Kingdoms of Experience Read online

  He’d taken a degree in politics and since then has lived largely as a ‘shuffling dosser’, working in climbing shops or guiding between expeditions, perpetually broke. At 24, he was to be the youngest of the Everest team’s lead climbers, having made his name through a series of very bold Alpine winter ascents.

  ‘I’m convinced I’m going to die on the hill before I’m 30,’ he said once in Glencoe. Then he added, ‘That’s bullshit, of course … I know I’m immortal!’ Pause. ‘Everyone is till they die.’ And when we first talked about Everest he suddenly confessed, ‘My greatest fear is being left to die on the hill. I look at the people I’m climbing with and wonder if they’d stay with me …’

  Mal and I drove down to the Lake District one wet day in October to see Chris Bonington. We needed his advice and his support before we could go any further. Bonington knew more about Everest and expedition organization than anyone in the country. Any potential sponsor would come to him to ask if we were worth backing. Most important, he knew the North-East Ridge, having led the only attempt ever made on it, three years before.

  We’d quickly read his book1 before driving down. The bare facts made grim reading. Of the four climbers, Joe Tasker and Pete Boardman had both disappeared forever somewhere on the Pinnacles that bar the way to the summit, Dick Renshaw had suffered two strokes, and Bonington himself had finally dropped out from sheer exhaustion. And these were four of the élite, among the finest mountaineers in the world.

  I looked at Mal as he drove, his fingers drumming on the wheel. Born in Kenya but brought up in Scotland, I still thought of him as ‘the wild colonial boy’. He has a grizzled, serious, sober air, yet loves high jinks and wild schemes. He once jokingly described his politics to me as ‘crypto-liberal-fascist-anarchist-communist-conservative’ and all those impulses are in his nature. He likes to play himself off against me as an unimaginative, down-to-earth realist, yet at the same time he’s an impulsive romantic.

  ‘Romantic? Malcolm?!’ I can hear his wife Liz say. ‘He can be romantic, but not about climbing. That makes him sound wet.’

  True enough. Mal is about as wet as the Kalahari desert. Yet he is driven by dreams, as mountaineers are. There is nothing practical in climbing a mountain, and suffering and risking your neck for nothing. And certainly impulsive – who else would have asked someone like me with no climbing experience whatsoever on the Mustagh Tower expedition? ‘Well, I’d never met one of you author types and I thought it would be interesting to see what you did when I put you on the spot!’

  ‘Like a cigarette, youth?’

  ‘Thanks.’ His head bobbed as he whistled tunelessly, rehearsing the issues he wanted to bring up with Chris Bonington when we arrived. He’s physically and mentally restless; the only time I see him entirely at peace is occasionally in the pub and always when he’s climbing. ‘It’s a wonderful game,’ he once said, ‘only sometimes you look round and realise half your friends aren’t there any more.’ And I wondered what his life expectancy would be if he began getting involved in trips like this. Well over half the people who start climbing in the ‘death zone’ above 7,500 metres wind up dead, and half of the North-East Ridge is above that height …

  I cut off this line of thought as Mal cut the ignition and we sat in the car outside Chris Bonington’s house while the rain hammered down.

  ‘Nice house.’

  ‘Very.’ Here was a survivor and a success. We picked up our notebooks and the bottle of whisky we’d brought by way of introduction, and dashed for the front door.

  We shook hands with Chris and went into his office. While his secretary made coffee we looked around the filing cabinets, the ordered racks of slides, the word-processor, the signed photographs. I felt like a sixth-form schoolboy in the headmaster’s study to discuss his career.

  He was brisk and business-like, neither patronizing nor over-effusive. He congratulated Mal on the Mustagh Tower and asked some questions about it. He told us the modified Norwegian expedition was well in hand and he was going with them both as an advisor and climber, hoping to finally make the summit on this his yet-again last time on Everest. They were tackling the now standard South Col route, with sherpas and oxygen, so if the weather behaved they had a good chance.

