by Clint Willis
Chris also left Jim Curran off the Everest roster. Jim had filmed the Kongur expedition, but he’d asked Joe Tasker to carry a camera and shoot some film during the second summit attempt. Joe had taken to the work, and had convinced Chris to let him make the film of the Everest expedition.
Al and Jim were neighbors in Sheffield, and around this time they came across their mutual friend Don Whillans. Don—now forty-eight—was getting used to his own status as an outsider. The younger climbers who dominated high-altitude climbing weren’t eager to invite him on their expeditions to the world’s great ranges. It was hard to blame them: Don was still cranky and demanding, and he was increasingly unfit.
He had managed to wangle an invitation from Doug Scott to join a trip to Shivling (6,543 meters; 21,466 feet) in the Garhwal Himalaya the previous summer—while Al and Jim were on Kongur. The other climbers had complained to Doug about Don’s slowness (he was vastly overweight, and his knees troubled him) and his selfishness (he still couldn’t be brought to help with the cooking). Doug and Georges Bettembourg and two other climbers had managed a beautiful route on Shivling’s formidable East Pillar, climbing it in perfect alpine style. Don had attempted the mountain’s West Face with another group, which had turned back in high winds. He had returned to Audrey—they lived in Wales now—and to his oddly rootless life. He roamed the countryside in his van or on his motorbike, turning up at climbing clubs and at friends’ houses—Jim Curran’s place in Sheffield had become a favorite stop—to drink to excess and scramble up an occasional route. His friends found him a trial—though some found him to be surprisingly good with children—but they tolerated his visits. Many did so for old time’s sake or because they were too kind to send him on his way; others, including Jim Curran, genuinely enjoyed his company.
Tonight Don sat and drank with Jim and Al and the three outcasts talked mostly about climbs, and about the fickle nature of climbing careers and reputations. Al was feeling particularly shaky that evening. He had recently suffered through the end of a long-term relationship, and he had been drinking far too much, dreaming of climbs that would recoup his reputation and his shattered ego. Don listened for a while and then offered young Al Rouse his version of sympathy over Al’s banishment from the Bonington circle: Aye-aye, lad—welcome back to the ’uman race.
THERE WAS TALK later that Chris ought to have kept Al on the team and added another pair of climbers. That would have made a total of six climbers—an opportunity to establish a different expedition chemistry. And it would have created a stronger team with greater reserves. The Northeast Ridge was a tremendous undertaking for four climbers—far more ambitious than anything Chris had yet attempted.
Chris for his part looked forward to the simple delights of a small expedition. His liking and admiration for both Pete and Joe had deepened on Kongur. This was true in spite of the differences in their ages; Chris would be forty-seven on Everest, roughly fourteen years older than Joe and more than sixteen years older than Peter. Bonington took Joe’s advice and offered Al’s spot to Dick Renshaw. Chris hadn’t climbed with Renshaw, but Dick had performed well on Dunagiri with Joe and then with Joe and the others on K2 in 1980. It helped that Renshaw was the most self-effacing of climbers, offering the sharpest possible contrast to Al’s flamboyance.
Charlie Clarke and Adrian Gordon also were coming. Charlie had provided medical care on Everest in 1975 and had organized the food for both Kongur expeditions. Adrian Gordon had managed Advance Base Camp on Everest in 1975; he would play a similar support role this time. Sponsor Jardine Matheson was sending along a small trekking party. The trekkers would accompany the expedition to Base Camp and explore the surrounding area before making an early departure.
Chris planned to climb Everest’s Northeast Ridge using tactics similar to those that had succeeded on Kongur. The climbers would establish a series of low camps, and then make a dash for the summit carrying bivouac gear. They would not rely on porters past Advance Base Camp. They would hump their own gear, which meant they couldn’t stock the higher camps with oxygen or carry up enough rope to fix much of the route. The lack of oxygen would make them more vulnerable to exhaustion or altitude sickness. The absence of fixed ropes meant that a rapid retreat might prove impossible. Those dangers would compound as they climbed into the increasingly thin air on the higher sections of the ridge—where they would face the most difficult climbing and be furthest from the hope of rescue if something went wrong.
