“Al, you will not believe what happens when you put this on!”
Al was busy sorting out his pack and had not yet rigged his cylinder.
“Yeah?”
I knew Al was of two minds about using the oxygen. He had climbed K2 and all his other 8,000-meter (26,246-foot) peaks without it. I think in the back of his mind he felt that using it could compromise his reputation as Britain’s most successful high-altitude mountaineer.
But he strapped the mask on nevertheless and within a short while he was smiling just as I had.
“I see what you mean. Not bad stuff this, is it?”
We both experimented with the valve settings, getting used to the different levels of flow. It was difficult to tell much difference between one and one and a half liters per minute, but knocking it down to half a liter was noticeably thin. Pumping it up above two liters a minute was a real treat—delivering an O2 “high” that was sheer delight for our oxygen-starved bodies.
Al pointed out the useful fact that there would be three extra cylinders here for Brian, Barney, and Kees. That meant we could use two bottles rather than one each for sleeping at night. The same would be true up at Camp Six. Simon had promised from the beginning that there would be sufficient supplies of oxygen for everyone to have an attempt, and the extra margin we now had might prove extremely useful if we were pinned down at Camp Six by a storm.
The oxygen had done more than eliminate my headache and depression. I suddenly realized that I was hungry and so was Al. We ate two Wayfarer meals each and some pistachio nuts I had brought up from Advance Base Camp. Then we got the camera out and filmed a short sequence of cooking and eating in the tent. I filmed Al putting on the oxygen mask and bedding down in his sleeping bag. He filmed me eating from one of the ready-meal packs, complaining about the lack of calories while stuffing my face with beef-and-dumpling stew.
With very little daylight remaining, Al then took the camera outside and filmed the view across toward Pumori.
“Get a panning shot of the platform,” I yelled, “and make sure you can see all the shit and the ripped-up tents.”
“Yeah.”
As dark fell, I began to search the rucksack for my headlamp. A first and second rummage failed to find it so I emptied every single item out onto the floor of the tent. No sign. I shifted position and checked underneath and inside the sleeping bag. Still no sign of the lamp. Then I checked every corner of the tent, inside my discarded clothing, and Al checked his side of the tent. Nothing.
I just couldn’t understand it. I was absolutely certain that I had packed the headlamp in the rucksack that morning. I definitely remembered checking the two spare bulbs and batteries that were taped to it. But now it seemed to have vanished.
The seriousness of this was far greater than the inconvenience of having no light inside the tent for the night hours. It ruled out my summit bid completely. Five or six hours of the summit-day climb would be through darkness, and without a headlamp I was going nowhere.
I searched the pack again and again, increasingly desperate. Inwardly I cursed myself for this mistake. There would be no spares up here, and trying to borrow one from another expedition would merely put them in the same predicament. How could I have been so careless?
“Maybe it fell out of the pack at one of the filming stops.” Al was sounding sympathetic, but I knew he had every right to be angry. My stupidity could adversely affect his own summit bid as well.
I thought through the day. There had been one stop, in the rock section, when I had dug deep into the pack for a battery. Maybe the headlamp had fallen out then.
“The six o’clock radio call’s coming up. I’ll ask Simon if they’ve found it in your tent down at the Col.” Al picked up the walkie-talkie and radioed down.
As he talked to Simon, I chewed over the hard reality of the situation. Even if they found my headlamp, it could not get up to me until the B Team arrived the following afternoon. Then, unless I could make it through the night to Six, there would be too little tent space for us all at Five. I would have to go down. A wave of unbearable self-pity swept over me. To lose all this from one tiny mistake? I hated myself for being so fucking sloppy. Where was that lamp?
B Team had made it safely to the Col and were resting when we called. Simon was pleased to hear that Camp Five was in good shape but a search of the tent I had left that morning revealed no sign of the headlamp.
Al clicked off the radio.
“That’s a bummer.”
“It has to be here.”
I began another search of the tent, shifting every single item down to the end and then sorting through the pile as methodically as I could in the cramped conditions. Nothing.
Then I noticed that the side wall of the tent was folded over. I ran my hand underneath the flap of fabric and brought out the headlamp. That I had missed it in the earlier searches was beyond belief. I can only assume that my brain was still running at half speed from the oxygen depletion of the climb.
“Panic over.” Al lit the stove for another brew.
“Thank God.” I was hugely relieved. My chance for the summit had just been reinstated.
We radioed down to Simon again to tell him the lamp had been found, then spent the rest of the evening brewing tea and hot chocolate. By 9:00 P.M. we were preparing to bed down.
Sleeping in the mask was hard to get used to. The Russian apparatus was as uncomfortable as it was ugly, with the restraining straps always digging into some part of the face. The exhaust system was inefficient too, so that small pools of icy liquid collected periodically inside the valve of the mouthpiece. Shifting from side to side in the search for a comfortable sleeping position delivered a quantity of disgusting frigid spittle down our necks.
But no matter how difficult it was to sleep in the mask, the prospect of trying to sleep without it was worse. I passed a restless night, waking to readjust the mask every time it began to slip and checking that the cylinder was still delivering the flow.
