The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  He had found three support climbers to supplement the eight lead climbers. Mike Thompson, an old friend and climbing partner from Sandhurst and the army, agreed to help ferry gear on the mountain’s lower reaches; meanwhile, he could help organize the food for the expedition. Dave Lambert, a thirty-year-old hospital resident, called to volunteer as team doctor. Chris liked Lambert well enough to accept his offer almost on the spot. Chris asked Kelvin Kent—an army officer stationed in Hong Kong, who understood wireless communications as well as logistics—to manage the flow of information and supplies out of Base Camp.

  Chris planned to hire six climbing Sherpas to ferry supplies between camps on the face. George Greenfield managed to sell the expedition’s television rights to Independent Television News and Thames Television, which planned to send a four-man film crew. That brought the main party to twenty-one members. The expedition ultimately would employ another half-dozen local porters on the route, as well as a motley collection of European and Asian trekkers and climbers—passers-through recruited on the spot to carry loads and perform camp chores. The climbers also would need to hire 140 porters to carry supplies to the bottom of the route.

  Chris had never commanded more than twelve men and three tanks in the army—and this was not the army. His friends were difficult, most of them misfits with antisocial tendencies and refined or quirky sensibilities. Some of them had adopted the style and sensibilities of the booming counterculture; they had longish hair and beards, wore grubby bellbottoms, smoked grass and listened to rock and roll. The climbers who gathered at Heath-row airport in March of 1970 looked and sounded more like a traveling rock band—the Beatles on their way to visit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—than a traditional British mountaineering expedition. These young men didn’t look disciplined or ambitious or respectful of convention; they looked moody and painfully young and rather confused but also earnest, as though they were serious about something—or as though they wished for something to be serious about.

  The ship carrying most of the gear had left England on January 23, 1970, but it was late arriving in Bombay—engine trouble. Ian Clough gamely agreed to wait for its arrival. The main party went on to Pokhara to hire porters and pack loads for the walk to the peak. Chris sent Don Whillans and Mike Thompson ahead with two high-altitude porters to find a site for Base Camp. The main party left Pokhara on March 22.

  The approach was dreamlike. They walked for eight days. The cook boys woke the climbers each morning with tea and biscuits at six o’clock. The porters shouldered their loads and set off; the climbers followed in small groups or alone, chatting or watching the scenery unfold. The preparations were behind them; the actual climb lay in what seemed the remote future. The dangers ahead remained abstractions, just as the mountains to the north remained mysterious, glimpsed through haze or cloud. They were marching into the Annapurna Sanctuary, a fantastic amphitheater surrounded by a series of huge, exquisite peaks—fishtailed Machapuchare, the virgin Hiunchuli, massive Modi Peak. The march led past villages and terraced fields and into the shadowy gorge of the Modi Khola.

  They encountered Mike Thompson on the third day. He’d come down to meet them after failing to get a glimpse of their peak—too many clouds, and a great deal of snow in the higher approaches. He’d come back to report, leaving Don and the two porters to finish the reconnaissance. The main party marched three more days and at last came upon Whillans himself, calmly sitting on a boulder at the entrance to a cave.

  Don had seen the South Face. It was big and steep—but the avalanches stayed clear of the line of ascent they’d picked out in the photographs. He’d seen enough to believe that this original line or something close to it offered the most feasible way up the face. Chris was vastly relieved; he had during the past year fretted endlessly that the photographs would prove misleading, that the climbers’ first view of the actual face would shatter their hopes of climbing it.

  Don also had a story to tell. There had been a noise one afternoon, and he’d turned in time to glimpse a black figure drop behind a ridge. Don had lain awake that night with his head outside of his tent, and at some point he’d seen an apelike creature run on all fours across the snow to disappear in the shadows. Don had seen the Yeti, or so he believed.