  But did we? Mal outlined the team and tactics he’d been considering, the few areas of improvement he felt could be made on the basis of Chris’s experience on the North-East Ridge. Cut out one of the camps by making the first camp higher; take a slightly larger team; fix ropes across a couple of awkward sections where a lot of load-carrying would be necessary; use tents rather than try to dig a snow-hole below the Rock Buttresses.

  Chris listened, letting his eyes flick over Malcolm, assessing him. Then he gave his opinion.

  All of Mal’s suggested changes were ones he’d have made. They would probably help. But he had to say he thought we hadn’t a chance of making the summit by that route, ‘And that’s no slight on the team you’ve suggested.’ He believed that the chances of anyone reaching the top of Everest via the North-East Ridge without using oxygen were virtually nil – for the first ascent, at least. We might just get through the Pinnacles. No modern mountaineer wants to use oxygen, which is regarded as a backward step and definitely uncool, but if one route in the world merited it, it was the North-East Ridge.

  There was an emotional resonance behind his controlled voice, and we realized the depth of involvement Chris must have in the ‘Unclimbed Ridge’. He’d lost two close friends in their oxygenless attempt – no wonder he was emphatic. Mal also thought he was right.

  ‘But of course you can’t use oxygen,’ Chris added. Using oxygen would vastly increase the number of climbers needed to carry the cylinders (there being no Sherpas in Tibet to help with that donkey-work), which in turn would mean more tents, gear, food, clothing. We’d be talking about nearly 20 high-altitude climbers, and there simply weren’t that many in Britain. Nor could we raise the inordinate amount of money involved, or organize an expedition on that scale in the time we had. A major expedition normally takes two years to set up; we had less than five months before the date set on the Everest permit we hadn’t yet acquired.

  Mal nodded, agreed. That was the heart of it: we couldn’t do it without oxygen, but we couldn’t take oxygen.

  Even if we still wanted to have a go at it, Chris suggested we enlarge our proposed team from six to more like ten, to allow for the inevitable natural wastage arising from repeated load-carrying and nights sleeping above 7,000 metres. His experience had convinced him that a fast, lightweight, Alpine-style attempt on the Ridge was almost bound to fail, and fail dangerously. A serious attempt would mean a return to something like his 1975 Everest South-West Face expedition, the protracted leap-frog process of a siege-style assault, using many climbers, fixed ropes and camps slowly established up the mountain. But even at that, an attempt to go through the Pinnacles to the summit, leaving the unknown technical problems of the Pinnacles aside, would mean a minimum of three days and nights above 8,000 metres without oxygen – and nothing like that had ever been done.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t think you have a chance,’ he concluded, ‘but of course you should go for it if you want.’ We shook hands and left.

  Discouraged, we drove back north through the rain. Bonington’s evaluation of our problems seemed realistic. Was it worth going any further? We knew the facts. At this point roughly a dozen people had reached the summit of Everest without oxygen; nearly half had died or had to be carried down on the descent. Other than the astonishing Messner and Habeler, they had all been helped by having companions with oxygen to break trail and help them down. Messner and Habeler had naturally taken the most straightforward routes up, a far cry from the North-East Ridge.

  We could settle for having ‘an outside chance’ of climbing the Pinnacles only, without oxygen. That would still be a challenge from a mountaineering viewpoint, because above the Pinnacles the North-East Ridge joins the North Col route, so all the ground from there o
n up has been covered. The ‘route’, the unknown and unclimbed element, could be said to end above the Pinnacles. But that would mean kidding any potential sponsor that we intended to go for the summit; summits matter to sponsors and the public, whereas mountaineers tend to think in terms of ‘the route’ rather than ‘the top’.

  ‘Mal, it sounds like all we need is two cylinders of oxygen above the Pinnacles,’ I said.

  ‘Well, sure, but Chris explained why we can’t get involved in a massive oxygen expedition, and I agree,’ Mal replied impatiently.

  ‘But can’t we just use a minimum of oxygen?’

  ‘To carry two bottles through the Pinnacles, you’d have to use oxygen to make up for the extra weight.’

  ‘Well, why not? What I mean is, does oxygen have to be all or nothing? Could we not just use the minimum amount required to end up with two full bottles at the end of the Pinns, for giving you a real chance of going on to the summit?’

