The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  The four climbers woke at Camp Three on April 19. The view from the camp was spectacular—serrated peaks, endless fields and shadows, the sky. Don and Dougal felt by now that these sights belonged to them, had become a part of their strange routine. Nick and Martin, the new arrivals, weren’t feeling well; the ascent to this altitude—20,100 feet—had given them bad headaches, and they decided to remain at Camp Three for the day. Dougal and Don melted snow for tea, and dressed and trudged once more to the fixed ropes. They followed the ropes to the small saddle that marked their high point of the previous day; here Dougal stood and considered his alternatives.

  The climbers had exhausted the potential of their arête, which disappeared into a cornice before reaching the crest of the Ice Ridge. Dougal traversed a gully to the wall of the ridge, and carefully forced his way up 50 feet of rotten snow and fractured rock. He emerged at last on the crest of the ridge in the early afternoon. It was snowing. Dougal and Don retreated to Camp Three to find that Nick and Martin were feeling somewhat better after their day of acclimatization.

  The four men sat out a snowstorm in their tents the next day, and climbed together on April 21. They regained the ridge crest and found that it led quickly to easier ground, low-angle snow that could accommodate Camp Four. They spent two days carrying loads to the new site and digging out a platform. Dougal and Don at last returned to Base Camp for another rest.

  Nick and Martin remained at the newly established Camp Four. Their job was to find a way up or around the rest of the Ice Ridge, which still towered overhead. The two friends had been on the mountain for three weeks. They were happy to be out front making the route. They woke alone on the morning of April 24 and stepped into a world of sky and snow, feeling that this was what they had come here to do. This was the reason for all the talk, the planning and expense, the walking and the headaches, the worry and homesickness. It all fell away, meant nothing in the context of this beauty and this isolation.

  They set off up a snow slope that quickly grew steep. They were climbers again after their weeks of hauling loads, and their relief was like a drug. They climbed into a gully that seemed to offer a way past a pair of ice towers blocking progress on the ridge. The snow here was rotten, so Martin moved to the right and set off up an overhanging wall of ice that required direct aid, which here meant hanging from ice screws. The ice was somewhat rotten, so the screws offered poor security.

  Martin reached a sort of hole in the snow and burrowed for 20 feet, emerging over a 2,000-foot drop that seemed to lunge at him. He set himself to ignore the exposure and his task took possession of him. He reached up—he was like a man climbing out of an attic window onto a roof—and placed a screw in the wall that loomed overhead. He clipped a sling to it and clambered out to stand in the sling, swaying and creaking over what seemed a near-infinity of crystal air. He was in it; he’d gone through a hole and no one would know where to look for him. There was an incredible freedom—also terror—in his sense of the surrounding void, how it lapped at him. He forced himself to continue to move, reaching yet higher to chop holds in the ice, traversing toward easier ground. He stopped to place his ice screws and each time felt the fatigue in his arms but his physical and emotional limits seemed to back away, receding as he worked. He felt amazed and pleased by this, but he believed at each moment that this dispensation would end in the next one. He knew he would fall when it did.

  Martin took a full two hours to cross the wall to a corner. He finished in a gully full of still more rotten snow. He was almost entirely exhausted. He sank into the sun-pocked snow and rested for what seemed a long time. Then he rose and looked up and picked out a route up an ice arête. He started up and it was like climbing the sun-drenched prow of some enormous barge at sea. He was 50 feet above his last protection when at last he stepped back onto the crest of the Ice Ridge.

  He had never done harder ice climbing, not back in Scotland, not anywhere. He built an anchor and brought up Nick—who even with the top-rope took two hours to climb through the tunnel and cross the wall to Martin’s stance, arriving worn out and deeply impressed.

  Martin led one more pitch, and the climbers retreated to Camp Four. The next day they encountered still more hard climbing—complex route-finding, unstable snow, rotten ice. Each climber led entire pitches without finding any real protection, knowing that a fall would rip him and his partner from the mountain. They would drop into another world—sucked out of a window and into the sky itself; no one would have the faintest prayer of finding them or their remains. They had climbed some 700 feet of new ground when they turned to make their way back to Camp Four. Their strength was ebbing, and with it the crisp and thoughtless nature of their awareness; anxiety welled up in them as they descended the fixed ropes.

