Summit 8000 Page 4

  Matt Godbold and I made our own summit attempt a few days after the others, but I was again struck down by a gastro attack at Camp 1. I lay curled up in the foetal position for hours as waves of cramps swept over me. The next day I had neither the mental nor the physical strength to continue, so we descended to Base Camp, our expedition over.

  While my first Himalayan summit attempt was unsuccessful, I had learned much about climbing at high altitude and on steep ground, and my enthusiasm for the mountains was undimmed. Being so close to Everest had brought home to me the intimidating reality of an 8000-metre mountain. I had climbed to around 6000 metres and been defeated. I knew that to achieve my goal of climbing to the highest place on Earth, I would have to be better prepared, both physically and psychologically.

  I had seen the potential cost of high altitude, too—death and serious injury. Despite this, and despite my illness, I had felt the thrill of the high mountains. I was captivated by the spirituality and majesty of the Himalaya and I knew I would return.

  *

  The next year, 1989, I set out to climb Pik (Mount) Korzhenevskaya in the Pamir ranges of Tajikistan with a friend from the Sydney Rockclimbing Club, Ian Collins, and a couple of other guys. The climbing was technically easy and we soon made our first summit attempt, which turned out to be another lesson in the dangerous effects of altitude.

  Ian, who was suffering from altitude headaches on the summit day, waited in the tent at our highest camp while I made a bid for the top. After making him a cup of tea and leaving another pot full of snow on the stove to melt, I set off.

  ‘Good luck,’ Ian said as I left the tent. ‘I’ll have a cuppa waiting when you get back.’

  Twelve hours later, after being defeated by a blizzard a short distance from the summit, I returned to camp, looking forward to that cup of tea. Instead, the door of the tent was wide open and Ian was buried under half a metre of snow inside the tent.

  God—he’s dead! I immediately thought. I guess that means no cup of tea, then. But to my great relief, Ian sat up, the snow falling off him in a wave. It turned out that after I’d left the tent, he’d fallen straight back to sleep. With the door open when the blizzard hit, the tent had soon filled up with snow and buried him in his sleeping bag—all without disturbing him, such was the coma-like state of his altitude-induced stupor.

  While Ian was okay, there would still be no tea because our stove had been ruined and it was a tough descent over the next few days as we struggled to melt enough snow to drink. Undeterred, we re-equipped at base camp and ascended again, reaching the summit a few days later. At 7105 metres, it was my highest peak to date.

  In December that year I joined another AAA expedition, this time to Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America, and in fact the highest mountain in the southern and western hemispheres. As one of the so-called Seven Summits—the highest peaks on each of the world’s seven continents—Aconcagua is very popular, but it’s quite easy and so the normal route can be crowded. We chose instead to climb the Polish Glacier route, which was less visited and more challenging.

  From Base Camp, we made speedy progress as far as Camp 2, where we were disconcerted to find the body of a climber wrapped in plastic—the man’s corpse was slowly mummifying in the cold, dry air. We later learned that he’d been injured high on the mountain several years earlier, but when a rescue helicopter had attempted to extract him it crashed, killing the crew. A second helicopter crew had apparently retrieved the bodies of the first helicopter crew but were so angered by the death of their comrades that they abandoned the climber to his fate. He died there and has been enjoying the view ever since.

  Several weeks into the expedition, we were ready to make our summit attempt. The slope above the high camp looked bare of snow, exposing steep and treacherous ice. Our team was not highly experienced on that terrain, so rather than follow the true Polish Glacier route to the top, we decided to traverse around the mountain to the normal route and finish the climb that way. As I picked my way carefully across the slope, I found an old ice axe with a wooden shaft. The pick at the top was almost dead straight, indicating that the axe was quite old. Its owner clearly didn’t need it any more, so I put it into my backpack and continued the climb. I still have that axe at home today.