The months leading up to the expedition’s departure were frantic for Joe. He was finishing his second book, an account of his climbs to date. Peter’s success with The Shining Mountain had galled Joe, who had contributed material to the book and thought he deserved a mention on the cover. Joe had taken just two months to write his own first book, about the winter Everest expedition, writing longhand with almost no revisions. He was writing this second book—Savage Arena—the same way. He sometimes scribbled for eight hours at a time before quitting to drive somewhere to deliver a lecture.
The writing came easier this time. He was writing about himself and his motives, about climbing with Dick and Peter and others in circumstances that had left him battered and temporarily happy. As he wrote he felt his bewilderment at finding himself compelled to undertake such difficulties. He also felt a rising sense of what it might mean to be an artist—of how much he would have to leave behind to say anything entirely true.
Meanwhile, there was packing to do for the Everest trip—and there were parties. The parties these days were fantastic; the decadence felt earned. People knew that something big was happening. The women were in love with the men and the men knew it. They all went to the parties to forget what was missing from their lives—and what they were likely to miss if they continued to live like this—and to tell themselves and each other that their sacrifices made them extraordinary. They traded gossip, too; they sorted through each other’s lives like family members do; if you had a problem everyone knew all about it.
Joe went to watch all of this. He would drink some mushroom tea and stand in a corner for a time and watch the others through the smoke and noise of the party; it was as though he had stepped outside of his new life to take pleasure in its shape, or as though he were trying to learn something about these people who populated it.
Maria was still with him. She would watch him as he sized up the other partygoers, and she would marvel at his determination to understand and perhaps outdo them. Joe was always telling her he’d like a holiday. She didn’t believe him. He would sometimes rest. He would lie on the couch and everything in him would give way, go completely slack: his hands and feet, his limbs and torso, his face and his neck and shoulders. Maria would see him that way and think of an animal. Other times he was completely alert, taking everything in, a curious but deeply skeptical child. And when Joe would go away for a trip she would go back to her teaching job and sit in the faculty room listening to the talk and she would remember Joe and the parties—the faces and shouts and bodies—and she would think My God, this is so boring.
Peter and Hilary had married after his return from K2 in 1980. He told her now that this trip to Everest would be his last major expedition for a while. He needed to make some money. He was thinking he might write a novel. He loved being home, and he was tired of the deaths—losing friends and burying strangers. He had come home to Hilary after Nick’s death in 1978 and had poured out his sadness and his fear. When he returned from expeditions he would learn about a divorce or an illness or an accident, and he would grieve for others’ losses as if they were his own. He wrote in the afternoons and into the evenings and stayed up late to talk with Hilary. They talked about what kind of life would make sense for them. They wanted to have a child. There might be an answer in that.
THE CLIMBERS ARRIVED in Lhasa on March 8, 1982. The Chinese guides who supervised their travels gave them a tour of the Potala Palace. The climbers followed their guides up steep flights of stairs and through dark passages to emerge a
thousand feet above the city on a roof drenched in sunlight—the courtyard of the Dalai Lama’s former living quarters. The Chinese also took the climbers to Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims circled the Temple clockwise, prostrating themselves and chanting. The Temple’s interior held several thousand people; the air smelled of butter, smoke and incense, sweat and animal skins.
They left Lhasa in a small caravan of trucks to travel the Chinese-built road to Everest Base Camp. The trucks wound through terrain almost startling in its absence of any obvious glamour. The landscape’s huge features seemed to lack features of their own; they were simply folds in the earth. The air grew cold as the trucks bumped along the road so that the road seemed to heave beneath them. The travelers stopped to visit monasteries, aware that the Red Guard had destroyed thousands of such places during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Monks still lived in these remaining retreats, but the small men with their robes and curious calm seemed reduced to relics. The climbers felt themselves tourists on some ancient battleground; they trod as it were on corpses and tattered objects, once precious to now-absent owners.
