Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  It wasn’t that the relationship itself was a bad one – far from it; in fact many of the good things in our relationship remained surprisingly intact. We had always been essentially happy together when we had been together, in fact in all the years we had never once raised our voices at each other in anger and somehow we still found the ability to laugh.

  But that didn’t alter a fundamental problem: after two or three days back with my family I invariably found myself pacing the floor wondering how the hell I was going to tell Fiona about the latest attack of itchy feet. It wasn’t that I was bored with being there, it was more a permanent dissatisfaction with myself – a feeling that I could be doing better in the films I was making, better in the scripts I was writing, in fact pushing myself a darn sight harder all round. Perhaps that was the driving force that pushed me out of the door?

  Whatever it was, Fiona was pretty fed up with it.

  So what to do? There was still a massive amount of affection, and love, between us and I didn’t want to throw that away. And I certainly didn’t want to alter the chemistry of what was basically an extremely happy family. But I had pushed Fiona to the point where living with me was a lot harder than living without me. The tension of never knowing when I was going to sling on my rucksack and go had turned her into a bag of nerves.

  I lay in the tent all afternoon, staring into space.

  That night, at the evening meal, I found myself in a quieter than usual mood.

  ‘You look a bit down,’ Roger said, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Thinking of home.’

  ‘Ah.’

  It needed no more explanation – every single one of us suffered from homesickness at one time or another and we all knew it was inescapable.

  ‘Better not to get letters from home,’ Brian said, ‘It’s too much to bear.’

  And in a way, he was right.

  *

  With so much time on our hands, the subject of how and when the team would be split was, not surprisingly, a well-worn topic of conversation. With nine climbers still in the running for a summit bid, splitting the group was a logistical necessity on two fronts: there were simply not enough tents available at the higher camps to support us all in one push – and a summit team of nine would be dangerously unwieldy. We would leave in two teams, three or four days apart.

  The split was not a difficult decision for Simon. As Kees, Al and myself were on board to film Brian, we would have to be in his summit team, as would Barney in his role as guide. That made us a self-defining team of five.

  The four-man team was Simon, Tore, Sundeep and Roger.

  But which team would go first? That was the question which obsessed us during this extended wait at base camp. We discussed the pros and cons endlessly while we waited for Simon’s decision. Going first was a psychological advantage mainly because it meant less time spent stagnating at base camp. We had reached a peak of fitness, a peak of acclimatisation, and our minds and bodies were poised on a hair-trigger ready for the attempt.

  Days spent at base camp were wasted days, depressing days, days when a virus picked up from a visiting team of trekkers could wipe out any chance of success. Then there were the mental pressures of the waiting period. Doubts multiplied inside us like bacteria, the corrosive fears building as each of us contemplated in our own way the known and unknown risks to come.

  We were all desperate to leave for the mountain.

  There were other factors which gave the first team a perceived advantage. The oxygen and food supplies were all in place at camps five and six and had been carefully calculated on a ‘man-day’ basis. What if the first group had a one- or two-day weather delay and were forced to use up those supplies which had been allocated to the second group? Simon had assured everyone that he would simply restock the camps if this happened but, given the huge task of portaging the heavy cylinders up to the high camps, there was always the nagging doubt whether the precious oxygen would be in the right place at the right time.

  Al pointed out another drawback for the second team if the first team were delayed. Tent space was extremely limited at camps five and six – just two mountain Quasars would be available, space for four, or five at a pinch. The second group could be on their way up, only to find that the descending climbers were unexpectedly occupying camp five, creating a bottleneck and thereby forcing the upcoming team to abort their attempt. Al had experienced this very scenario on his second Everest expedition. In fact, a logjam at camp five had wiped out his chances of the summit.

  A medical emergency or accident might also scupper the chances of the second group if it were forced into a rescue mission for members of the first. The odds seemed to be stacking up against the second team, but one factor above all others could wipe out every one of those advantages at a stroke: the weather.

