Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  We were leaving camp six bang on schedule on as near as the North Face ever gets to a perfect night. We had liquid, food, an adequate supply of oxygen and the assistance of three very strong Sherpas. Our equipment was tried and tested, we were as fit as one can be above 8,000 metres with no major sickness or injury to cope with.

  It doesn’t get much better than that. The ‘window’ was open. For the first time, I allowed myself the luxury of thinking that we might just make it. If our luck held.

  In the precise minutes of our departure from camp six, as we later learned from the Hungarian climber who was with him in the tent, Reinhard died.

  The Sherpas set a fast pace up the first of the snowfields lying above the camp. Al kept up easily but I found myself lagging behind. The thin beam of light from the headtorch, seemingly so bright when tested in the tent, now felt inadequate for the task, illuminating a pathetically small patch of snow.

  Catching up, I concentrated on watching Al’s cramponed feet as they bit into the snow. The conditions were variable with an unpredictable crust. Frequently it gave way, plunging us thigh deep into a hidden hole.

  I quickly learned not to trust the headtorch with its tunnel vision effect. It confused the eye by casting shadows of unknown depth. Rocks could be bigger than they seemed. Holes in the snow lacked all perspective. Distances became hard to judge. Was Lhakpa’s light ten metres in front of me … or fifty? I couldn’t tell.

  We crossed several old tent platforms, abandoned by previous expeditions. Each one was littered with the usual shredded fabric, splintered tent-poles and empty oxygen cylinders. A foil food sachet got spiked by one of my crampon teeth and dragged annoyingly until I could be bothered to remove it.

  At each of these wrecked sites, Al, the mountain detective, would pause for a moment to cast his headtorch around the remains. Even now, on our summit bid, his fascination for them was as keen as ever.

  The climb continued, step after step, up the snowfield towards the much more demanding terrain of the yellow band. Very conscious of our limited oxygen supply, I tried to concentrate on regulating my breathing; I knew from scuba-diving training how easy it is to waste air.

  But the terrain of the North Face is mixed; both in steepness and in composition. Steep ice fields give way to shallower rock slabs. Demanding rock sections end in long traverses. Establishing a breathing pattern is virtually impossible. Mostly I found I was puffing and panting at a very fast rate and there was nothing I could do about it.

  After an hour I found I was feeling better. The headache and nausea had faded away with the concentrated physical work of the climb. My feet and hands both felt warm, and the weight of the rucksack was not as bad as I had feared.

  Reaching the end of the larger of the two snowfields, we encountered the first bare rock. I watched in horror as the three pinprick lights of the Sherpas began to rise up what seemed to be a vertical wall. Surely it was an optical illusion? I had never heard anyone talk about any actual climbing before the Ridge. But, standing at the foot of the rock section, my heart sank. It was steep. Very steep. I was completely inexperienced in night climbing, and fear formed an icy pool in the pit of my stomach.

  We were about to tackle the yellow band.

  Worse, we would have to climb on rock with our crampons on. This is like trying to climb stairs on stilts. The spiked fangs act like an unwanted platform sole, elevating the foot away from any real contact with the rock. Using crampons on rock greatly increases the risk of a misplaced foothold or a twisted ankle. In a tight spot, where the feet have to move in close proximity, they are even more deadly. A spike can snag in the neoprene gaiter of the other foot, a mistake which invariably leads to a heavy fall.

  On other mountains we might have stopped to remove the crampons, but here that was not an option. On the North Face of Everest, removing crampons every time you made a transition from snow to rock would waste hours of precious time and risk almost certain frostbite to the hands.

  I paused for a brief rest as the others made their way up into the rock band. Turning off my headtorch, I let my eyes adjust to the dark. The sky was mostly still clear of cloud but I could see no sign of the moon. The only illumination came from the stars, which were as dazzling as I have ever seen them. The towering mass of Changtse was now far below us, I could just see the sinuous curves of its fluted ridge.

