Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  For a further two hours we made our slow plod up the spur and into the valley where a boulder-strewn path snaked along the northern side of the milky stream. The yaks picked up speed once we started to climb, and they soon overtook us. The yak herders followed them with astonishing ease, sure-footed and fast in their plastic shoes and old canvas army boots, even when crossing treacherous ice patches. They were endlessly singing and whistling, finding spare breath in their lungs where we had none.

  With an hour of daylight remaining, we established camp on a small cliff above the river, beneath a slope which showed signs of massive instability. It was our first attempt at putting up the Mountain Quasar tents, and Kees and I had to enlist Al’s help to work out which poles went where.

  We ate together in a makeshift cook tent and then crashed out exhausted by 8 p.m. As I tried to get to sleep, boulders popped out of the nearby cliff and crashed down into the river with horrendous bangs and splashes. A horrific thought occurred to me: Kees and I were in the most vulnerable of the tent positions – just a couple of metres from the cliff edge, which was obviously in the process of falling to pieces. If our section of cliff suddenly gave way, we would be dumped twenty metres down into the river in the midst of hundreds of tons of rock.

  With every new stonefall my heart leapt and my breathing rate increased. For an hour or more I lay in a state of terror and then fell into an uneasy sleep, filled with dreams of falling and the rumble of landslides.

  I am sure that at sea level I would scarcely have thought about the risk; or would have reduced it to a logical assessment based on the knowledge of how many millions of years that piece of cliff had been in position. But, here at 5,8oo metres, my brain seemed more prone to fear and paranoia – another of the insidious effects of altitude.

  Kees had his own problems. For the last three or four days he had been developing a raging sore throat which had now evolved into a racking cough. The nights were particularly bad.

  ‘You’d better see Sundeep about that throat, Kees.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll worry him about it yet,’ he replied, then collapsed in another coughing fit.

  Typical Kees. He’d have to be in the final stages of acute mountain sickness before he would voluntarily seek a doctor’s help. In the end I bullied him into seeing the doc, but most of Sundeep’s medicines had gone missing with the barrel that vanished en route from London to Kathmandu. Sundeep could only offer cough sweets and lozenges – or antibiotics. Kees decided to see how the condition developed and continued to cough through the nights.

  The weather deteriorated the next morning, with grey clouds threatening from the west. The wind was bitter, forcing us to put on every thermal layer beneath the windproof Gore-tex clothing. I protected my face with a scarf and a silk balaclava, preserving precious warmth by breathing into the woollen fabric of the scarf. Occasional snow flurries whipped down the valley as we rounded a rocky pass, crossed the small glacial river and began the trek up the East Rongbuk glacier.

  Conversation tailed off as we began to pick our way up through the dirty mounds of ice. We were all struggling to force enough air into our lungs to cope with the erratic trail. The path was inconsistent, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, and defying any attempt to get into a rhythm. Splashes of red blood marked the snow at regular intervals, for many of the yaks had cut their feet on the sharp terrain.

  I felt exhausted and irritable after the restless night, and found that the muscles in my legs were devoid of power. Every time the path began to climb, my pace slowed to a crawl, with impatient yaks and their herders shouting behind to get past. The rucksack, which had felt fairly light back at base camp, now pulled down on my shoulders as if it were loaded with ballast.

  I wanted to get a film sequence of the team climbing up the East Rongbuk glacier – and ideally in bad weather conditions. For obvious reasons, the tendency with mountain films is to shoot predominantly in good weather conditions when the light is strong and the risk of damaging equipment is at a minimum. Melting snow and spindrift can penetrate even the best-protected film camera with disastrous results. But a large proportion of Himalayan climbing is carried out in conditions which are anything but good. I wanted to capture that, to avoid going back with a film that made it all look too ‘nice’.