  Mal drove on in silence, the calculations and permutations clicking through his head. Then he turned to me thoughtfully. ‘You know, it could work if you didn’t use oxygen before 8,000 metres. If two people each carried one cylinder through the Pinns … they’d need another cylinder each … Three days through the Pinns, that would mean …’

  He glanced back at the road in time to avoid the oncoming truck that nearly ended the expedition right there and then. We pulled up at a café in Biggar, ordered coffees and began working out logistics on the back of an envelope. Starting from the desiderata of two full cylinders above the Pinnacles, Mal worked backwards using elaborate combinations of flow-rates, half-bottles, changeovers, support along fixed ropes without oxygen … More coffee and more cigarettes as the enthusiasm and excitement began to build and a solution began to appear. One of the most intoxicating moments of any adventure is this phase where you start mapping a dream on to reality and perceive it might just fit.

  By the time we left the café, revving with caffeine, nicotine and adrenalin, Mal had concluded the outlines of a possible game-plan: with 13 oxygen cylinders, ten climbers, and some very complex and fragile logistics, we had a chance of making the summit.

  When Mal wrote to him outlining the new game-plan, Chris Bonington seemed to agree, and said he would be happy to be our patron for the Expedition (which had now acquired a capital ‘E’ in our minds!). That was a step forward: Chris’s backing gave us some credibility. All we had to do now was secure the permit, raise a team and some £80,000, plan and buy 5 tons of food, tentage, clothing, climbing gear, stoves and gas. There was not time to do things in that sensible order. Instead we had to go full-steam ahead, trying to raise money as though we had a permit, put together a team and start ordering gear as though we had the money, and immediately negotiate with the Chinese as though we had all these. Mal gave up his off-season casual labour and threw himself into organization full-time, and I got my head down over the Mustagh Tower book, which now had a possible early deadline: early March, when we would fly to Peking.

  Developments fell into place thick and fast, overlapping and obscuring each other like cards being rapidly shuffled and dealt …

  The Team, We were looking for another seven lead climbers. They had to have proven high-altitude abilities; just as important, they had to be able to get on and work together over three intense and stress-filled months. To have any chance of success, this had to be a team effort, demanding a great deal of selfless and possibly unrewarded load-carrying from everyone – so no stars, no prima donnas.

  There was a limited field for Mal, Jon and Sandy to choose from. The grim truth was they could number on one hand the surviving British climbers who had been to 8,000 metres, and enquiries proved that all of them had other ploys for spring ’85. There was a new generation of talented, thrusting young mountaineers, but they had concentrated on bold Alpine-style ascents, by very small teams, of hard routes on the ’smaller’ Himalayan peaks. So any team we took to Everest would all be operating above their previous height records just in getting to the foot of the Pinnacles at 8,000 metres. ‘It’s not ideal,’ Mal said, ‘but we’ve all got to start sometime and it might as well be on Everest.’

  ‘I just don’t know if you’re ready for it, Malcolm,’ Liz said one evening.

  ‘Look, Liz, what can you tell me about the North-East Ridge that I don’t know already? That it’s very long, very high, very hard, and it’s a death route? I know that. There’s only one way to find out if we’re ready, and that’s to go there. I’ve always jumped in at the deep end, it’s the only way to learn …’

  Sandy nominated Bob Barton – an exiled Yorkshireman and self-adopted Scot, working as an instructor at Glenmore Lodge outdoor centre. He had the requisite Scottish and Alpine background, expeditions to the Hindu Kush, Peru, Kenya, Alaska, and two notable Himalayan successes on Kalanka and Bhaghirathi II. Sandy had met him in Chamonix and the Cairngorms and been impressed by his steady, unflappable temperament and quiet determination. A natural team-member, he thought: friendly, selfless, easy-going.

  ‘Want to come to Everest, Bob?’ Sandy asked over the phone. Bob is a family man who, as he put it, at 37 is ‘old enough not to want to die young’. He’d consider it if it was to be a non-Alpine style attempt with oxygen used above 8,000 metres. Assured that it was, the only remaining problem was that Bob realized his second child was due to be born just before our planned departure for China in early March. He was torn between two events he did not want to miss, but after talking it over with his wife Anna he said ‘Yes’ – and prayed that the baby would arrive on time.

