by Bear Grylls
It was clear that this climb would be a systematic war of attrition between acclimatizing our bodies and keeping our spirits fired. And that is before you add into the pot illness, exhaustion, injuries and bad weather.
Quietly we all knew that, to be successful here, many factors would have to come good at the right time. It is why luck has such a part to play on Everest.
Our aim was to be acclimatized to camp three as soon as possible, hopefully around the end of April. Our fight then would be against the weather and the fierce jet-stream winds.
It is these winds that make the mountain, for the vast majority of the year, completely unclimbable. Their ferocious strength can literally blow a man off the face.
But twice a year, as the warm monsoon heads north across the Himalayas, the winds abate.
It is known as the ‘silent beckoning’ – as the mountain goes strangely quiet for a precious few days.
When, and for how long this period lasts, is the gamble that every Everest mountaineer takes.
Get it wrong, or be unlucky, and you die.
Along with the mind-numbing cold, the endless crevasses, the daily avalanches, and the thousands of feet of exposure, it is these fierce jet-stream winds that contribute most heavily to Everest’s grisly statistics.
As the statistics stood that year, for every six climbers who reached the summit, one of us would die.
One in six. Like the single bullet in a revolver used in Russian roulette.
I didn’t like the analogy.
CHAPTER 79
On 7 April, Mick, Nima – one of the Sherpas – and I would be climbing on Everest for the first time.
The others would remain at base camp to give their bodies more time to adapt to the altitude before they started up any higher.
We sat at the bottom of the Khumbu Icefall, amongst rolling crests of contorted ice, and began to put our crampons on. At last we were beginning the task that had been a dream for so long.
As we began to weave deep into the maze, our crampons bit firmly into the glassy ice. It felt good. As the ice steepened, we roped up. In front of us were what looked like endless giant ice sculptures, disappearing into the distance above.
A few strong pushes and we would clamber over the next ice ledge, lying there breathing heavily in the ever-higher air.
We could soon see base camp below us, getting smaller in the distance.
Adrenalin surged around our bodies those first few hours that we climbed together in the early dawn light.
It was a familiar routine on a very unfamiliar mountain.
Soon we came to the first of the aluminium ladder systems that spanned the many, yawning chasms. These had been pre-fixed in place by the Sherpas in elaborate webs of rope, ice screws and stakes, to form bridges across the icefall’s giant crevasses.
Over the years, these lightweight ladders, fixed in place, and adjusted every few days according to the moving ice, had proved the most efficient way of slicing a route through the icefall.
But they took a little nerve at first.
Crampons, thin metal rungs, and ice are a precarious cocktail. You just have to take your time, hold your nerve and focus on each rung – one at a time. And remember: don’t look down into the gaping black abyss beneath your feet.
Focus on your feet, not the drop.
It is easier said than done.
Only a hundred or so feet below camp one, the route that the Sherpas had so diligently fixed through the ice had crumbled. The remains of the rope and ladder system hung like long strands of thread above a gaping chasm.
Mick and I assessed our options.
Nima was back down beneath us, re-fixing part of the route that needed additional ice screws.
We decided not to attempt to find a new route through to camp one – we had climbed high enough for the first day. So we turned and started down.
The journey back was tiring. Much more so than I would have imagined. My legs were aching, and my heart and lungs were pumping hard to suck every ounce of oxygen from the rarefied air.
I felt drained by a whole day in the ice. Adrenalin, concentration and altitude make for a highly effective energy discharge.
It is a hard type of fatigue to describe: it simply saps you of all your strength and gives you nothing in return.
The sound of the metal karabiners clinking on my harness was becoming hypnotic. I squeezed my eyes tight shut, then opened them. I tried to breathe rhythmically.
We were eighteen thousand vertical feet above sea level, in the mouth of Everest’s killer jaws. I noticed my hand was shaking as I fumbled with the ropes through thick mittens.
It was pure fatigue.
An hour later, it felt like we were still no closer to base camp, and it was starting to get late.
I glanced nervously around the icefall. We should be meeting back up with Nima somewhere around here, as arranged. I scanned around but couldn’t see him.
I dug my crampons into the snow, leant back against the face to get my breath back, and waited for Mick behind me.
He was still ten yards away, stepping carefully across the broken blocks of ice. We had been in this crevasse-ridden, frozen death trap for over nine hours, and we were both moving very laboriously.
Watching him, I knew that if the mighty Mick was moving this slowly then we were indeed on a big mountain.
I stood up and took a few more careful steps, testing the ice with each movement. I reached the end of one length of rope, unclipped, breathed hard, and grabbed the next rope.
I held it loosely in my hand, looked around, took another deep breath, then clipped my karabiner into the line.
Then all of a sudden, I felt the ground beneath me twitch.
I looked down and saw a crack in the ice shoot between my feet, with a quiet, slicing sound.
