The Other Side of Everest Read online

  Copyright © 1997, 1999 by Matt Dickinson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Three Rivers Press, New York, New York. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland www.randomhouse.com

  Three Rivers Press is a registered trademark and the Three Rivers Press colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, a division of Random House UK, London, in 1997, and by Times Books in 1999.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickinson, Matt.

  [Death zone]

  The other side of Everest/by Matt Dickinson.

  p. cm.

  Previously published as: The death zone. 1997.

  1. Dickinson, Matt—Journeys—Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)

  2. Mountaineering expeditions—Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)

  3. Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)—Description and travel.

  I. Title.

  GV199.44.E85D53 1999 796.52′2′092—dc21 [b] 98-48850

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55887-9

  98765

  v3.1

  For Fiona

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Photo Inserts

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  Preface

  There are two lists that are meticulously compiled by Everest observers. The list of those who reach the top. And the list of those who die.

  The fact that my name has joined the first of those lists is a constant source of wonder to me, and even today—a couple of years after I set foot on the summit of the world—I still wake in a cold sweat as my mind replays how near I got to putting my name on the second. Everest is a hard place and the passing of time has not softened my recollections of it.

  I was one of the hundreds who gathered at the foot of the mountain in the spring of 1996. Like them, I was nervous, awestruck to be in the presence of this phenomenal creation of nature. Unlike them, I was never intending to get to the summit, and I certainly wasn’t intending to write a book about it. My responsibilities were professional ones—to make a one-hour television documentary about a British expedition to climb the northern face of Everest, run by the Sheffield, England-based company, Himalayan Kingdoms. The route would be via the North Col, the North Ridge and the Northeast Ridge—the same as that attempted by the 1924 British expedition on which George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine so tragically disappeared.

  The North side of Everest has traditionally received little publicity compared to the more frequently climbed southern (Nepalese) side, but all that has changed with the remarkable discovery of the body of George Leigh Mallory high on the North Face. Mallory’s disappearance, with his fellow climber Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, had entered into mountaineering folklore. Their gutsy bid for the summit happened on June 8, 1924, in an age that had none of the high-tech equipment we now take for granted. They climbed in clothes similar to those worn on a Scottish winter climb: heavy woollens, tweeds, and hobnail boots. The route was unknown, the dangers of altitude were not clearly understood—Mallory and Irvine were truly stepping into the unknown.

  When they failed to return to their top camp, the tragedy was clear—Mallory and Irvine had lost their lives in the summit attempt. But had they reached the summit first?

  Their fellow team members searched for them in vain, as did others, for almost seventy-five years. The North Face is vast, and a human body could lie in an inaccessible gully or among massive boulders, and never be found. It seemed that the mystery of Mallory and Irvine would never be solved.

  Then a dramatic press release from a small Anglo-American expedition searching the high slopes of the North Face in the premonsoon season of 1999 was sent around the world. Mallory’s body had been found! The climbing world waited impatiently for more news. What discoveries would be made? Had he died in a fall, or was his body undamaged, indicating that his end had come from exhaustion? Most tantalizing of all, would a camera be found on the corpse? It was known that Mallory and Irvine had taken a small portable Kodak camera with them. Perhaps it would contain an image of the summit, offering incontrovertible proof that these two pioneers had beaten Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay by almost thirty years.

  Gradually, information was released. A pair of glacier goggles had been found in Mallory’s pocket, a clear sign that the moment of the fall had come in the dark. There had been other artifacts—a packet of matches, letters to his loved ones back in England, scribbled notes relating to their oxygen supplies for the summit push.

  Then there were the pictures of the 1999 discovery—moving, almost unbearably poignant photographs of a corpse bleached white by radiation and exposure. Mallory was half buried in ice and small stones but his back and lower legs were clearly visible. On one foot the team found the remains of a hobnail boot. The other leg had a more troubling story to tell; it was broken in two places. Later they found head injuries compatible with a serious fall, and a hemp rope broken in two. Mallory had fallen, that much was now clear.

  But the final mystery had not been solved. No camera was found, and the altimeter Mallory was carrying had been smashed in the fall.

  What had been confirmed by the discovery was the perilous nature of the northern side of Everest, the side that I had been commissioned to film. This was a place where a simple slip would mean death. Like Andrew Irvine, this would be my first Everest expedition, a fact I had firmly in mind as I put my team together for our three-month expedition.

