Death Zone Read online

  *

  I chose my camera team with a great deal of care. Very few camera operators have filmed above 8,000 metres but if our project was to be a success I had virtually to guarantee that one member of my team could be there to record a summit attempt.

  Alan Hinkes was my first choice, and I put the proposal to him on the telephone with just six weeks remaining before we were due to leave. As Britain’s most successful high-altitude climber, Al has an Everest-sized profile in the world of mountaineering and had filmed on the summit of K2. He was one of only two British climbers to have reached the summit of the second highest mountain in the world (K2 is 8,611 metres) and returned alive. In addition, he had summitted four other 8,000-metre peaks.

  Al had twice been on Everest but the summit had eluded him. I knew he was looking for another opportunity to go back, and my offer to pay him would be hard to resist. He wasn’t trained as a cameraman but I was confident he could turn in a workable result in extreme conditions.

  A plain-speaking northerner, Al has a reputation for bluntness and has his fair share of enemies in the climbing world amongst those who resent his highly commercial approach and his talent for self-publicity. He is a hard person physically, capable of remarkable endurance, and at first meeting he seems a hard case psychologically too.

  With a tightly cropped military haircut and a set of glacial blue eyes, Hinkes looks every inch the high-altitude hero that he undoubtedly is. He has a pugnacious undercurrent which rubs some people up the wrong way. Very much an individual, I was told that he had not always made a good team player on previous expeditions but from my point of view that was not so important. I wasn’t hiring him for his diplomatic skills. What I needed was someone who could operate a camera in the Death Zone and there are few people better qualified than Al to do that.

  Al listened carefully to my proposal, successfully managed to bump up the fee I was offering, and accepted the contract.

  As principal cameraman for the lower altitudes I chose Kees ’t Hooft, (his name is pronounced ‘Case’) a Dutch film-maker based in London who I had worked with before on several films. Kees has the vague look of a slightly dotty professor, with a thinning sweep of gingery hair and the refined features of an intellectual. He spends his weekends attending Jungian philosophy classes and has an unexplainable fascination for the English aristocracy. He is never happier than when rubbing shoulders with dukes, duchesses and lady dowagers and presumably they like rubbing shoulders with him too because he does seem to meet a lot of them.

  Essentially a gentle person, Kees has the type of excessive good manners normally found only in butlers and wine waiters, but underneath the mild exterior lurks a very strong climber. He had been to almost 7,000 metres on Makalu (8,481 metres) filming for a Channel 4 documentary, and had operated camera for me on Pokalde Peak in Nepal. I called to check if he was interested;

  ‘Certainly, but what date does the expedition finish?’

  “The sixth of June. Why?’

  ‘Oh nothing really, just that I’m getting married on the eighth.’

  My heart sank. This news would obviously rule Kees out of the expedition, leaving me with a difficult gap to fill. Surely he couldn’t abandon his fiancee for ten weeks just before the wedding? Could he?

  Yes he could.

  ‘I think I had better have a little chat with my fiancee,’ Kees told me, sounding numb.

  Kees asked me for a twenty-four-hour ‘cool off’ period to talk things through with Katie Isbester, his betrothed. A professor of political science at the University of Toronto, Katie didn’t hesitate. ‘I would be most upset if you didn’t go on my account,’ she told him.

  Kees called me back and told me he was on for the expedition.

  The third member of my team was Ned Johnston, an American film-maker of high repute. He would join us to shoot on 16mm film for the first three weeks of the expedition, coming with us as far as advance base camp and then returning with the film footage to the UK, leaving the rest of us to continue on digital video camera.

  The remaining weeks passed in a blur of equipment-gathering, physical training to get myself fit, and the one thousand and one other details that precede any major shoot.

  On 31 March, at Gatwick, the expedition members came together for the first time. Only Roger Portch and Richard Cowper were missing, as they had both travelled independently to Kathmandu. We looked and felt oddly out of place queuing up at the Royal Air Nepal check-in with our piles of flight cases and blue expedition barrels amongst holiday-makers heading for Tenerife and Mahon.