I didn’t dare move.
The world seemed to stand still.
The ice cracked once more behind me, then with no warning, it just dropped away beneath me, and I was falling.
Falling down this lethal, black scar in the glacier that had no visible bottom.
Suddenly, I smashed against the grey wall of the crevasse.
The force threw me to the other side, crushing my shoulder and arm against the ice. Then I jerked to a halt, as the thin rope, that I had just clipped into, held me.
I am spinning round and round in free air. The tips of my crampons catch the edge of the crevasse wall.
I can hear my screams echoing in the darkness below.
Shards of ice keep raining down on me, and one larger bit smashes into my skull, jerking my head backwards. I lose consciousness for a few precious seconds.
I blink back into life to see the last of the ice falling away beneath me into the darkness.
My body gently swings around on the end of the rope, and all is suddenly eerily silent.
Adrenalin is coursing round my body, and I find myself shaking in waves of convulsions.
I scream up at Mick, and the sound echoes around the walls. I looked up to the ray of light above, then down to the abyss below.
I clutch frantically for the wall, but it is glassy smooth. I swing my ice axe at it wildly, but it doesn’t hold, and my crampons just screech across the ice.
In desperation I cling to the rope above me and look up.
I am twenty-three years old, and about to die.
Again.
CHAPTER 80
The rope I was dangling off wasn’t designed for a long impact fall like mine.
It was lightweight, thin rope that got replaced every few days as the ice, on the move, tore it from its anchor point. The rope was more of a guide, a support; not like proper, dynamic, climbing rope.
I knew that it could break at any point.
The seconds felt like eternity.
Then suddenly I felt a strong tug on the rope.
I kicked into the walls with my crampons again.
This time they bit into the ice.
Up I
pulled, kicking into the walls a few feet higher, in time with each heave from above.
Near the lip I managed to smack my ice axe into the snow lip and pull myself over.
Strong arms grabbed my wind suit and hauled me from the clutches of the crevasse. I wriggled away from the edge, out of danger, and collapsed in a heaving mess.
I lay there, my face pressed to the snow, eyes closed, holding Mick and Nima’s hands, shaking with fear.
If Nima had not heard the collapse and been so close, I doubt Mick would ever have had the strength to haul me out. Nima had saved my life and I knew it.
Mick helped escort me the two hours back down the icefall. I clutched every rope, clipping in nervously.
I now crossed the ladders like a different man – gone was the confidence. My breathing was shallow and laboured, and any vestiges of strength or adrenalin had long left me.
That thin line between life and death can make or break a man. And right now I was a mess.
Yet we hadn’t even begun on Everest proper.
Lying in my tent alone that night I wept quietly, as all the emotion seeped out of me. For the second time in recent years, I knew I should have died.
I wrote:
31 March, midnight.
The emotions of today have been crazy. And through it all, I just can’t quite fathom how the rope held my fall.
Over supper this evening, Nima spoke in rapid, dramatic gestures as he recounted the episode to the other Sherpas. I received double rations from Thengba, our hard of hearing cook, which I think was his way of reassuring me. Sweet man. He knows from experience how unforgiving this mountain can be.
My elbow is pretty darned sore where I smashed it against the crevasse, and I can feel small bits of bone floating around inside a swollen sack of fluid beneath it, which is slightly disconcerting.
The doctor says you can’t do much about an elbow apart from medicate and let time try to heal. At least it wasn’t my head!
I can’t get to sleep at the moment – I just keep having this vision of the crevasse beneath me – and it’s terrifying when I close my eyes.
Falling is such a horrible, helpless feeling. It caused me the same terror that I felt during my parachute accident.
I don’t think I have ever felt so close to being killed as I did today. Yet I survived – again.
It leaves me with this deep gratitude for all the good and beautiful things in my life, and a conviction that I really don’t want to die yet. I’ve got so much to live for.
I just pray with my whole heart never to go through such an experience again.
Tonight, alone, I put in words, thank you my Lord and my friend.
It’s been a hell of a way to start the climb of my life.
PS Today is my Shara’s birthday. Bless her, wherever she is right now.
CHAPTER 81
‘If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.’
The dude who said this was dead right.
Life is all about getting up again, dusting yourself down again, learning from the lessons and then pushing on.
And I did.
The next few days of early April, the conditions were perfect for climbing. Together we all pressed on, and apart from the constant reminder from my broken elbow, I forgot all about my close encounter with the Grim Reaper down the crevasse.
We cleared through the icefall and established our camp one at the lip. We spent a night there, and then descended back to base. Next time we would be pushing up into the mighty Western Cwm itself in an effort to reach camp two.
Our packs were heavier than before, laden down with additional kit we would need higher up the mountain. The great cwm lay before us as we made our way slowly along the vast, glaring white, ice valley – like ants on a giant ski ramp.