  But as the morning went on, my energy was gradually seeping away. To film, we would have to open the packs and assemble all the equipment and that meant fifteen to twenty minutes standing still in the freezing conditions with fingers and toes going numb and the rest of the team waiting for us. The prospect of the physical effort of shooting the seven or eight shots was a depressing one. With my brain and body running well below their normal levels, raising any enthusiasm at all was extremely difficult.

  The more I thought about it, the more attractive it became to forget about the filming for the moment and just concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other and completing the day stage. That was all the other team members had to do, wasn’t it? I found myself experiencing, for the first time in ten years of filming expeditions, an irrational anger at the enormity of the task we were facing. How could anyone expect us to shoot a film on Everest? The day-to-day realities of climbing are hard enough. But to film as well, and carry all the film equipment?

  I was swearing and cursing under my breath, getting myself into a real state at the injustice of it all and feeling distinctly sorry for myself. What the hell was I doing here? All this pain for a few television pictures? Shit, we could shoot this sequence and it could easily never appear in the final cut. All that work for nothing. What could be more pointless?

  I was not having a good day and my physical strength was fading fast. The thought that we would have to do this trek up the East Rongbuk at least twice more before the end of the expedition only added to my malaise. I seriously doubted now that I would have the strength.

  Two hours later, we paused by a frozen melt water lake to drink from our bottles. I had filled mine with sweet black tea back at the camp and, having wrapped the bottle inside my sleeping bag in the pack, the liquid still retained a hint of warmth. The effect of the tea was immediate, diffusing a warm glow through my body. I was like a frozen cartoon character who turns from blue to pink in a matter of seconds.

  With the liquid came an almost instantaneous change of mood. The anger melted away and was replaced by a sense of shame that I could have lapsed into such a negative frame of mind.

  What was going on? With a shock, I realised. I had let myself become dehydrated during the first hours of the day and lost the critical balance of fluids in my body. The depression and anger had been the result. It was the first time I had experienced such a mood swing from dehydration but I had no doubt that water loss was the cause. Why else, after half a litre of tea, would my state of mind have swung back so dramatically the other way?

  It was an exciting moment of discovery. Every piece of acquired knowledge was another step up the learning curve … and another step up the mountain. I drank the rest of the tea and carried on, determined that I would not let anger take me over again.

  Another hour of hard work brought us to a small flat platform where the Indian expedition had erected an intermediate camp. Our yak herders were having a break, crouched in the falling snow cooking tea. They greeted us with gap-toothed smiles as we struggled up the slope, cracking jokes between themselves and coughing loudly in the smoke. The smell of burning wood and cheap Chinese cigarettes filled the air.

  Neat piles of plastic expedition boxes were stacked against the green Indian army tent, each one bearing the stencil ‘Indo-Tibetan border police’. Large sacks of yak fodder were dumped alongside, guarded by a ferocious-looking dog. It would have been good to rest and eat here but we had no means to cook and so continued down a steep incline, across a frozen river and up on to the next feature of the East Rongbuk, the straight three-kilometre ridge of moraine which would lead to our next camp.

  The depressing rubble-strewn hilloc
ks of the lower glacier were now replaced with a vision of extraordinary beauty. To our left, were the pinnacles described by Mallory as the ‘fairy kingdom’, the sail-shaped towers of ice which sprout miraculously from the glacier like the sawtooth scales on a dragon’s back. Shaped by the wind, the pinnacles range in colour from purest white to deepest blue.

  This was a place where we had to film.

  Ned was carrying the Aaton, I had the DAT and the microphone, and Kippa Sherpa was carrying the tripod, the heaviest and most awkward load. On the crest of the ridge, we unloaded the equipment, taking great care to shield the camera from the blowing snow. For the next hour we filmed a series of shots with the climbers and the caravan of yaks framed against the highly visual backdrop of the ice towers. The climbers were happy to comply with our requests to pause while we got into positions ahead of them, it gave them an extra rest. Stopping a line of yaks, however, is impossible once they are on the move, but we got whatever shots we could as stragglers came up behind the group.