  Nick and Martin slept late the next morning. They rose and ascended the fixed ropes but the effort exhausted them both. They pushed the route a mere 30 feet higher, through difficult mixed ground. That was all they could do. They turned and set off down the mountain for a rest.

  Chris and Ian had meanwhile arrived at Camp Four to take over the lead. They spent the next day—April 27—shoveling out sections of the route above the camp; they adjusted anchors and fixed ropes for climbers who would ferry loads up this ground during the coming weeks. High winds battered their Whillans Box that night. Chris woke at midnight, and the two friends went about their preparations clumsy from the altitude, taking their time, waiting for the wind to blow itself out. They left the tent at seven o’clock in the morning.

  They made their way up the fixed ropes in the cold mountain light. Chris set off to lead an overhanging corner. He could not afford to fall and hurt himself; there was little chance of a rescue here. Each move echoed dimly in the folds of the mountain. He’d climbed a beanstalk to the anteroom of an empty palace; he was awestruck but prepared to act from what he knew.

  He climbed to the foot of another steep groove in the rock. He placed a single piton for an anchor. Ian followed and then climbed past, moving steadily, hammering in more pins for protection. Chris watched clouds fill the vast mountain hollows like billows of snow. His sense of drama faded. He heard stones fall from the Rock Band overhead, and saw them bound past in the near distance to land in snowfields far below.

  The falling rock threatened some of the fixed ropes. The route was festooned with them; climbers carrying loads higher or descending to lower camps swayed and dangled on the ropes for hours at a time. Chris thought of John Harlin; the knowledge of John’s death was like a blurred woodcarving, half-shrouded in wishes and aversion, marked and worn by fumbling attempts to examine it. Chris owned his knowledge of the death in common with Dougal and the others who had been there.

  Ian surmounted an overhang and took a full hour to improvise a belay anchor in the rotten ice. It was very cold. The partners retreated to Camp Four for the evening radio call, which gave the climbers at various camps a chance to communicate. Don came on the air to insist that Chris stop letting climbers retreat all the way to Base Camp to rest. Don argued that this practice disrupted the flow of supplies on the mountain. He went further, accusing Mick of spending too much time resting at Base Camp. Don proposed that none of the lead climbers should descend below Camp Three; they could leave the Sherpas to supply the lower camps. Mick, furious, broke in to argue that climbers didn’t fully recover at the higher camps. Nick and some of the others agreed—but Chris shared Don’s concern that the flow of supplies to the higher camps had dwindled. He tentatively agreed to Don’s suggestion, leaving most of the other climbers in various states of unhappiness.

  Chris and Ian spent part of the next day, April 29, improving the route above Camp Four. They climbed further in the afternoon, up bad snow and broken rock. Chris took three hours to lead a 60-foot traverse. The tremendous exposure at his back seemed to tug at him as bits of rock skittered from his footholds. Each move called for a precision difficult to muster at this altitude and in his growing fatigue.

  Ian followed t
he traverse. Chris set off to lead another difficult section. He took off his gloves to grip the small handholds. His fingers grew cold. He couldn’t feel the rock. He retreated to join Ian, and the two of them descended to Camp Four in a rising snowstorm. They spoke for the first time of the possibility of failing on the route.

  Ian was physically shattered. He wanted a rest. Chris asked him to stay for one more day. That would allow time for Dougal to arrive and replace him—they wouldn’t lose a day of climbing. Ian agreed, but the next morning he was in no condition to climb. He sagged at the edge of collapse on the fixed ropes; still, he carried on above them so that he could hold a rope for Chris.