  The others were interested as well as amused; they let the story pass. Don understood the dark figure as further evidence of the world’s potential to surprise him. He had lived part of his youth working in shadows, moving pipes and appliances to and from cellars. He’d dug and blasted in the mud of new tunnels, subject to a civilization that would without remorse deprive him of the sun. The greater world meanwhile had shown itself to him in hills and then in mountains. He felt the gap between his different lives without adequate language to filter or explain it. He lay with his head outside of his tent and watched moonlight ricochet from snow to illuminate the night and this black creature and he thought he recognized the Yeti. The idea of such a creature seemed to him no stranger than the notion of a miner or a plumber’s assistant.

  Whillans was by reputation a surly, violent man with a quick wit and a talent for climbing. He also had an artist’s vocation. He could glance at a slope and measure the risks. He could find the best way through the jumble of a glacier. He could lay eyes on a ridge and know whether to try to climb it. Chris understood Don’s limits but he understood as well that Don was admirable and at this stage indispensable. Bonington’s own artistry lay partly in knowing this—as he had known that John Harlin’s demons made him dangerous, and that Dougal Haston in pursuit of salvation in the mountains would avoid certain mistakes and distractions.

  The expedition established a temporary Base Camp on March 28. Chris sent Don and Dougal and Mick Burke ahead to establish the expedition’s permanent Base Camp. Chris himself stayed behind to oversee the porters at their task of ferrying loads up through increasingly difficult terrain. Many of the men walked barefoot through the snow and frozen avalanche debris of the Sanctuary. They were saving their expedition-issue canvas gym shoes for barter. It was infuriating; the shoes were meant to protect the porters’ feet so that they could climb further up the glacier. And yet it was disturbing to try to imagine what these men must think of their employers, who were in a position to expend such vast resources on an enterprise of such dubious merit.

  The advance party quickly found a site for a permanent Base Camp. Don and Dougal took two more days to pick their way past the glacier above the new camp. The glacier was a jumble of ice walls and bottomless slots that shifted under the heat of the sun, threatening to collapse and destroy the climbers. The creaking of the glacier sometimes escaped their immediate notice, and at such times their fear became blurry. Other times they heard the sound without fear of any sort, as if their futures were of no concern to them. They made their way across the glittering maze toward their first objective, an island of rock in what seemed a sea of snow.

  The other climbers helped the high-altitude porters ferry loads up to the new Base Camp. They carried the tents, sleeping bags, stoves and other gear needed to stock higher camps. They carried the heavy bottles of oxygen for climbing the route’s upper reaches; they also brought food and cooking fuel. The permanent Base Camp grew to include a two-man tent and two Whillans Boxes, improved versions of the shelter Don had designed to withstand the Patagonian winds.

  Chris moved up to Permanent Base Camp on March 31. He roped up with Mick Burke the next day to consolidate the route through the glacier. Don and Dougal remained out front; they climbed an easy snow slope to the top of their rock island at 16,000 feet on April 1. This would serve as a site for Camp One. The two climbers dropped their loads and descended to Base Camp for a rest.

  Chris and Mick moved up the next day to occupy the newly established Camp One and take over the lead. They were now at 16,000 feet, and the night was bitterly cold. They lingered in their sleeping bags on the morning of April 3, melting water for tea and waiting for the sun to warm their tent. They were old friends now. Mick’s m
arriage had settled him down a bit; he’d begun film school. It was nice being up here together, away from the others.

  The two of them crawled out of the tent. They could look down at Base, now three miles and 2,000 vertical feet below. They could look up into the cloudless sky, the dry perfect blue that seemed to draw the mountain itself toward heaven. The sun’s rays fell with no indication of warmth on the half-frozen snow. No wind stirred. The sounds in the dazzling light were the crunch and squeak of their boots.

  A ridge ran down the lower half of the center of the South Face, and continued down to divide the field of snow and ice that lay in their path. Chris and Mick roped up against the risk of falling into a crevasse, and set out toward the face. They left bamboo wands in the snow to mark their path through the maze. Chris felt dimly afraid—not of death but of his own unfathomable ignorance; the scale of this place suggested to him that he knew nothing. Mick felt unsettled as well.

