Death Zone Read online

  Four hours into the climb, we reached the steep pitch. It was now mid-afternoon and the full heat of the day had worked on the compacted ice, turning the entire route into soft, granular snow of a type that makes progress doubly hard. We traversed the face beneath a threatening serac. I moved as quickly as I could, not trusting the snow conditions which, as far as I could judge, were now ripe for avalanche. Every foot jammed into the snow created a mini-slide, some of which continued down the face for ten to fifteen metres before coming to a stop.

  The snow had the consistency of semi-thawed ice-cream, and the useful cut ‘steps’ which we had relied on earlier were now eroded and melted away. On two or three occasions my foot pushed down on to what I presumed was solid ice, only to slip down the face in the slush. I pushed the ice-axe deep in to provide extra stability, moving continuously to get the section over with as fast as possible.

  Beneath the steep section I had to rest for five minutes to regain my breath. The muscles around my ribs were just beginning to ache from the continuous heavy load they were put under to suck down sufficient oxygen.

  Al was already halfway up the steep pitch and I followed him, using my jumar clamps on the fixed ropes. With no option but to rely heavily on the pulling power of our arms and shoulders, this was the most strenuous work we had encountered. Here too the ‘steps’ had been destroyed by the heat of the day, forcing us to kick hard into the still frozen stuff underneath.

  ‘We’re up here a bit late, really. We should have set out a lot earlier,’ Al called back. I didn’t have the breath to reply.

  Feeling slightly dazed, I reached the top and clipped on to the snow anchor for support. Al was already cutting himself a small platform to film from. His capacity for work at this extreme altitude was very impressive, and, by the time the rest of the team were approaching the bottom of the steep pitch, Al was ready and waiting with the camera poised to shoot.

  Interestingly, Brian put in one of the stronger performances on this difficult stage, more so than Roger, Sundeep and Tore who were all struggling as I had done. His frame was built for this heavy upper-torso muscle work, and he hauled up with powerful thrusts, gasping huge intakes of air between clenched teeth.

  ‘Trekkers! You look like a line of bloody trekkers!’ Al yelled down. It was true, the team did look like a complete shambles from our vantage point, a tightly bunched line of grunting, panting figures, faces screwed up against the glare of radiation, shoulders hunched in exhaustion.

  ‘We’re heading for the Khumbu Lodge,’ Simon yelled back. ‘Is this the right way?’

  Roger reached the top of the steep ice, panting very hard and leaning heavily on his ice-axe.

  ‘The worst thing,’ he said, once he had regained a bit of puff, ‘is that I’m paying for this.’ He managed a smile and then moved on up the slope, the final pitch before the more gentle traverse which would bring us on to the Col itself and the welcome sanctuary of camp four.

  Sundeep and Tore both came up without a word, every ounce of breath devoted to the serious business of supplying the lungs with air.

  I was very happy with the way the day’s filming had gone so far, but to complete the sequence we still needed to film the team’s arrival at camp four. I went on ahead up the final rope length to recce the camp and find a good location to shoot from.

  Reaching the Col I was surprised by how little space there was available compared with the southern side. Pictures of the South Col reveal a vast, flat area with acres of room. The suitable places for camps are far more restricted on the North Col, and the teams have to tuck themselves into a narrow strip on the lee side of the ridge crest itself, thereby gaining a little precious protection against the prevailing westerly winds.

  The cramped situation is further complicated by the presence of the large crevasse which runs right beneath the crest. This, ever-widening each month, is an unwelcome reminder of the unsettling fact that the entire North Col camp is sited on the top of a vast piece of ice which will one day collapse. I reassured myself that the combined weight of the expeditions could not hasten this process one iota when compared to the millions of tons of ice involved.

  I worked my way up through the tents belonging to other expeditions, greeting a few familiar faces which we had got to know at advance base camp. As it was late afternoon, many of the tents were occupied by exhausted-looking climbers and Sherpas who had come down from load carries up to camp five.