  Chris led higher, climbing slowly and with great care as if afraid of disturbing some balance that held things in place. No person in the history or prehistory of the world had been here. He stepped into that empty flow of time and felt the crispness of solitude draw fear from him like a dry poultice. A huge mushroom of snow towered above him and he climbed cautiously out of its shadow, losing track of the scale of his surroundings even as he felt himself dwindle to a speck of awareness. He imagined sailing backward toward the sun—he would leave this tiny, four-limbed figure on this sky-sized wall.

  These odd sensations passed; the wall became a mere obstacle. Chris moved with great effort, amazed at his own selfishness; he should have let Ian go down. There was nothing lighthearted or playful about this work; this was just fending off death in the shape of this menacing wall, which threatened to collapse or topple as he clung to it. The wall seemed big enough to sweep him from the planet and into the endless, slow spin of an infinite fall. Chris was aware of his body—cold and sweat and the awkwardness of joints and sinews, the pull of gravity and the tug of his muscles on bone. He forced his way up, every step new. He saw a chimney that might lead to easier ground. It was snowing. The climbers turned back—the snow fell every afternoon now.

  It was May 1. The climbers had been at work on the Ice Ridge for eighteen days. They wouldn’t finish the route at this rate. They were tired, and some of them were sick. The team doctor, Dave Lambert, was laid up with dysentery at Camp Two. Mike Thompson had a badly ulcerated mouth; he was too debilitated to carry loads. Nick Estcourt had chest pains. Ian was now truly exhausted; he must have a real rest at Base Camp.

  Martin Boysen was still moving strongly, but he couldn’t support the frontline climbers by himself. The carries between the upper camps were nightmarish. They began with the three-hour process of dressing and cooking in the bitter cold, all of it done in a fug of weariness and nausea. Then the slow plodding and heaving in a stupor of misery, the stupor pierced by terrifying moments of clarity on the fixed ropes, where a climber would in effect wake up dangling thousands of feet above the glacier, wondering how each lurch wore at the now-battered ropes.

  Such moments of doubt soon sunk into fatigue. The climbers were far too miserable most of the time to consider hypothetical outcomes, however gory or profound. It was also true that other considerations distracted them from the danger. Each climber understood that a strong performance carrying loads between camps might earn him more time at the front, where he could compete for a spot on one of the summit teams. At the same time, each climber knew that too much load carrying might render him physically unfit to take advantage of such an opportunity.

  They managed this knowledge in different ways. Dave Lambert and Mike Thompson had been recruited as support climbers. They did that work; still, they dreamed of the summit. Nick and Martin worked themselves to the point of exhaustion to carry loads between camps, and grew more or less resentful of the others—especially of Don and Dougal. Mick Burke complained—it was in his nature and in his history to resist any form of exploitation. Don and Dougal alternated bouts of lead climbing and resting, with not much time or inclination for carrying loads.

  Dougal replaced the shattered Ian at Camp Four, joined Chris to at last reach the top of the Ice Ridge in two days of hard climbing. That effort left Chris exhausted; he descended to Camp Three to rest.

  Don arrived to take Bonington’s place, and roped up with Dougal to climb an ice cliff above the ridge. Dougal led, climbing into dazzling sunlight. He arrived at the top of the cliff and stared up at the enormous Rock Band, which towered above him across a patch of easy snow. He crossed the snow and hammered a ceremonial piton into the rock to mark the site of Camp Five. Don came up behind him, and the two climbers discussed their agenda. They would go down for a rest, leaving the Rock Band to Mick Burke and Tom Frost—and then they would return to finish off the mountain.

  MICK AND TOM spent two days carrying loads up to Camp Five, and occupied the camp on May 9. They arrived that evening weary but excited. Tom knocked over a pan of boiling water. The climbers were too tired to melt more snow so they went to sleep in a haze of thirst and fatigue and desire—all of it colored by their isolation and by the fear that smoldered in them like a low-grade fever.

  They left their tent early on May 10, under perfectly clear skies. Their comrades at Base Camp could observe the two climbers through binoculars—the watchers almost like the tourists who peered up at Eiger climbers from the hotel balcony at Kleine Scheidegg; only here the scale was grander and the climbers more remote. The climbers had tentatively mapped out a route through the Rock Band. The route led through ice fields and up rock walls to a huge spur of rock—they called this landmark the Flatiron, after the feature of similar shape on the Eiger’s North Face.

