s performance on the Eiger made him an obvious choice. He was still in Leysin running John Harlin’s climbing school, where he employed Don Whillans and Mick Burke as instructors. Dougal occasionally guided clients himself; but he was more likely to drink with them. The drinking took place at the Club Vagabond, which housed the guides and students upstairs at priority rates. Dougal routinely remained in the bar until the place emptied, then struggled across the room and up the stairs—one careful step at a time—to his bed.
He still carried the aura of a pop star; in the three years since the Eiger Direct he’d settled into his role as a sort of pseudo-working class hero, mountaineering’s version of the rock stars who dominated British and American pop culture. He dressed the part: sunglasses and scarves, pink shirts and tight trousers. His hard drinking, together with his moody silences and sullen good looks, completed the picture for the young climbers, star-struck girls and others who arrived in Leysin to sample the mountain lifestyle and drifted into the Club Vagabond. A pair of English nurses on holiday—their names were Annie Ferris and Beth Bevan—had wandered into the Vagabond one night in May of 1966 and paired up with Dougal and Mick Burke. Dougal had ended up marrying Annie, an intense, pixyish young woman; Mick had married Beth.
Dougal at moments tried to convince himself that he was indeed a kind of hero. His journals were laced with cutting and somewhat callow remarks about climbers who struck him as over the hill or unserious. He still sometimes cultivated the notion of himself as a kind of superman—someone who lived with a purpose and vitality that set him apart.
His passion surfaced in bouts of climbing. He climbed in Patagonia in 1968, with a group that included Don Whillans and Mick Burke as well as Martin Boysen. He made some difficult routes in the Alps—including a few winter climbs with Chris, who found he enjoyed climbing with Dougal. They had in common their single-mindedness, and Dougal’s reserve interested the voluble Bonington. Chris also understood something of what his younger friend could do. He understood on some level that Dougal’s ambition and selfishness endowed the Scot with a ruthless brilliance that might be useful on Annapurna’s South Face.
Ian Clough, now thirty, was another obvious choice for the expedition, but for very different reasons. Chris still recalled with pleasure his early days with Ian in the Alps, leading up to their ascent of the Eiger’s North Face. And Ian’s 1964 trip to Gauri Sankar made him one of the few young British climbers with Himalayan experience. Ian still taught climbing in Glencoe, Scotland, where he occupied a small cottage with his wife and their young daughter. Ian liked teaching. He had in fact established a number of his new routes in Scotland with his climbing students. Chris liked and admired Ian, and trusted him to behave well—he was the furthest thing from a prima donna.
Chris also asked Mick Burke to come. Mick was a steady and cheerful companion, the kind who could be trusted to speak his mind and keep a bloke honest. Chris over the last few years had gotten to know a bit about his background. Mick had grown up working class in Wigan, an industrial town with not much to recommend it; he’d left school at fifteen to work in an insurance office, and soon quit that job to live and climb in the Lake District. He kept bar and did odd jobs during the winter, climbing when he could and putting aside money for annual trips to the Alps.
He was just back from a stint teaching at Dougal Haston’s school in Leysin, where he’d spent much of his time drinking with Dougal and Don Whillans at the Club Vagabond. Mick liked to drink, and he was wildly funny. He was intensely argumentative; like Whillans, he was inclined to insist upon his rights. And yet there was something impressively normal about Mick. He was a talented climber—not a genius like Martin Boysen, but he worked hard at it. He’d done well on the Eiger, following Chris around in 85-mph winds at the top of the face, huddling for days in the summit snow hole with nothing much to eat while they waited for Dougal and the Germans to finish the climb.