  The early arrivals had naturally taken the prime spots on the Col, leaving us with the furthest and least protected end of the ridge. Swirling plumes of spindrift were rotoring off the ridge on to our tents as I arrived.

  From our site I could see, for the first time, the route ahead up the North Ridge and across the North Face to the summit pyramid. The Ridge was bathed in the last few rays of sunlight, and as I watched, these died away, leaving the ice steely grey and forbidding. The route looked absolutely huge, and our day’s toil up to the Col suddenly felt puny and insignificant. I couldn’t even see camps five or six, as they were too far off to be visible to the naked eye.

  There is an irresistible temptation to overplay the importance of the climb to the Col, and the inexperienced members of our expedition (including me) had fallen right into this trap. Make it up the Col, went the common wisdom, and you’ve as good as made it to the summit.

  What bullshit.

  As my eyes took in the immensity of the North Face, I recognised the fallacy of this assumption. Climbing the Col doesn’t magically qualify the climber for the summit. Far from it. Climbing to the Col is merely a warm-up stage, a qualifying round which admits the climber into an arena where far greater challenges begin.

  I was humbled and frightened by what I saw, now realising that the struggle I had experienced on the Col was just a tiny taste of things to come. It was difficult to tear my eyes away from the summit and I watched it in a trance until thick cloud blew in and obscured the view.

  When Al joined me, we set up the camera for the final time that day and filmed as the weary climbers came in. The Col was in shadow, and the temperature was already dropping rapidly as the wind rose.

  I did a brief interview with Brian, who, whilst he was extremely tired, still had the energy to give us a few words.

  ‘I hate the Col!’ he coughed, ‘but we made it.’ Then he collapsed on the snow, worn-out. I admired Brian’s strength of character, all of us were aware that he had had a tough day, yet he had not been at all irritable or depressed, the normal signs of a climber who is out of his depth. He seemed to take the pain in his stride without letting it get to him psychologically. I was beginning to understand why Brian did so well at altitude.

  The Sherpas had already erected most of the tents, and the only work left for us was to cut ice blocks to anchor them down. This type of Sherpa back up was a massive help, and a key part of the strategy for commercial operators like Himalayan Kingdoms who seek to save every ounce of their clients’ energy wherever they can. Our arrival at the Col would have been a lot colder, and a lot more exhausting, if we had had to erect the tents ourselves. When I saw Nga Temba I thanked him for doing such a great job. He looked faintly shocked, as if the very idea of praise was an alien one!

  Kees and I finished bedding the tent down with the ice blocks and then cut several more to melt for drinking water. Choosing the source for these was a delicate task, because much of the easiest ice to cut was soiled with urine or other waste. By the time all the chores were finished, the last few moments of daylight were slipping away.

  Inside the tent, illuminated by our headtorches, the scene was one of complete confusion. There is not much space to spare in a mountain Quasar at the best of times and the sides of ours were bulging inwards dramatically from the weight of snow we had just shovelled on.

  We were using the high-altitude sleeping bags – the really thick ones – for the first time, and, taken out of their stuff sacks, they now swelled like giant slugs. Add to that the profusion of other cloth
ing, the Thermarest inflatable mattresses and the duvet jackets which we would undoubtedly need for warmth, and there was little room for either of us to move.

  Kees, with his neat sense of logic, quickly organised his own side of the tent into some semblance of order, banishing his rucksack to the back and magically tidying the cooking area at the front so that the gas stove could be lit. I fumbled around inefficiently, cursing the lack of space, until I too forced my ever-expanding equipment into a more or less manageable heap.

  A voice shouted through the dark, raised against the increasing volume of the wind; it was Simon, checking up on us.

  ‘Matt and Kees. You got your brew on yet?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  He was right to make sure. Drinking was a paramount need after our hard day’s work, and yet preparing that drink was the last thing we wanted to do. Lying back on the soft sleeping bag, I knew I would be asleep in seconds if I closed my eyes. Every tired fibre, every stretched muscle was calling out for sleep, yet to succumb would be a direct route to acute mountain sickness and could even lead to a possible coma. Many of the saddest and fastest fatalities from altitude sickness have occurred when climbers have fallen asleep without replenishing their vital body fluids.

