The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

  For me, this question was a vital one to resolve. I didn’t want to make a film that covered the same ground as Galahad of Everest, I wanted this film to go the whole way, right to the summit, and to bring back pictures of Brian on the top.

  Brian had no doubts. “This time I’m going to go for it, Matt. By God, I’m going to do it!”

  Brian’s coffee sat completely untouched before him. In his hands, he twisted the venerable ice ax to and fro like a cheerleader’s baton, knocking the business end periodically onto his kneecap with a resounding clung to reinforce a point.

  “I’ll get on the oxygen much earlier. That was my mistake on the southern side, I was too fucking proud to strap that mask on. But this time I’ll use the gas, and I’ll make it, and you’ll be there with me to film it! It’ll be the greatest Himalayan film there’s ever been!”

  General Bruce’s ice ax sliced through the air with a dramatic flourish.

  “What about you, Matt? Are you a bit of a man for the mountains?”

  “A bit, yes.” I gave Brian my most modest smile.

  In fact, for someone contemplating making a film on the North Face of Everest my mountain experience was decidedly patchy. My towering achievements so far were limited to just two summits: a Himalayan trekking peak called Pokalde, 5,700 meters (18,700 feet), and an obscure Ecuadorean volcano of about the same height. To serious Himalayan mountaineers these are mere nodules, amusing warm-up molehills to be conquered before breakfast.

  Climbing them had been extremely difficult.

  More alarming than these dubious triumphs were the ignominious failures that dotted my climbing curriculum. My track record wasn’t just flawed, it was criss-crossed with vast, gaping chasms, huge, shadow-filled gorges of bumbling flops and incompetent failures.

  Among the most astounding of these—so much so that I am almost proud of it—was a solo attempt to climb Ben Nevis in October 1981 when I was a university student at Durham.

  It started encouragingly enough. Leaving on a Friday afternoon, I hitchhiked up to Edinburgh and then across to Glasgow. As night fell, a rainstorm began, and progress ground to a halt. By 2:30 A.M., I was stuck just north of Dumbarton, soaked to the skin, and feeling very sorry for myself. Very few cars were about, and those that were showed no sign of stopping.

  Remembering a service station a few miles back down the road, I decided to beat a tactical retreat south and wait there until dawn. As I walked, I put out my thumb, just on the off chance of a lift.

  To my astonishment, a vehicle stopped. It was a motor home converted from an old fish-and-chip van. A family welcomed me inside, and commiserated with me on my plight. When the driver heard I was heading for Ben Nevis, he proposed a different plan. Climb Snowdon instead.

  The family was heading home to Flint, on the north Welsh coast. They could drop me there at first light, leaving me with an easy hitch along the A5151 toward Bangor, and then a quick raid down into Snowdonia, from where the mighty peak itself could be swiftly and triumphantly conquered.

  It was warm inside the van and, subject to my taking off my dripping outer rain gear, a bunk bed was offered. Snowdon it was. Ben Nevis could wait. (In fact it still does. I haven’t climbed it to this day.)

  When I woke up in Flint, I found the couple’s daughter—she must have been about eight or nine—had covered me with a blanket as I slept. “I thought you looked cold,” she said, and then gave me a Mars bar for breakfast.

  The “easy” hitch along to Snowdonia proved a lot more elusive than anticipated, and it was almost midday by the time I was dropped off at Betws-y-Coed. A low blanket of clouds shrouded the national park, reducing visibility to less than a few hundred meters (six hundred or so feet). The mountain itself was sulking, nowhere to be seen, and I had no maps, and no money to buy any.

  Having consulted a national park map in a parking lot, I set off into a fine mist of drizzle in the direction of Snowdon. For two hours I battled my way along a boggy path that stayed stubbornly in the valley floor. I kept telling myself it would surely start to rise soon. The path then degenerated further as it entered more marshy terrain. I found myself hopping from one tussock of bog weed to another. Glutinous wallow-holes of black slime lurked on either side.

