Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  He died in Rob Hall’s arms. Two days later, a devastated Hall lowered the body of his climbing partner and friend into a crevasse on the slopes of Dhaulagiri, using their best-loved climbing rope for the task. He wrote the following words in a later obituary:

  In his guiding career, which spanned twenty years, he enjoyed an unbroken safety record of which he was rightfully proud. Arguably his greatest guiding achievement was taking clients to the summit of Mount Everest. He believed that the whole Everest scene had become far too elite and he gained enormous satisfaction in being able to make this goal attainable for climbers of more modest skill.

  Hall finished the obituary with this moving sentiment: ‘Some people come into your life and leave footprints across your heart – and they never go away.’

  Although the untimely death of Gary Ball affected Rob Hall deeply on a personal level, his determination to continue the commercial venture they had founded together never wavered. The 1994 brochure of Adventure Consultants was as full and as ambitious as ever, and ‘100% success on Everest!’ was the headline on one of their advertisements in the mountaineering press.

  On 9 May that year Rob Hall and Ed Viesturs – a legendary American high altitude climber – led a team of eleven expedition members to the summit; they broke several records in the process, becoming the first Everest expedition to get every member to the top and back down again in one piece. At the same time, Rob Hall became the first westerner to have reached the summit four times.

  As Adventure Consultants’ own literature concluded: ‘This now brings the Adventure Consultants Everest summit tally during our last four expeditions to 39 climbers!’

  In 1995, however, the successful pattern of the first few years was finally broken. The Adventure Consultants expedition of that year ground to a halt just a few hours from the summit. In conditions of deep snow, and with an exhausted team, Rob Hall decided to turn his expedition around. His decision was a wise one based on his intimate knowledge of the peak, and the dangers of being on the summit too late; but it must have rankled nonetheless, particularly with that ‘100% success on Everest’ advertisement still fresh in the minds of his commercial rivals.

  Now, in the pre-monsoon season of 1996, Adventure Consultants was back again, and so was the British company Himalayan Kingdoms, based in Sheffield, the rival which had stolen much of Rob Hall’s thunder with its successful expedition of 1993. This time Himalayan Kingdoms would tackle Everest from the northern side – a much longer and more technically demanding route. Their choice of the northern side was made despite the fact that they had tried this route in 1994, and failed to get anyone to the summit.

  Adventure Consultants, sticking to what they knew, would once again tackle the ‘standard’ tried and tested route from the south. Hall attacked the preparation with his customary thoroughness as Caroline Mackenzie revealed. ‘When it came to the planning there was no complacency at all,’ she told me. ‘Rob was constantly thinking around what could go wrong – even down to the tiniest of details.’

  Alongside them on the southern side was another commercial expedition, the Mountain Madness team led by the flamboyant American climber Scott Fischer, who – at forty – was aiming to break into the potentially lucrative Everest market.

  Fischer had the type of physique and craggy good looks normally only found in Hollywood casting agencies. In many ways he was the all-round American hero, a top climbing athlete consumed with the desire to be the best … and to be recognised as such. Fischer had ambition oozing out of his fingertips right from the time he first began pushing himself on the rock-faces of Wyoming at the age of fifteen.

  Fischer wore his blonde hair tied back in a pony-tail. Clean-shaven, with a jawline which might have been carved out of rock, he was a charismatic leader and raconteur … a larger-than-life character when compared to the bearded, more studious persona of Rob Hall.

  ‘Scott led his team in a very different way to Rob Hall,’ a member of a rival team told me, ‘He was capable of being quite histrionic, over the top. He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but there was no doubting he could inspire his team.’

  Despite the fact that this was Fischer’s first attempt to lead a commercial team on Everest, there was no question of his credentials for the task. Like Rob Hall, he was an elite high-altitude climber. He had summitted K2 in 1992, and Everest without the use of supplementary oxygen in 1994.

