There was wisdom in the proposal. It would maximize our chances if the good weather were only brief, and yet, if the good weather lasted, Frank would have a better shot at the top. I only had one concern.
“The thing is safety,” I said. “If the weather comes in, it would be just the two of you up there. You'd have to make certain your decisions were conservative, and not take any unnecessary risk.”
“If I take any risk, it'll be calculated,” Frank said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Bonington said the risk of staying at camp two was the one-in-thirty storm. I’ve been thinking about that, and Vinson is important enough to me that those numbers seem okay.”
I remembered that conversation earlier in the year, with the Everest team at Camp 2 just after the first summit team had returned, when we all had agreed that the heart of mountaineering was the freedom for every man to choose his own odds. That still seemed fair enough, but my concern was the same as it had been then: that Frank be careful enough to make sure he stacked those numbers as much as possible in his favor. It wasn't enough to rely only on luck, though admittedly that played a part. I had noticed Frank still had around his neck the sacred red string from the lama at Tengboche that the Sherpas had given him during the blessing ceremony at Everest base camp before going into the Icefall.
We agreed to the plan, then a short time later Miura and Maeda were back in the big tent saying they had decided they would go with Frank and Steve, and also stay over in camp 2. Just as they had opted to turn back with Frank on the first summit attempt, we suspected their motivations this time were based on their wish to help Frank get to the top.
So it would be just Dick and me on the first attempt. We left the tent, Miura and Maeda returning to their shelter, me to the small tent I had been sharing with Bonington. I fell asleep to the sound of spindrift spattering the tent. When I awoke I checked my watch: a ten-hour sleep. I recalled my dream, and thought how for me the expedition had just turned a corner, as my dreams had changed from sex to food. One thing about mountaineering, it does order your priorities.
I also noticed my tent had nearly collapsed. I zipped open the entrance, and instead of sky and mountain all I saw was an amorphous gray wall. I was buried in snow, with no shovel to dig out.
“Anybody awake? Can you hear me?”
In a moment Frank was over digging me out. When finally I could peer out I saw the weather wasn't nearly as bad as my burial suggested; in fact the clouds were thinning and the wind had died. After “breakfast” (it was 1:00 in the afternoon) we made the decision. Dick and I would leave in a couple of hours, carrying some of Frank's gear to camp 2 en route on our summit effort. The others would wait a few more hours after we left in the hopes that Bonington would arrive with another load of food. We were now so short there was only enough for two meals, and we knew that even with more provisions up here our food supply back at the plane was so low that this was most likely our final chance.
It was 4:00 in the afternoon when Dick and I got away. We realized that for the last half of our climb we would be in the coldest part of the twenty-four-hour cycle, but since this calm weather could be brief, we had to take advantage of it while it lasted.
For the first several hours we were in sun and quite comfortable. We made good time back to the site of camp 2, and stopped to unload Frank's gear. Then the sun moved in its sidewise crawl behind Vinson and we entered shadow. There was no wind, but for some reason it was far colder than anything we had yet experienced. We didn't have a thermometer with us, but certainly it was 40 below and probably colder. We climbed slowly but very steadily. At one point, after we had been moving for six hours without stop, Dick motioned he wanted to rest. He pulled his water bottle from his pack, and even though he had it encased in an insulated cover it was frozen solid. My candy bar was frozen too, and biting on it was like chomping down on a bar of steel.
We had stopped for perhaps a minute when I realized we were quickly losing body heat.
“My toes are starting to go on me,” Dick said, “and my fingers, too. Lord, but it's a cold mother.”
We were doing a little war dance, walking in circles stamping our feet and swinging our arms.
Then Dick got poetic:
“’Talk of your cold/through the parka's fold/it stabbed like a driven nail.’”
“Dan McGrew?”
“No, Sam McGee. You know, I always enjoyed reading it, but living it is something else.”
“I think I’m getting more worn out from this rest than from climbing,” I said. “Let's get moving.”