  The expedition leader Simon Lowe was there, looking harrassed and hot in a massive down jacket. Simon wore his hair long, scraped back and tied in a pony-tail, which certainly wouldn’t have won him any brownie points in his former life as an Army officer. He had been with Himalayan Kingdoms as operations manager since leaving the Army under the ‘options for change’ clear out of 1993. He had been to Everest twice before, in 1988 to the West Ridge from the north side and in 1992 to the same ridge from the south side. On both occasions he had climbed higher than 8,000 metres. Behind his bespectacled, slightly hippyish air, Simon was a tough negotiator, as he immediately proved by persuading Royal Air Nepal to cut several thousand pounds off our excess baggage bill.

  Simon’s second in command, Martin Barnicott – known as ‘Barney’, was also there, shod in a weathered pair of fur-lined mukluks. Softly spoken, Barney had the shifting gaze of someone who has spent a lifetime in the mountains. Reluctant to make eye contact, he looked like he was scanning corners of the departures hall for an incoming avalanche. Naturally shy and self-effacing, I knew from his reputation that he is one of the best high-altitude guides in the business. He had guided (and summitted) Everest with Himalayan Kingdoms in 1993, and would now have a crucial role to play in Brian’s attempt. He seemed anxious to get the introductions out of the way and get on with the flight.

  If Barney was successful during our expedition, he would be the only British climber to have summitted Everest from the north and the south … a potential first which he shrugged off with a nonchalant ‘We’ll see.’

  Sundeep Dhillon, the expedition doctor, was busy doing some last-minute packing, stuffing sterile swabs and sinister-looking inspection devices into a huge barrel. Sundeep, a Captain with 23-Parachute field ambulance based in Aldershot, had obtained army leave to join our expedition at his own cost. He was on the final leg of a personal quest which had taken three years of his life, to become the youngest person ever to have climbed the ‘seven summits’ the highest points on the continental landmasses. Kilimanjaro, McKinley, Aconcagua, Elbrus, Carstenz Pyramid, Mt. Vinson – it was a project which had taken him to the furthest corners of the world and to the brink of financial disaster.

  Now, ‘only’ Everest remained on Sundeep’s list … a mountain which he was unlikely to be able to afford to attempt more than once in his lifetime. He had taken out a bank loan of £20,000 to join the expedition and would be paying it off for years to come. This, coupled with the high expectations of his commanding officers, meant that Sundeep was under considerable pressure to succeed.

  Tore Rasmussen, the Norwegian member of the expedition, had flown into the airport from Oslo earlier in the day and had the jaded look of someone who has already spent too many hours in a waiting lounge. A black belt karate expert, he had hard, slate-coloured eyes set beneath impressively bushy eyebrows. Tore had the compact body and high muscle definition of a top-class athlete. His hand shake could crush avocado stones. Simon had climbed Aconcagua with him and had a high regard for his strength at altitude.

  Kees’s pretty Canadian fiancee Katie was there too, looking slightly bemused to be wishing her husband-to-be goodbye when their wedding was just a couple of months away. Realising that last-minute planning would be too late by the time Kees returned, they were plotting the finer details of the wedding ceremony and the travel arrangements of family members (large numbers of Kees’s family would be flying to
Toronto from Holland) right up to the departure gate.

  Brian arrived with his family, bearing with him a single bag which looked suspiciously light. The rest of us had numerous bulging packs, zips strained to breaking point, into which the thousands of essential items had painfully been squeezed. Just one of my kitbags – the one containing extra food – was bigger and heavier than Brian’s entire load. He looked as if he was leaving for a weekend break in a country hotel.

  ‘Where’s all your gear?’ I asked him.

  ‘That’s it.’ Brian patted the bag, looking shifty.

  ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘Well I can buy any extra bits and pieces in Kathmandu. You can get everything there.’

  I was about to pick up on this when Brian moved on, noticing that Kees had the camera out and was preparing to film. A consummate performer, Brian cannot resist the opportunity for fun when a camera is waved in his direction:

  ‘The main piece of advice, Kees, is never camp below the French. They will shit on you from a great height.’

  As soon as he saw the cameras were out, Al Hinkes also leaped into action. Armed with a handful of brightly-coloured stickers, he moved from one barrel to the next, sticking on logos from some of his various sponsors.