  Mountain Madness was founded in 1984 but it took more than ten years before Fischer led his first successful commercial expedition to an 8,000-metre peak. He chose Broad Peak in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan, and used the publicity surrounding the 1995 expedition to launch the prospectus for Everest the following year.

  The Everest asking price was $65,000 and Fischer had two pieces of luck in the run-up to the expedition’s departure. The first was to procure the services as guide of Anatoli Boukreev, indisputably one of the finest high-altitude mountaineers in the world. Boukreev was from Korkino, a small mining town in what is now the Russian Federation, just eighty kilometres from the northern border of Kazakhstan. It was in the nearby Urals that he first found his love of the mountains. Having graduated in physics, Boukreev dodged the draft for the Afghan war and found himself a place teaching cross-country skiing and climbing in the Army Sports Club in Almaty. Boukreev excelled at altitude on the 7,000-metre peaks of his homeland, but it wasn’t until 1989 that he was permitted to travel to Nepal where bigger and more glamorous objectives awaited.

  Scott Fischer’s second piece of luck was to sign up, as one of eight paying clients, Sandy Hill Pittman, a high-profile figure on the New York social circuit. Pittman, armed with a formidable array of communications equipment from the US television channel NBC, would be filing reports from the mountain and posting Internet progress updates on a special Website. Fischer knew that getting Pittman (who had tried Everest three times before) to the summit would be a massive publicity coup for Mountain Madness and would put him in the forefront of Himalayan guiding.

  Himalayan Kingdoms also had a celebrity on board, the fifty-nine-year-old British actor Brian Blessed, another big personality in every sense. Blessed’s fascination – some called it an obsession – for Everest had attracted the attention of ITN Productions in London. And that was why, as the season cranked into gear on the lower slopes of the mountain, I found myself looking up at Everest and wondering how on earth I was going to make a film on a mountain I had never even dreamed I would set foot.

  The offer to go to Tibet had come out of the blue in a telephone call I received on 4 January.

  2

  ‘Is that Matt? This is Alison at ITN Productions. I have Julian Ware for you …’

  My heart missed a beat. I needed a job, badly. A pile of red ‘final demands’ was sitting next to the phone and it wasn’t long before, that we had been so far behind on our mortgage that the company had tried to repossess the house.

  ‘Ah, Matt. There you are. Had a good Christmas?’

  Seasonal pleasantries were exchanged.

  ‘Thing is, I’ve got Channel 4 interested in a film featuring Brian Blessed’s new Everest expedition. Its a ten-week shoot, starts March 31st, just wondered if you might be interested?’

  The question was delivered as a casual, throw-away line … with no more urgency than if it were an invitation to a dinner party.

  ‘Which route?’

  There was the rustling of papers at Julian’s end of the telephone.

  ‘The North Face. From Tibet,’ he replied.

  The North Face. Those words set off a spontaneous chemical reaction within me. Travelling at a mind-warping 2,250 miles an hour, a series of electrical impulses raced like hyperactive greyhounds through my brain. Inches in front of them ran a dummy hare with ‘responsibility’ daubed on its backside in red paint. Thirty-five-year-old married men with three children have to think about these things. Carefully.

  But I couldn’t play for time; Julian Ware is not a man to keep waiting. Two mi
lliseconds, three milliseconds … four …

  The greyhounds fell on the dummy hare with manic howls, ripping it gleefully to pieces with drooling fangs.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I’ll set up a meeting with Brian.’

  The call was terminated with a gentle click. I found myself breathing heavily.

  On the floor, lying prettily amongst the twists of wrapping paper and styrofoam box inserts of Christmas, my wife Fiona was playing the high velocity flick game ‘pro-action football’ with Gregory, who was then five. At the television, Alistair, seven, was viciously annihilating a 16-bit rodent epidemic in the video game ‘Krusty’s super fun house’ while Thomas, nine, lay on the sofa, trying to pretend he was reading the Beano when really it was Viz.

  ‘I think I’ve just been offered a job.’

