For the probable answer we have to turn back the clock one year, to the Adventure Consultants’ summit bid of May 1995. On that expedition, Rob Hall had turned back Doug Hansen at the south summit at about 2:00 P.M. Hansen had wrestled with the bitter frustration of that “so near but so far” decision and then decided with Hall’s enthusiastic support to give it another go in 1996. Hansen was no millionaire; he had a modest salary as a postal worker and had taken extra work to pay to join the expedition. It was very unlikely that Hansen would ever be able to afford to come again.
The two men were close friends and Hall had a special commitment to get Hansen to the top. As he waited on the summit for his client to appear, Hall must have been fighting a titanic struggle within himself. Turning Hansen around again, this time even closer to the summit than the previous year, would have been an unbearably difficult thing to do.
In the end, the desire for his client to reach the top clouded Hall’s judgment sufficiently for him to wait.
And wait.
As Hansen came up, the clouds came with him and then, so did the wind. Fischer and Lopsang were already out of sight. Hall was left on his own with his exhausted client as the storm swept in.
True to the highest principles of his profession, Hall stayed with his client until the end.
By June 6, all members of the Himalayan Kingdoms 1996 North Ridge expedition had returned to their “normal” lives.
Simon, the expedition leader, returned to the Himalayan Kingdoms office in Sheffield and resumed his duties as operations manager. He plans to return to Everest in 1999 on the southern side, and this will be his fourth attempt at the mountain.
Barney was back in the Himalayas within a few months, guiding a small group of five clients for Himalayan Kingdoms on Cho Oyu (8,201 meters, or 26,906 feet) to the west of Everest. As on our Everest expedition, Barney did not reach the summit, having turned back again with a client. Since then he has been working partly on guiding contracts and partly on petroleum surveys in countries such as Pakistan.
Kees made it back to Toronto for his wedding with forty-eight hours to spare. On the great day his face still bore the ravages of radiation burns from the expedition and he was as thin as a strand of spaghetti. His son, Cornelius Alexander ’t Hooft, was born on November 19. After the birth, Katie went back to her work teaching political science at the University of Toronto with Kees fulfilling the duty of house-husband and shooting the occasional film. Kees still makes the odd canal-boat journey back to Britain where, for some whimsical reason of his own, he has commissioned a narrow boat to be built to his own exacting specification. A lover of fine things, Kees had instructed his boatbuilders to install a floor of solid oak in the five-star canal barge.
“It wasn’t quite right,” he told me forlornly, “so I had them remove it and replace it with teak.” He watched my incredulous face for a moment, then burst into laughter when he saw that I had fallen for it.
Brian returned to the United Kingdom sixteen kilograms (thirty-five pounds) lighter than when he left and gave a press conference in which he told newsmen that he had torn the Japanese expedition’s flag from its pole and pissed on it—just one of numerous juicy quotes that the conscientious journalists duly reported verbatim. While the press were taking pictures of Brian in the street outside ITN’s headquarters, a bus driver, distracted by the clamoring hordes, crashed his double decker into a plane tree with a resounding crunch, ending the session—perhaps appropriately—on a note of high farce.
Scarcely pausing to recover from the rigors of the expedition, Brian launched back into the frantic merry-go-round that is his working life. Voice-over sessions, a tour to promote his new Everest book, a season in pantomime in Tunbridge Wells, and putting together the new feature film of Macbeth that he is to direct.
And as to Everest—how did Brian feel about our expedition?
“I feel ashamed of my performance on Everest this year,” Brian told me. “I didn’t have the nerve to carry on. But I’ll be back in 1999—to the southern side. Have another go.”
The passion still burns in Brian—that is what makes him special.
Al was not back for long before he was packing his barrels and heading out to Pakistan on a successful summer expedition to climb Gasherbrum 1 and 2 in the Karakoram. That brought his total of 8,000-meter-plus peaks to eight, a world-class achievement in its own right. How he found the energy to turn around within a few weeks after the Everest expedition and tackle another mountain is beyond my comprehension. It took me and most of the other members of the expedition months to recover fully.
After Pakistan Al then returned to his Newcastle haunts and resumed his promotional work for the outdoors equipment company Berghaus, doing the rounds of the trade shows and lectures and putting the final touches to a master plan that—if it works—will launch him into the super-elite of high-altitude mountaineering. Under the title “Challenge 8,000,” Al has set himself the target of climbing the remaining six of the fourteen mountains of the world that are higher than 8,000 meters (26,246 feet). If he succeeds, he will be the first Briton to have completed the challenge and only the fifth person ever.