  Further down, thousands of metres further down, the great glaciers were just visible, reflecting the dull metallic grey of the starlight against the darker shadows of their deep valley walls. The whole of Tibet lay beneath us and there was not a single electric light to be seen.

  Taking off my Gore-tex overmitts, I reached up to the oxygen mask. Ice was beginning to constrict the intake valve at the front. I carefully broke the chunk away.

  Then, my crampons clanking and scraping with a jarring metallic ring against the rock, I began the climb up. The route took a line up a series of ledges, linked by narrow cracks. It was a nasty scramble, involving strenuous leg and arm work to lunge up steps which were often uncomfortably high. More than once I found myself jamming a knee into a crack for support, or squirming up on to a balcony on my stomach.

  ‘This must be the first step,’ I yelled up at Al. He didn’t reply and hours later, when we reached the real first step, I realised how far out I had been.

  We came to a platform and took a few minutes’ rest before beginning the next section.

  The climb was littered with tatty ropes. Some were frayed, some were kinked from unknown causes, others were bleached white from exposure to the intense ultraviolet radiation here above 8,000 metres. Al sorted through them with a professional’s eye, muttering under his breath.

  Selecting the best of a bad lot, Al attached his jumar clamp and started up, sliding the handgrip of the camming device with each move. I waited for him to gain some height and then followed on. The crampons made every move a nightmare, as they had to be jammed into crevices or rested on protrusions to gain a purchase. Often I found my feet scrabbling frantically for a hold, the metal spikes grinding the flaking rock into granules of grit.

  A steady barrage of small stones, and the occasional fist-sized rock, came down from above where the Sherpas were climbing. Normally this is avoidable by all but the clumsiest climber, but here every foothold had the potential to dislodge debris. Our ears rapidly become adept at guessing the size of an approaching missile as it clattered down the rock-face.

  ‘Below!’ A flat, briefcase-sized rock slithered down the face and spun off into the dark depths.

  After sixty or seventy metres of ascent I made my first mistake. Pushing down to lift my body weight up on a boulder foothold, my crampon slipped away with no warning, unbalancing me and crashing my knee into a sharp ledge. The down suit cushioned much of the blow but it still took me several minutes to regain my composure as a series of sparkling stars did cartoon laps of honour across my field of vision.

  On that fall, as at many other times, my entire body weight was suspended on the rope.

  Another twenty metres of ascent brought me to the anchor point of the rope I was climbing on. Shining the headtorch on to the fixing point, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. My lifeline was attached to the face by a single, rusting metal piton which had been ineptly placed in a crack.

  Out of curiosity I tested the solidity of the anchor point with my hand. It moved. With one gentle pull, the piton slid right out. I stared at it dumbly for a few seconds, incredulous that my recent fall had been held by this pathetic piece of protection.

  Throughout the expedition the knowledge that fixed ropes existed on the more technical rock had been a reassuring notion. ‘Get to camp six and then you’re on the fixed ropes’ was a much repeated mantra, implying that they were somehow safe. In that one heart-stopping moment as the piton slid out of its crack, my faith in the fixed ropes was destroyed. I resolved to rely on them as little as I could.

  The incline eased off and I found Al and the three Sherpas
waiting for me. As I arrived they continued onwards up a series of steps cut into wind-hardened snow. At the next steep section Lhakpa again led the way up the rocks. Climbing strongly and steadily, the light from his headtorch rapidly went out of view.

  I had a favour to ask. ‘Al, can you let me go in front? I’m not happy at the back.’

  ‘No problem.’ Al unclipped his sling from the rope and let me pass. It was a generous gesture which I greatly appreciated.

  I started up the next rock section feeling a lot more confident with Al behind me at the tail-end of the rope. This was partly psychological, and partly from the practical help he could give by shining his headtorch on to holds. I found myself moving easier and with more certainty.

  As everywhere on Everest, the rock was fragmented and unreliable. Apparently solid handholds came away easily in flakes, boulders trembled under the weight of a leg, and a flow of gravel-sized stones seemed to be perpetually on the move.