  Then, with the snowfall thickening, and the wind rising, we hastily packed the film gear away and continued up the moraine ‘highway’. The ice pinnacles had all but disappeared in the white-out, becoming a series of half seen ghostly shapes. Our filming had been just at the right time, with the weather bad enough to ‘read’ on film, but the pinnacles still visible. Ned was pleased, and so was I.

  We reached the next camp at about 4 in the afternoon after seven hours on the move. Our average progress, I calculated, was just one kilometre per hour at this altitude, compared to the usual two or three kilometres an hour which might be expected by a fit group on mixed terrain at sea level. We kicked clear platforms and erected the tents as a fresh flurry of freezing snowfall began, backed by a consistent northerly wind running directly off the ice. Our fingers froze in seconds when we took off the thick overmitts to thread the fiddly tent-poles into their sleeves.

  This second intermediate camp occupied a spectacular location at the junction of the East Rongbuk and Beifeng glaciers. Everest was obscured behind the massive flank of Changtse, but other views now opened up towards the outlying peaks of Changzheng 6,977 metres, and Lixin 7,113 metres.

  Our water supply was from a frozen glacial pond, held fast between two crumbling ice pinnacles. While Kees got the gas cooker going, I climbed down the short snow step to fill the water bottles and the biggest of our saucepans. Setting up a mess tent was not practical here so each tent was responsible for its own food and drink.

  A hole had been smashed through the six-inch-thick ice to gain access to the unfrozen water beneath. In the couple of minutes since the last visitor filled his pans, a layer of fresh ice had already formed, thick enough to need a blow from my ice-axe to smash it. I managed to get my gloves wet in the process of collecting the water and by the time I got back to the tent, the fabric had frozen as hard as iron. I had to prise my fingers apart with my other hand to remove them from the saucepan handle.

  We put on the water for tea, and talked lazily through the day’s filming for half an hour while we waited for the pot to boil. Simon had warned us to boil the water well here as the source was almost certainly polluted. Clearing the platform of snow for our tent had backed his theory up; the ground at this camp was littered with toilet paper and human waste from previous expeditions.

  Kees’s cough had worsened in the past twenty-four hours and my own throat was now feeling none too good. The first of a string of throat infections was setting in and swallowing food was becoming difficult. Neither of us felt like eating but we forced down a prepacked meal of bacon and beans and then collapsed into sleep. As had been the pattern of previous days, I woke several times to use the pee bottle, passing more than a litre of fluid. Kees, better groomed in matters of social etiquette perhaps, chose to exit into the freezing night air to answer his own calls of nature.

  The shouts of the herders gathering up their yaks woke us at first light.

  Leaving the second intermediate camp, we now entered the ‘trough’ – the final stage of the East Rongbuk trek which would lead us to advance base camp. The ‘trough’ – so called by the early expeditions of the 1920s, is a natural depression which sits between two parallel lines of ice pinnacles. Filled with moraine rubble, it is, compared to picking a way through the ice maze of the glacier itself, a relatively simple path which runs directly to the flat basin at the foot of the North Col. We climbed in silence through a murky white layer of cloud, oblivious to the views of Everest’s North Ridge which now lay above us.

  Now the altitude was really beginning to make itself felt. Not since an asthma attack as a child had I struggled to breathe as I did on that last day’s journey into advance base camp. The soreness in my throat had flared up overnight into an infection which was now getting hard to ignore. Each breath of super-dry air merely antagonised the inflamed tissue and a sharp digging pain began to throb away like a pin being pushed in and out a few inches behind my tonsils. Pausing to spit out some bloody mucus which had oozed from my throat, I reflected that this was probably the least enjoyable day’s trekking I had ever known.

  I resolved to try and get medical attention for my throat once we got to the camp, knowing that this was just the early stages of what could get a lot more serious … and even prevent me going higher. I had read an account of the 1924 British expedition in which Howard Somervell (who had climbed over 28,000 feet in his attempt on the summit) found himself choking to death after a piece of infected flesh came loose and blocked his windpipe. Somervell wrote:

  I made one or two attempts to breathe but nothing happened. Finally, I pressed my chest with both hands, gave one last almighty push – and the obstruction came up. What a relief! Coughing up a little blood, I once more breathed really freely – more freely than I had done for some days.