  They walked on into heat and searing light and what seemed a shimmering ageless emptiness. They could imagine a watcher who regarded them from the world to come. They would appear to him as tiny black figures like those that exist in some photographs, too small to offer a sense of intention or outcome. Their figures would flicker so that any such watcher would be required to fish for them as people fish for ghosts—for those who know nothing of us, who do not watch us in return, whose ignorance suggests that what is past is gone.

  The climbers walked for two hours through a corridor that split the glacier. They passed features so enormous as to make them recoil from the scale of things. The terrain became more threatening. They stood and shivered in the shadow of a creaking ice tower and debated their course. They climbed onto the glacier itself and walked to the start of a new maze of towers. It was midday; the sun had turned the snow heavy and soft so that it was difficult to walk. Chris and Mick dropped their loads and returned to Camp One. Don and Dougal, back already from their brief rest lower on the mountain, were there to greet them.

  Mick awoke exhausted the next morning. Chris and Dougal and Don set off without him to find a site for Camp Two. They reached the previous day’s high point and continued up snow toward the base of a cliff. Debris—fragments of ice and rock—rained down from the ridge as they climbed. They entered a new maze, this one made of angles and towers—dark unstable-looking shapes that cast huge shifting shadows on the snow.

  Chris and Dougal roped up and made their way across a shelf that seemed to offer a way past the cliff. They stopped to build an anchor, and Don caught up with them. He paused only long enough to suggest that they hurry—this was not a place to linger—and carried on higher without benefit of a rope. The three climbers traversed a wall that had the feel of a vertical glacier, a slow-motion riot of decaying ice. They climbed more steep ground above this wall to a shelf protected by a rock overhang—the shelf would do as a site for Camp Two.

  They were now at an altitude of around 17,500 feet—roughly 2,500 feet below the col the climbers had designated as the route’s next major landmark. The col would serve as a starting point for their attempt on the huge ice ridge that was a key to the face.

  Chris carried a load from Camp One to Camp Two the next day—April 6—and then descended all the way to Temporary Base Camp to greet Ian Clough. Ian had made a difficult journey from Bombay, where he had waited for the ship with their remaining supplies. He arrived at the mountain worn out and dispirited from the maddening work of collecting and supervising tons of supplies on bad roads with unreliable transport. He’d brought with him a small mob of porters who had carried the gear up into the glacier. Many of them had suffered from hypothermia during a snowstorm that occurred near the end of their approach march.

  Don and Dougal spent the night of April 6 at Camp Two. They left the next morning to climb toward the col. They climbed steadily past hanging glaciers and towers of ice. Whillans understood this task of finding the route better than any of them. He knew how to balance one hazard against another—when to move quickly, when to slow down to avoid a careless mistake. Dougal watched him. Snow fell and both men grew cold. They reached a short rock wall that led to the col and at last turned around. They slept at Camp Two, and spent the next day fixing a line of ropes to the col before retreating to Base Camp for another rest.

  The two of them had entered into a partnership of sorts. Dougal did the heavy work, breaking trail and leading most pitches. Don followed, still working off his beer gut. He gave Dougal a belay when Dougal wanted one, and made the hard route-finding decisions. There were ten years between them. Dougal took to calling the older man Dad.

  They were coming to believe that the climb belonged to them—and so far it did. Chris and Mick had played a modest part in making the route to Camp Two. Nick Estcourt and Martin Boysen had been glorified porters to this point. Nick and Martin now moved up to Camp Two, and went to work to clean up the route to the col, digging the fixed ropes out from under new snow. The two of them erected a Whillans Box at the col—Camp Three—on April 11. That done, they descended to join the others at Base Camp.

  The expedition was making good progress, but the most difficult work awaited them. The porters weren’t trained to use fixed ropes or climb on steep ground. Mike Thompson and Ian Clough were down with influenza. Mick Burke was feeling poorly. Dave Lambert wasn’t adjusting well to the altitude.

  Chris saw how easily his expedition could fail—but he was increasingly hopeful that it would succeed. He began to see that he was playing for high stakes, that this route might be celebrated and remembered. And even as he allowed himself to glimpse such possibilities he felt a puzzling sorrow. He would lie in his sleeping bag at night and figures from his past would rise up—forlorn but somehow purposeful shapes—as if to attend him as he drifted into sleep.