The six mountains facing him are Lhotse (8,516 meters, or 27,939 feet), Makalu (8,481 meters, or 27,824 feet), Kanchenjunga (8,586 meters, or 28,169 feet), Nanga Parbat (8,125 meters, or 26,656 feet), Dhaulagiri (8,167 meters, or 26,794 feet), and Annapurna (8,091 meters, or 26,545 feet). As this book goes to press I have had the good news that Al summitted Lhotse in May 1997 and Nanga Parbat in July 1998.
The project is a high-risk one: mountain statisticians have calculated that to climb all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks carries with it a 40 percent chance of fatality.
Al and I have never spoken about the events of summit day on Everest and my irrational fear that he wasn’t going to make it. We don’t need to. I realize now that it was the onset of altitude sickness eating into my brain that caused me to become increasingly convinced that he had dropped out of the attempt. The delay when I waited with the three Sherpas for Al to come up the Third Step that to me had seemed like an age had in reality probably been just a few minutes while he sorted out his frozen goggles, which had caused him trouble all morning. My brain was operating on the paranoid assumption that something had to go wrong—and I seized on the slightest evidence to build a theory that it had gone wrong for Al. In fact, Al reached the summit not much more than ten or fifteen minutes after the rest of us.
To my surprise, a few of Al’s old rivals, scenting perhaps that a flaw had been revealed in his otherwise untouchable “hard man” image, called me at home after the expedition to relish the details of how I had “beaten” him to the top; but if they thought I was going to dish the dirt, they were disappointed. Al arrived at the summit in immaculate style and when he was there he was lucid enough to hold a long radio conversation with Brian and then put the flag on the summit pole. He also made sure he stayed with me all the way down to Camp Six, when I am sure he could have moved faster if he had chosen.
Sundeep came home to a £20,000 mountain of debts and the news that he was shortly to be sent to Bosnia with his unit. This was later called off and he went on to attempt the course that would qualify him for P Coy—the selection for British airborne forces. Sadly, a serious shin complaint—perhaps a legacy from the Everest expedition—ruled out his chances. Sundeep resumed his duties as an army medic, trying like crazy to lock away the frustration of having gotten so close on Everest to his dream of completing the Seven Summits.
“I was offered a place for ten thousand pounds on an expedition going out in spring ’ninety-seven, but with all the debts from this one to pay off, I just couldn’t afford it,” he told me.
Hearing that Sundeep had found this opportunity, Roger quietly offered to lend Sundeep the money, an act of extraordinary generosity that touched me greatly when I heard of it. But other commitments made it impossible for Sundeep to go. But the following year, as many of us expected, Sundeep
did finally find a way to go back to Everest, successfully reaching the summit on May 25, 1998.
Roger Portch shaved off his beard and climbed back into the hot seat of a British Airways 747 ferrying passengers around the world. Madras, Muscat, Johannesburg, Mexico City—his average working month contains a lifetime of travel, but the memories of the Everest expedition will never be eclipsed for Roger no matter how many take-offs and landings he performs.
“I’m learning to live with it—the fact that I didn’t make it to the summit—but coming to terms with it is going to take a long time,” he told me. “But I won’t go back. That was my one and only chance. I’m too old to have another try and it really wouldn’t be fair on Muriel and the girls. I can’t put them through that again.”
There is one particular moment for Roger when thoughts of what might have been are almost too much to bear, and unfortunately it is a moment he goes through every day of his working life. It comes when he is flying, as the digital read-out on the cockpit facia of his Boeing 747 reaches 8,848 meters—29,029 feet. That is when he looks out into the deep lapis blue of the earth’s upper atmosphere, savoring the elevation, enjoying the curvature of the earth, wondering, dreaming, imagining, what it might have been like to have taken those final few steps onto the very summit of the world. It is the infinite sadness of a dream that was never quite realized.
Roger still wears the red thread around his neck from our puja ceremony.
As for me? I returned with my two frostbitten fingers to be told that I was the twenty-seventh Briton to have climbed Everest, and the fifth to have climbed it via the North Face. Quite a few curious friends asked me, “What happens when you climb Everest?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know—invitations to Buckingham Palace for a quiet sherry—toasted tea and crumpets with Lord Hunt at the Royal Geographical Society mulling over the finer points of the route. Medals—that sort of thing.”
In fact nothing happens at all, which I find extremely refreshing. The nearest I got to fanfare was a poster my son Alistair painted in crayon daubed with the legend RUDDY WELL DONE DAD! That was tribute enough.
For some weeks I paraded my fingers in front of various specialists. Between them they decided the best thing to do was wait, so I did. After two weeks the blistered skin went green, then black, then as hard as cardboard. Then the frostbitten caps fell off completely, revealing, eight weeks later, two more or less perfect fingers underneath. The ends of those fingers will always be ultrasensitive to heat and cold—and more susceptible to frostbite—but I am lucky to have them at all.
