‘I don’t think this is going to go,’ shouted Jim. ‘I’ll abseil down and try out to the right.’
He fiddled with his pegs, trying to get a good placement. The hammering sounded flat and dull with none of the resonant ring that is the sign of a peg well in. We were uncomfortably aware of the dangers of abseiling. We had met three young British climbers in Delhi at the headquarters of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation. They had made an impressive new route up the West Ridge of Bhagirathi I, the fine-pointed peak we could see dominating the other side of the Gangotri Glacier, but one of them had fallen to his death on the way down while abseiling from a nut anchor. Jim was now abseiling from the piton he had finally managed to place to his satisfaction, stepping down carefully, putting as little weight on the rope as possible.
He pulled the ropes down and picked a way to his right in a long diagonally rising traverse towards what appeared to be a break in the smooth band of rock. In the meantime the clouds had rolled in to cover the sky. Our friendly ridge was looking bleak and threatening and I had now had over an hour to savour the isolation and commitment of our position. The rope had nearly run out.
‘Only ten more feet.’
‘I’m nearly there.’
There was a whoop of success.
‘It’ll go all right. Looks great.’
I shivered. ‘Come on Jim, we’ve still got to build a bivvy site.’
He anchored the rope, and picked his way back to join me. The ledge where we had left our sacks looked even smaller than it had been three hours earlier. Jim set to with a will, heaving rocks from the ridge to build a delicately balanced platform projecting out from the original tiny plinth. After an hour’s work we had quite a respectable platform, though the tent, once erected, was overhanging it at both ends and on the outer side. From outside it looked incredibly precarious but inside, though we could barely sit up it had a reassuring enclosed feel. We had chipped away at some ice and collected it in a pile by the entrance. The stove was purring and our first brew was almost ready. In our effort to save weight we had just the one pan and a single spoon.
It had begun to snow, pattering lightly on the tent. I suspect that Jim was wondering, in much the same way that I was, just how we would manage to get off the climb in bad weather, but we didn’t discuss it. There was no point. We chatted lightly and easily. Our climbing judgement and attitudes seemed so close that there was very little need to talk over plans or intentions. Whoever happened to be out in front took the tactical decision; it was as good and as easy a level of teamwork as I have experienced in the mountains.
It was now dark. Just one more brew before settling in for the night. Jim opened the tent door to get some ice, there was a rattle and our only remaining torch, which had been propped in the entrance, went hurtling down the slope, casting its beam erratically over the snow-plastered slabs.
‘That’d give someone a shock, if there was anyone down there to see it,’ commented Jim cheerfully.
We had now lost both head torches but we could do without them. At least it gave us an excuse to lie in until it was light in the morning.
About an inch of snow had fallen in the night, but this was quickly burnt away once the sun crept above the cloudless peaks to the east. We were away by 8.30 a.m., jumaring up to the high point. I had the first lead of the day up a steep crack line that yielded both holds and placements for protection. This led to an overhanging corner. It looked as if Jim had captured the crux. He bridged out widely, managed to get a running belay above him, swung out onto the overhanging wall and let out a yell.
It looked spectacular. He was moving steadily out over the bulge until he vanished from sight. Slowly the rope ran through my hands. There was a shout from above; he’d made it. Another pause and he zoomed back down the rope to pick up his sack. As I followed, jumaring up the rope, I was part envious that he had probably got the best pitch of the climb, and part relieved that it hadn’t been my turn. It looked hard and committing with widely spaced holds over a giddy drop.
The angle now relented but every ledge was piled with rocky debris which the rope dislodged on to the man below. Pitch followed nerve-racking pitch. We were now above the col but the top seemed as far away as ever. The higher we got, the more insecure the rock became, with great flakes piled precariously one on top of the other. We weaved from side to side, trying to take the safest line. There was no point in putting in any runners, for nothing was solid. Then, suddenly, I was nearly there. I pulled carefully over a huge block and found myself on steep snow just below the crest of the ridge. But I’d run out of rope. There was no alternative, I’d have to stop and bring Jim up. We were now both carrying our sacks and he hardly paused as he came alongside, excited to reach the crest and see the view from it. He kicked up it, feeling the lack of crampons, and peered over the top, a precarious knife edge of snow. The other side fell away in a precipitous slope that swept in a single plunge of some 300 metres to a snow basin far below.
The summit seemed barely a rope-length away. It was a slender tapering tower, sheer rock on the southern side, near-vertical snow on the northern; a mythical peak from one of those eighteenth-century pictures or perhaps a Chinese watercolour. It was now five in the afternoon. The snow of the final ridge would be safer after a night’s frost, so we decided to stop where we were. We cut away the crest of the ridge until we had a platform just big enough for the tent with crazy drops on either side.
That evening we finished most of the small quantity of food we still had. We were just thirty metres or so below the South-West Summit of Shivling but, having got up, we now had to get down again. Descending the way we had come would be a nightmare. The rope would almost certainly jam on all those loose rocks and, even if we got down the ridge, we would still have to negotiate the crumbling walls near the base and the bottom gully with the threat of the icefall. Yet descent on the other side didn’t seem much better. The snow slope was ferociously steep, the crest of the ridge knife-edged and it was a long way back to the col. We couldn’t have been much further out on a limb.