They traveled some 250 miles to Xegur, the last town on their journey. The expedition members spent two days there, resting and acclimatizing before the drive to the Rongbuk Glacier and Everest Base Camp. Chris and Charlie and Adrian Gordon had all come down with the flu; they were glad for the halt.
Xegur had been home to a pair of monasteries, and one of them survived. The guides conducted a tour. Charlie Clarke was struck by two 20-foot figures at the monastery entrance: a black demon on the left, a red dragon on the right. Inside the gates were trees that seemed sprung from the monastery itself; the region was otherwise treeless. The walls supported huge frescoes. There were golden Buddha statues and there were thousands of vases—gifts from China some centuries before, when China was a mere neighbor to the Kingdom of Tibet.
Charlie Clarke and David Mathew—a member of the trekking party—stole away from the guides to cross a bridge and climb to the ruins of the second, northern monastery. The hill had once been terraced to hold the dwellings of 6,000 monks. There remained only scattered standing fragments of frescoed wall.
The trucks left for Rongbuk Base Camp on March 16. The big mountains soon came into view. The expedition reached the ruined Rongbuk Monastery, where British mountaineers had stopped to receive the blessing of the high lamas a half century before. Here Chris and his companions could at last gaze upon the North Face of Everest, known to them from countless books and photographs, from paintings and even models.
A group of Tibetan boys helped cut a track through two iced-over rivers the next day. The expedition reached Base Camp, a rocky and in some ways an ugly place, that evening. The camp was strewn with the litter of previous expeditions, including a fair amount of broken glass and human excrement. It was growing dark. The wind rose and the temperature fell as the expedition members worked to unload the trucks.
The climbers rummaged for food and pitched a mess tent. It was a miserable evening. They were cold and hungry and intimidated by the place and the conditions, and by their notions of what lay ahead. Base Camp was at 5,200 meters, and most of the climbers were ill with headaches and nausea. Their discomfort blended with their anxiety to create a malaise that seemed likely to persist. The expedition proper hadn’t quite begun, but already it was difficult to pretend that they were engaged in something reasonable.
They planned to spend two weeks below 6,000 meters to acclimatize. Joe and Peter led some of the trekkers on a hike up the Central Rongbuk Glacier on March 19. Chris and Dick led another group up the East Rongbuk Glacier; they established a temporary camp at 5,650 meters, on the way to Advance Base Camp. Charlie Clarke and Adrian Gordon remained at Base Camp. Charlie noted that Joe and Peter looked tired when they returned from their hike. It was still very cold and windy; they had all expected spring by now.
There was a farewell banquet for the trekkers on March 22. The cook was laid low by altitude sickness—the air at Base Camp held only half as much oxygen as the air at sea level—and the meal was not a great success. The trekkers left for home in the morning. That left the four climbers and their support team: Charlie and Adrian as well as the liason officer, the interpreter, the cook and two drivers.
The next chore was to establish Advance Base Camp at 6,500 meters on the East Rongbuk Glacier. The climbers would rely on yaks to carry gear to Advance Base. Charlie and Adrian would oversee the process of stocking the camp once the yaks arrived; the animals and their herders were due at Base Camp on March 29. Chris estimated Charlie and Adrian would make three trips between the two camps over the next month or so, taking into account rest days and bad weather. The four principal climbers would spend the month acclimatizing—moving up and down the lower stages of the route—and making progress on the Northeast Ridge itself.
The climbers took three days to make their first trip to the site they’d chosen for Advance Base. The spot had served as Camp Three for British expeditions attempting the North Col route before World War II. The walk up the glacier gave the climbers fine and intimidating views of their own route up the Northeast Ridge. The mountain had begun to seem real to them; the sleeping gray creature they had viewed from a distance resolved into stone and snow. They pitched their tents each night near the shadows of strange ice formations—thick sails of ice that at dusk seemed carved from the mountain itself.