  My first decision was to hire Alan Hinkes—an experienced high-altitude climber who had previously summitted K2—to handle the filming if the team should get a chance at the summit. My limits would be dictated, I presumed, by my own chronic lack of experience. I had never climbed above 20,000 feet before—and on an 29,028-foot peak like Everest, that is barely a qualification to get to Base Camp.

  Our expedition didn’t go as planned. No expedition went as planned in that premonsoon season of 1996, as has been described in countless newspaper and magazine articles and a number of books. The storm that hit the mountain on May 10 made sure of that, killing eight climbers in its fury. In all, twelve climbers died on Everest in those turbulent months.

  Less than a year after the storm, Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air was published, its immediate success proving that the events of ’96 had fired an unprecedented level of Everest interest throughout the world.

  Krakauer wrote in the preface to Into Thin Air that he hoped that writing it might “purge Everest from my life.” In fact it did the opposite, inspiring a storm of media and Internet reaction that has made him a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. So successful was the book that it has sold well over one million copies—enough, according to my calculations, that if they were stacked one on top of the other they would tower higher than the mountain itself.

  Into Thin Air is a spellbinding account, acclaimed as a classic of the genre, and rightly so. Yet controversy h
as dogged it from the start. Krakauer’s criticism of the summit-day actions of Anatoli Boukreev, the Russian guide who was on the mountain under the paid employ of Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness team, resulted in a very public shouting match between the two men. In his book The Climb, written with G. Weston De Walt, Boukreev robustly defended the arguments against him. Boukreev was later given an award from the American Alpine Club for his heroic actions in saving several climbers from certain death on the South Col in the height of the storm.

  Tragically, Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna shortly after his book was published. Yet even though he is no longer with us to state his case, the debate rolls on. The Internet, particularly through such websites as www.amazon.com and www.salon.com, has become the new forum for Everest debate, argument and counterargument still volleying back and forth through the ether on a daily basis.

  Into Thin Air revealed a great many truths about climbing, and particularly about the state of commercial guiding on the mountain. Not all of his observations were welcomed: as IMAX director and Everest summiteer David Breashears later commented, “I think Jon’s book is a very honest account. It tells a lot of hard truths. Climbers are not a group of people who are used to internal criticism. We’re tribal. Jon wrote about things that people were uncomfortable hearing about, and that was traumatic for some.”

  The Other Side of Everest was not written to compete with Into Thin Air or any of the other Everest books, although I, like Krakauer, naively cherished the thought that once I had written it I might be able to put the mountain behind me. Instead, it was written—pure and simple—to tell the story of our attempt from the northern (Tibetan) side, a longer, colder, and, by reputation, more technically demanding route than the ascent from the south. I was astonished by what I saw in those months … and even more astonished as my role in the expedition changed from that of film chronicler to summit team member in a matter of hours. Making the film of the expedition was a rewarding experience (particularly the opportunity to film on the summit), but as the post-production process got under way I found the need to start to write the story down.

  Once I’d begun, I didn’t stop writing for six months, and the result is the book you now hold in your hands. It was published in the United Kingdom one month after Jon Krakauer’s book hit the bookshops. As far as I can ascertain, The Other Side of Everest is still the only book concerning the events of that season that tells the story from the northern side of the mountain, and from that point of view I hope that it will provide a valuable addition to the record.

  We had fatalities on the Tibetan side—four in all—including the Austrian Reinhard Wlasich, who took his final breaths in a tent just a few yards away from ours as Alan Hinkes and I left Camp Six for our summit bid. I have found myself questioned closely on this incident: “Why didn’t you do more to try and save him?” and “How could you carry on with your summit attempt with someone dying so close by?”

  The easy answer—and virtually a worthless one—is to reply that unless you have experienced extreme altitude on a mountain like Everest, there is no realistic way of comprehending human actions in those circumstances. The more personal answer is the one I normally give—although this perhaps is equally worthless—to concede that the more I look back on my experience on Everest, the more questions I too feel like asking.

  I have tried as best I can to address these questions in this book.