As we continued upward, we stomped our feet with each step to force blood to our toes. We had constantly to switch our ice axes from hand to hand as the steel conducted cold through our double-layer mittens. My goggles were beginning to ice again, and I made the mistake of pushing them up on my forehead. When I brought them down again they had cooled so quickly away from the heat of my face that the plastic lens had buckled and they were now useless. As we were still in shadow, and there was no wind, I decided to go without them, although that meant with no covering I had to be careful to keep my face mask hitched over my nose. Without protection, it would have frozen in minutes.
I had an idea that we could avoid the technical rock “picket fence” section where I had turned around on my attempt with Bonington by traversing further around the backside of the summit pyramid, then climbing up. Doing this, we also climbed into a very welcome stretch of sunlight. It was still brutally cold, but our progress was steady and soon we were climbing a steepening slope that led to the ridge just below the final summit rise. Dick was behind me, following my footsteps. We were unroped, as there was no way in this cold to stop and make the belays that would have justified using a rope.
Although he didn't say anything, Dick grew apprehensive; a slip here could be big trouble. Even if you only sprained an ankle, in these temperatures you could die before anyone could get back to help.
Dick said to himself, Remember what Marian told you, “Never let your guard down, remember how much you have to come home to, I love you.” So place your footsteps carefully, keep in balance, don't make any foolish mistakes.
Dick was incredible. With only a couple of years of any real climbing experience, here he was scaling unroped a steep slope in the heart of Antarctica. It was almost midnight; we had been climbing with only two brief stops for nearly eight hours. And at fifty-three, Dick showed no sign of fatigue.
We made it up the steep slope, then across the short ridge connecting the final summit rise. Dick was about forty feet behind me. Ahead I could see the top of a ski pole sticking above the slope. It was maybe thirty feet away. I knew that the previous party who had climbed the mountain (a German, a Russian, and an American from a scientific party who made the second ascent in 1979) had left a ski pole buried on the top, but I was surprised to see it still there. I made the last few steps to the ridge crest: there was the summit, an easy ten steps away. Dick was a few feet below me, still unable to see the pole.
“Dick, you've got maybe thirty feet before you're standing on the highest point on the coldest continent.”
“Rick, are you pulling my leg?”
“No, Dick, we've got it!”
Dick crested the ridge, and arm-in-arm we marched the last steps to the top. Then we bear-hugged. It was a good, solid, long-lasting hug, and I wasn't sure whether it was for joy or because we were freezing to death. I decided it must be joy because I had tears in my eyes. That presented a new problem when the tears quickly froze and glued my eyelashes together.
“’When our eyes we'd close/then the lashes froze/’til sometimes we couldn't see.’”
“Dan McGrew?” I asked.
“Still Sam McGee.”
The sky was faultless, there was no wind, and we commanded a view down the backbone of the Ellsworth Range, across the ice cap that stretched like a great frozen plain uninterrupted for the 700 miles between us and the South Pole.
“Let me take your picture,” I said.
Dick posed on top with a Snowbird banner while I tried to take the shot. My eyelashes were so frozen that I had trouble seeing through the camera, so I had to yank a few out before I could get the shot. Then I ran out of film. I pulled out one of those small black film containers but the plastic was steel-hard and the cap wouldn't come off. I set it on a rock and beat it open with my ice axe.
With the camera reloaded I gave it to Dick to get a picture of me. He removed his bulky mittens and exposed his bare hands; by mistake he had opted to start out without glove liners and it soon became too cold to try to get them out of his pack. It was another mistake when he grabbed my camera, for instantly his skin stuck to the metal and we had to carefully peel his hand away to keep from leaving some of it behind.
“Where the careless feel/of a bit of steel/burns like a red hot spit.”
“Sam McGee?” I asked.
“No, Blasphemous Bill.”
