The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  Chris was now forty-one, and his mountaineering options were dwindling. The Ogre seemed to offer a way back to the past—climbing for the sake of climbing, without the pressures of sponsors and headlines—even as it offered a chance to continue to play a further role in shaping the future of mountaineering. His own experience and the example of younger climbers had convinced him that he could tackle difficult routes on the biggest peaks with truly small teams and succeed. The Ogre might be just the thing.

  DOUG HAD ALREADY chosen the other climbers for the expedition. He had invited his mate Tut Braithwaite. Chris knew Tut from Everest but they weren’t old friends. Clive Rowland and Mo Anthoine also were coming. Clive was another old friend of Doug; he worked as a builder on the Black Isle, north of Inverness. He had a huge, shaggy beard and a sharp tongue. He seemed unimpressed by and perhaps resentful of Bonington’s fame.

  Mo Anthoine was a bona fide character. He was a native of the English Midlands, a fireplug of a man at 5'7", with a big neck and a deep chest. He walked with a stiff, rolling gait—a sailor on shore leave, maybe looking for a fight. Mo as a young man had in fact worked his passage on ships to New Zealand and back. He’d been gone two years; during that time he had crewed yachts, worked in the asbestos mines and smuggled turquoise into Pakistan.

  He had returned from his travels to start a company with Don Whillan’s old climbing partner, the great Joe Brown. The firm manufactured and sold climbing gear out of the Welsh climbing center of Llanberis, where it employed a staff of two-dozen workers. Mo used his share of profits to finance small expeditions. He’d climbed the Great Prow of Roraima—a sandstone wall in the jungles of Guyana—in 1975. He’d done it with Hamish Mac Innes and Joe and Don. The Ogre invitation, which came early in 1976, found Mo preparing for an expedition to the Karakoram’s Trango Tower. That trip—led by Joe Brown—would put Martin Boysen and Mo on the peak’s summit that fall.

  Mo was a highly competent climber. Other climbers knew him as a great wit—a talker, inclined to be vulgar, a cheerful dispenser of insults, utterly independent, dismissive of authority and disdainful of reputation. He was not a person likely to put Chris at ease.

  Doug had invited Dougal Haston, too. Dougal, now thirty-six, had enjoyed his Everest fame and the sense of possibility that came with it. He had pursued his literary ambitions, drafting a novel about a pair of mountaineers—a brooding, darkly handsome young Scot and his mentor, an American modeled on John Harlin. Dougal’s plans for the coming year included summer guiding in the Alps and teaching a climbing course in Canada, as well as a series of lectures to raise money. Meanwhile he ran the climbing school back in Leysin. He had cut back on his drinking—though he still indulged in occasional binges. His finances were a shambles, his bank accounts often overdrawn. He’d parted with his wife Annie after several years of hard living and mutual infidelity. He had settled into a less tempestuous relationship with Ariane Giobellina, a young woman—his junior by eleven years—who had grown up in Leysin. Ariane worked at a travel agency in town to help cover the couple’s living expenses.

  Dougal was no longer the enfant terrible he had been on the Eiger and Annapurna. The new generation climbed routes in the Alps that were far harder than his own best efforts, and made their high-altitude climbs without the support of Bonington’s well-oiled expeditionary machine. It didn’t matter; his writing absorbed him, and he climbed routes that interested him. It was enough. Dougal and Chris spoke on the telephone, and agreed that they would climb together on the Ogre. They would take one of the more reasonable lines to the summit; let Doug tackle his big wall with one of the other climbers. The idea of climbing with Dougal again made Chris happy; it would be a chance to revisit their friendship, which had deepened over time.

  Chris drove out to Chamonix in January, bringing along Mo Anthoine. They planned to do a little climbing and meet Dougal to talk about preparations for the Ogre. Chris and Mo found the Chamonix weather too unsettled for climbing, but fine for skiing. Chris telephoned Dougal, who confirmed that he would come over from Leysin in a few days.