‘You know, we’re just about on top. We’ve climbed the route. Don’t you think we should start getting down? It looks bloody desperate to me,’ Jim suggested tentatively next morning.
‘Oh, come on Jim, we’ve got to finish it off. Don’t you want a picture of yourself standing there on top? Where’s your sense of glory?’
‘I’m more interested in getting down in one piece.’
‘It’ll only be twenty minutes or so. You’ll regret it for ever if you don’t go to the top.’
It took more than twenty minutes. It was my turn for the first lead and I set out, kicking carefully into the snow that was still soft even after a night’s hard frost. I ran out a rope-length and started bringing Jim up. I was barely halfway to the summit. As he came towards me, using the steps I had kicked carefully, my eyes were drawn beyond him to the line of descent. It looked quite incredibly frightening. The top of the ridge curled over in a cornice, making the crest itself dangerous to follow. That left the steep snow slope on the left, but was it secure?
Jim was now kicking into the snow above me, moving steadily. He reached a little rock outcrop, pulled up it and then he was there, perched on a tiny platform just below the top. He brought me up and offered me the summit with a sweep of his hand. It was just a single clamber to the perfect point of Shivling. I have never been on a summit like it. There was barely room for a single person to balance on its tip. I stood there and waved my ice tools in a gesture of victory, not over our mountain, but of joy in the climb we had completed, the beauty of the peaks and sky around us and the complete accord with which we had reached our summit. But then reality returned. We had to descend an unknown route that, from what little we could see of it, was going to be frighteningly difficult. We returned to the tent and packed up, leaving behind anything that we felt we definitely would not need again.
‘We might just as well solo down,’ I suggested. ‘I don’t
think we’ll get any decent belays. If we’re far enough apart and unroped, if the slope does go, at least one of us might survive.’
‘Oh!’ said Jim. ‘It’s like that is it? OK.’
He admitted afterwards to being horrified by the prospect. He was less used than I to Himalayan snow slopes and hadn’t experienced an apprenticeship with Tom Patey, the legendary Scottish climber who rarely agreed to use a rope on anything but the most difficult ground.
I started down, kicking hard into the snow, trying to get the tips of my crampons into the solid ice beneath, hoping that the snow was just firm enough to take my weight and that the whole lot wouldn’t slide away. It was as frightening ground as any I have been on, steep, insecure and going on for a long way. I moved as fast as I could, concentrating on each separate step, trying to insulate my mind from the drop below and the scale of the danger. Just kick, step, kick, step, place the ice tools, balance the weight evenly, delicately yet firmly, and hold the fear in tight control. The knife edge went in a great curve and I kept just below the crest, slowly getting closer to the col, gradually lessening that terrifying drop. At last I was above the col and, if I fell now, I’d stop where it levelled out. It was broad and inviting. I turned outwards, started walking down with greater confidence, negotiated a filled-in bergschrund with care and then at last was on the level. I could relax.
I pulled off my sack, slumped onto it and looked for Jim. There was no sign of him. After twenty minutes I began to worry. I was just starting to retrace my steps when to my immense relief I saw him come round the crest of the ridge.
‘That’s the worst bit of ground I’ve ever crossed,’ he announced.
We were now on the col and had joined the route by which the mountain had first been climbed. There was a snow bowl just below which dropped away in what we presumed was a hanging glacier. We certainly didn’t want to go down that. We could see the ridge that formed the boundary of the North Face of the main peak. It didn’t seem too steep.
‘That must be the way, surely,’ I suggested.
‘Looks as good as any other,’ Jim agreed.
So we roped up, for fear of crevasses, and started down, at first traversing across the ice slope at the foot of the West Face of the summit pyramid, then dropping down over the bergschrund with a two-metre jump into the snow basin. Getting across to the North Ridge was less easy than it had looked from above. We were soon on steep bare ice, traversing fearfully on the tips of crampons for three rope-lengths, until at last we gained the ridge. Down the sheer slope of the North Face we could see the gem-green oasis of Tapoban far below. But it was going to be a long time before we reached it.
I felt a constant nagging fear that is never present on the ascent. Then all one’s energy and thoughts are directed to reaching the top, whilst on the way back down, survival dominates the mind. But it is this very fear, the banishment of all euphoria, that helps one avoid careless mistakes that are the bane of so many descents and the cause of so many accidents to good climbers. The ridge seemed endless. We soloed some sections and roped up on others. Most of it was easy-angled, but it was slabby and smooth, the ledges piled with scree and the snow soft. There were no signs of our predecessors; none of the old fixed ropes that we had expected to find. We reached the top of a vertical step – time to abseil. We completed one rope-length but were still only part-way down, made another over a steep void, swinging awkwardly back on to the ridge.
We tugged one end of the doubled rope. The rock was broken and spiky, full of traps for the unwary abseiler. We had been careful and the rope was coming free but, as we pulled the end through the sling at the top, it fell in a wild arc over a rocky spike some thirty metres above us, looping round it in a knot that got tighter the harder we pulled. We had lost a rope which meant that we could now abseil only twenty metres at a time.
