Death Zone Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Matt Dickinson

  Title Page

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Matt Dickinson is a film-maker and writer who specializes in the wild places and the wild people of the world. Trained at the BBC (which he joined in 1984, and where he worked as a researcher and production manager on programmes as diverse as Wogan, Jim’ll Fix It and Ever Decreasing Circles), he left in 1988 to pursue a freelance career as a producer-director.

  Specializing in adventure documentaries, Matt Dickinson’s credits include ITV’s Voyager, BBC 1’s Classic Adventure, and several hour-long films such as Channels 4’s Encounters, Equinox and ITV’s Network First. He has also produced films for National Geographic Television in the USA. His programmes have been broadcast in more than thirty-five countries and have won several awards at film festivals.

  Matt Dickinson’s recent journeys have included a sea voyage by yacht to Antarctica, a first descent of the perilous rapids of Brahmaputra river, and a walk across the inhospitable Namib desert.

  In the pre-monsoon 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 Face, one of the most technically demanding climb’s on the world’s highest peak.

  Also By Matt Dickinson

  High Risk

  Black Ice

  THE

  DEATH ZONE

  Matt Dickinson

  Illustrations

  (Unless otherwise attributed, all the photographs are © Matt Dickinson/ITN Productions)

  Base camp on the Rongbuk Glacier

  Brian Blessed in Kathmandu

  Trekking up the Rongbuk Glacier (Sundeep Dhillon)

  Yak herders on their way to advance base camp

  Members of the Sherpa team (Sundeep Dhillon)

  The North Face of Mount Everest

  Matt Dickinson with Changtse in the background (Alan Hinkes)

  The North Col camp

  The Himalayan Kingdoms team on the North Col (Simon Lowe)

  Alan Hinkes

  Camp six on the North Face

  Matt Dickinson climbing the Second Step (Alan Hinkes)

  Matt Dickinson on the summit

  Alan Hinkes on the summit (Matt Dickinson/Alan Hinkes collection)

  Matt Dickinson on the summit, ‘fun camera’ photo (Lhakpa Sherpa)

  First-degree frostbite on Matt Dickinson’s fingers (Sundeep Dhillon)

  Matt Dickinson and Alan Hinkes in Kathmandu (Simon Lowe/Alan Hinkes collection)

  Matt Dickinson and Brian Blessed at base camp (Roger Portch)

  Sundeep Dhillon practises dentistry on Kees ’t Hooft

  The North Face of Everest from the Tibetan Plateau

  Everest from the Rongbuk Monastery

  Ned Johnston filming on the Rongbuk Glacier

  The Sherpa team at the Pujah ceremony

  Advance base camp

  Members of the Himalayan Kingdoms team on the North Col

  The storm over the North Face

  The ‘B’ team at base camp

  The North and North-East Ridges

  Rob Hall at the Pujah ceremony on the southern side of the mountain (Caroline Mackenzie)

  Beck Weathers (Caroline Mackenzie)

  The helicopter rescue of ‘Makalu’ Gau (Caroline Mackenzie)

  Rob Hall’s team (Caroline Mackenzie)

  Brian Blessed on the North Ridge

  The final summit ridge

  Mingma, Gyaltsen and Matt Dickinson on the summit (Lhakpa Sherpa)

  Maps

  The route from Kathmandu through Tibet to Everest base camp

  Mount Everest from the north

  Mount Everest from the south

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly I wish to record my eternal thanks to my wife Fiona, and to my children Thomas, Alistair and Gregory. Their love and support was with me for every inch of the way, as was that of my parents Sheila and David.

  Also I would like to thank the following people for their enthusiastic assistance both during the expedition and in the writing of the book: to Nicola Thompson for finding me a publisher; to Himalayan Kingdoms for running a faultless expedition in extremely difficult conditions; to Simon Lowe, Sundeep Dhillon and Roger Portch for making themselves and their expedition diaries available; to Kees ’t Hooft and Alan Hinkes for their unstinting filming efforts on the mountain itself; to Julian Ware at ITN and Charles Furneaux at Channel 4 for believing that I could bring back the film they wanted; and to Brian Blessed, whose dream got this whole expedition rolling.

  Throughout the expedition our Sherpa team, under the leadership of Nga Temba, took on the back-breaking work of setting up camps, and in particular I wish to thank Lhakpa, Mingma and Gyaltsen for their incredible efforts on summit day.

  During the research for the book I have been grateful for assistance from, amongst others, Audrey Salkeld, from Rob Hall’s base camp doctor Caroline Mackenzie and from IMAX Expeditions Leader David Breashears, and from Crag Jones.

  My editor Tony Whittome has been – from start to finish – a constant source of encouragement, and in addition Chris Bradley and Nicholas Crane gave me valuable editorial comments just when most needed.

  Finally I wish to thank Anna Guma Martinez, without whose inspiration no mountain would have been climbed.

  Introduction

  Just before 4 p.m. on 10 May 1996, Audrey Salkeld, an Everest historian and researcher, was typing one of her two daily Internet reports into an Apple Mac notebook in a tent at Everest base camp when the bitter chill of the afternoon set in. Salkeld was on her second Everest expedition, hired by the American IMAX filming expedition to generate newsletters and keep the world informed of their progress.