The wind also conspired to make sleep elusive, dropping away to a whisper and then sweeping back against the walls of the tents with a huge crack as a new surge of energy ran across the Ridge.
At 5:00 A.M., I heard the Sherpas moving around outside, collecting snow for their morning tea. By 6:00 we had our own gas cookers burning. At first light, Al was already poking his head out of the tent to check on the weather.
“How’s it look?”
“Mixed. There’s a lot of cloud about.”
“Can we get up to Six?”
“It’s the wind that’ll stop us if anything. We’ll just have to see how it goes.”
We carried out our preparations slowly and methodically, checking off each bit of gear as it went back into the rucksack. It is surprising how much mess a two-man tent can get into, and the last thing we could afford was to leave a vital piece of equipment behind. I made a special mental note to check the headlamp was in place. Then, critically aware of how even the smallest piece of missing equipment could bring us to a grinding halt, I checked it again.
Al gave the tent a last-minute tidy.
“No point in leaving it in a mess for the others.”
Then we rigged the oxygen cylinders in our packs and left for Camp Six, climbing with oxygen for the first time.
The first obstacle was a steep snow patch directly behind the tent platform. Even with the trickle of oxygen flowing into our masks, scaling this demanded a strenuous burst of activity for so early in the day, requiring front-pointing with our crampon spikes and pushing our ice axes deep into the snowpack for stability.
Panting for breath at the top of the snow patch, I checked the visual indicator on the oxygen line to confirm that it was working. I was not at all convinced I was getting any air. But inside the clear plastic section of the tube, the indicator was clearly activated.
I had imagined that climbing with the supplementary oxygen would be like climbing at sea level, but this was another miscalculation. The ga
s definitely helped, but I still felt dizzy and breathless after any sudden moves.
It would have been useful to get into a plodding rhythm but one factor ruled this out: the wind. Within thirty minutes of leaving the tent we were lashed by the strongest winds we had yet experienced. As the North Ridge narrowed, sometimes becoming quite exposed, with very long drops down to the East Rongbuk, we were increasingly brought to a complete halt to avoid being bowled over the edge. The power of the blasts was both terrifying and impressive. On two occasions I was physically hurled off my feet, to crash onto my knees among the rocks, both hands clinging tightly to any holds I could find.
After an hour of this battering, the first doubts were playing through my head. How much longer could we continue in these conditions? A morbid fear struck me that Al, seeing me struggle, would decide the wind was too much and call the attempt off. Every time he stopped to clear his goggles or take a rest, he looked out toward the west—the direction the wind came from—appraising the situation. There was plenty of scattered cloud cover, but as yet there was no evidence of a large mass that could indicate a storm. We climbed on.
I was so wrapped up in the process of staying upright that I failed to notice the climber coming down until he was right upon us. It was John, the leader of the Norwegian expedition, on his way down from a disastrous stay at Camp Six. He was moving awkwardly, clutching his chest and grimacing with pain each time he coughed.
“What happened?” Al asked him.
“It’s my throat. I’ve spent the whole night coughing and I think I’ve broken a rib.” Even as he spoke, a massive coughing fit overtook him, bending him double in agony. He looked utterly bereft. We all knew he was on his third attempt to climb Everest.
“What about the rest of your team?”
“They left Camp Six this morning … but the winds …” He turned his face up to the Ridge, where scudding clouds were racing past. He shrugged.
“How about the Austrian? Have you got any news on him?”
“Not good. He’s in a coma. Cerebral and pulmonary edema.”
“Shit.” We had heard that Reinhard was in trouble at Camp Six but this was exceptionally bad news.
We stood silently for a few moments as John’s information seeped in.
“Anyhow. Good luck.” He picked up his ice ax and continued his lonely trek down the mountain, the sound of his coughing quickly swallowed up in the wind.
By late morning we were approaching the point where the route leaves the North Ridge and begins to traverse across and up the North Face itself. Here we had to take special care not to miss the right line, as numerous old fixed ropes travel directly up the North Ridge. By the time we would discover the mistake we could be a long way off track and facing a lengthy detour to get to Camp Six.
Al made the decision on which route to take, and we began to traverse diagonally up a series of snowfields interspersed by bands of crumbling rock. In the postmonsoon period this part of the Face is a lethal avalanche slope, but in the premonsoon the snow is compacted and stable. The snow was a welcome change from the problems of picking our way up through the rock.
The wind dropped off rapidly from midday onward and cloud swept up once more as it had the previous day. Soon we were climbing in the same murky whiteout we had encountered on the route to Camp Five.
To distract my mind from the effort needed for each step, my old mantra came back: “every meter up is a meter less to go.” The words, recycled time after time, had a hypnotic effect, lulling my brain into a near trance as the day wore on. At the top of each snowfield I would stop and try to assess how many vertical meters it had won us. Because we were traversing, the height gain per hour was less than on the Ridge. Thirty minutes of hard progress might equal as little as fifteen or twenty vertical meters (forty-nine to sixty-five feet).