But the angle had eased once again and we climbed down unroped to a glacier that dropped down from the West Face in a great convex sweep. At first it was easy walking on ancient iron-hard ice, then it steepened alarmingly. We were still a couple of hundred metres above the valley floor. To escape the glacier we climbed up on to a broken ridge and were just wondering where to go next when Jim noticed a line of fixed rope across to the left. We had not only made a first ascent but we had found, inadvertently, a new way down. The original route went up a rocky spur in the centre of the West Face.
We were glad of the ropes, for the last hundred metres or so were on smooth water-worn slabs which would have been difficult. A last snow slope and we were on grass once more. It was five in the afternoon. We had just made a 1,500-metre descent, but were determined to get back to Base that evening. We were four miles from Tapoban, night was falling and we had lost our head torches. But it didn’t seem to matter. We were alive and we’d just completed one of the most wonderful climbs that either of us had ever undertaken. All we now had to do was put one foot in front of the other as we dropped down the side of the Meru Glacier.
It was ten that night before we stumbled into Tapoban, first passing the camp of a group of young Indian climbers from Calcutta. They were delightfully naive and ill equipped but full of enthusiasm and warmly hospitable. After having a cup of tea with them we walked another half mile to our own little campsite, to find Vijay pitched alongside the Poles and very relieved to see us. We had gone beyond fatigue and were in a state of excitement, needing to communicate everything that had befallen us in those five intense days. The Polish girls had climbed Meru and were also about to return.
The following day we all had breakfast together and started back for Delhi. We no longer had the red carpet of the tourist organisation and, squeezing on to a bus packed with pilgrims, were rattled for twelve hours to Uttarkashi and then for another eighteen dusty hours all the way back to Delhi, talking, laughing and swigging Polish vodka until we reached the bus terminal in the early hours of the morning.
Shivling had been a delight. It was an intense, fast-paced experience on a challenging and very committing climb in a tight timespan. It really was alpine style, not just in the way we made the climb, but in its entire spirit. Tapoban, with its little groups of climbers, had the feel of an obscure Alpine campsite and the mountains themselves were Alpine in scale. While the way we had been able to change our plans and react to circumstances had created a sense of freedom you can never feel on a larger expedition. It all added up to one of the best mountain experiences I have ever had.
– CHAPTER 14 –
One in Seven
The breaking seas 3,000 metres below were little more than hazy white hachures on the dark shifting grey of the Southern Ocean. We were flying over Cape Horn, heading for Antarctica with 600 miles of storm-racked ocean to cross in the strangest aircraft I had ever seen. It was a converted DC3, the old Dakota, work-horse of the Second World War and of Third World airlines ever since. The plane had first flown in 1942 but since then it had undergone a transformation. The engines had been changed to modern turbo-props in elongated, thrusting nacelles and, even more improbably, a third had been added to the nose. Skis had been fitted to the undercarriage and a big alloy box in the cargo bay held a giro whose spin gave our exact position above the surface of the earth at all times.
I glanced out of the window in the cramped passenger area and could see ice beginning to form on the wing by the engine cowling.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Rick Mason, the engineer. ‘It’s got to be several inches thick before it’ll affect our performance and even then it wouldn’t take us down.’
‘What would?’ someone asked.
‘If the engine ices up,’ was the reply.
‘How do you know if that’s happening?’
‘You don’t. The engine just stops.’
Thick-set and bearded, fur hat hugging his head, Rick looked the polar hand that he was. When he wasn’t caring for this unique plane he lived in Alaska. It was his job to keep it flying in the coming weeks when we would be far from any kind of maintenance suppo
rt. We were heading for Mount Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica and probably the most inaccessible summit in the world.
I was immensely lucky to be in that plane. I can’t think of a single mountaineer who would have turned down the chance of a seat in the modified DC3. My own good fortune dated back to a chance meeting at the foot of the north side of Everest in 1982. The Seattle-based American expedition that was attempting the North Face, whilst we were going for the North-East Ridge, had been underwritten by two wealthy Americans, Dick Bass and Frank Wells. Although they were not climbers, they had conceived the ambition of reaching the highest point of all seven continents.
I first met them carrying colossal loads on pack-frames up to their Advance Camp at the foot of the face and was impressed by the way they were mucking in, portering for the team that they had funded. I took an immediate liking to them. They seemed to complement each other. Frank Wells, then president of Warner Brothers, was very tall and ungainly with a thrusting abrasive manner. He was a highly successful super-executive who had worked his way up the corporate tree. Dick had inherited wealth and was more relaxed. At five foot ten and compactly built, he looked a more likely mountaineer. A Texan, he came from an oil and mining background, but the love of his life was Snowbird, a ski resort in Utah that he had built from nothing. He was a great talker with a fresh enthusiasm that verged on the naive, happy to tell stories at his own expense, cheerfully confessing that he was known as Bass the Mouth.
The Everest Years Page 20
