The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

  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 that 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 this day’s 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 meltwater 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 realized. 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 liter 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 onto the next feature of the East Rongbuk, the straight three-kilometer (1.8-mile) ridge of moraine that would lead to our next camp.

  The depressing rubble-strewn hillocks 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 that sprout miraculously from the glacier like the sawtooth scales on a dragon’s back. Shaped by the wind, the pinnacles range in color 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 whiteout, 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 four in the afternoon after seven hours on the move. Our average progress, I calculated, was just one kilometer (.62 mile) per hour at this altitude, compared to the usual two or three kilometers (one to two miles) an hour that 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 toward the outlying peaks of Changzheng, 6,977 meters (22,890 feet), and Lixin, 7,113 meters (23,336 feet).

  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 ax 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 liter 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 that would lead us to Advance Base Camp. The trough—so called by the early expeditions of the 1920s, is a natural depression that 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 that 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 that now lay above us.

  Now the altitude was really beginning to make itself felt. Not since experiencing 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 that was now getting hard to ignore. Each breath of superdry air merely antagonized 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 that 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 meters (3,280 feet) above Base Camp—higher than all but a handful of peaks outside of the Asian continent, including giants like Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley—yet we still hadn’t reached the foot of the mountain.

  The tents of Advance Base Camp came into view just after 2:00 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 that would be our home for the next two days.

  At 6,450 meters (21,161 feet), 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 Southeast 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 that 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 onto 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 around from the effects of a general anesthetic. My brain felt like someone was trying to cleave it into two chunks with a blunt hacksaw and it took me over an hour to generate the willpower 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 kit bag.”

  “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 that, 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 that 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 acclimatize to the paucity of oxygen and feeling pretty rough. Only Sundeep the doctor could generate a sense of wonder in the mysterious process of acclimatization taking place silently within us.

  “Just think of all those red blood cells changing and acclimatizing. Incredible, really, isn’t it?” he said in a burst of enthusiasm as we sat in the gloomy half-light of the mess tent.

  The only reply was the sinister slurping of soup. For the rest of us, acclimatization was a grisly affair that had to be endured rather than enjoyed.

  On April 19, when the time came to leave, we packed and headed down the glacier as fast as we could for Base Camp. The sixteen-kilometer (ten-mile) trek, which had taken us three days to complete on the upward journey, now took most of us just eight hours.

  But for two members of the team, the descent of the East Rongbuk was not so straightforward. Brian and Richard, the Financial Times journalist, debilitated perhaps after the grueling rigors of the first trip to Advance Base Camp (or Camp Three), both found their strength waning as the day went on.

  Most of us reached Base Camp just before nightfall, and as it got dark, we scanned the glacier anxiously for any sign of headlamps. There was no sign of approaching beams of light even though we could see for miles. By 7:00 P.M. we realized that Brian and Richard must be having a problem and, taking a Thermos flask of tea, a sleeping bag, and some extra survival clothing, Roger, Sundeep, and I headed back to try and locate them.

  We had to retrace our steps for several hours, almost to the point where the East Rongbuk joins the Rongbuk, before we found Brian and Richard being ushered through the night by the ever-patient Barney, Simon, and Al. They were both exhausted and close to collapse. Simon was mightily pleased to see us.

  Brian was slumped against a rock mumbling apologies: “It’s this bloody glacier. Just ran out of steam. Can’t seem to get the legs going at all.”

  Richard was in a stranger st
ate, almost euphoric in his advanced state of fatigue. Perhaps due to dehydration, half of what he was saying didn’t make any sense. He asked us if we had any beer, then burst into hysterical giggles.

  “Richard certainly seemed to have the initial symptoms of acute mountain sickness,” Sundeep later told me, “and for a while I thought it could be the onset of cerebral edema. When we had a chance to examine him at the Norwegian camp we realized he was badly dehydrated.”

  After sipping some tea, both recovered enough to continue toward Base Camp, albeit at a painfully slow pace and leaning heavily on the Sherpas for balance and support.

  At Base Camp, which we reached at 3:00 A.M., Richard continued to behave irrationally, showing reluctance to drink. In the end Sundeep had to insist that Richard drink the liquids he was being offered, for his own good.

  The episode reinforced the dangers of altitude and shook my confidence in Brian’s physical condition. He had performed so strongly on the way up to Advance Base that I had not even considered the possibility of a problem on the way down.

  “Don’t worry, Matt,” he reassured me the next day, “just a momentary blip. I’ve had it before, it’s always the same on the first trip up to ABC. I’ll be better on the second one.”

  It was typical of Brian’s generous personality that he sought to re-assure me after his problem descending the glacier. He had gone through a very painful day, but showed not a shred of self-pity. After a couple of days’ rest he did indeed make a remarkable recovery and did not “hit the wall” again in such a dramatic way.

  For Richard the episode had a less happy ending. On arriving at Base Camp he received the bad news that the bag stolen from the equipment tent during our absence had been his. In it was his portable computer, and a quantity of money. To lose the cash was bad news but to lose the computer was worse. Richard’s reports for the Financial Times were to have been written on it.