The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 39
I thought of the morrow, when we three would at last get on to rock. I looked forward expectantly to covering what ground we could up the pillar, going along hopefully lapping up that granite rock, on the way to who knows where exactly.
During the next two days we got to work on the 1000-foot pillar. This provided some interesting climbing on both faces and in cracks, all carried out at a height of about 22,500 feet. We then descended to the tent to wait for Chris, having equipped the pillar with 450 foot of fixed rope. The four of us eventually took off on 11 July, reclimbing the 1000-foot pillar and continuing to about 23,000 feet, where we dug a snow cave just below the final rocks of the West Summit. During the next day, Mo and Clive took over the lead and went across some very steep ice (65°), made all the more difficult by a thin coating of powder snow. They then continued up to the West Summit Ridge, via a steep couloir. After a stop for a brew, we slowly climbed the ridge and traversed over the summit. We brought the day to a close by digging a big snow cave just below the long ridge connecting the West Summit with the Main Summit. The snow was thick here, but it was lying at about 50°–55° on ice, giving grounds for concern. Even when we had dug right into it, the thought crossed our minds that the whole South-East Face could easily avalanche and take our snow cave with it. We did dig a bit deeper and a position at the back of the cave was more often sought after than one at the front, but our main hope lay in the face not avalanching, which it didn’t until we were off the mountain.
That night, within sight of the summit rocks, we cooked up a big meal of freeze-dried Strogonoff, rounded off with apple flakes and endless cups of tea. The cave was sealed off against spindrift and, despite the 23,000 feet altitude, we slept well. Chris and I set off next morning to break trail to the foot of the rocks. Mo and Clive were to follow later, as Mo wanted to take some ciné film for a BBC documentary he was making of the expedition’s ups and downs. When Mo and Clive came up later, they were to be disappointed. Clive recalls, “When we reached the small col 300 feet below the summit it was obvious that we couldn’t possibly reach the top that day as Doug and Chris were taking a long time on the final tower. At 3.00 pm we set off back to the snow cave, hoping to try for the top the next day, but fate had other things in store for us . . .”
Chris was feeling the effects of his previous attempt. He was moving well enough, but suggested that I led the rocks ahead, as I should be faster, being fitter. I greedily accepted and soon “lost” myself climbing two 150-foot pitches up a pinnacle and down its far side to a snow patch on the north side of the summit rocks. From the snow we followed a diagonal break right up to a seemingly blank wall. This turned out to be the crux of the climb, for a crack I eventually found and followed for eighty feet suddenly ended. From a wire chock wedged into the crack, I got Chris to lower me some forty feet so that I could make a pendulum swing across the granite wall. I swung first to one side then to the other, gradually increasing the arc by a sort of gallop against the rock, until I could reach over to another crack which looked climbable. I was just placing a chock when my feet slipped off and away I clattered across the rock. Chris continued to hold his end of the rope firm and, after another session of galloping about, I regained the crack, banged a piton into it, clipped my étrier to that and stood up from the peg, gasping for air after these exertions at nearly 24,000 feet. Chris let out the tension in the rope and by leap-frogging the aid up the crack, I was able to reach a point higher than before. Here the wall relented and I was able to free climb to a point fifteen feet above the pendulum swing, to where a crack went through an overhang to the top of the wall. I climbed this using direct aid from chocks and the odd piton and, just as the 150-foot length of rope adjoining us together had all been run out, I arrived at the top of the wall. Chris then jumared up the rope to join me, and from there we traversed down seventy feet and climbed an overhanging corner into the summit gully.
This final 100 feet took up the last hour of the day, for when Chris had arrived on the top of the Ogre the sun had gone down over the Hunza. As he had my camera, I had been able to sit on the top and take in the new perspective of Snow Lake and the hundreds of snowy peaks stretching off in all directions, without, for once, having to fiddle with camera stops and speeds.