  At 5,360 metres, base camp is a cheerless place at the best of times, but once the sun has dipped beneath the surrounding ridges, it is like living in a freezer. Shivering with the cold, Salkeld left the mess tent and walked across the ice moraine of the Khumbu glacier towards her tent to find some extra clothing.

  Glancing into the sky to the south, she became one of the first people, and probably the very first, to see what was sweeping up from the lower valleys of the Himalayas towards Everest. It was a sight which fixed her to the spot, all thoughts of seeking out a few more layers of clothing momentarily forgotten.

  Sudden squalls are common in the afternoon on Everest but Salkeld had never seen anything like this before. She describes it as looking like a ‘tyre dump fire, great billowing lilac clouds racing up from the south’. She called out other members of the team from their tents, and they stood watching in awe as the apocalyptic vision crept silently and swiftly towards them.

  At speeds touching 80 to 100 kilometres an hour, the storm whipped into the camp just minutes later, plunging the temperature down by ten or fifteen degrees in as many seconds, ripping into the tents in a blinding fury of driving snow. The storm swept up the southern flanks of Everest engulfing the ice-clad slopes effortlessly in a swirling mantle of hurricane-force winds. Within minutes it had the northern side in its grip, and then it rose to take the summit. The mightiest mountain in the world disappeared from view as the storm took contr
ol.

  If Shiva – the Hindu god of destruction – and Nemesis – the Greek goddess of retribution – had joined forces they could not have done a better job of devastation than nature itself did that day. The timing was uncanny, as bad as it was possible to be. If the storm had struck in winter then no one would have been hurt. But as chance would have it, the tempest arrived on the busiest day of the Everest calendar, right in the middle of the pre-monsoon climbing season.

  Our expedition, a British attempt on the North Face via the North-East Ridge, was at camp three (6,450 metres), poised on the edge of our own summit attempt when the storm thundered in.

  We immediately knew that this was something far more dangerous that any other storm that had hit us in the eight weeks we had been there. The temperature fell to ten degrees below freezing, then twenty, then thirty degrees below. The wind became a constant, bullying force, pulling guy ropes from the glacier ice, tumbling fully-laden equipment barrels into crevasses and demolishing our canvas mess tent with frightening ease. The dome tents, built to withstand hurricane-force winds, creaked and groaned under the beating, distorted into shapes they were never designed for and straining the Kevlar poles to their limits.

  In an attempt to record the event on film, we staggered out into the maelstrom, dressed in every piece of down clothing we could get our hands on.

  We could have been in the Antarctic, on the Greenland ice cap, or at the North Pole, so complete was the blanket of driving snow which obscured every feature around us. Not a single landmark, not even the huge North Ridge, was visible through the raging white-out of the blizzard, and the nearby tents of the Indian expedition were likewise invisible.

  Through the white wall of snow, and rising above the tempestuous roar of the wind across the glacier, was another sound: a sinister howl which told of even greater powers at play in the altitudes above us; the scream of the storm as it whirled across the North Face at 8,000 metres and above.

  There, in the ‘Death Zone’, more than thirty climbers were fighting for their lives. On the northern side three Indian climbers were stranded, exhausted and with their oxygen supplies running out, high on the North-East Ridge. On the southern side, two commercial expeditions were strung out between the South Col and the summit – the Mountain Madness team led by Scott Fischer, and the Adventure Consultants team of Rob Hall.

  The night that faced them was a night from hell. By the end of the following day, the three Indian climbers on the north side and five of the climbers on the south, were dead. The toll included, incredibly, Hall and Fischer. The total of eight fatalities made this the single greatest loss of life in any twenty-four hour period on the peak.

  But that was not the end of the drama.

  The storm was the blackest of many black days in a season of terror, in which one disaster followed another. There had been two other deaths prior to the storm. There were two more deaths to come. It changed the fortunes of every team on the mountain, including our own, and it ignited a flurry of sensational debate around the world as newspapers and television programmes tried to make sense out of what had gone wrong.

  The storm left a mountain of questions in its wake. How could world-class mountaineers like Rob Hall and Scott Fischer lose their lives on a mountain they knew so intimately? Why were so many inexperienced climbers high on the mountain when the storm hit? Why did a team of Japanese climbers and their Sherpas pass the dying Indian climbers and yet fail to try and rescue them?

  The storm lasted less than twenty hours but for those of us who decided to carry on and try to rebuild our shattered hopes of a summit bid, it never really stopped. The fatalities it caused, the doubts it raised, the powers of nature it demonstrated, were with us for every step we took. It altered the physical process of climbing the mountain, and turned our plans upside-down, but most of all it played havoc in our minds, preying on the insecurities we all shared in that most dangerous of places, and ultimately stopping in their tracks all but two members of our expedition.

  For me, a total novice at this deadly game of high-altitude Russian roulette, these questions were at that moment in time as unfathomable as they were to anyone who had never stepped into the Death Zone – that beckoning, and terrifying world where there is just one third of the oxygen that exists at sea level.