  DOUGAL HAD NOW lived in Leysin for ten years. He had become a good skier; it was part of his identity as a complete mountaineer. He avoided the resort slopes near town, preferring to ski off-piste. His daily routine during the first two weeks of January of 1977 included a morning of work on his novel—he had set himself a daily target of 2,000 words—and lunch with Ariane. He’d ski in the afternoon if conditions were good. He got very drunk one night just after the New Year, and arrived home in the early morning with a deep cut over one eye. He told Ariane he’d fallen.

  He finished a draft of his novel on Sunday, January 16. One passage described a run down the Northeast Face of La Riondaz—one of the few difficult runs easily accessible from Leysin. The face wasn’t always in condition; it was forested, and required heavy snowfall to create adequate covering for a skier. The face occasionally unleashed huge avalanches. The American climber in Dougal’s book triggered a slide there but managed to outrun it.

  Dougal planned to ski the face on Monday. He walked Ariane to her office that morning and kissed her good-bye at the building entrance. She went inside, and then she followed an impulse to run up the stairs and out onto a balcony; she hoped to catch sight of him, but he was already gone. They spoke again an hour or two later when Dougal phoned her office. He wanted her to join him on La Riondaz. Conditions on the mountain would be beautiful: sunshine, a lot of snow. Ariane was touched, but she refused; her boss couldn’t spare her.

  Dougal took the lift to La Berneuse, which lay at the bottom of the face. The upper lift was closed due to avalanche hazard. Dougal kicked steps up the snow, carrying his skis across his shoulder. He was glad the lift was closed; he had the slope entirely to himself.

  He was doing what he’d always done: moving alone in the mountains, putting distance between himself and the rest of the world. It took time, and he felt his breathing deepen. The work didn’t stop him from thinking, but it helped. He still carried with him his shame. The shame didn’t always attach itself to a particular sin or omission. The understanding that he’d killed that boy in Scotland wasn’t always there; Dougal sometimes had trouble finding it. When he did it was like digging a snow cave and poking through to sky, rearing back—but that version of his shame mostly eluded him.

  It sometimes seemed to him that his shame and confusion had little to do with the boy; it was nothing he could think about or face as directly as that. He carried with him voices—he’d heard them on Everest—that spoke mostly in mutters or dialect. He wasn’t sure they were talking to him; it might be that they talked of him among themselves.

  It was quiet here. The snow was softer now so that he had to concentrate to keep his footing. The skis over his shoulder made him clumsy. He felt lonely and he fended the feeling off with pictures, as he often did. He conjured up Whillans standing there at the top of Annapurna looking grim, still half-disappointed at the ways things turned out, still angry about it. Dougal saw almost nothing of Don these days. The older man—he was forty-five—seemed finished with serious climbing; he’d been to Alaska the previous year and he’d had his hands full getting up the tourist route on McKinley. And now he was back to plumbing. He traveled around in his van—outfitted for sleeping—to do emergency jobs between visits to friends who would give him a free bed and maybe rope up for a climb. Audrey didn’t seem to mind. She was probably happiest when her man was on the road. Don was a spent force—but Dougal sometimes missed him. He missed them all: John and Ian, Tony and Mick.

  John Harlin had been dead more than a decade now. He’d left his school to Dougal, which had turned out all right. Dougal had to rummage to find the American but then Harlin came into focus, confused but near stupid in his determination—his version of courage. The Eiger Direct—the Harlin Route—had killed John. It had made Dougal famous. They’d all died for Dougal; they’d died getting him up the Eiger and Annapurna and Everest. It was ridiculous. He was something like C
hrist in reverse.

  He stopped thinking. He reached the top of the slope. He wanted to ski; the walking had excited and calmed him, had put him back in his body as if that was where he belonged. He knew the view from this place. There was no need to linger. He put on his skis and for a moment he felt tired. He closed his eyes and made an effort. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he resolved to wish for it with all of his power; to conjure his strength, which he believed lay in his desire. He imagined himself spending everything he had in pursuit of some wish or need and failing. This failure seemed a vision of purity. This failure, this empty outcome, this purity was itself what he desired. His strength was of no use to him—it came between him and what he loved.