  ‘It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference which team goes first or second.’ Al was, as ever, the voice of wisdom on this subject. ‘If the weather socks in then neither group will make the summit. The second team have got just as much chance of hitting the right weather window as the first. It’s down to luck.’

  The weather window. That precious, fragile, elusive moment of opportunity. That, more than oxygen, food and tent space, would decide who if any of us made it to the roof of the world.

  We needed that window but we also feared it. A weather window could just as easily be a weather trap. We had all marvelled at the awesome speed at which conditions can change on Everest. A clear blue day can and frequently does deteriorate into a savage blizzard in less than an hour. That window can slam shut as fast as it opens, and Everest’s five-lever deadlock flips into place to secure it.

  It was a humbling fact, the mountain’s ultimate trump card, and the reason why no one, no matter how brilliant a climber they are, can be totally sure of success. We could try our best to predict what conditions would be like for our summit attempt, but ultimately we would be in the hands of fate.

  The possibility of a second attempt for any of us was one that we hardly discussed. We were all aware that the recovery period following an unsuccessful climb to 8,000 metres would almost certainly push us beyond the ten-week period of the expedition. We accepted we would have one chance, and that was it.

  Finally Simon announced his decision, making a tour of the camp and telling each one of us individually in our tents (cynically, I interpreted this move was a tactical one to prevent potential protests if we were told en masse).

  Brian, Barney, Al, Kees and myself would go first, leaving in two days. Simon, Sundeep, Tore and Roger would follow on three days later. Inevitably the teams were dubbed the ‘A’ team, and the ‘B’ team.

  There were no dissenting voices but Tore, particularly, was frustrated to hear he would be spending more time at base camp. He, more than any of us perhaps, was getting increasingly depressed as each day of inactivity crawled by. Sundeep and Roger took the decision as well as they could, but they too found it hard to contemplate more days at base camp while the ‘A’ team were on the mountain.

  There was only the slightest hint, but it was there nevertheless, that Simon’s decision was partly a political one. Himalayan Kingdoms had a lot to gain in publicity terms if Brian reached the summit; his status as an actor would ensure widespread news and print coverage in addition to our film.

  Was that why Brian and our film crew had been given the prized first slot? To give us the first, and best, chance with the maximum resources in place? The question was never aired publicly, but most of us, particularly the ‘B’ team, believed it was a possibility.

  Brian was as sanguine and relaxed as ever. like Al, his temperament was perfectly tuned to the long waiting days at base camp. Unlike the rest of us, Brian did not allow himself to get frustrated, he accepted the inactivity for what it was – part of the whole process.

  ‘We’re climbing the mountain,’ he told me, ‘even when we’re sitting here. We’re getting strong, getting ready. A good day here is just as valuable as a goo
d day high up – it all helps. There’s no point in moving until we’re sure the conditions are right.’

  So saying, he would retire, the very model of calm, to the ‘Himalayan hotel’ dome tent for some classical music and a browse through a book. And it wasn’t just an act; Brian really was capable of relaxing in this situation. I greatly admired the strength of mind and maturity this revealed. Brian understood perfectly the importance of the ‘waiting game’. He could shrug off the pressure when the rest of us were buckling beneath it, perhaps a trick which he has developed from years of acting where the ability to control first-night nerves is paramount.

  Halfway through our waiting time at base camp a surprising rumour began to circulate that Richard, the Financial Times journalist, was coming back to join the expedition. It originated from the Indian team who were in daily radio contact with Kathmandu. In one of their communications they had received a message from Richard via the Indian embassy there to say he was intending to return.

  Simon sent back a strongly worded radio message indicating in blunt terms that in no circumstances should Richard seek to rejoin the expedition. Having one fewer member to account for had altered Simon’s logistics on the mountain. Put simply, mere was no food or oxygen now in place at me high camps for Richard, and it was too late to alter that. Simon’s message elicited no response.