Not having any bivouac equipment, Chris and I were very anxious to get down to the snow cave. However, it had been a good climb, at least above the fixed rope. There had been so much variation – a veritable magical mystery tour of a route, taking in steep rock and ice, a climb over the West Summit and then a traverse across and up to the Main Summit.
We worked our way down a ridge of soft snow to a block of rock. We put a nylon sling round it, threaded our two climbing ropes behind that, and threw both down in the direction of the 150-foot wall. To regain the peg crack, I had to push myself well over to the left as I abseiled, but eventually I got to the crack, just as I was reaching the end of the double rope. I leaned across to fix myself on to a peg, pressing myself over with my feet. I stepped my right foot up against the wall but, in the gathering darkness, unwittingly placed it on a veneer of water ice. Suddenly my foot shot off and I found myself swinging away into the gloom, clutching the end of the rope. Mo saw the fall from below and they then knew that there would be no summit for them the next day.
I couldn’t imagine why the swing was going on and on. I had not realised how far left of the abseil sling I was. And all the time I was swinging, a little exclamation of awe, surprise and fear was coming out from inside me, audible to Mo some 2,000 feet away at the snow cave. And then the swing and the cry ended as I slammed into the opposite side of the gully, 100 feet away. Splat! Glasses gone and every bone shaken.
A quick examination revealed head and trunk O.K., femurs and knees OK, but – Oh! Oh! – ankles cracked whenever I moved them. The right one felt very peculiar: Pott’s fracture, I diagnosed, without much real idea – left one, too, but perhaps it’s just the tendons. So that was how it was going to be: a whole new game with new restrictions on winning – it was curious to observe my own reactions. I had no fear then, there was too much to do. I banged a peg in, put a couple of wire nuts in, tied off direct from my harness and hung off them while Chris came down the abseil rope.
“What ho!” he said, cheerily.
“I’ve broken my right leg and smashed the left ankle,” I said.
“We’ll just work at getting you down,” he replied, airily. “Don’t worry, you’re a long way from death.”
Too true! – the thought that I might have major problems of that kind had not then entered my head. I felt extremely rational, remarkably clear about what to do.
We continued our descent as far as we could that night. Chris abseiled down to a large patch of snow on a rock slab. By the time I reached him, he’d hacked a step out in the snow and, for the first time, I put my body weight on my legs and ankles. They both collapsed, the right leg cracking horribly. So I got on my knees, with my lower legs stuck out behind, and kneed across the ledge with no trouble at all.
“So that’s how it’s done,” I thought. And that’s how it was done over the next seven days, with a little help from my friends – Chris, Clive and Mo.
Chris and I hacked away at the snow patch, producing a passable ledge on which we could lounge back in a half-lying, half-sitting position. Most of the time we sat facing each other with our bare feet stuck into each other’s crutch. Every half hour or so we would reach down and rub a bit of life into each other’s feet, a lesson learnt whilst bivouacking on Everest two years before.
Mainly I cursed the night away, moaning and groaning at the cold, wishing I’d brought a sleeping bag and a duvet, afraid that internal bleeding might cut off the blood going to my toes. That thought kept me grabbing at Chris’s toes which I would rub furiously, hoping that he would take the hint and rub mine, which he did with gentle pressure. The night passed in these little flurries of action. At 5.30 next morning we abseiled four more rope lengths down to the snow basin of the Sou
th-East Face.
Mo and Clive didn’t keep office hours either. As Clive noted: “Mo and I went off at first light and passed Chris on the snow slope. Mo went to Doug who was behind and I stopped about two or three hundred feet short of him and hacked out a platform so that I could make him a brew. The rest of that day was spent in returning to the snow cave.”
We spent that night in the snow cave and ate the last freeze-dried meal, leaving ourselves with only soup and tea. It was with some concern, therefore, that we found a howling blizzard raging outside the snow cave the next morning. We had to get down to Advance Base to get food and even lower to escape the debilitating effect of the lack of oxygen. But first we had to climb up 300 feet to gain the West Summit. Clive tried first, but after climbing for three quarters of an hour he had only gained eighty feet and packed it in as his goggles, eyelashes and everything else froze up. Mo tried next and returned in ten minutes. As Clive wrily pointed out, “Mo isn’t as daft as I am.” There was so much snow in the air it had become impossible to see, and the wind made it difficult to stand up, let alone climb steep snow.