  He pushed off and turned quickly once, and again; he was skiing well and his mind receded. This was bliss; it was passing too quickly. He heard something and the slope moved under him and he fell; he was carrying an urn, and it flew from his hands and shattered soundlessly, scattered black ash across snow. He rose in a fluid, spectacular cartwheel and subsided again; he was conscious of carrying his heart in his body. The earth became a moving flood and entered him; he woke and struggled and black fear rose—it seemed composed of everything he knew. The sun receded and vanished and something clanged; he felt a terrible pain. The flood of earth had turned to pitch or cinder but someone had left a door just barely ajar and not for the first time in his life he was lost entirely in a wish to thank someone. He reached for the door but something caught and his head turned as if to greet or beckon a pursuer.

  THE SEARCHERS FOUND Dougal’s body the next day. The slide had broken his leg and buried him under three feet of snow. He had worn a scarf. A doctor at the scene told someone that the scarf had strangled the skier.

  Wendy Bonington heard the news on the radio in England. Her first thought was that Chris might have been with him; she knew the two of them were planning to ski together that week. She made calls and reached Chris at a bar in Chamonix and told him. The news was like taking a blow to the face; he felt the blood rise in his body and his mind went dark at his inability to retaliate. Instead he would have to bear the fact that he could do nothing for Dougal now.

  They had been friends and collaborators; Dougal was part of his history. Chris had helped to invent Dougal—they had helped to invent one other. He wondered dimly in the days that followed whether he shared some blame for the fact that Dougal had never entirely grown up; had not managed to finish his life before ending it. It might feel like a kind of disgrace to die in that condition, a Catholic dying unconfessed. Chris felt a rising horror at the ease with which death was overtaking the members of his dwindling band and at his own inability to protect them.

  They buried Dougal in Leysin, at the cemetery where John Harlin’s family and friends had buried him eleven years before. Doug Scott and Big Ely Moriarity carried the coffin from the road up a path cleared in the snow; they were the two strongest men but it was still tricky; the path was icy and the grave stood up on the tier of graves just below the highest ground. Annie Haston and Ariane were both there. Mick Burke’s widow, Beth Bevan, came from London. Beth was glad to see Annie, and glad for the ceremony of Dougal’s burial; she told herself that she was laying Mick to rest, as well.

  She remembered coming to Leysin with Annie for the first time, two nurses on holiday, the two of them walking into the Vagabond that night and right away meeting Dougal and Mick, those two boys as if waiting for them, swimming up out of nowhere and into the young women’s lives. And now it seemed the boys had swum back off into the blue. They were at any rate both absent again, so much so that at certain odd moments it was possible to imagine that first encounter had never occurred.

  CHRIS WOULD NEED another partner for the Ogre. His old friend and neighbor Nick Estcourt agreed to come, and took on the task of organizing the food. Tut Braithwaite assembled the expedition’s gear. Clive Rowland drove all of it out to Islamabad. He was waiting to greet the rest of the team at the airport on May 27.

  Chris was determined to sit back and let the others run things. Doug and Clive and Mo had all climbed in Pakistan before. Chris had not. They didn’t ask his views on much and they didn’t seem to like it when he spoke up. Clive seemed especially prickly. Some exchanges were awkward, unpleasant. Chris didn’t much mind. He liked the freedom. He could play with the idea that he was just a climber again. It had been a long time since he’d been in the Himalaya without the responsibility to run things.

  The expedition hired porters in Skardu, and crossed the Indus in a boat. The porters broke into song during the crossing. The party walked three days to the village of Askole, near the start of the Biafo Glacier; then another four days to Base Camp. Here they came upon another small party of British climbers. The party hoped to climb a nearby peak—Latok I—but had been stalled for a week by storms that dumped huge quantities of snow on their mountain.

  Doug still planned to follow the line he’d shown Chris—straight up a huge rock buttress to a snowfield within striking distance of the Ogre’s summit. He would rope up with his friend Tut. Chris and Nick and Mo and Clive had their eye on the mountain’s West Ridge. The ridge led through a jumble of buttresses and snow gullies to the peak’s West Summit; once there they could descend to a col and then climb to the higher Main Summit. The West Ridge had turned back a Japanese team the year before but it seemed to offer the best chance at getting up the peak.