  The hissing noise of the gas had its own soporific effect and the ice seemed to take forever to melt. We chatted aimlessly about the highlights of the day while we watched the pot slowly begin to steam.

  The evening was spent brewing, drinking and eating as much as we could, a tedious process given the long wait time for each pan of ice to melt. Tea, coffee, Bournvita and soup all went down – a measured intake which gave us about two litres of fluid each. We were doing the right things but I could not shake off a rising feeling of nausea which had been with me since mid-afternoon. Lying completely still and concentrating my mind on other things, I tried every trick to rid myself of the sickness. But, by nine o’clock in the evening, I couldn’t fight it any more. In a sudden violent spasm which barely gave me time to unzip the front tent flaps, I vomited the entire evening’s fluid up in a retching attack which left me gulping for breath. For several minutes I lay half in, half out of the tent, while the attack subsided.

  ‘Shit!’ I collapsed back into the tent, my head pulsating with a throbbing pain.

  The sickness was bearable, but the real implications were really depressing. Having lost all the fluid we had so painstakingly melted and drunk, I was now faced with a simple decision: go to sleep and take a chance that I had ingested enough of the fluid to get me safely through the night, or go outside to cut more ice and start melting all over again.

  The temptation to forget it all and go to sleep was almost overwhelming. But I knew I couldn’t do that. I spent fifteen minutes putting on my boots and jacket and went out into the freezing night to cut the ice, cursing my bad luck and feeling more angry than I can remember. Back in the tent I assembled the gas cooker once more, coaxed it back into life and watched as the first pan of ice slowly – impossibly slowly – began to melt. Kees, not surprisingly, crashed out to sleep.

  To save weight I had not packed a book. Now I regretted that decision as I stared into the darkness of the tent and fought the urge to sleep.

  Two interminable hours later I hit the target of two litres of fluid, packed away the cooking gear and tidied up the front of the tent as best I could. I was not even aware of lying down on the sleeping bag in the fraction of a second it took me to fall asleep.

  Next morning we had a leisurely start. Simon’s original plan had been to continue for a short way up the North Ridge to increase our acclimatisation, but that idea had been abandoned somewhere along the way. Now we prepared to descend the Col and commence the trek all the way back to base camp.

  The descent was fast and relatively straightforward, a question of clipping on to the fixed ropes for security on the easy sections, and abseiling the steeper stages.

  Halfway down, I made a clumsy mistake. Standing on a snow step, I unthreaded my figure-of-eight descendeur (the alloy metal device used to control an abseil) from the rope to transfer it to the next section. Working with frozen fingers, I fumbled the figure-of-eight and dropped it. At the same instant, the snow step I was standing on gave way a little, jerking my body down awkwardly. I clutched at the rope with my free hand to stop the fall, cursing my stupidity.

  By a stroke of luck, the figure of eight lodged against my boot and I was able to retrieve it. If it had dropped down the ice slope it would have fallen right amongst the climbers below me, which would have been embarrassing at the least, and potentially dangerous if it had hit anyone on the head. I glanced up at Simon, who was climbing down just above me, to see if he had noticed my blunder. But he was busy sorting out a tangle in his own harness and had not seen it.

  I was grateful for that. Making cock-ups in front of the expedition leader was something I could do without. How could he trust me to abseil down the first and second steps, the difficult rock stages above 8,000 metres which are the highest rock-climbing pitches in the world, when I had fumbled a vital piece of equipment here in the relatively easy terrain of the Col? I regained my composure, and secured the descendeur back on to the rope.

  I had got away with it, just, but the incident opened the door on a flood of old doubts and that flash of anger at myself. My capacity for making stupid mistakes was likely to increase with altitude as the mind-numbing effects of oxygen depletion set in. I continued the climb down the Col in subdued mood, concentrating extra hard at the rope change-overs and taking care to defrost my fingers before handling the descendeur.