We tentatively shuffled into, and then climbed up and out of, yet another of the giant, snow-filled chasms that scarred the glacier’s face. As we climbed out of one particularly high lip of another false horizon we saw for the first time the face of Everest in the distance.
The mighty summit loomed over us, still some eight thousand vertical feet higher. It took my breath away.
As the sun rose over the top of Everest, its rays filtering between the wind and snow of the summit, we sat on our packs in silence. My heart rate soared with excitement and trepidation.
The summit seemed truly unconquerable, still so far away, aloof and unobtainable.
I decided not to look up too much, but instead to concentrate on my feet, and commit to keep them moving.
I suspected that this would be the key to climbing this mountain.
We were getting more and more drained by the altitude and the scale of the glacier, and camp two never seemed to get any closer.
Finally we made it to camp two, but considering the effort it had taken to reach, it wasn’t much to look at. Tucked into the shadow of the vast wall of Everest, it was grey, cold and unwelcoming.
Shingly rock covered the dark-blue ice that ran into melt-water pools in the midday heat. Everything was wet, sliding and slushy.
I tripped trying to scramble over a small ledge of ice. I was tired and needed to rest, but I was excited that another stage in the climb was reached – albeit the easy part.
On our next return to base camp, and after the best night’s sleep I had had since arriving in Nepal, I decided that I would call home on the satellite phone.
At $3 a minute, I had not yet used the phone. I had enough debts already at this point. I’d originally intended to save my phone call for when and if I had a summit bid.
‘Mum, it’s me.’
‘Bear? It’s BEAR!’ she shouted excitedly.
It was so good just to hear the voices of those I loved.
I asked for all their news.
Then I told them about my narrow escape in the crevasse.
‘You fell in what? A crevice?’ Mum questioned.
‘No, in a crevasse,’ I enunciated.
‘Speak up. I can hardly hear you, darling.’ She tried to quieten everyone around her, and then resumed the conversation. ‘Now … what was that about your crevice?’
‘Mum, it really doesn’t matter,’ I said, laughing. ‘I love you.’
Families are always great levellers.
CHAPTER 82
Four days later we were back up again at camp two, on the moraine edge of the vast Western Cwm glacier.
It was 5 a.m. and eerily still in the pre-dawn light, as I sat huddled in the porch of my tent looking out across the ice.
It was cold. Very cold.
Mick had been tossing and turning all night. Altitude does that. It robs you of sleep, furnishes you with a permanent migraine, and sucks the air and your lungs of all moisture – ensuring everyone coughs and splutters twenty-four seven.
Add the freezing cold, a constant urge to vomit, and an indescribable ability for even the most mundane physical task to become a labour of Herculean proportions – and you can see why high-altitude climbing is a limited market.
The reality of life up high, in the sub-zero, could not be less romantic.
But today was make or break for us.
We had reached camp two after a seven-hour climb up from base camp. It was the first time we had done the route all in one go without a night at camp one, and it had taken its toll.
Today we had to push on up higher – and this was where it would start to get much steeper and much more dangerous.
Camp three is on the threshold of what the human body can survive, and as I had been repeatedly told by doubting journalists, the body’s ability to adapt to high altitude improves as you get out of your twenties and into your thirties.
Well, at twenty-three, age wasn’t in my favour, but I tried not to think about that, and the doubters.
Yes, I was young, but I was hungry, and the next few weeks would reveal all, as I pushed into territory that was higher than I had ever gone before.
In front of me
was now the real tester. If I failed to cope with the altitude at camp three I would return to base camp and never go back up again.
Looking at the vast face ahead I tried to imagine being up there.
I couldn’t.
Thirty minutes after setting out we were still on the scree and ice moraine. It felt like we had hardly moved at all. But finally we reached the ice again, and started heading up towards the start of the ice face that loomed some five thousand feet above us.
Beckoning. Silent, apart from a gentle breeze blowing across the ice.
The leap we were making in altitude – some three thousand, three hundred feet – was huge, considering the altitude we were at. Even on our trek into base camp we had only ever ascended around nine hundred feet a day.
We knew the risks in pushing through this invisible altitude boundary, but because of the severity of the gradient we were forced to take it. There were simply so few places where we could level out a small ice shelf to pitch a camp up there.
As soon as we could complete our trip to camp three we would return to base camp for one last time. From then on, it would all be weather-driven.
For the next five hours we continued up the sheer, blue ice. Crampon points in, calf muscles burning, lungs heaving – yet finding no relief.
The air was now very thin, and the exposure and drop increased with every faltering step we took up the ice.
Look only in front, never down.
The Sherpas had reached camp three the previous day, and had spent the afternoon putting the two tents in. Their bodies still coped much better than ours up here. How grateful I was for their strength!
As we clawed our way up the final patch of glistening sheer blue ice, I could see the tents wedged under an overhanging serac above us.
Precarious, I thought.