  The clouds thickened as I lost the trail completely. I began fighting my way upward through fields of sour-faced sheep, crossing stone walls and getting snagged on barbed-wire fences. Eventually, with just an hour of murky daylight left, I collapsed against the rusting carcass of a derelict tractor and conceded defeat. Snowdon can wait, I thought.

  In my pack was a quarter-bottle of Southern Comfort. I drank it in less than half an hour, then ate a packet of cookies and a sausage. Feeling distinctly queasy, I then beat a retreat off the mountain—if indeed I was on the mountain at all—reaching the safety of asphalt as night fell.

  Having hitchhiked through the night, I arrived red-eyed and exhausted in Durham on the Monday morning just minutes before lectures began. Strangely, despite the stinging shame of having failed to climb anything, I considered it an excellent weekend.

  The one part of my mountain history that did give a glimmer of hope, and the one about which I now told Brian and Julian, was my time as a trekking guide. In the summer of 1984 I ran a series of mountain treks through the High Atlas mountains in Morocco for the adventure-holiday company Explore Worldwide.

  Every two weeks a new group flew into Marrakech via Paris. I would sit in the airport café drinking pastis with Philippe, a French guide for a rival trekking company, and watch the new arrivals walk off the plane. Philippe had a talent for spotting members of his own group and delighted in a running commentary as they emerged. “That’s one of mine,” he would state confidently each time a pretty girl emerged.

  Elderly women, or those who did not meet Philippe’s demanding standards, got a “That’s one of yours.”

  Most infuriatingly, Philippe was almost always right. “Le trekking” was chic in France at that time, and his groups did indeed seem to include unusually high percentages of gorgeous girls. Mine had unusually high percentages of whiskery old matrons and bearded librarians. Seen on the trail, Philippe’s groups were a glittering fashion parade of skintight cycling shorts and wraparound reflector sunglasses. Mine wore moleskin britches and hairy shirts from Millets army surplus store.

  At the airport Philippe would deliver a parting shot: “As usual, Mathieu, I have ze gazelles—and you have ze goats! See you in two weeks.”

  Then, having effortlessly maneuvered the pick of the crop into his turbocharged Toyota, Philippe would roar off into the night with his gazelles, leaving a vapor trail of diesel fumes and Chanel behind him.

  These irritations aside, my time as a trek leader in the High Atlas was time well spent. I learned that strange things happen when people and mountains meet. The treks were not so hard, rarely more than six hours of walking each day, but in the heat of a Moroccan summer they could be demanding enough. In the High Atlas I watched personalities change, just as the mood of the mountains changes from one valley to the next.

  Mountains peel layers away from a climber like a scrapper dismantles a car at a junk yard. They strip off veneers and shells, leaving just the distilled essence of a person behind, the chassis on which the body panels are bolted. Seemingly placid group members might burst into sudden, violent, rages. Hard-talking Glaswegian hit men might be reduced to tears. Mousey matrons might become mountain lions, thundering up peaks and down valleysides at superhuman speeds.

  In the middle of this dynamic, shifting entity is the trek leader, encouraging, cajoling, informing, and trying to prevent one member from ripping another’s head off when personalities clash. It is psychologically demanding, physically exhausting work, and tempered with the gentle, ironic humor that seems to be an inevitable attribute of the British once they find themselves in a group. I loved it, especially when a lone, and particularly lovely, gazelle did finally walk off the Marrakech plane with an EXPLORE baggage tag on her rucks
ack.

  “Mine,” I told Philippe. He was spitting with rage.

  But trekking is not climbing, and Toubkal, 4,165 meters (13,664 feet)—the greatest peak in the High Atlas—would be a mere ink dot on a map of the Himalayas.

  In short, I was seriously underqualified to join an Everest expedition of any description, let alone one to the technically difficult, vast North Face. As previously mentioned, I had never climbed the highest mountains in Britain, nor had I reached the summit of any peak in the Alps. I had never taken a formal climbing course or even properly learned the rudiments of ropework.