  Tom and Mick climbed at first unroped on easy snow that seemed to lead past the first difficulties. Tom soon plunged into a slot in the snow, much as he had done at the start of the Ice Ridge. He hung wedged in the throat of the crevasse, his legs dangling over the darkness like limbs of some stubby insect. The easy snow slope lost its appeal; it menaced them now. They made their way back to their starting point, and set out across ice-glazed rock. Mick led, climbing on blunt crampons that offered precarious purchase on the thin ice.

  He knew that a fall with crampons—even a short fall—would be serious. The crampon points might catch on ice or rock as his body continued to fall, tearing an ankle or a knee. The worry flickered at the periphery of his mind. He traversed left toward rock that looked like it would take a piton for a new anchor. He reached left with his axe, taking weight off his right crampon, which shifted beneath his boot. The ice was brittle and steep. Each time he lifted a foot he balanced carefully on the other as he moved the first foot sideways and kicked it back into the ice; sometimes when he kicked, a crampon skittered and when this happened he teetered on the brink, supported by the tip of his axe. He had in the intensity of his work forgotten to place screws; he would fall at least 100 feet if he came off now. Fear gripped him; he could barely shout to Tom to watch the rope.

  Tom could see that a fall at this point would be catastrophic for him as well as Mick. He calmly advised Mick to try tapping in an ice piton; it would be easier than placing a screw. Mick had forgotten he had ice pitons. He managed to get one in—barely—and he began to climb again but now his right crampon had come loose. It dangled useless from his foot. He somehow retreated to the ice piton and struggled awkwardly to get the crampon back onto his boot; he thought of standing on a high stool to put on socks.

  It took him ten minutes. He rested briefly and set off again, feeling a bit like an astronaut casting off for a space walk. He climbed further toward the rocks where he hoped to build a proper anchor. He reached them at last, standing on small holds in his crampons and sighing with relief as he laid hold of a giant flake—the rock moved and he saw it was going to come off and take him with it.

  It didn’t. The huge rock settled in again, some ancient stone creature disturbed in its long sleep. Mick had recoiled in fright but now he recovered his balance and commenced an awkward, one-handed struggle to place a piton. He managed to get something hammered into a crack, and clipped in and settled down to smoke while Frost followed him up the pitch.

  The next pitches were mostly steep rock, sli
ck with ice. Mick continued to lead, climbing in his heavy boots; he made steady progress. He placed occasional pitons for protection, and hung from each new pin to smoke his Gauloises. The intensity of the climbing hid the wider world from him, but Mick while he rested could look around and note the steepness of the ground. The sky was in front of him when he turned his face and body from the mountain to smoke. There was nothing directly above him but a narrow band of light that was as much a border as a river might be—it divided the mountain from the rest of the world.

  They continued to climb. The sun warmed the mountain and rocks whistled past; one brushed Tom’s pack with a muffled thump. The two men came to a ledge at the foot of huge ice fields. They studied the fields for a moment but they were too tired to draw conclusions. They turned and retreated to Camp Five.

  The following morning dawned windless and clear. Mick and Tom carried 500 feet of rope to their new high point. Mick led again. He climbed rock slabs and traversed across the top of a huge snowfield—steep, engaging climbing with good protection. They were now some 8,000 feet above the glacier; the climbers felt a dim wonder only partly blunted by fatigue and altitude and concentration. Mick ran out of rope just below a spur of rock that obscured his view of the Flatiron, their next objective.

  It was May 11. Chris and the others at Base Camp could see the tiny black figures of their two friends and the immense task that awaited them—Mick and Tom had made what seemed small progress on the towering mass of the Rock Band. Chris estimated that the expedition had perhaps three weeks to finish the route before the monsoon would arrive with heavy snowfall that would make climbing impossible. They wouldn’t get up the wall at this rate.