  Jon in turn suggested Nick Kekus, with whom he’d climbed on Annapurna III. Nick, like Jon, was known for being young and very bold. He’d made the usual transitions from hill-walking to scrambling to rock-climbing to snow and ice; progressed to the Alps, Kenya, Peru, then the challenge of altitude and sustained big mountains: Kalanka, Shiveling, Annapurna III. He’d just come back from another success on Ganesh II in Nepal and with his appetite for climbing undiminished said ‘Yes, I’ll come.’ Tall, lean, forceful and temperamental, he was the antithesis of calm Bob Barton. He took on the responsibility of organizing food for some dozen people for three months – a massive piece of planning, involving endless letters and phone calls cajoling products from manufacturers and suppliers.

  ‘Meanwhile in Aberdeen a red beard is munching marzipan …’ Sandy suggested to his friend Andy Nisbet that he get in touch with Mal about Everest. Mal confessed he felt somewhat put on the spot: Andy was a good friend whom he trusted, had a good expedition temperament, was a brilliant technical ice climber – but he had problems at altitude. He’d been with Mal on the West Ridge of Nuptse in 1981, and had beome seriously ill at 6,000 metres. Okay, so they’d rushed the acclimatization a bit, but the fact remained he’d got ill and the others hadn’t. One is seldom given a second chance.

  Mal talked it over with Andy, who admitted the problem but believed that given more time to acclimatize he’d be okay. Convinced of his sincerity and commitment, Mal decided to gamble on Andy.

  Andy is an Aberdonian with wild red hair and a long pointed beard that some say make him look like a demented garden gnome. He’s ill at ease in company, sits on his hands, fiddles and fidgets, finds it hard to look at people directly; he hides his inner nature and feelings almost completely. If he’s interested in anything other than climbing, not many people know about it. He also has the sweetest tooth in Christendom, living mostly on fudge and whole blocks of marzipan. So he was nominated to work with Nick on food, with particular responsibility for planning hill-food and sweet goodies. He based his projection of our needs on his average daily consumption … When we finally left Tibet we left behind enough chocolate to ruin an entire generation of Tibetan teeth, and my last sight of the ruined Rongbuk monastery was of a beaming old nun munching a Twix bar.

  The Permit. Mal and I had arranged to go out for a formal Mustagh celebration meal with his wife Liz, my girlfriend Kathleen Jamie and Adrian Clifford, w
ho had been our doctor on that trip. Just before we set out for the restaurant Mal answered the phone. He walked back in, trying to keep a straight face. He held out his hand. ‘The Nords have given us their permit – we’re on the way.’ We shook on it and went to celebrate one trip by toasting the next.

  Of course it wasn’t as simple as that. The Chinese still had to agree to the transfer. The Norwegians wrote to Peking cancelling their permit and recommending us, while we wrote at the same time applying for the route. A long and nerve-wracking wait ensued. By this time we were heavily committed to the trip, without actually having secured the permit – an inadvisable way to proceed but we hadn’t time to play it any other way.

  Unfortunately Adrian was unable to come with us again as a support climber and doctor, having just started his obstetrics at Kirkaldy hospital. So we had to look again for a medic who was an experienced climber, had been to altitude, understood the ways of climbers and every aspect of mountain medicine – and was free to go.

  Around this time Mal was interviewed in a climbing magazine and mentioned we were still looking for lead climbers and a climbing doctor for the trip. He was promptly smothered by an avalanche of letters:

  ‘I am a 17 year old student … I’ve always been interested in climbing and go to the Fells most weekends. I’m sure I can carry a 50lb rucksack at 26,000 feet …’

  ‘I have done some rock climbing and will be in Kathmandu next spring so I can join you on the way in …’ (Overlooking the fact we would be in Tibet, not Nepal.)

  ‘I have recently retired and have plenty of spare time on my hands …’ The search went on.