  The other controversy from the northern side that definitely won’t go away is the one concerning the summit-day encounter between the Japanese-Fukuoka team and three climbers from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. In this widely examined episode, three Japanese climbers and their Sherpas passed three Indian climbers who were close to death on the Northeast Ridge without offering food or liquid, or making any attempt to rescue them.

  Their actions caused a storm of protest around the world, and led to a crisis meeting at Base Camp in which our own expedition leader was asked, along with other leaders present, to censure the Japanese team’s actions. The reaction of the assembled leaders was an interesting one—and perhaps not the one I had expected. Later, Alan Hinkes and I found the bodies of two of the Indian climbers on our summit day—one of the most disturbing experiences I can recall from a period in which death never seemed to be far away.

  The Other Side of Everest is Everest seen through the eyes of a high-altitude novice, and I make no apologies for that. It is a personal account, pure and simple, written not for climbers but for anyone who has a fascination with Everest. Like Into Thin Air and The Climb, it has not always been welcomed with open arms in the rarified world of elite climbers (one well known British climber told me, waspishly, that, “it can’t be a climbing book because you’re not a climber”).

  Perhaps I have trespassed into territory in which I do not belong. I am not an authority on mountaineering in the same way that Jon Krakauer is, nor am I a climber like Boukreev was. I was well out of my depth on Everest and I am the first to admit it. The fact that I am still alive today is as much due to luck as to anything else—that, and the care of the fellow climbers and Sherpas who supported me through every nerve-jangling moment of those months.

  Meanwhile, I find that scarcely a day goes by in which my Everest experience does not come back to me in some form or other. On dozens of occasions in the United Kingdom, in France, in Spain, and in Switzerland, at climbing clubs, at bookshops, and for gatherings of businessmen, I have told the story of what happened on Everest that ill-fated spring of 1996. I see no sign that people are beginning to tire of the subject. In fact rather the opposite—the nightmare of the storm and the brutal reality of sudden death at high altitude have gripped the public imagination to the point where Everest is once more a subject of earnest debate in bars and pubs, just as it was when John Hunt’s expedition made the first ascent back in 1953.

  Just as a transparency projected onto a six-foot screen can never convey the true majesty of dawn seen from 27,000 feet on the North Face of Everest, words can never convey the true horror of stepping over the outstretched legs of a dead climber on the corpse-strewn path to the summit. There are some images from that expedition that I will never be able to erase from my mind.

  There is another question which I get a lot: “Did climbing Everest change your life?” I think the closest I can get to answering that one is to say that climbing Everest did not change my life—but writing The Other Side of Everest did. I have been a professional storyteller for the last twelve years—expedition stories told in the form of documentary films. Writing this book has been a revelation, opening up to me a deeper form of communication than any film I have made. In my Everest documentary Summit Fever I had just forty-seven minutes to tell the story of three months on Everest. In this book I have your (hopefully) undivided attention for over 200 pages! I’ll be writing more in the future, and filming less.

  The Other Side of Everest is now being translated into German, Dutch, Hebrew, and Spanish, but I was particularly pleased when I heard that it was to travel across the Atlantic for this American edition. I have been making adventure films for American broadcasters such as the Discovery Channel, the Arts & Entertainment Network, and National Geographic television for more than ten years and, as a frequent traveler to the United States, it will be a real thrill for me to see it in bookstores alongside such distinguished Everest books as Into Thin Air and The Climb.

  Matt Dickinson

  November 1999

  Acknowledgments

  First 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 every inch of the way, as was that of my parents, Sheila and David.

  I would also 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 Dhil
lon, 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, among 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 they were most needed.

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

  Illustrations

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

  First Section

  6.1 Base Camp on the Rongbuk Glacier

  6.2 Brian Blessed in Kathmandu

  6.3 Trekking up the Rongbuk Glacier (Sundeep Dhillon)

  6.4 Yak herders on their way to Advance Base Camp

  6.5 Members of the Sherpa team (Sundeep Dhillon)

  6.6 The North Face of Mount Everest

  6.7 Matt Dickinson with Changtse in the background (Alan Hinkes)

  6.8 The North Col camp

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

  6.10 Alan Hinkes

  6.11 Camp Six on the North Face

  6.12 Matt Dickinson climbing the Second Step (Alan Hinkes)

  6.13 Matt Dickinson on the summit