Below, the huge Nimitz Glacier inched implacably over an underlying shelf that split the deep ice cover into hundreds of parallel crevasses. We gazed over the expanse, and again we had the impression of the ice cap as frozen ocean, the mountains as otherworldly islands, and we as voyagers in an alien icescape.
“What's that peak down the range there?” Dick asked. “That big one.”
“Must be Tyree,” I answered.
“Gosh, it looks higher than this one.”
I gazed downrange and could see that while Tyree wasn't necessarily higher than Vinson, it did certainly appear to be at least as high.
“I don't know,” I said. “The survey of these peaks was done a while back, and the National Science Foundation does admit it wasn't too accurate.”
“Can you imagine,” Dick said, “all the way down here, and we climb the wrong mountain.”
“Naw, this has got to be the highest peak,” I said.
We stared downrange for a few more minutes, trying to convince ourselves. Then I noticed we were both starting to shiver uncontrollably.
“Time to get the hell out of here,” I said.
Dick agreed. So it was, in the best tradition of mountaineering, having worked our asses off to get there, we were more than happy when it was time, as Dick put it, “to put this mother behind us.”
eanwhile Frank and the others had waited a few hours in camp 1, but with no sign of Bonington they went ahead and packed what food they had and started for camp 2. Frank made very good time, no doubt in part because Miura, despite the extra weight of his downhill skis on his pack, had insisted on taking part of Frank's load, as we had helped with the rest. If we considered Dick Bass a physical dynamo, then this self-effacing, handsome Japanese ski hero at age fifty was a superman, and Frank said he'd never forget his generosity. In fact, in months ahead Frank would constantly refer to Miura as having the single greatest character of any person he had ever met.
At the camp 2 site they erected their tents and crawled in their bags to wait for us. Frank was just waking up when he heard a faint squeak-squeak of approaching crampons.
“We'll know in just a second if they made it,” Frank said to Marts.
A few seconds later they heard it:
“Aah-eah-eaahhh!”
“They got it,” Frank said, his whisker-stubbled, frostbitten face breaking into a wide grin. “Goddamn, they got it.”
Frank was out of his tent to give Dick a big hug. Dick and I were by then very tired, having climbed for twelve hours straight, and we wasted no time playing musical sleeping bags, switching places with Marts and Frank as they dressed and then left, with Miura and Maeda, for their attempt. The weather appeared to be holding, and even better it was 5:00 in the morning, which meant they would be climbing in direct sunlight for most of the day.
It took nearly eight hours to reach the steep slope below the final summit rise, and by then Frank was exhausted to the point of losing motivation. He vomited twice, just minutes apart.
He thought, Please, Steve, tell me I’m going too slow, that I’m too sick. Tell me I’ve got to turn back.
Marts judged it would be a good idea to rope up for this next section. Still in direct sun, the temperature was now only about 20 below zero, warm enough to make it easier to accommodate the delay caused by rope handling. They divided into two rope teams—Marts with Frank, Miura with Maeda. They scaled the steep slope at an agonizingly slow pace, and Marts knew, having memorized the geography of the peak from a distance, that from there they only had a few hundred more feet to reach the top. But Frank was unaware of this. He was sure it would be another one of those mountains where you had to climb one rise after another to get to the true summit. He was also sure, if that were the case, he wouldn't be able to make it.
Marts figured the exposed climbing was now behind them so he had Frank untie from the rope and leave it at the top of the steep slope. What Marts didn't know was that Frank was now pushing himself to his limit, that he felt like a drunkard in a world divorced from reality. Marts pulled ahead until the distance between the two men was 300 feet; Miura and Maeda were another 300 or so feet behind Frank. Ahead Frank saw Marts reach a ridge crest with nothing behind it but blue sky.
“Where's the top?” Frank called.
“Over there.” Then Marts disappeared. Frank was certain that by “over there” he had meant, “Over several more humps.”
Frank told himself, I can't make it much further.
Then he threw up again.