The next day, 16 July, there was less wind and we all set off out into the heavy snowfall. Clive took the lead, slowly kicking his way up desperately deep powder snow, angled in places at 60°. Mo went next up Clive’s rope, then I, then Chris. It took Clive three hours to climb 400 feet to the West Summit and seven hours for all of us to reach there. Mo then took over the lead, rigging all the abseils, as well as two horizontal sections where I was hauled over on ropes. Clive took up the rear. We eventually reached the snow cave where we had spent the night of the 11th. The weather was terrible – cold and violent. We had to dig out snow that had drifted into the cave, but as it was dark when we arrived no one felt like waiting around in the storm whilst the digging took place. So we ended up with cramped quarters and an inadequate entrance. Mo and Clive already had damp sleeping bags, and these became quite wet during the night with snow drifting in on to them. It was the worst night of all: no food, wet, still above 23,000 feet and me slowing them all down with the 1,000-foot pillar still to come. There was only one way for me to tackle a big, complex problem like that, and that was one day at a time, keeping the broad idea hovering around in my mind that I’d got to get to Base Camp, but each day thinking no further than that day’s objective, confident that if each day’s climbing was competently executed then the whole problem would eventually be solved.
Next morning, Mo stuck his head out of the cave and announced that the storm was now, if anything, worse. He went off, followed by Clive, then me, then Chris – all of us bent on reaching the tents, for there we had left a pound of sugar, which was something we had not had for two days. That seemed to be a number one priority. But also there was no real resting place between the snow cave and the tents – so we had to make it. It was a nightmare descent. Whenever there was a ridge of level ground, I found crawling painful, seeming always to be catching my legs on protruding rocks. Only on steep, snowed-up rocks did I feel comfortable, for then Mo would have fixed up the abseil ropes and I could slide down with my body making contact with the snow and rock, whilst my feet stuck out, out of the way of obstacles. Clive stayed right by me during the descent, making certain I was belayed, hacking out the occasional steps for my knees and checking my maudlin tendencies. I was apt to moan a lot and lose my temper with myself at which point Clive would come in with “You’re always moaning!” and “Who needs legs?” and other punny remarks which brought me out of myself. In this fashion we started to descend the 1,000-foot pillar.
Unfortunately, on the way down, Chris abseiled off the end of one of the double ropes. Luckily, Clive had tied the other off to a rock, so Chris fell only about twenty feet or so, but he still broke two ribs and painfully damaged his right hand. Cold and getting colder, he had no alternative but to continue the descent. Mercifully, he did not at once start to experience the pain in his thorax that was to dog him later. It was a sorry little band that made the tents. Mo was the first and he had to re-erect them, as they were both flattened under three feet of snow.
The rest of us were happy to crawl straight in out of the tearing wind and into our sleeping bags. For me, it was a long and painful process removing gaiters, boots, inner boots and socks. But it had to be done so that I could rub my frozen toes back to life, for circulation was somewhat restricted by having my legs permanently bent at the knee. More serious, though, were my frozen finger ends. Crawling about so much I had no opportunity to keep my gloves dry, and not much time to stop and warm my hands when they started to lose sensation. I hoped that things would improve now that we were losing height, and we all kept thinking that the storm could not go on for many more days.