  After reaching the summit, I started my descent to Base Camp. I wanted to get down quickly, but en route I passed a Japanese team on its way up. It was immediately obvious that one of its members, a young woman, was seriously attitude sick—she was lurching and falling and could barely speak. I wasn’t overly experienced at high altitude at the time, but I certainly knew that she needed to descend, and quickly. I advised the leader to take her down straightaway, offering to accompany her.

  He refused and said, ‘Some will summit; some will die.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked. He grunted and pushed past, so I spoke to the young woman directly.

  ‘You must go down or you will die.’

  ‘No, no. Summit,’ she mumbled as she lurched onwards.

  Interesting approach. I’m all for pushing oneself to the limit of one’s ability but climbing is about identifying and working within the limits of acceptable risk. The girl had long since passed that limit. At that point she was just competing for a Darwin award. And her leader was encouraging it! It was the first of numerous examples of bizarre leadership that I would see on the high mountains. I don’t know if any of that team summitted, but I suspect the leader was right about the second part of his comment.

  From Base Camp I made my way to the nearest major town, Mendoza, where I met up with the rest of my team and celebrated the summit in good style. After that, I split from the group and headed off for eight months of backpacking around South America. I’d taken the whole year off from the police, so I had plenty of time to engage with the South American culture. I also wanted to explore some of the continent’s wilderness areas and mountain ranges.

  I had been in a serious relationship for several months before I’d departed and Joanne and I had agreed to keep our relationship going while I was away. We missed each other a lot, though, so after a couple of months Joanne took leave and flew across to join me. Together we travelled, trekked and backpacked through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and parts of Brazil. We were on a shoestring budget—by the end of it, we could only afford one meal per day—but it was fabulous fun to be young, together and without a care. It was one of the most enjoyable holidays I’ve ever had. Actually, it was one of the only non-climbing holidays I’ve ever had.

  *

  Joanne and I returned to Australia in August 1990, and she went back to work. I still had several months of leave, though, so in September I took a job leading a trekking group to the Karakorum Mountains of Pakistan, in which stands K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. It was at once hugely intimidating with its steep, black, rocky faces and its massive cliffs of ice—known as seracs—but it was also powerfully magnetic. By the end of the trip I knew I would one day return to climb it. First, though, I had to develop my technical climbing ability and gain more high-altitude experience.

  In April 1991, I returned to Mount McKinley to attempt the difficult and very challenging Cassin Ridge. My climbing partner was Piotr Pustelnik, a Polish climber I’d met in Tajikistan in 1989. On McKinley, we first set out on a very fast ascent of the West Buttress route for acclimatisation, successfully reaching the summit just eight days after arriving at the mountain. I’d left my warmest clothing at Base Camp to save weight, with the intention of picking it up before we moved around the mountain to climb the Cassin Ridge to the summit, so when we decided to go for the summit on the West Buttress route I had only a lightweight down jacket and gloves. I had to line my jacket with a garbage bag and put plastic shopping bags over my gloves to help block the wind. It worked, although I was more than a little chilly on the top, given that the temperature was about minus 30 degrees Celsius with a strong wind blowing.

  This time, thankfully, I didn’
t suffer any brain explosions, but reaching the summit during our acclimatisation phase actually worked against us, as it robbed Piotr of his motivation to complete the Cassin Ridge. He didn’t say outright that he wouldn’t continue but I could tell he was having second thoughts.

  After returning to Base Camp and collecting our equipment, we trekked up the north-east fork of the Kahiltna Glacier. We marched for several hours under massive ice cliffs that threatened to release from thousands of metres above and crash down upon us. We made it through unscathed and set up camp in a bergschrund—a crevasse that separates the mountain face from the glacier it feeds—at the base of the Japanese Couloir—the start of the Cassin Ridge route. By then it was late in the afternoon, so we decided to start our ascent of the couloir the following morning.