  The climbers recruited seven of their strongest porters to stay for a few days. The four West Ridge climbers and the porters took four days to lug supplies to an Advance Base Camp at the start of their route’s difficulties. Mo and Clive then settled in at Base Camp for a brief rest. They had asked their wives to join them for part of the trip, and expected the women to arrive any day.

  Chris and Nick moved up to Advance Base Camp. They began the real climbing the next day, June 15, roping up to cross the glacier. Nick broke trail through heavy snow until a slot in the ice swallowed him up to his armpits. Chris hauled on the rope and Nick dragged himself out and they walked on, picking their way cautiously to the face.

  They reached the face and kicked steps up a snow gully. They were keenly aware that the gully would act as a funnel for any avalanche that occurred on the slopes above them. They climbed out of it as soon as they could. Nick moved up steep rock with adequate holds. He built an anchor and fixed a rope. Chris got out his jumars and climbed it. The sun was well up; it was ten o’clock—already too hot to climb further. They retreated to Advance Base Camp.

  The women had arrived at Base Camp, cheering up Mo and Clive and stirring vague resentment among the others, who groused that the wives were distracting their husbands from the task at hand. The climbers meanwhile continued to make progress on their respective routes. Tut was Jumaring up a chimney to the first bivouac on the buttress he and Doug had chosen when his rope dislodged a stone the size of a soccer ball. Tut’s feet were wedged against the ice in the chimney and the rock brushed his thigh, knocking both feet from their perch; if he’d worn crampons the impact might have taken off his legs. As it was, the stone bruised his leg very badly. He could walk, but he would be out of action for at least a few days.

  Chris and Nick established Camp One on June 20. The camp was partway up a face that led to a dip in the West Ridge—this dip was the West Col. The two of them had altered their plans slightly. They would establish Camp Two at the col, traverse right to the Southwest Ridge, and make their way up mixed ground to the col between the Ogre’s West Summit and its Main Summit.

  Mo and Clive still intended to climb from the West Col directly up the West Ridge, which meant crossing the West Summit on their way to the Main Summit. They took a turn out front on June 21, fixing ropes to just beneath the West Col, where they meant to part with Chris and Nick. They descended to Camp One, where all four men spent the night. The two pairs would move back up to Camp Two beneath the col in the morning, and then launch their separate attempts on the summit.

  Chris
and Nick had trouble sleeping. Nick suffered the most. He had an increasingly painful cough. He complained bitterly of Bonington’s snoring, which was as usual very loud. Morning came at last, but Mo and Clive showed no signs of rousing themselves. They said something about waiting for Doug, who might wish to join them if Tut’s injury kept him from climbing.

  Chris and Nick were off by 5:30. They muscled their way up 1,600 feet of fixed rope and then climbed snow to arrive at the West Col, an airy shelf heavily corniced on both sides. They made camp and brewed tea. The sky clouded up and then cleared again at evening.

  They were alone with the prospect of the summit push ahead. They had a week’s supply of food to see them up and then back down 3,500 feet of hard climbing on new ground. The past bound them together, but each man was sustained and defined by secret narratives, endlessly revisited and revised. Nick had his resentment and his standards of behavior and his wits. Chris had his ideals and his mounting losses and achievements. Here the two friends were necessary to one another in the most practical ways: to hold a rope, to brew tea. They allowed each other liberties. Nick today was somewhat cranky, but Chris was tolerant and subdued. He felt that his youth had at last escaped him; he sometimes feared that he would replace it with something heavy and pointless.

  They set out early—five o’clock—on the morning of June 23. They climbed past crevasses and up snow that lay precariously on a slope of hard ice. They came upon a fixed rope left behind by the Japanese expedition. They followed the rope to the snow shelf that would lead them across to the Southwest Ridge. The sky at moments was blue enough to seem to stain the snow and the rock. The two climbers felt themselves figures in these pools of color; boundaries gave way and the climbers’ connection to each other and to the world waved and shimmered in the high mountain light.