  The ‘obstruction’ Somervell wrote of was the entire mucus lining of his larynx.

  We were now one thousand metres above base camp – higher than all but a handful of peaks outside of the Asian continent, including giants like Kilimanjaro and Mt. McKinley – yet we still hadn’t reached the foot of the mountain.

  The tents of advance base camp came into view just after 2 p.m.

  ‘Almost there,’ I told Kees. But the distance was deceptive. The tiny flecks of red and green canvas were much further away than they seemed; I had been deceived by the foreshortening effect of the thin air. We trudged on for another two hours before we made it, taking care to overtake Brian so we could film him coming into the camp which would be our home for the next two days.

  At 6,450 metres, camp three, or Advance Base Camp, makes base camp seem like a Caribbean resort. Squeezed into a narrow rocky strip of rubble between the dirty ice of the glacier and the decaying rock wall of Changtse’s South-East Face, it is not a location in which relaxation comes easily. The terrain is unrelentingly brutal; walking from one tent to another is an obstacle course of lurking crevasses and ankle-twisting rocks.

  Eating, sleeping, every human function, has to compete against the tidal wave of exhaustion and apathy that goes hand in hand with altitude. Every single action, whether it is tying a bootlace or summoning the energy to answer a call of nature, is carried out in slow motion – partly because the mind can’t bear the thought of doing anything anyway and partly because the body is operating on oxygen levels which are simply not enough to run the engine at full power.

  At the evening meal on our first night I stared miserably for nearly thirty minutes at a plateful of greasy packet noodles before I could finally summon the enthusiasm to try a mouthful. Try as I might, I couldn’t swallow it. Without saying a word, I walked out of the mess tent and spat the mouthful on to the glacier. Then I vomited the semi-digested remains of lunch on top of it and retired, shuddering with the cold, to the tent.

  The next morning, after a night plagued with nightmares and claustrophobia, I felt like I was coming round from the effects of a general anaesthetic. My brain felt like someone was trying to cleave it in
to two chunks with a blunt hacksaw and it took me over an hour to generate the will-power to get out of the sleeping bag and walk to the mess tent for some tea.

  Later in the afternoon Simon called us together for an announcement.

  ‘There’s a bit of bad news come up from base camp,’ he told us, pausing to catch his breath. ‘We just got a message to say that a couple of thieves broke into the equipment tent last night and got away with a kitbag.’

  ‘Whose was it?’

  ‘No way of telling until we get back down there.’

  The news was something to chew over in the long hours of tedium. Who had been the unlucky member of the expedition who had lost a bag? And what had been in it? On an expedition such as this, every piece of equipment has a specific purpose … whichever bag it was, it would almost certainly, contain items which, once lost, could affect someone’s chances of success. All our high-altitude clothing was down there, waiting to be brought up on the next run to ABC (Advance Base Camp) – if plastic boots or down suits had gone then there was little chance of a replacement being shipped out in time.

  ‘Who do you think did it?’ I asked

  ‘Yak herders,’ Al volunteered.

  Sad to tell, he was probably right. It was hard to see how anyone else could have been the culprits – base camp was seething with the temporary camps of the yak herders and the knowledge that our equipment tent was virtually unprotected must have made it a tempting target. Having stolen the bag, the booty could easily be stashed in one of the thousands of crevices and small caves which surround the Rongbuk base.

  Concerned with this lapse of security, Simon descended to base camp one day early. The rest of us sat it out for forty-eight hours at advance base, listlessly letting our bodies acclimatise to the paucity of oxygen and feeling pretty rough. Only Sundeep the doctor could generate a sense of wonder in the mysterious process of acclimatisation taking place silently within us.