They returned to Base Camp on March 28, and rested the next day. They were beginning to acclimatize. An American team was attempting Everest’s regular North Col route. The Americans stopped by to drink and talk in the evening. Peter wrote in his journal that his own expedition was a happy one. They were like members of a certain type of family. They knew one another well enough to squabble, but they had adopted the same virtues.
The 1982 British Everest team: Chris, Charlie, Adrian, Joe, Peter, Dick
CHRIS BONINGTON, CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY
The yaks arrived two days late, on April 1. Five of the expedition members—everyone but Dick Renshaw—left for Advance Base Camp the next day, again moving up in easy stages. Dick stayed behind to wait for the next mail delivery. He would follow the others in a day or two.
The yak herders stopped to rebuild a section of the path demolished by a recent rockslide. Joe and Peter filmed the work while the other climbers continued on their way. Charlie and Adrian heard the rattle of rocks on rocks a moment later and ran for cover. Charlie hid behind a boulder that took several direct hits from the hail of stones that scored the earth around them. He was frightened at this evidence of the danger of this place, and struck by how easily his companions dismissed the incident.
The party reached Advance Base Camp on April 4. Dick Renshaw caught up with the others by walking up from Base Camp that day—ten miles and an altitude gain of 1,200 meters. He was empty-handed, however; the mail hadn’t arrived. Adrian and Charlie helped unload the yaks and then set off down with the animals and their herders to fetch another load.
Peter felt ill the next day. Chris and Dick walked across to the Raphu La, the col that overlooks the mountain’s fearsome Kangshung Face. The two climbers brought wands to mark their route over to the col, which would bring them to the start of their ridge. It would be easy to lose their way in fog or a snowstorm. They walked in crampons on windblown snow. Chris was relieved to find that he could keep pace with Dick.
They reached the Raphu La and looked down to the Kangshung Glacier, some 1,200 meters below. They raised their eyes to the horizon and found the outline of Kangchenjunga. Jannu’s exquisite form lay to the right; it brought to their minds Al Rouse and his achievement there.
Chris returned his gaze to the beautifully fluted, frighteningly steep snow of the Kangshung Face. The sight undermined his sense that the Northeast Ridge was something real. He could not always accept this scale; his mind’s eye reduced it to something as artificial and flimsy as a stage set.
Chris and Dick left the col and worked their way across sno
w slopes, hoping to identify the most efficient route to the crest of their ridge. The ground wasn’t steep. The snow took their crampons well. They identified a gully that would take them onto the ridge crest. Huge cornices overhung the gully, but the cornices looked stable. The two climbers returned to Advance Base Camp. They passed slots that opened into huge underground caverns, and skirted an area threatened by avalanche.
The wind the next day was too strong for them to go up to the ridge. They stayed in camp. Pete and Joe had put up four tents: one for each climber. The four men spent the afternoon building windbreaks and a stone table; they also erected a tarp over the mess tent. They reviewed their plans, which called for them to establish two or three camps—ideally, snow caves—on their way to the foot of the pinnacles that barred the final section of the ridge. They would make an alpine-style push from the highest snow cave to the summit, carrying food and tents and making one or more bivouacs, much as Chris and Joe and Peter and Al had done on Kongur. They hoped to do without fixed rope low on the route. They agreed that they might need it on the steeper sections higher up.
The four climbers set out for the ridge on April 7. They had been on Everest for three weeks. Their acclimatization was coming along and they were pleased to be getting to the real climbing at last. They carried their personal gear and some food, along with rope and snow pickets and pitons. They reached the ridge crest, which gave Peter and Joe their first view of the horrifying drop down the Kangshung Face. Chris suggested that this would be a good place for their first snow cave. The climbers left their gear and went down. They knew the ground now so they climbed unroped to the glacier, where they roped up again as a safeguard against hidden crevasses.