  ‘Oy!’ Simon shouted at him, laughing, ‘have you ever thought I might not want those stickers on my barrels?’

  ‘Nope.’ Al kept sticking.

  We filmed Brian’s farewell to his wife Hildegard and daughter Rosalind and then bid our own goodbyes.

  I walked with Fiona to the car park and made sure she had the right change for the ticket machine. Over the past twelve years we had been through these airport partings many, too many, times before but this time we held each other tighter than ever.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s only a film … just like any other shoot.’

  ‘Just come back in one piece or I’ll be seriously pissed off.’

  With that, she smiled, wiped away the tears and drove away, pausing only to blow a kiss through the back window.

  Fifteen hours later, after a stop in Frankfurt, we arrived in Kathmandu, minus the huge barrel of medical equipment and drugs which Sundeep had so painstakingly, and expensively prepared. A volley of faxes and telexes was sent out to London and Frankfurt in the attempt to track it down.

  An eager gang of porters loaded our equipment on to the back of a pick-up truck which promptly shot off in a plume of black smoke. We followed it at speed through the backstreets of Kathmandu in a rickety old bus, dodging trucks and swerving to avoid the odd cow sitting impassively in the middle of the road.

  Squinting in the early morning light, feeling dazed after the sleepless night flight, I thought back to the first time I had arrived in Kathmandu as a traveller of eighteen on my first big solo journey. My recollection was of a tranquil, gentle place, in which the ringing of bicycle rickshaw bells was the loudest form of noise pollution. Since 1978, a lot had changed. Now, the streets were filled with the choking fumes of badly-tuned engines as trucks filled with building materials hurried to their construction sites and taxis touted for fares.

  At our hotel, an embarrassingly grand banner was stretched across the entrance. Daubed on it in huge red lettering was: ‘The Summit Hotel welcomes the 1996 Himalayan Kingdoms’ Mt. Everest Expedition (North Face).’

  ‘We like to keep a low profile,’ Simon said.

  Garlands of flowers were placed around our necks by smiling hotel staff and a small ceremony was held in which we were annointed with red paste on our foreheads and provided with an egg and a clay bowl of raki.

  ‘Firewater!’ exclaimed Brian, and downed it in one.

  Waiting for our arrival were the remaining two team members, Roger Portch, a British Airways pilot, and Richard Cowper, the Financial Times journalist who would be reporting on our progress.

  Roger struck me immediately as a calm and self-confident personality, exactly the type of person you’d want to have at the controls of a jumbo jet while bumping around in a tropical storm. A talented climber, he had an impressive Alpine climbing history and was another of the team to have climbed Aconcagua, 6,860 metres, the Argentinian volcano which is highly regarded as a ‘warm up’ for the greater altitude of Everest. To afford his place on the team, Roger had sold his BA shares. When he spoke of the expedition to come, his total enthusiasm for the task was transparently, and charmingly clear; to climb Everest would be the greatest moment of Roger’s life.

  Richard was harder to read. An expert on the politics and economics of Asia, he looked like he would be more at home at a political briefing than in the rough and tumble of an expedition. His mission was to send back a series of articles including a profile of Al Hinkes and a piece on the pros and cons of oxygen-assisted climbs. He had brought his own dome tent out from the UK, a ‘Himalayan hotel’ of gigantic proportions with an intricate double pole system to resist even the fiercest of storms. The rest of us, with our inferior expedition-issue, Nepalese-constructed ridge tents, were green with envy.

  The Summit is a pretty hotel with an immaculately-tended garden, positioned on a small hill overlooking Kathmandu. Normally it is a haven of peace but our arrival soon changed that. Within a few hours the first-floor balcony was crowded with a jumble of expedition equipment as new gear was tried out for the first time. Most of us had only managed to pull together the final pieces on the list in the dying moments before departing for Nepal. This was our first and last chance to make sure it all fitted together.