  Just inches from my hand a stone the size of a telephone directory fell out of the night. Impacting hard, it shattered into hundreds of pieces, showering me with splinters of stone. Mingma’s warning cry from above came simultaneously. I saw his headtorch flash down the face.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘OK.’ We carried on up.

  By now I had no idea of our precise position on the Face. From the Rongbuk glacier the distance from camp six to the North-East Ridge does not look great. In fact, as I was discovering, it is a significant climb. It was now many hours since we had left the camp and my body was already feeling as if it had done a substantial day’s work.

  There was still not the slightest glimmer of dawn. I began to long for the first rays of light.

  Now we started what I guessed was the final section of the yellow band; more steep slogging up an eroded fault in the rock strata. It began with a stretching high step of a metre or more up on to a ledge; another occasion when there was no choice but to rely on a fixed rope. Then, with the infernal crampons scraping horribly on the rock, we scrambled up for about thirty minutes, pausing every five minutes or so for breath.

  Turning back for a moment, I saw that Al was free-climbing the section. He, like me, had no confidence in the fixed ropes, but, unlike me, had the experience to know he could climb the route without a fall.

  As the ground evened off, we began another traverse to the right, across a field of dirty snow. A bright red rope had been laid across it – the newest protection we had seen so far. Clipping on, I wondered who had fixed it: the Indians, or perhaps the Japanese?

  The line continued up through a crack and then on to a sloping rock plateau the size of a tennis court. Crossing it, I realised we had finished the first stage of the climb.

  The horrors of the night climb ended as we took the final steps on to the North-East Ridge. The crumbling cliffs of the yellow band had been steeper, more complex and much more committing than I had imagined. Climbing them in the dark, with just the glow-worm light of the headtorch, had been a nightmare.

  Now, with the first rays of dawn to light our route along the Ridge, I reached up and turned the headtorch off. If all went well now, we could be on the summit within the next six hours.

  The three Sherpas stood hunched over their ice-axes, alien figures in their goggles and oxygen masks. They had set a blistering pace through the dark hours and now rested as we waited for Al to join us on the Ridge.

  One of the Sherpas – Lhakpa – had climbed to the summit before, but I knew the others had never been this high. Each had stalactites of ice clinging to the bottom of their oxygen masks where exhaled vapour had frozen into spikes several inches long. Mingma was having trouble with his mask. I watched him take it off to unblock the frozen pipe and remembered the expedition doctors warning that we might be unconscious within thirty minutes if our oxygen supply failed.

  My oxygen hadn’t stopped yet, but the hard frozen shell of the mask was eroding a nagging sore where it rubbed at the bridge of my nose. I eased it away from my face for a moment to relieve the irritation. Then, sucking deep on the oxygen, I prayed it wouldn’t let me down.

  With the dawn came the wind, our greatest enemy. As Al picked his way carefully up to join us, the first few gusts of the day began to play along the North Face, sending up flurries of ice crystals. While we waited for Al to recover his breath, I moved carefully on to the crest and looked over the knife edge drop down the Kanshung – the Eastern – Face.

  There can be few more terrifying sights anywhere on earth. Seen from my vantage point, the Kanshung Face was a sheer 10,000-foot wall of ice falling away beneath me, so steep it seemed almost vertical. Vast fields of ice – hanging glaciers – perch precariously on its walls. It is deeply etched with fragile fissures and crevasses. It wasn’t hard to imagine the whole Face – all those billions of tons of ice – giving up its fight with gravity and peeling off in one monumental avalanche down into the valleys below.

  When Mallory first saw the Kanshung Face during the British reconnaissance expedition of 1924, he pronounced it unclimbable. He would leave it, he decided, ‘to others less wise’. Now, looking down the Face, I understood precisely what he meant. The fact that it has subsequently been climbed – and by several different routes – seems to me an incredible achievement.