Mo came into the same tent as Clive and me, to warm up, as his sleeping bag was now reduced to a useless clump of wet, soggy feathers. We played cards, hoping the storm would finally blow itself out during the morning, so that we could move the tents down to the West Col later in the day. Chris was now in a bad way – coughing, his throat hoarse, his voice down to a whisper, and every cough increasing the pain under his ribs. He burst into our tent during the morning, announcing that he really must go down as he thought that he had pulmonary oedema. We discussed this with him, but he did not seem to have any of the gurgling noises one hears about. It was probable that he had mild pneumonia which wouldn’t have been helped by spending the day out in the swirling spindrift. Neither did the three of us fancy the sub-zero temperature and harsh wind, for Mo announced that he had not felt his toes for nearly a week and Clive’s digits were also numb. Despite it being our fourth day without food, we decided to give it one more day. At least now we had enough sugar for the next dozen brews of tea. We had been taking tea without milk or sugar for breakfast and half a curried meat stock cube for dinner, and we were lacking in energy, but now noticed a slight change for the better with the sugar.
It was still blowing hard the next morning as we roped down to the South-West Col. By now I had become quite expert at knee-climbing. I found that being on my hands and knees was actually an advantage in particularly deep snow, and I did a bit of trail-breaking. Mo unearthed some old Japanese ropes, and we slid down the first 500 feet to the West Col. We went across to our former camp site and dug around until we uncovered a waste bag, in the bottom of which was some boiled rice mixed with cigarette ash, which we ate. We rummaged around some more and found an ounce of milk powder and, in another bag, three packets of fruit sweets and two packets of cough sweets. We shared them out when Clive and Chris arrived.
We moved off to the top of the fixed ropes that would take us to Advance Base the following day. I carried Clive’s sack as he had to go and recover a tent that had fallen off his sack higher up. There was now about a mile to go across soft snow, but at last the clouds were rolling back to reveal the mountains all around covered in fresh, sparkling snow down to the glaciers. My arms kept sinking deep into the snow with the weight of Clive’s sack pressing down over my neck. Despite following Mo’s footsteps, I took many rests, flopping down flat out in the snow. Expeditions are usually good times to sort out a few things in the head – times to drop down a level or two – but it occurred to me then that since my accident I had brought such an iron will to bear on every moment of the day that I had not given such matters a thought. But there had been some compensations, for whenever I shut my eyes I went off into a hallucinatory world of lilac and purple colouring, incredible shapes and forms, caricature people and stylised views of distant times and places. It did not make a lot of sense, but it was one way to while away a few minutes and recover enough to take a further twenty or so crawling paces through the snow.
Mo and I dug out tent platforms, put up one of the tents and then the other when Clive arrived with it. Chris came in very slowly, coughing up a rich yellow fluid from his lungs.
Chris and Mo set off at first light for Advance Base. Clive and I followed four hours later, for by then the sun would be up to warm our frost-bitte
n hands and feet. Also, Chris and Mo would have had time to cut out big steps at various key places.
Abseiling down fixed ropes was no real problem for me, so I was able to descend 2,500 feet in four hours. Crawling over soft snow down to 17,000 feet was also relatively easy, but after that the snow became thin, and I had to crawl over hard, sharp glacier ice.
We arrived at last to find that Advance Base was no more – either blown away or taken away by Nick and Tut – so there was nothing for it but to follow Mo and Chris down to Base Camp. Clive gave me his down trousers and over trousers, but I went through these after another mile. The next section was the most painful of the whole retreat. The distance was about four and a half miles from the end of the fixed ropes. About one mile was on soft snow, two and a half on ice and one on moraine. Clive was worried.
Just before dark it was evident no one was coming to help us. We didn’t want to bivvy on the ice again, so I rushed off to Base Camp to get a torch and some food. I found Chris asleep under a boulder. He told me that Mo had gone off in hot pursuit of Nick who had that same morning given us up for dead.
Nick had left us a note which said: “If you get as far as reading this, then it presumably means that at least one of you is alive”, and added that he was going down to fetch Tut from Askole and form a search party. There was no torch in camp so I got Chris to lie in his pit on top of the moraine ridge above Base with a gas stove burning to light the way for us off the glacier. I then grabbed some food and set off back up the glacier to find Doug. It was pitch dark, but after about an hour we found each other by shouting and whistling. After eating the food it took Doug about three hours to crawl the rest of the way, all the time the little beacon getting closer and closer.