  Fiona lined up a chancy, probing shot, from just outside the penalty box, her index finger hovering like a hunting kestrel above the tiny player.

  ‘Oh yes.’ She didn’t look up. The finger adjusted itself by fractions of a millimetre.

  ‘It’s Everest. Ten weeks.’

  The finger delivered its lightning blow, rocketing the pea-sized ball into the top of the net.

  ‘Take a good look at your daddy, boys, he may not be around for much longer.’

  The boys ignored her. Gregory lined up his players for a centre kick.

  ‘I’m serious. That was Julian Ware.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘He’s got Channel 4 interested in Brian Blessed going back for another try.’

  ‘It won’t happen.’ Fiona swiftly blocked Gregory’s counter attack. ‘If you think anyone in their right mind is going to commission it, you’re wrong. He’s too fat. They’ve already made a film about him trying to climb that stupid mountain and I fell asleep if you remember. Forget it.’

  There is no creature on God’s earth as deeply cynical as the wife of a freelance television director. It goes with the job. If I came home from a trip to the Vatican and told Fiona that the Pope himself had given me a guarantee written in his own blood that he would definitely be commissioning my next documentary idea, her answer would be ‘Uh-huh’.

  And why is that? Eleven years ago she was a fresh-faced girl of twenty-three, tripping up the aisle of a Sussex village church with flowers in her hair. She trusted the world and its people. And me. Perhaps she saw my chosen career in television as a noble one; a mission to bring colour, entertainment, and light into people’s homes. To be married to a television director … surely that was something to be proud of?

  Oh, it was all so wonderful.

  Now she knows the truth. And its not pretty. Television is a dirty business. To survive in it, you have to be part weasel, part python, and part wolf. To succeed in it, you have to be 99.9% great white shark. The capacity for barefaced lying also comes in handy, particularly if you are freelance.

  The weaselling part is to get the programme proposal in front of the reluctant commissioning editor. He has a warehouse full of proposals just like yours and no time to read any of them. By stealth, by bribery, by slithering through air conditioning shafts, you get your proposal on to his desk and pray. For the telephone to ring.

  It does. Oh, the tears of gratitude that greet that call. The surging upswell of joy, the euphoric, dizzy sensation that the world IS a happy place after all.

  The commissioning editor is ‘interested’.

  That’s when you become the python. You have the commissioning editor in your coils. Squeeze too hard and they pop out and escape. Relax your grip for a moment and they get interested in someone else’s idea.

  The months drag by, and the meetings continue. Co-production partners are sought in the far-flung corners of the globe. Camera operators are lured out of their Thameside mansions for luxurious lunches at Greek Street eateries. The momentum grows. The telephone lines are glowing red-hot. You start to use your John Lewis store card again.

  Then the world collapses. The commissioning editor calls. He’s ‘going off’ the idea.

  That is when you become the wolf. You snarl, you rally the pack, you bare the fangs and fight. Through cunning, through fast-talking, through begging, whining, wheadling, pleading, cursing, bullying, bullshitting, exaggerating, and, in the end, through sheer bloody-minded stubborn refusal to give up, you force the commissioning editor to change his mind.

  Suddenly he can see it all. It was the greatest proposal he’d ever seen. It is going to be a compelling documentary. Hell … people might even watch it, for Christ’s sake. He does want to commission it after all.

  Fireworks. Champagne. You buy yourself a new laptop.

  There is a god. You find yourself out there, somewhere in the world, standing next to a film camera loaded with four hundred feet of celluloid. You say ‘turnover’. The cameraman presses a switch. A motor turns, and a tiny rectangle of light passes through a lens and exposes a frame of film that is smaller than a postage stamp for precisely one-fiftieth of a second. The first of the millions of frames that will make your programme.

  That’s when you wonder if there is any crazier business on the planet. That’s when you realise you love it.

  Fiona finished off the game of pro-action football with a flourish. Mummy, 3 – gutted infant Gregory, 0.

  I was still staring, in shock, at the telephone. ‘This is it. This is the big one. I can feel it in my bones. I’m going to Everest.’