  The Kanshung Face is home to, and creator of, some curious winds. With day breaking, one of those winds was beginning. As I looked down the Face, a billowing cloud of ice crystals was moving vertically up towards me. It was like looking down directly into the gaping mouth of a power station cooling tower. This is the tail of the massive ‘rotor’ that Everest spins out of the constant north-westerly Tibetan gales. As the ice crystals come up to the Ridge, they are blown to the south-east in a deadly plume which can be thirty miles long.

  Few people summit when Everest’s plume is running.

  Lhakpa shouted something to me which broke the spell and I turned back towards the group.

  Now our climb along the Ridge itself was about to begin. From where we were standing, it looked incredibly complicated: a dragon’s tail of switchbacks, dips and rocky steps. Two of these, the ‘first step’ and the second, are regarded as the most formidable of the obstacles on the North Face route, but it was the sheer length of the Ridge that most worried me.

  Back in London, I had met Crag Jones, one of the four British climbers to have summitted via the North Face. We sat in a Soho coffee bar drinking cappuccino while Crag cracked his knuckles and rolled up his sleeves to reveal Popeye muscles and veins the thickness of climbing ropes.

  ‘The first and second steps are problems,’ he told me, ‘but it’s the size of the Ridge you want to think about. When you get on to the Ridge you have to realise there could be another twelve hours of climbing to get back to camp six via the summit. Twelve hours. It’s a hell of a long day.’

  From where I was standing, Crag was right. It was already looking like a hell of a long day and we’d only cracked a tiny proportion of the route. Lhakpa moved towards me and shouted, his voice muffled by the mask:

  ‘We move fast. Move very fast. OK?’

  He tapped his wrist to indicate that the clock was ticking away. At 8,600 metres we were the highest human beings on the planet; and we were dying a little more with every hour. In the Death Zone, you have to move fast to keep alive.

  Now in full daylight, we set out along the lifeline of tattered ropes which snake along the Ridge, the legacy of previous ascents. With the night hours behind us, I felt a glimmer of optimism creep in. I was feeling strong.

  Thirty minutes later we rounded a small cliff and found the first dead Indian climber. We knew that the three Indian bodies would still be there on the Ridge where they had died a few days earlier, but, ridiculously, I had completely forgotten about them.

  Now, here was the first body, lying partly in the shelter of an overhanging rock and ringed by an almost perfect circle of wind-blown snow.

  Al shouted through his mask, ‘Must be one of the Indians.
’

  We would have to step over his outstretched legs to continue along the ridge.

  The Sherpas stood side by side, seemingly rooted to the spot by the sight of the dead man. Their heads were bowed, as if in prayer; perhaps, it occurred to me later, they were praying.

  I felt an almost irresistible urge to look at the dead climber’s face. What expression would be fixed on it in those final moments of life? Terror? A smile? (They say that those who die of acute mountain sickness have a delusion of well-being in the final stages.)

  But his head was thrust far into the overhang, the neck bent so his face rested against the rock. All I could see was the edge of his oxygen mask. From the mask ran that precious, life-giving tube to the oxygen cylinder which was standing upright against a rock. It was an orange cylinder, a Russian one like our own.

  I bent down, using my ice-axe for support, to have a closer look at the gauge on the top of the cylinder. It read, of course, zero. Even if he had died before the cylinder ran out, it would have continued to spill its feeble trickle of oxygen into the atmosphere until it emptied.

  He was wearing very few clothes, just a lightweight red fleece top, some blue Gore-tex climbing trousers and a pair of yellow plastic Koflach boots similar to our own. His rucksack lay nearby, flat and empty. I wondered about this mystery for a moment. What had happened to his high-altitude gear? His down suit? His Gore-tex mitts? We knew the Indian team had been well-equipped. That left only two possibilities: either he’d ripped them off in the final stages of delirium, or someone had stolen them from the corpse.

  In a way I found the first scenario an easier one to imagine.

  The tragedy of the Indian team was central to the film I was making. Seduced by Everest’s siren call, they had pushed themselves well beyond their own limits of endurance and had failed to reserve enough strength to get down in the worsening conditions which preceded the big storm. Summit fever had killed them.