  ‘Hi boys!’ Three days later, Richard sauntered into camp, having hitchhiked across the Tibetan plateau from Kathmandu.

  ‘I specifically sent a radio message to Kathmandu instructing you not to come back!’ Simon told him, frostily.

  ‘You’re not having your fucking tent back!’ Brian chipped in.

  It was hardly the friendliest of receptions.

  I had seen this ‘odd man out’ syndrome on other expeditions and now Richard was experiencing it in its bitchiest form. The chemistry of teams adjusts itself and changes in subtle ways once one of the number has gone. When that person tries to reintroduce himself unexpectedly, he invariably finds himself alienated and ‘frozen out’ – no matter how popular he had been in his earlier incarnation.

  Richard was barred from going any higher than advance base camp, but he decided to stick with the team to carry out his professional obligations to his newspaper. This impressive display of professionalism meant that he was one of the only journalists on hand to file reports when the storm swept in just days later.

  Knowing that we would be leaving imminently, I gave a small parcel of letters to Sundeep for safe keeping. As the weeks had passed, I had realised that we could take nothing for granted on our summit push. Something as simple as an avalanche could kill us just by chance. I had written a number of brief ‘goodbye’ letters which I now gave to Sundeep.

  ‘Could you post these for me if I don’t come back?’ I asked him.

  He looked down at the slender pile of letters in surprise.

  ‘Of course.’

  It may seem a morbid thing to have done, but I was actually happier leaving for our summit attempt knowing that those letters would reach the people I loved in the case that anything untoward happened. Not saying goodbye would be the hardest thing of all, I felt.

  ‘Hey, Matt,’ Sundeep called after me as I returned to my packing, ‘I sincerely hope I don’t have to post these!’

  ‘Me too.’

  Looking thoughtful, he returned to his tent to store the letters in a safe spot.

  The ‘B’ team waved us off from base camp on 8 May, after a cheesy photo session in which the ‘A’ and ‘B’ teams posed uncomfortably, separately, and together. I dislike team photographs and found myself superstitious about the event – I’m not sure exactly why; I also sensed that the rest of the team was reluctant. Perhaps a team photograph is another of those moments, like the flash of nerves I experienced when I saw our names on the climbing permit for the first time, when the vulnerability of the enterprise is suddenly vividly clear.

  Those names typed on the list, those confident rows of smiling faces captured in a photograph at base camp – how effortlessly the mountain can scratch them out. And how frequently it does. Team photographs often become obituary shots in the literature of Himalayan climbing, and not a single one of those smiling faces has the faintest knowledge of the fate that awaits him.

  Barney more than any of us hated the photographs. He wouldn’t even show his face, but put his sunglasses on the rim of his sun-hat and tipped it down so his eyes couldn’t be seen. At the time I thought his behaviour was prattish, but later I realised that he probably felt the same as I did, only more so.

  Al, too, was uncomfortable with the team shots. He has a collection of similar expedition photographs which are filled with the faces of the dead. But he stood to attention with the rest of us as two members of the Norwegian team took the group pictures.

  *

  Our third trek up the East Rongbuk was a very different experience to the first two, fired up by the adrenalin rush that this time it was for ‘real’. The sheer pleasure of being unleashed from the constraints of base camp seemed like a catapult shot: I almost felt as if I was walking at sea level, and my mind was clear and untroubled.

  After our familiarisation climb to 7,000 metres at the North Col, our bodies were now able to take these lower altitudes in their stride. Compared with the thinness of the air at the Col, the East Rongbuk, between 6,000 and 6,500 metres, now seemed to offer rich lungfuls of satisfying oxygen. One month earlier we had been gasping for breath here as we completed the sixteen-kilometre trek for the first time, taking three days to reach advance base camp. This time we would be a lot faster, reaching ABC in two days.