Whillans was another candidate, but Chris hesitated to ask him. Don was now thirty-six, only a year or so older than Chris but badly out of shape; the old working-class hero carried quite a gut these days, and had done nothing much lately in Britain or the Alps. The Gauri Sankar expedition four years before had marked his third trip to the Himalaya, and he’d yet to reach a summit there. His continued string of failures had made him more difficult than ever. He made fewer concessions to courtesy or tact. He was increasingly lazy and presumptuous; he was touchy and still on occasion violent. Chris knew all this, but he also believed that Don’s stubbornness sometimes amounted to a kind of wisdom. The other climbers were young and had very little experience in the big mountains; perhaps Don could help protect them—as he had protected Chris and Hamish and the others twelve years before on the Bonatti Pillar. The photograph of the South Face was frightening. Chris knew that the reality would be worse. The picture of the face—strange in its two dimensions—occupied a towering place in his mind.
He invited Don for a day of winter climbing in Scotland. Don by now knew that something was up, but Chris didn’t mention Annapurna; he just arranged to pick up his old friend on a Friday night. Don arrived home four hours late—2:30 in the morning—from a marathon at the local pub. It was precisely the behavior to set Bonington seething. And Don wanted to drive; Chris had to insist on taking the wheel.
Chris had made plans to meet up with Tom Patey in Glencoe that morning. The three climbers made their rendezvous and immediately set out for an unclimbed gully. Don lagged behind Chris and Tom, letting them lead the hard pitches until the party reached the last pitch: an awkward chimney choked with ice. Here Don came to life. He volunteered to lead the pitch and climbed it in impressive style, with a steady and deliberate power.
Chris was moved by this surprising, last-minute display of genius and grace—and also by his own sense of relief. He had dreaded leaving Don behind. It would end their friendship; and Chris had a sense that such a break would leave unresolved some chapter in his own story. That evening he asked Don to join the Annapurna expedition, offering him the post of deputy leader.
Don for his part had made his point; he had something to offer and was willing to offer it—on his own terms. Chris showed him a photograph of Annapurna’s South Face. Whillans looked it over for a moment, concluded that it could be climbed, and agreed to come and help do the job.
That made seven climbers. Chris wanted one more. He chose a stranger, an American named Tom Frost. Frost was a practicing Mormon, who adhered strictly to his religious code—a strange bedfellow for the foul-mouthed, vice-riddled British. He’d made his name in Yosemite, refining techniques for climbing huge walls—techniques that might be useful on the South Face of Annapurna. And Chris had another reason to invite him. The expedition by now had an agent—one George Greenfield—who maintained that including an American would
make it easier to raise money in the United States.
Such considerations mattered now. The proposed climb combined the scale and altitude of a Himalayan peak with the types of technical challenges encountered on the Eiger Direct. Once again, the climbers would borrow tactics from earlier mountaineers, mounting a siege on the peak. They needed sufficient funds to buy huge quantities of supplies—and also to pay the army of porters who would carry those supplies to the mountain.
The expedition also presented a huge logistical challenge, which brought into play Bonington’s military background and his mania for organization—his sheer love of planning. He lost himself in contemplation of the expedition’s future in all of its intricate potential. He asked and tried to answer questions about how many feet of rope they’d need; how many climbers would stay at Camp Four in support of a summit team; whether to send the gear by air or truck or ship; the number of porters required to ferry gear from Base to Advance Base Camp. He had begun work in late 1968, recruiting the team and seeking financial support; by the fall of 1969 the work of the expedition consumed his days—he spent his nights lecturing at various clubs and other venues within 60 miles or so of his Bowden home. There was food to plan and order, and travel to arrange; there were endless permits to pursue and appointments to schedule; there were donors to entreat and thank. Gear and equipment had to be begged or purchased and then packed—thousands of feet of rope for stringing between camps; hundreds of pitons and ice screws and carabiners; tents, ladders, flares, snow shovels, headlamps, a winch . . . all of it.
The others helped, but Chris did the lion’s share of the work. He did it with a growing sense of elation. He was discovering a new aspect of his genius. He had found a task that engaged his peculiar qualities: his wish for certainty and his need to have that wish thwarted, his need to recognize that life was unmanageable and his urge to try to manage it. Thus engaged, he felt at moments that his life was at last unfolding without his interference.