  Worse, again, was my tendency to make mistakes. Unfolded maps fly from my hands in the gentlest of breezes, carabiners mysteriously drop off harnesses, water bottles leap out of rucksack pockets and hurtle down ice slopes without warning. I have set fire to tents, dropped sleeping bags into freezing rivers, and lost enough pairs of sunglasses to stock a medium-sized store. Such clumsiness is inconvenient at lower altitudes but above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) it can kill you.

  “I’ll just set my sights on Base Camp,” I told Brian, “and leave the high-altitude shooting to a specialist cameraman.”

  “Nonsense.” Brian was adamant. “You’ll be with me the whole way. Once you get out there and see that great shining pyramid sitting at the top of the Rongbuk Glacier, she’ll have you in her spell.”

  So saying, Brian delivered a knuckle-crunching farewell handshake and left for a voice-over session in a Soho studio.

  “You think it can work?” Julian poured out the dregs of the coffee.

  I had liked Brian tremendously but, looking at it as a filmmaker, the project still had some major question marks hanging over it.

  “I think I need to do some research. There’s no point in going ahead unless we’re absolutely sure Brian can make a summit attempt. If he does, and we can find a way to shoot it, it’ll be really something. If he doesn’t make a summit attempt, we’ll be left with a remake of Galahad and I don’t want to do that.”

  Julian gave me a week to make up my mind.

  I began to canvas opinions on Brian’s chances. I spoke to some of Britain’s top high-altitude specialists and they all said the same thing. Based on Brian’s impressive altitude record, he could make a summit attempt if all went well with weather and logistics.

  On a professional level I was now inclined to take the offer, and there were other, more personal reasons why ten weeks in Tibet was an attractive idea at that particular time.

  My marriage, eleven years old, was cracking at the edges, in the middle of a crisis that I desperately needed to resolve. Everest, I began to realize, could give me the space I needed to sort out the mess.

  — 3 —

  I met Fiona in 1981, my first year at Durham university in northern England, but it took me a while to realize how much I fancied her. I was studying archaeology and anthropology, she did liberal arts, so our paths didn’t cross that often in the lecture halls—in fact neither of us went to many lectures anyway.

  Fiona had a cheeky smile, a cascade of unruly black ringlets, and a penchant for ambitiously short skirts. She smoked Benson & Hedges cigarettes, bit her nails to the quick, and drank so much gin and tonic that a friend once bought her five shares in United Distillers as a birthday present. On the tennis court, even after half a bottle of Pimms, she was still capable of smashing the best players in the university. She never joined any of the college teams, probably because she couldn’t be bothered. I thought that was very cool.

  Every time I caught a glimpse of Fiona she always seemed to be floating past on a punt poled by a brilliantined Old Etonian, or drinking champagne in the late summer sun on the university green with a bunch of people wearing velveteen cummerbunds.

  Occasionally we met at parties, and we knew each other well enough to say hello in the street, but I was very wary of Fiona’s rah-rah friends and that was a problem no matter how much she made me laugh. My social world revolved around the exploration society that, in the second year at Durham, I was now running. My friends were travelers and wanderers and dreamers who spent every last waking moment of the day poring over maps depicting places they could not possibly afford to visit. Fiona’s world revolved around the college drama scene and the sophomoric beer-swilling fringes of the university rugby team—a social set that I absolutely went out of my way to avoid. We didn’t have a single mutual friend.

  There was another barrier between us at the time we first met. Fiona was involved with someone else, and I was involved with several someone elses. My personal life was going through one of its periodic entanglements in which a long-term relationship, a medium-term relationship, and a couple of extremely short-term relationships were variously, and simultaneously, collapsing, reigniting, climaxing, imploding, or simply grinding to an ignominious halt.

  Given all the above, the chances of a relationship with Fiona were looking shaky to say the least, but all that was to change unexpectedly with a three-minute conversation we had after a chance meeting in the street. I think it was the only time I ever saw her carrying a book. We walked together across one of the city’s many bridges and, on a sudden impulse, I asked her if she wanted to come to the Lake District for a weekend camping trip in the mountains with some friends. To my surprise she said yes immediately.

  And that was how it began.