  Two days later we descended the Rongbuk glacier for the second time back to base camp, relishing the warmer temperatures and thicker air, and regaining at least a vestige of appetite. To an outside observer we were a relaxed party, taking the rare moments when the wind dropped to lie in the sun by our tents. But internally the stresses were grinding away at us all. This period of waiting at base camp would be the last. The next time we shouldered our rucksacks for the trek up the Rongbuk would be on our way for the summit attempt.

  6

  I was shaving in a bucket of ice-cold water in the mess tent at base camp when Kees swaggered back from the Indian tent. The Indians had had a problem with their satellite phone and boffin Kees had been called in with his magic soldering iron to work it out. By some miracle he had managed to breathe life into the defunct machine and the Indians had offered him a free call by way of thanks.

  ‘I managed to get through to Katie in Canada.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘And there’s some news.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘I’m going to be a daddy.’

  ‘Jesus. That is great!’

  That night we celebrated Kees’s news with some disturbingly evil Tibetan brandy, accompanied by a raft of predictably smutty comments at Kees’s expense. Looking smug, the father-to-be brought out a slender tin of Cuban cheroots and offered them around. Failing to find a single taker, and rethinking the wisdom of lighting up at this lofty altitude, Kees contented himself with the occasional sniff at the unlit cheroots.

  ‘The aroma alone is enough,’ he pronounced, grandly.

  Next morning, slightly hungover, I was lying in my tent reading when I heard the rumble of a diesel truck rolling up the Rongbuk glacier. Shortly after, there was a shout from Simon:

  ‘Monty!’

  I poked my head out of the tent and saw Simon greeting someone by the mess tent. Sundeep called over.

  ‘Looks like the pussy wagon’s arrived!’ he said.

  The ‘pussy wagon’ was the dubious name which had somehow evolved for the incoming trekking truck which we knew would be visiting us any day. On board was a team of ramblers on a tour of Tibet with the trekking arm of Himalayan Kingdoms’ operations. As the weeks had gone by, the combined imaginations of our (all male) expedition had conjured up a vision, fired up no doubt by our enforced period of sexual abstinence, of the lithesome beauties this group would surely
contain. In fact, over recent days we had talked about little else over our evening meals, proving (as if it needed to be proved) that men behave badly regardless of the altitude.

  ‘Let’s say there’s twenty in the group, at least five or six have to be girls,’ someone would speculate.

  ‘More like ten or fifteen, I reckon.’

  ‘They’ll be gasping for some men …’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Bound to be some Scandinavian girls on it.’

  ‘Several probably.’

  ‘Historically, Tibet always has attracted nymphomaniacs …’

  But when the ‘pussy wagon’ did finally disgorge its occupants, we realised how far off the mark we had been. Along with Monty, the tour leader, there were just four paying clients: an anxious looking couple in their sixties and two nobbly-kneed men with beards.

  In one respect we had been right. The trekkers were gasping – but from the effects of the altitude rather than anything else. It was all rather a blow.

  But there was one good side to the truck’s arrival – it carried with it a bundle of post from friends and family in the UK. We grabbed our letters and retreated to the tents to read the precious missives.

  Fiona’s letter was full of family news about a short holiday to CenterParcs and a round-up of new plantings in the garden. Sitting in the bleak stone environment of the Rongbuk, where scarcely any plants grow at all, it sounded incredibly lush. It was all cheery enough, but the darker undercurrent to the letter was not difficult to decipher – Fiona knew very well how hazardous this expedition might be, and the stress of that was obviously turning the ten weeks into something which felt closer to ten years.

  It wasn’t an unusual situation for us to be in, with me on one side of the world, and she on the other, but it was different this time and not only because it was a dangerous shoot. Fiona knew that Everest would be a watershed for me in many ways: that I wanted it to be my last adventure film, that I was trying to find a way to break the destructive pattern that our relationship had got into.