  We settled into our tent and melted snow for tea. Sitting in our lofty lookout, we marvelled at the immense ice faces all around us. Then we spied another two climbers following in our tracks way below. They looked absolutely insignificant compared with the massive blocks of ice above them.

  Suddenly the ice cliffs broke free and tumbled down the face of the slope. As they fell and bounced, they broke into smaller but still enormous chunks, some the size of fridges, others as big as houses. The two tiny figures made a vain attempt to escape the path of the avalanche, but within seconds they had disappeared from our view as the blocks of ice crashed in front, behind and over them.

  Piotr and I, some 500 metres away, could do nothing but retreat into our tent, hurriedly zipping closed the door. A massive blast of wind hit us moments later. Our tent poles flattened and the shelter was crushed by the force of the air for about thirty seconds. Once it passed our tent sprang back into something resembling its original shape and we peered down into the valley, waiting for the snow cloud to clear. Incredibly, we spotted the two little figures still running for their lives. How they survived I have no idea, but someone or something was looking after them that day. Half an hour later they reached our camp, still so high from adrenaline that they could barely speak.

  That night passed slowly, as avalanches reverberated around the mountain. The next morning Piotr declared that he didn’t want to continue the climb. The two climbers—who were British, it turned out—didn’t want a third person on their team, and the Japanese Couloir was too technical for me to solo. My expedition was over. Great! I thought. That was time and money well spent. Our frosty trek back to base camp, had nothing to do with the temperature, and I collected my gear and walked out of the mountains alone.

  *

  In mid 1991, having returned frustrated after the lost opportunity on McKinley, I was invited by my friend Ian Collins to join him on an expedition to the big one, Mount Everest. This was it! After six years of climbing around the world I now had the opportunity to realise my dream.

  At that time, the normal process if you wanted to climb Everest was to apply to Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism two or three years in advance. But a Russian team had cancelled their permit at the last minute and Ian had managed to secure it. In a short time we’d formed a team comprising Ian, me, Michael Groom and expat New Zealander Mark Squires.

  I’d rock climbed with Ian and Mark for several years but hadn’t met Groom, who lived in Queensland. He was the only one on the team with 8000-metre experience, having twice climbed on the world’s third-highest peak, Kanchenjunga. He’d also made two unsuccessful attempts on Everest. He was best known for his second attempt on Kanchenjunga, when he suffered severe frostbite on his descent from the summit and subsequently had to have the front portions of both his feet amputated, including all ten toes.

  Everest’s history is well known. It was identified as the highest point on Earth during the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in the nineteenth century and received its western name from the Royal Geographical Society in 1865, in honour of Sir George Everest, a surveyor-general of India during the survey. The locals, of course, had known it by a quite different name, and for quite some time. To them it was, and is, Chomolungma, meaning ‘Mother Goddess of the Earth’.

  As with several other 8000ers, the border of Tibet and Nepal runs up and over its summit. During the 1920s and 1930s, the British launched six attempts to its north side, several of which came within just a few hundred metres of the summit, despite the climbers’ rudimentary clothing and oxygen systems. The disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine close to the summit in 1924 left an as yet unsolved mystery as to whether they may have reached the top twenty-nine years earlier than the first official success.

  The Second World War interrupted proceedings, as did the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1947, and the subsequent closing of Tibet’s borders to foreign expeditions for many years. Attention switched to Nepal, which until that time had kept its own borders locked but had relaxed its restrictions with the coming of democracy to the kingdom in the early 1950s. Some preliminary exploration identified that a route might be climbed through the Khumbu Icefall, and up the mountain’s south-east ridge to the summit. Success finally came to the British on 29 May 1953, but not before the Swiss almost stole the crown in 1952 when they reached the south summit, just 100 metres from the top.

  Mallory and Irvine weren’t the only climbers to make Chomolungma their last resting place. Around 250 have now perished in pursuit of summit ‘glory’. The two worst incidents were in 1996, when fifteen climbers died on the mountain (eight in a single storm), and 2014, when a single avalanche crushed sixteen High Altitude Porters in the Khumbu icefall.