  Although there was no yak traffic on the glacier, there were other distractions. On the lower Rongbuk, we caught glimpses of shy Tibetan deer feeding on the tiny patches of vegetation. When we disturbed them, they ran for the safety of the higher ground, scaling the fragile scree slope so nimbly that not a pebble moved beneath their hoofs. On the East Rongbuk we saw no mammals, just a few hardy birds that had arrived with the warmer weather, pecking through the remains of yak fodder for seeds and chaff.

  We also saw the Tibetan snowcock, a duck-sized bird that looks like a customised pheasant. Its call is a bizarre cackling sound. Barney told us a tale about a German climber who had shot and eaten one of these birds a few years earlier. Not long after, he was killed whilst crossing one of the melt water rivers in full flood. We left the birds well alone.

  Around us, the glacier was showing the signs of the spring thaw. Silty melt water streams were now flowing strongly through the moraine, carving out sinuous routes from the gravel and revealing the milky-white ice beneath. We had to work much harder to keep our feet dry and in some spots only a series of strategically placed boulders enabled us to cross the fast-flowing water.

  In places the streams disappeared from sight into sink-holes and ran underground, deep down into the bowels of the glacier. These subterranean streams could sometimes be heard as a rumbling sound beneath our feet, like the sound of a tube train beneath a London street. I looked into one of the sump holes, where the water rushed down into a perfectly round, polished tube of blue ice, large enough to admit a small car. There was the horrifying temptation to jump into it. I wondered what it would be like to be sucked down for a high speed whitewater ride beneath the ice. A bit like a spider getting flushed down a plughole, I decided – but colder.

  The warmer days of spring had caused another change; now the steep valleysides above the glacier were far less stable. Rocks which had been frozen in place through the winter were thawed out and loosened – primed to fall down to the glacier below. The resounding crack and clatter of rockfall echoed back and forth, particularly on the lower sections of the East Rongbuk where the valleysides are steepest and most friable.

  On two or three occasions we had quite near misses from tumbling boulders. Brian got the closest call, shuffling out of the firing-line as fast as he could, while two killer rocks bounced past just a short distance off.

>   ‘That was a close one,’ I told him.

  ‘Like walking through a bloody firing range.’

  Two sections of the route had altered dramatically, revealing the instability of the shifting terrain. One tennis-court-sized frozen lake had disappeared entirely and the ground around it had collapsed into itself, leaving a twenty-metre-deep hole which we had not seen before. We concluded that a substantial underground cavity had collapsed beneath the spot, swallowing up the lake, and many thousands of tons of moraine. The well-worn path had run straight across the collapsed area and this had now disappeared; we had to take a new track across steeper terrain to regain the stable ground on the other side.

  The other change to the face of the glacier was a huge rockfall which had slipped down the valleyside onto the ice since our last journey up to ABC. This was just as impressive as the collapsed cavern, with thousands of new boulders heaped up in a shambolic pile, many freshly shattered and scarred by the impact as they tumbled down. We crossed the area carefully, hopping from one rocking boulder to another and testing each one for stability before committing our weight. Such a massive rockslide would be too fast to outrun if a team were unlucky enough to get caught beneath it.

  After a night at the site of the Indian camp, mid-way on the East Rongbuk, we made it to advance base camp in the midst of a light snowstorm on the afternoon of 9 May. All day the wind had been building in intensity, and now it was blowing at force four or five – enough to cause me to doubt that we would be leaving the next morning.

  ‘What do you think are the chances of the weather clearing tomorrow?’ I asked Al.

  ‘Not likely at all. From the look of this stuff we’re in for a good few days of unsettled conditions,’ he replied.

  ‘We’ll just have to wake up tomorrow and see how it is,’ Barney chipped in, ‘but I have to say it doesn’t look good.’

  Although that none of us was convinced we would be leaving the next day, we still went through the motions of preparing for the summit push. Kees and I sorted through our equipment barrels, checking every last item off the list as we packed our rucksacks ready for a dawn departure.