  I fell for her in a big way. Some weeks later, on Midsummer’s Eve, we shared our first kiss halfway through a bottle of cider on a hilltop overlooking the soot-encrusted spires of Durham. The sun was setting and the air was filled with pollen and dandelion fluff. I was suffering from a violent attack of hay fever. Midway through the kiss I had a sneezing attack.

  By the time September and a new term came around, we were back together and spending increasing amounts of time in each other’s company. By about Christmas I realized with a shock that I was most definitely in love. Over the winter break I got a commission from the Traveller magazine to write an article on the Trans-Siberian railway. Fiona came with me on the journey. To while away the days as the train trundled slowly across the vast wastelands of the former Soviet Union, we drank spectacularly cheap Russian champagne and made love in our cabin between stations.

  In Siberia the stations are a very long way apart.

  By the normal course of events, given my previous failures with steady girlfriends, my relationship with Fiona was due to grind to a halt. But it didn’t. In fact it got stronger and stronger. By the time we realized that we had better do something about our exams, we were virtually living together. At the last minute, with the crunch just days away, panic set in and I managed to study enough to earn a second-class degree. Fiona also scraped through after a couple of weeks of all-night cramming.

  Somehow, somewhere, I had come to the notice of the Foreign Office—or, to be more precise, MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. After a series of interviews conducted in central London, they offered me the chance to apply for a career that would have plunged me into the world of covert intelligence-gathering. After some very serious thought I declined their offer. I didn’t want to be a spy—I had already decided on a career in television.

  I had to start somewhere, so I wrote to the BBC, asking to join one of their trainee programs. They wrote back an extremely brief letter informing me that 38 million people had applied for six vacancies and anyway I had missed the deadline for applications.

  In a fit of rage of the “I’ll show the BB Bloody C what fools they are” variety, I applied for the first cash-paying job I saw in the local paper and got it. Cleaning out chicken sheds was not exactly the high-profile media career I’d envisaged but it was a start. I lasted three disgusting days then went on to other equally soul-destroying jobs doing construction work, assembling double-glazing units, and traveling the country putting up marquees at festivals and fairs.

  Fiona worked at a travel agency and we pooled all our money. The idea, when we had saved enough, was to go on a long journey across the Sahara in the ol
d Land Rover I had recently purchased for £500. On the day we departed, Fiona’s bewildered parents had the tearful look of a couple that weren’t at all sure they would ever see their daughter again.

  They nearly didn’t.

  The Land Rover broke down. Bang smack in the middle of the Sahara Desert on the trail from Tamanrasset to Djanet in the deep south of Algeria. And when I say broke down, I mean it really did break; the rusty old chassis snapped in two just above the rear axle, with the dramatic result that the poor old Land Rover dragged its ass along the ground like a dog with no rear legs. If it hadn’t been for some Italians who happened upon us by chance we would have been in serious trouble.

  Using an ingenious collection of bits of broken leaf spring (I had quite a collection of these by this stage in the journey), and by drilling fixing points into the broken chassis, we managed to jack the vehicle more or less back into shape and bolt the pieces of metal across the broken section. Then, after a shaky welding job in the nearest oasis, we limped back to England at about fifteen miles an hour.

  Restless for more traveling, I applied for the job of trek leader with adventure-holiday company Explore Worldwide and was accepted. During my first season in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco I had plenty of time to think, and it was Fiona who was foremost on my mind. The journey across the Sahara had brought us closer together and now I realized that I desperately wanted not to lose her. After the High Atlas I was already penciled in for a season running felucca sailing boats down the Nile for the same company; that would take me away from Fiona for another extended period—perhaps six months—and I wasn’t at all sure she would hang around waiting for me much longer without some sort of longer-term commitment.

  In the closing days of my Moroccan contract, after a few beers in the Foucauld Hotel in Marrakech, I found myself wondering what the chances were of a long-term relationship—a really long-term one—succeeding. Would I ever stop traveling? Could I kill off the restlessness that ran through me as thick as my own blood? Could I ever—and the very words struck a chill deep inside me—settle down?