  Fiona fixed me with her big brown eyes. ‘I’m going to Waitrose. What do you want for supper?’

  *

  Two days later I took the central line to Chancery Lane and walked down the Gray’s Inn Road to the Headquarters of ITN. Headquarters is definitely the right word, we are not talking about mere offices here. The awesome eight-storey atrium alone could cheerfully swallow up the combined floorspace of every other production company I have ever worked for.

  A glass-walled lift whooshed me at high speed to the second floor, where the urbane Julian Ware served filter coffee from an elegant porcelain pot and briefed me on the project.

  The proposed film would be a one-hour documentary for Channel 4, to be shown as part of the ‘Encounters’ series. Running through the budget, and the obvious difficulties the shoot would pose, we both agreed that a lightweight production team was the only option. The film would have to be shot with myself as director and no more than two camera operators, one of whom would have to possess the specialist skills to shoot on the summit if the expedition were successful. There was precious little time to prepare. The expedition was due to leave for Kathmandu in less than three months, and the film had still not received a definite go-ahead from the broadcaster.

  We were moving on to the second plate of Danish pastries when, forty minutes late, Brian Blessed burst into the office with a thunderous roar, his beard bristling, his eyes backlit by some strange, demonic inner fire.

  ‘General Bruce’s ice-axe!’

  In his hand he waved an ancient, deeply stained, wooden stick, topped with a rusting spike. Brian gave it an adoring look.

  ‘I’ve just been given this by his family. Going to take it with me up the North Face! 1922 – you don’t realise what those people did … and General Bruce was one the greats!’

  Julian made the introductions. Brian was delighted. We had known each other for precisely ten seconds.

  ‘There you are! You see, Matt, we’re getting along famously already!’

  Brian was nervous, and so was I. As I was the proposed director of the film, it was essential for us both that we could work together. During my time as a production manager I had seen what happens when directors and their ‘stars’ fall out on location. Life is too short to make films with people you don’t like.

  Brian was dressed like an off duty farmer on his way for an evening pint. His sweatshirt was pock-marked with the missile hits of low-flying ducks (Brian has an impressive menagerie of semi-tame animals), and beneath a rugged set of thick pantaloons lurked a scuffed pair of leather boots of a s
tyle which can only be described as clodhoppers.

  “The vital thing, Matt, is to make sure you take a damn good hat with a string on it. If you take one without a string, that wind will whip down the Rongbuk glacier and you’ll lose it.’

  There was a long pause as I wrote in my notebook. ‘Hat with string.’

  Brian’s eccentricity is celebrated, and so is his love for Everest. He can name every member of every pre-war expedition to Everest, and recall their trials and tribulations with astonishing clarity. He knows the routes they tried, the altitudes they reached, the fates they suffered when (as it often did) Everest beat them back with tragic results.

  In 1990 after years of unpaid footwork filled with broken promises and setbacks which would surely have deterred a lesser man, Brian convinced the BBC, and the producer John Paul Davidson, to accompany him on a journey to the North Face of Everest. The result was ‘Galahad of Everest’, a ninety-minute film in which Brian’s passion for Everest, and in particular his obsession with the climber George Mallory, were given ample room to breathe.

  Dressed in the climbing clothes of the day, Brian retraced the route taken by the British expedition of 1921. Partly dramatic reconstruction, partly using archive footage and original diaries, ‘Galahad of Everest’ managed to evoke much of the spirit of that bygone era and addressed the mystery of Mallory and Irving’s disappearance near the summit … a tragedy which struck a nerve with climbers and the public in the 1920s and continues to do so to this day.

  But, fascinating though the historical perspective was, the real success of ‘Galahad of Everest’ was the opportunity to witness Brian in action on the mountain itself. Although the film was never intended to result in a serious bid for the summit, a freak spell of superb weather left the ‘window’ open for a foray up the North Ridge … and the chance really to experience what Mallory and Irving were up against.