“Another three to four minutes of exposure,” one of the specialists told me, “and you would have lost both fingers. Another ten minutes and you would have lost a lot more.”
Compared to the frostbite of Makalu Gau and Beck Weathers (both of whom had major amputations) it was nothing at all.
During June and July, I worked on the film, reliving the expedition in a cutting-room at ITN, and finishing the production in just six weeks. It was broadcast on Channel 4 on August 26, 1996. Since then I have made films in Malaysia, Thailand, Yemen, Malawi, and Oman, in addition to writing this book. The fact that I have filmed on the summit of Everest does not seem to have made much difference so far to my career. I am still writing movies in my spare time hoping to break out of adventure films.
As a person, I don’t think that Everest really changed me at all—a fact that irritates Fiona somewhat, as I think she was hoping a perfect butterfly of a husband would somehow emerge from the skeletal, frostbitten pupa that she picked up at Heathrow after the expedition. In fact, I am still the same selfish, stubbornly nomadic creature I ever was. I still can’t last more than a few days at home before I am pacing the floor thinking about where I am going next. I still lie awake in the early hours of the morning tracing journeys in my mind through the places I haven’t yet been. We still share a great many dreams—but the ones we don’t share haven’t magically disappeared just because I climbed a mountain.
Whether I will ever climb another big mountain is a question I often wonder about. Several people have been kind enough to tell me that the determination I showed on Everest could get me to the top of other peaks. But I am not so sure. The reasons I climbed Everest are, I am now convinced, rooted as much in my mind and my heart as in the pump action of muscle and sinew. I climbed Everest in a moment of my life when a whole internal geyser of frustrations was building up to a pressure-blast of energy. If the chance had come to me some years earlier or some years later, I am not so sure I would have reached the top.
So the conclusion? It’s all the same. Everything is the same. Everest is big but it wasn’t big enough to change the patterns of a lifetime. The red final-demand bills are still stacked up against the telephone. The mortgage company is still calling to get the back payments we owe them. Our marriage is still locked into the same pattern it ever was—of the joy of being together and the pain of being apart. Luckily we can still laugh together, and neither of us can see any way the relationship is really going to change now that it has survived Everest.
A part of me is still waiting for the bolt from the blue, the great celestial neon arrow that I didn’t see on the summit. Perhaps it is Fiona who should go out and climb a mountain—maybe she would see the great celestial arrow when she dragged herself to the top. Perhaps I should suggest it.
But, thinking about it, I’m not so sure that is a good idea. The logistics of hauling all that gin and tonic up the mountain would defeat even the most brilliant leader.
Meanwhile, I am still making adventure films. I have to, to make a living, but my heart has already moved on. I see myself in ten years’ time writing and directing movies in Hollywood—a seemingly noble vision until you realize that everyone who works in television has the same desire. So, I’m doing the only thing I can, letting my imagination fly and writing stories that come from some strange corner of my mind, hoping against hope that I can sell one of my movie scripts and launch myself into a new career before someone calls me up and asks me if I am interested in making a film about an expedition to K2.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATT DICKINSON is a filmmaker and writer who specializes in the wild places and the indigenous people of the world. He has a passion for adventure that has so far taken him to almost one hundred countries, including expeditions to the Sahara Desert, Greenland, and the jungles of South America.
He studied anthropology in college before beginning a career in television. After training for four years at the BBC he went freelance in 1988 to produce and direct adventure documentaries for, among others, the BBC, National Geographic Television, the Discovery Channel, and the Arts & Entertainment Network.
His films have been broadcast in more than thirty-five countries and have won numerous prestigious film festival awards.
His recent film projects have included a sea voyage by yacht to Antarctica, a whitewater rafting film on the Brahmaputra River in India, and an expedition on foot across the inhospitable Namib Desert.
In the premonsoon Everest season of 1996, amid the worst weather conditions on record, together with Alan Hinkes, Britain’s foremost high-altitude mountaineer, he made a successful ascent of Mount Everest’s notorious north side, one of the more technically demanding climbs on the world’s highest peak.
He lives in England with his wife, Fiona, and their three children. His website is www.mattdickinson.com.
A TRUE STORY OF SURVIVAL AGAINST ALL ODDS
In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.
Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team, as well as their family members and supporters, to an exhibition game in Chile had crashed somewhere deep in the Andes. Stranded on a lifeless glacier at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level, Nando’s thoughts turned increasingly to his grieving father. He resolved that he must get home or die trying. So this
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The Other Side of Everest Page 27