The steepness of the Face meant we could see no sign of Camp Six, and for much of the time the summit was also out of view. On the occasions when we were able to see the summit pyramid, my only thought was how distant it still seemed. The traverse was demonstrating in the plainest way possible the sheer immensity of the Face. Hours were passing and the summit was still kilometers of climbing away—and almost a vertical kilometer above us.
Somewhere during that long afternoon we passed the 8,000-meter (26,246-foot) mark. We were now firmly in the Death Zone, the place named by the Swiss physician in 1952 who described it thus:
Life hangs by a thread, to such a point that the organism, exhausted by the ascent, can pass in a few hours from a somnolent state to a white death. This depends first on the age of the subject, and then on his reserves of energy.
Now the clock was ticking away. We had to move fast but the conditions remained uncertain.
By midafternoon a light fall of snow was dusting the North Face and the cloud had thickened above us to become a total cover. With it, my optimism plummeted rapidly. All our good progress would be for nothing if the cloud brought a heavier fall of snow.
But the snowfall vanished as rapidly as it had arrived and with it went the cloud. With just a short distance to go, the skies were clear and blue and the cloud had dropped to the level of the Col.
The problem of the previous day, when my body had switched off as soon as we reached the lowest tents, was uppermost in my mind as we came to the first tents of Camp Six. I was terrified of hitting another “flat spot” and, even though I was physically exhausted by the day’s efforts, I prepared myself mentally for the extra stage that would take us to our own tent.
I needn’t have worried. The tent pitches of Camp Six are spread over a large area, but the vertical gain between the top and the bottom tents is not as great as at Five. We reached our tents thirty minutes later.
The Sherpas had reached the camp two hours earlier and were already occupying one of the two tents that had been erected during the previous weeks. As at Camp Five, a stack of oxygen cylinders was arranged here in a neat pile.
Deeply relieved to have made it, I drank my last dribble of juice from the water bottle, took off my pack, and lay down to rest. It took me quite a long time to get my breathing rate down, and even longer before my mind was alert enough to notice the incredible location we had reached.
Camp Six, at 8,300 meters (27,230 feet), is the highest camp in the world and it feels it. The extra 600 meters (1,968 feet) of elevation gave it a far loftier view than Camp Five, to the extent that it was possible to look right down the entire length of the Rongbuk Glacier during the moments when the cloud wasn’t obscuring it. If it hadn’t been for a layer of haze sitting to the north, we might even have been able to see the monastery.
The perspective from the Col was also far more impressive than from Five. Because we had traversed quite a distance across the Face, we were now looking down at the western side of the wall, with the avalanche-swept Southwestern Face of Changtse behind.
Somewhere at the bottom of that Face was the Catalan camp. We had heard little of the Catalans beyond the news that one of their team members had returned to Kathmandu with a suspected heart condition. From our vantage point we could see that the hanging glaciers of the western side were far more threatening than those on the east. Furthermore, their route was sitting in the full force of the prevailing westerly wind, whereas our route on the eastern side was to some extent protected.
I didn’t envy the Catalans their task. Their chances of getting any-where on the mountain were hampered by the western route to the Col, and they had virtually no Sherpa support. By contrast we were in a very privileged position, with significant amounts of oxygen and food waiting for us here at Camp Six.
The two tents were set fifteen meters (forty-nine feet) apart, with the Sherpa tent at the top of a snowfield and ours positioned on a very narrow platform midway down. Both had an awkward lean down the slope, being perched on areas that were not strictly big enough for the floor area of the nylon base. A cat’s cradle of guy ropes pinned the tents down to snow stakes and nearby rocks to preve
nt storm damage.
Gyaltsen came over from the Sherpa tent to speak to Al.
At Base Camp I had noticed he was always on the move, with a spring in his step. Here he was walking in slow motion, and obviously very tired.
“What time do you want to leave tonight?”
Al pulled his oxygen mask aside to reply.
“Wake up midnight. Leave by two.”
“Fine.”
Gyaltsen showed us where the cooking gas cylinders had been cached in the snow and then plodded back up the snowfield to join Mingma and Lhakpa in their cramped dome tent.
Al and I sat, too tired to talk, watching the clouds gather over the Rongbuk. To our right, on one of the rock areas, the ten or so dome tents of other expeditions were gathered. As I looked over, there was no sign of life.
A nagging voice in my head was telling me we should get some shots of Camp Six before the cloud came up and obscured the view. When I asked him, Al dragged himself to his feet to do this without a complaint—which, if he was feeling as utterly drained as I was, showed an impressive level of commitment.
While Al was shooting, it was all I could manage to unstrap my crampons, pull off the snow gaiters, and crawl into the tent. As soon as I was lying down, both legs suddenly locked again into the spasms of cramp that I had now come to expect at the end of virtually each climbing session. The culprit was my hamstring—the largest muscle in the human body, which runs down the back of the leg from the buttocks to the ankle. Both hamstrings locked rigid until I managed to push back my toes and ease the pain.
In addition to doing the filming, Al cut some snow blocks for melting and arranged a small platform of flat rocks in the foyer of the tent for the gas cookers to stand on. After a few false starts with the burner, we had the first precious pans of snow melting slowly away shortly before dark.
The Other Side of Everest Page 21