  Everest has two main climbing seasons: pre-monsoon, which runs from late March to the end of May, at which time the monsoon starts, and post-monsoon, which is officially defined as September to November. Pre-monsoon presents a mountain that has largely been swept clear of excess snow by the winter jet-stream winds that pound the mountain at over 300 kilometres per hour. It becomes warmer as the season progresses towards the beginning of summer in June, so the risk of frostbite is reduced. In the post-monsoon season, the mountain is covered in snow, which actually makes the climbing easier. But the avalanche danger is much greater and the temperatures become colder as the season progresses. Most expeditions prefer to climb in the safer, pre-monsoon, season.

  Our Everest expedition, however, was scheduled for the post-monsoon season because that was what the Russians’ permit had dictated. In early September, Ian and Mark travelled to Kathmandu to start the preparations, while I stayed for a few more days to marry Joanne in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Jo was a real homebody and desperately wanted to be married, but I confess that it wasn’t high on my list of priorities. The pull of the mountains was getting stronger and stronger, and I was about to have my first real taste of thin air. I knew that, ultimately, trying to satisfy both commitments would cause conflict. Fittingly, it snowed on our wedding day, so I was well acclimatised to the cold when I arrived in Kathmandu, sans wife, a few days later.

  *

  I knew from my experience on Pumori that Nepalese customs officials would inspect my bags and find some ‘technical issue’ with the amount or type of equipment that I was bringing into the country. They would either delay me extensively or confiscate something, which would disappear into the great black hole of their impounded-goods warehouse, never to be seen again. It was all a scam, of course, as the inspectors were simply seeking some minor bribe to complement their lowly wages. But I wasn’t prepared to give up any of my essential equipment, nor did I know what the appropriate financial ‘incentive’ was. To overcome this, I purchased a bottle of duty-free spirits at the airport and put it into my luggage while waiting to be inspected. When my bags were opened, the expected topic was raised.

  ‘Actually, sir, you have too much equipment here. It is not possible to take all this equipment into Nepal.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, you know, I really don’t need that bottle of alcohol at the top of my bag. Could you help by disposing of that for me? And would that bring my equipment back to an acceptable amount?’
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  ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ came the very pleased reply. I was soon out of the airport with all my equipment, and back in the hustle and bustle of Kathmandu.

  It was with a certain trepidation that I was returning to Nepal—the memory of that disastrous intestinal experience during my expedition there in 1988 was still agonisingly strong—I was desperate to get into the mountains healthy so I could take on Everest. Accordingly, I took great care that every bite and every sip of liquid I consumed was as hygienic as it could be. At least one restaurant owner was well aware of the needs of tourists like me, cleverly displaying a sign that read, ‘We soak all our vegetables in 2% iodine solution’. His restaurant was packed solid every night.

  We spent several days purchasing what we needed for our climb—food, rope, propane/butane gas canisters for our stoves, a couple of bottles of oxygen (we would be climbing without oxygen but still wanted a bottle or two for emergencies), snow pickets and other necessary expedition paraphernalia. We had engaged a local trekking agent, who liaised with the authorities on our behalf, and employed a cook and a sirdar (much like a foreman). The sirdar then hired and managed the porters who’d carry our equipment to base camp. The agent also provided us with a kitchen tent and cooking equipment. We would fend for ourselves while up high on the mountain, but while we were resting at base camp and recovering from our climbing sorties, it would be wonderful to have someone else do the chores.

  Prior to departing for the mountain, we had to undergo the arduous briefing process required by the Nepal Ministry of Tourism, which involved hours in a musty office filling out numerous documents in triplicate, all of which needed laborious and rather snooty consideration by the responsible official—and extended tedium while we waited for his benign consent. After a full day spent battling our way through bureaucracy of which any civil servant would be proud, we finally received his approving decree and were free to start our journey to base camp.