  He could remember the end of the war in Europe. He had gone with his mother on VE Day to watch the celebrations in Trafalgar Square. She’d taken him home but she had awakened him that evening to go with her to see the giant bonfire and the fireworks. He had been very sleepy standing there near her with his hands in his pockets. He could remember something of what it had felt like to be that boy—ten years old, drowsy and cold, seeing the lights, wondering what it all meant, having no one to trust for an answer.

  9

  CHRIS AND THE American, Tom Frost, moved up to Camp Three on April 13. The next morning they set out to come to grips with the Ice Ridge that towered above it. Don had urged Chris to follow a shelf that rose to the right of the ridge. Tom disagreed; he was determined to tackle the ridge directly. He set off alone, trailing a rope. Chris hung back long enough to wade through wet, heavy snow for a look at Don’s proposed route. It looked frightening. Chris turned and waded back to rejoin his partner.

  Tom meanwhile had given himself a scare, coming very close to falling into a hidden crevasse. The two climbers roped up and Chris took the lead. The ground quickly grew steep. The ice was rotten; it offered no purchase for screws, and his axe placements were tenuous. The world dwindled to his field of vision, a series of close-ups. He knew dimly that he was pressed against certain limits. He could not safely retreat; he stood almost parallel to the steep ice and he couldn’t lean away from it to look down at the ground that fell away beneath his boots; if he tried to descend he would have to guess where to put his feet, and he would fall. He glanced quickly to his right and saw easier ground. He edged across to it and then found a way up to a ledge. He had climbed just 100 feet. He was shocked to discover that it had taken two hours.

  Tom led now, moving up through deep snow. He used a shovel to make a path. Chris followed him. The snow was pocked and hollow; he thought of a honeycomb. The world seemed desolate and very quiet. Chris paused to breathe, and felt his breath deepen and steady him. He had been very frightened on that first pitch.

  The two climbers retreated to Camp Three for the night. The next morning they followed the fixed ropes to their high point. The climbing up here did not relent; the snow conditions gre
w worse as they floundered slowly higher, seeking firmer ground.

  Dougal and Don meanwhile arrived at Camp Three at midmorning. They dumped their loads and set out up the shelf that Don had recommended to Chris—the route Tom Frost had rejected. They made good progress, and it was soon evident that Don’s instincts had been right. The shelf offered an easy way to bypass the section of ridge where Chris and Tom had struggled for two days to little end. Chris up on the ridge saw the progress Don and Dougal had made, and was furious at himself. His decision to ignore Don’s advice and follow the American’s lead had cost the expedition two days of wasted effort—time that could easily cost them the summit. He resolved to keep Don out in front as much as possible.

  Tom and Chris abandoned the ridge. The next day they joined the other two on Don’s ramp. The four men climbed toward an enormous gully that had accumulated vast quantities of snow. They edged closer to the Ice Ridge. Huge overhanging cornices threatened the climbers here, but they were safer from the even greater threat of avalanche. Dougal led up the start of an arête, which the party hoped would regain the ridge above the difficulties that had defeated Chris and Tom.

  They spent three days on the arête. Don suffered one of his attacks of vertigo, and sat out the second day. The third day found all four climbers struggling up a subsidiary gully, still short of regaining the ridge. They retreated amid blowing snow. Chris and Tom descended to Base Camp. Nick Estcourt and Martin Boysen had already arrived at Camp Three to take their place. Dougal and Don were staying.

  Dougal was still doing most of the leading. The arrangement suited him as well as Whillans. Dougal had an almost physical need to see the mountain fall away beneath him. Each step kicked in the snow or chopped in the ice took him further from reproach or closer to some solution; he climbed at some moments in a panic of need that receded as he moved higher. Don was less impatient. The idea occurred to Dougal that Don knew what awaited them; that there wasn’t much curiosity in Don—only a smoldering anticipation.