The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

  “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-meter (26,246-foot) 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 months preceding the expedition’s departure. The first was procuring 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 kilometers (fifty miles) 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 high altitude on the 7,000-meter (22,965-foot) 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 signing 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 U.S. 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 upon.

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

  — 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 hadn’t been 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 Four interested in a film featuring Brian Blessed’s new Everest expedition. It’s a ten-week shoot, starts March thirty-first, just wondered if you might be interested?”

  The question was delivered as a casual, throwaway 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. Traveling 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 milliseconds, 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 among the twists of wrapping paper and Styrofoam box inserts of Christmas, my wife, Fiona, was playing the high-velocity tabletop game “pro-action soccer” with Gregory, who was then five. At the television, Alistair, seven, was viciously annihilating a 16-bit rodent epidemic in a Super Nintendo video game while Thomas, nine, lay on the sofa, trying to pretend he was studying when he was really reading a comic book.

  “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 millimeter.

  “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 center kick.

  “I’m serious. That was Julian Ware.”

  “Wow.”

  “He’s got Channel Four interested in Brian Blessed going back for another try.”

  “It won’t happen.” Fiona swiftly blocked Gregory’s counterattack. “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 color, 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 it’s 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 percent great white shark. The capacity for barefaced lying also comes in handy, particularly if you are freelance.

  The weaseling part is getting the program 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 onto 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 he pops out and escapes. Relax your grip for a moment and he gets interested in someone else’s idea.

  The months drag by, and the meetings continue. Coproduction partners are sought in the far-flung corners of the globe. Camera operators are lured out of their Thames-side mansions for luxurious lunches at Soho eateries. The momentum
grows. The telephone lines are glowing red-hot. You start to use your department-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, wheedling, 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 “action!” 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 program.

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

  Fiona finished off the game of pro-action soccer 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 shopping. 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-story atrium alone could cheerfully swallow up the combined floor space of every other production company I have ever worked for.

  A glass-walled elevator whooshed me at high speed to the second floor, where the urbane Julian Ware served 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 was 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 ax!”

  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! Nineteen twenty-two—you don’t realize what those people did—and General Bruce was one of 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 pockmarked with the missile hits of low-flying ducks (Brian has an impressive menagerie of semitame animals), and beneath a rugged set of thick trousers lurked a scuffed pair of leather boots of a style that can only be described as clodhopper.

  “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 prewar 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 Everest beat them back with tragic results (as it often did).

  In 1990, after years of unpaid footwork filled with broken promises and setbacks that 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 Leigh 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 1924. Part dramatic reconstruction, part 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 his climbing partner Andrew Irvine’s disappearance near the summit, a tragedy that 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 it provided viewers 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 Irvine were up against.

  That is when Brian surprised everyone, not least himself.

  Overweight, inexperienced at high altitude, seemingly hopelessly out of condition, Brian reached a high point of 7,600 meters (24,934 feet) on the North Ridge before altitude and exhaustion forced him back not far from Camp Five. Puffing and blowing, swearing and cursing, Brian and his ordeal were so faithfully recorded by cameraman David Breashears that you almost needed an oxygen cylinder on hand just to watch it.

  It did what very few Himalayan mountain films had ever done before: it made altitude—the enemy—real. The viewer could see with Brian’s every faltering step, with every gulping breath, the overwhelming physical and mental battle he faced. The antithesis of the cool, experienced, professional mountaineer, Brian was a protagonist the viewer could relate to.

  Brian went high, higher than anyone had imagined he could. He was pushing his luck, and so was the film. By the time he turned back, he was right on the edge of collapse. Fortunately, by his side he had David Breashears, an extremely strong Himalayan climber with two Everest summits to his name. Breashears’s cool-headed decision-making undoubtedly saved Brian from acute altitude sickness, frostbite, or worse. Painfully slowly, Brian was escorted back to Advance Base Camp where a highly relieved John Paul Davidson waited with the rest of the team.

  Having survived the expedition and seen for himself the sacred mountain on which his hero, Mallory, had disappeared, Brian might have been expected to hang up his climbing boots and return to acting, satisfied that a lifetime’s ambition had been fulfilled. But the siren call of Everest proved too strong. In 1993 Brian went back, and this time he was going for the summit.

  For this new attempt he joined a commercial expedition run by the Sheffield-based company Himalayan Kingdoms. Along with ten other team members, Brian would attempt the southern side of the mountain, from Nepal, the same route that took Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing to the summit in 1953. The expedition would rely heavily on She
rpa support to establish high camps, where oxygen, food, and cooking gas would be waiting. Each team member paid £22,000.

  In March 1993, the expedition flew from London to Kathmandu and trekked up through the Khumbu Valley to Base Camp where the eight-week climb began.

  If Brian’s performance on the Galahad expedition was impressive, his effort in 1993 was truly astonishing. By far the oldest member of the team at fifty-seven, Brian made a high point of 8,300 meters (27,230 feet), above the South Col, just 500 meters (1,640 feet) from the summit.

  During the descent from the South Col, Brian and several others narrowly escaped death when an avalanche swept down the face of Lhotse and wiped out Camp Five, 7,500 meters (24,606 feet), which they had occupied just hours before.

  Back in Kathmandu the team had much to celebrate, and so did Brian. The expedition leader Steve Bell had put eight members on the summit, a record for a commercial Everest expedition, and Brian had proved once again that he had the endurance to perform strongly at extreme altitude. By pushing himself above the magic 8,000-meter (26,246-foot) mark without using supplementary oxygen, he had achieved a considerable feat—one that hinted, perhaps, of even greater things to come.

  Three years later, now in his sixtieth year, Brian had signed up for his third Everest expedition, again with Himalayan Kingdoms. This time would take him back once more to the northern, Tibetan, side where the Galahad film had been shot six years before.

  Then he had approached as an enthusiastic novice, completely unacquainted with the devastating effects of altitude and with little experience to fall back on when things got tough. Now he had the experience of two Everest expeditions to draw on, including that impressive performance above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) on the southern side. Brian’s high-altitude curriculum, for a man of his age, indicated a real talent for going high, and there was no doubting his boundless enthusiasm for the task at hand.

  But would that be enough? Could Brian summit? Or had he reached his ceiling during the 1993 expedition—a personal best beyond which he could never climb?