He recovered and convinced himself he could make it to the ridge crest, anyway. It was now only thirty steps higher. He started counting them … four, five, six. He made ten feet, then twenty. He made another step and was just a foot short of the crest when suddenly his foot skidded from under him. He shifted weight and like a shot the other foot popped out.
My God, I’m starting to fall.
In an instant he began picking up speed. He fumbled for his ice axe, trying to remember how to stop himself. Fifty feet, seventy-five feet … he was going faster, faster … one hundred feet down … the slope steepened below, then it seemed to drop off, down toward the basin to only God knew where.
Get the ice axe, get the ice axe, where is it? Where's that damn thing… ?
It was gone, out of his hands. He had dropped it.
There, below him, some rocks were sticking out.
The slope started to lay back. Frank slowed, then grabbed for a rock. It popped from his hands. He grabbed another. It started to pull through his mittens—then it held. He stopped.
Panting, he looked up. He had gone maybe 200 feet. He could see Marts’ face peering down from the ridge crest.
“What happened?” Marts called.
“Never mind what happened, did you get it on film?”
Marts had missed seeing it, much less filming it, and disappointed he again didn't have his high-action footage, Frank steeled himself to the task he knew he had to face, and slowly started climbing back toward Marts, picking up his ice axe on the way.
Once again he wondered how far he could get.
He thought, I dare not slip again because this is the last bit of energy I’ve got.
He threw up again.
He recovered, and thought, And if the summit is still a distance away—I’ll never make it.
He had three more steps to reach Marts and the top of the ridge crest when he looked over and saw the tip of the ski pole sticking up.
“What's that?”
“The top.”
“You mean I’m going to make it?”
Suddenly the fatigue left his body and he quickly made the last steps to the ski pole. Then, with one leg forward on the summit he pounded his ice axe into the slope once, twice, three times, venting all the frustration, the anxiety, the physical pain it had taken to get where he was. Then he held his ice axe outward in the snow, like a sword planted at a rakish angle away from him, so he looked like Washington crossing the Delaware.
He gazed across the white pa
norama, feeling different than he had on the tops of the other peaks he had achieved. This one was really special, truly unique. He thought how his team was only the third that had ever stood in this rarefied place, and the first to have done so completely with private financing and organization, without military equipment and support personnel.
That last point made Frank feel better than anything. He knew the main reason they had achieved success was because of his effort. If there was a flesh and blood example of how his modus operandi of tenacity and unrelenting hard work could pay off, then standing there on the highest real estate in Antarctica was it.
Frank knew that if you considered the whole project, climbing Vinson was in many ways every bit the achievement of getting to the top of Everest. They had missed the Big E, all right, but by God they had pulled off Antarctica. It might have taken fifteen days—over twice as long as they had anticipated—but they had hung in there and got it. And with Kosciusko in Australia a sure bet, what the hell, six out of seven wasn't too bad in anybody's book.
Especially for somebody who two years before hadn't even been able to hike to the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii without falling and bloodying his nose.
Dick Bass had often called Yuichiro Miura a modern-day samurai. “Those old samurai used to train themselves to the highest proficiency with weapons, and develop their courage to the ultimate degree. Miura's doing the same thing on skis, facing extreme danger, even death, unflinchingly.”
We had all seen Miura's movie The Man Who Skied Down Everest, where he showed that skill and bravery skiing down the Lhotse Face with a parachute to brake his descent. Even with the chute, he had hit speeds close to one hundred miles an hour, and when he finally lost control he rolled, tumbled, and slid for several hundred yards before coming to a stop just above the bergshrund at the bottom of the face. Going into that crevasse definitely would have killed him.
That was in 1970, and since then Miura had been working on skiing down the flanks of the other highest peaks on each continent, and now that he was positioned to knock off Vinson, he would have only Elbrus and Aconcagua left on his list. (He still wouldn't be the first to climb the Seven Summits, however, as he had never actually gone to the summit of Everest.)
Seven Summits Page 34