  I was on Everest to make a film, not to climb it. I had employed other, far more qualified people, to do that job for me. I had never climbed Ben Nevis or Snowdon, never stood on the summit of a single Alpine peak, yet, as the events of the season unfurled, my desire to experience the Death Zone for myself became impossible to resist.

  It was an obsession which took me to the very edge of self-destruction. But it also took me to the summit of Everest.

  1

  Feeling more dead than alive, I staggered the final few steps into advance base camp just as darkness swept across the Tibetan plateau and chased the last glimmer of light out of the Himalayas. It was 6.35 p.m. on 20 May 1996.

  I stood alone, swaying unsteadily on my feet, trying to work out what I should do next. For a few moments I was dimly aware of the snow-covered tents around me. There was a shout from the darkness. A glowing headtorch bobbing up and down as a shadowy figure emerged from somewhere and picked a way towards me across the rocks of the glacier.

  Then, with all the suddenness of a power cut, both my knees collapsed. I found myself lying on my back, staring at a sky full of stars, with a jumbo jet pilot called Roger kissing me on both cheeks and calling me a bastard. We held each other in a bear-hug for what seemed like an age as Roger’s words of congratulation worked their way through the fog that shrouded my brain.

  For the first time in many weeks, a half-forgotten sensation overwhelmed me to the edge of tears. The feeling of being safe. It was over. The summit of Everest was behind me.

  I opened my mouth to reply to Roger but all that came out was a gabble of unintelligible words. Confused by a mixture of euphoria and shock, and scrambled by the effect that extreme altitude and dehydration had wrought on my brain, I was unable to string two words together.

  It didn’t even occur to me to wonder where my fellow climber Al Hinkes had disappeared, even though we had descended from the North Col together. As far as I was concerned, he had simply vanished. (In fact, as Roger later told me, he had gone to his tent to sort himself out before searching for food and drink.)

  Roger pulled me to my feet, helped me out of my rucksack and unstrapped my climbing harness. Then he supported me into the unbelievable warmth of the mess tent where our Sherpa team was sitting around two steaming pots of food in a haze of kerosene fumes and cigarette smoke. Excited faces crowded round in a babble of conversation. I was guided on to a seat while Dhorze the cook prepared some sugared tea.

  My three layers of gloves were pulled off by eager hands, revealing the frozen fingers within. There was a whistle as the right hand emerged to reveal the two frostbitten middle fingers. The ends of each were consumed by a growing gooseberry-sized blister of fluid, the skin marbled and cheese-like in texture.

  Kippa Sherpa mimed the motion of a saw, cutting across the fingers. ‘Like this!’ he laughed.

  ‘No. No.’ Ang Chuldin, long experienced in judging the severity of frostbite, turned my hand in his and spoke reassuringly; ‘First degree. But fingers probably survive OK. No cut!’

  As I sipped the drink, the sweetness of the tea mingling with the bitter taste of blood oozing from the blisters on my lips, I felt the tent begin to spin. As the kerosene fumes seemed to engulf me, the familiar rise of nausea in my throat warned me I was about to vomit. I managed to stagger into the cleaner air of our own mess tent where I put my head between my knees and tried to ward off the fainting fit which threatened to black me out.

  The cool air and the tea revived me, and it suddenly struck me as strange that Roger was here alone.

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘They’ve gone down to base camp.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Roge
r’s generosity in staying was now all the more apparent. Advance base was no place to linger and he had waited here for several days even though the rest of the team had evacuated down to the warmer and more hospitable climes of the Rongbuk valley base sixteen kilometres away. His gesture moved me greatly.

  ‘Thanks for being here.’

  ‘Well, I thought there had to be someone to welcome you back to the land of the living.’

  I finished the tea and walked like a drunk back outside with Roger to the tents. I knew one of them was mine but in my fuddled state I couldn’t remember which. Roger pointed out the correct one and I unzipped it and climbed in as he pulled the foam sleeping mat and sleeping bag from my rucksack. He pointed to my feet.

  ‘You can’t go to sleep with your boots on.’

  He unlaced them and pulled them off. I could feel the frozen fabric of the inner socks ripping against the dried blood where blisters had eroded the skin. This was a moment I had been dreading. I hadn’t looked at my feet since the day before our summit bid and they were feeling very odd … swollen and numb, just like my fingers.

  Roger went to fetch more fluid for me while I plucked up the courage to shine the torch on to my toes.

  They were encrusted with blood. At first I was horrified, then, looking closely, I realised the damage was superficial, the blood was from the constant chafing of the plastic boots, and the swelling was from the impact of striking my feet into the ice. There were two small areas of frostnip but nothing more. In my nightmares I had imagined the toes would already be going black and gangrenous.

  Roger was back. He took a look at my feet.

  ‘Looks like you’ve got away with it.’

  ‘Yeah. Looks like I have.’

  Roger gave me a big smile, ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ He zipped up the tent and I heard his footsteps move away.

  Lacking the energy to pull off the down suit, I shoved my feet into the sleeping bag and wrapped the top end of the bag around my upper body. Then I sucked down a full litre of tea, revelling in the warming sensation as the hot fluid ran through my body.