  Problems immediately became evident. My plastic high-altitude boots were so huge that the neoprene overboots Al Hinkes had brought out from the UK, would only fit after considerable effort. They were so stretched that the slightest tear would cause dramatic damage. I made a mental note to take extra care with them. My crampons too, were stretched right to the outer limits and looked like they would snap in two from metal fatigue after a few hours of use. There was nothing to do about that other than carry the spare parts which might enable a repair.

  Kitting up was strenuous work. Putting on the footgear, particularly when clad in the down suit, left me short of breath, even though Kathmandu sits less than 10,000 feet above sea level.

  Brian’s equipment problems were more critical. His crampons didn’t fit at all, confirming my fears that he was not very well-prepared or equipped. He went to the Tamel tourist market area with Barney to track down a better pair, which provided one of the first sequences we shot for the film.

  Tamel is one of the joys of Kathmandu. It is a series of winding streets flanked by hundreds of enterprises offering everything from embroidered waistcoats with marijuana motifs, to bootleg CD’s of Simply Red and U2. In the wood-carved interiors of Tamel cafes, chocolate cake and banana fritters are served up now just as they were in the heyday of the hippy era. In fact, alongside the crowds of trekkers – easily recognisable from their Gore-tex boots – the sandaled feet of second-generation hippies still pad Tamel’s dusty alleys.

  Passing a photographic shop, I decided on impulse to buy an eight-dollar-plastic camera. This single-use Kodak ‘fun’ camera, I thought, might be useful if my other two stills cameras had problems. I stored it in a barrel and promptly forgot all about it.

  In contrast to Brian, Al had a virtual mountain of gear, spewing out from an impressive array of barrels and kitbags, many of which bore the names of previous expeditions to other fearsome peaks. As a ‘regular’ on the Kathmandu scene, Al kept a permanent stash of equipment in the town, to avoid air freighting it backwards and forwards several times a year: a mark of the true professional and another way in which Al was a different mountain creature to the rest of us. His passport also told the same story, with page after page of Nepalese, Pakistan and Chinese visas.

  Our Sherpa crew came to the hotel the next day to help check out the general expedition equipment. They looked a young, but extremely strong team. Led by the experienced sirdar, Nga Temba, who had summitted Everest himself in 1993, the nine high-altitude Sherpas and t
wo cooks would be an essential part of the summit bid.

  Working with the Sherpas in the hotel garden, where we were serenaded by a persistent cuckoo, the two-man tents were erected and surveyed for damage. The heavyweight mess tent proved more of a problem. Its complicated metal poles beat us until Sundeep, who knew the design from his army training, patiently showed us how to piece it together. The cooking equipment, food stores and oxygen were counted and packed ready for the journey to base camp.

  That night, our last in Kathmandu, we ate together with the Sherpas, where free-flowing beers quickly broke the ice.

  We pulled out of the Summit hotel on 3 April and began the eight-hour drive towards the town of Tatopani and the Chinese border. Al was in good form, regailing us with dubious stories and even more dubious jokes. One of these mystified Richard, and prompted his question, ‘Al, what exactly is a “fudgepacker”?’

  Even Al couldn’t bring himself to answer that one.

  We drove up into the foothills of the Himalayas, passing through villages which became progressively more picturesque as we gained altitude and distance from Kathmandu. After centuries of cultivation, the mountain slopes of Nepal are etched with millions of terraces and in these opening weeks of spring each terrace was carpeted with a blaze of green shoots.

  After a pause to fix a puncture we arrived at the Nepalese border town of Kodari two hours after nightfall. The ‘Friendship’ Bridge, the narrow span which forms a fragile border link between Nepal and China, was closed for the night so we booked into a simple resthouse perched above the turbulent Bhut Kosi river. High above us, on the Chinese side, the lights of Zangmu glittered enticingly beneath a full moon.

  That night, whilst unloading the supplies from the truck into a storeroom, I misjudged the height of a door and smashed my head hard against the frame. Mistake, I told myself, seeing stars. I had got into the habit of analysing such clumsiness in a futile attempt to try and discipline myself to avoid it. I still had a very real fear that my biggest enemy on the mountain might be myself and my lack of co-ordination. I sat on a barrel, feeling sick, swearing at myself and trying pathetically to work out how I’d failed to see how low the frame was.