almost certainly fatal fall. These ice hammers are wonderful for such frozen-crust and real-ice climbing, but none of us has adequately practiced self-arrest with them.
Then we’re both tied in again, and I let out a breath I haven’t even noticed that I’d been holding. This reminds me to dial my O2 flow back to the lowest 1.5-liter level.
The Sherpas behind Reggie, except for the always grinning Babu Rita, look exhausted and anxious. They all wear our experimental climbing harnesses, and Reggie has helped them each clip a carabiner onto the fixed rope, but I notice that each Sherpa (again except for the trusting Babu Rita) is also hanging on to that rope more tightly than is really good for our group’s sense of security.
Suddenly Reggie unties from the Sherpa rope and quickly ties a 30-foot strand of Miracle Rope onto Tenzing Bothia’s harness. Thus freed, she moves up and down the line, using her long ice axe to dig more substantial cups in the snow for each of the porters. She then shows them how, by shifting hands without totally relinquishing their reassuring grip on the fixed rope, they can slowly turn around and lower their behinds into the cup-shaped depressions, all while keeping their regular 10-point crampons embedded in the frozen snow beneath them. Watching them take their assigned seats in the snow on that near-vertical hillside, I’m glad that we’ve brought underwear for the Tiger Sherpas as well as thick woolen trousers with a covering of Shackleton gabardine. Babu Rita giggles and laughs at the beauty of the views.
Now it’s time for the ultimate test of Jean-Claude’s new climbing apparatus and techniques.
My neck hurts from craning and I find that I’m leaning ever further backward, trusting, perhaps, too much to my crampon points and ice hammer adzes. But it’s hard
As he’d done on much safer ice in Wales, J.C. kick-scrambles his way up the sheer wall of ice like some gecko on a
About two-thirds of the way up the icy wall, J.C. pauses, fumbles in his rucksack, and pulls out his oxygen tank. The Deacon and I exchange guilty glances; the plan had been for Jean-Claude to do this part of the climb with a new oxygen tank, opened to its full flow of 2.2 liters per minute. We’d all forgotten to make the exchange; even Jean-Claude in his eagerness to start the most dramatic part of our day’s climb had forgotten.
Now he removes his oxygen mask and free-hanging regulator with its various tubes and carefully sets them in his rucksack, even while pulling out the empty tank, pinning it against the ice wall with his body while using just his free right hand to unscrew the connections.
Shouting “Watch out below!” J.C. swings the empty tank one, two, three times and then hurls it to our right. We all watch, delighted and horrified at the same time, while the heavy oxygen tank bounces first off the ice wall itself and then off snow and ice for the full 1,000-foot drop to the glacier below. The noise it makes in its bouncing—especially its final ricochet off a snow-hidden boulder—is wonderful.
The Deacon pulls his own mask down. “Want to change leads?” he shouts upward.
On a windy day, I have no doubt that the shout would have been lost under wind roar, but today is almost perfectly still. I’m using the undershirt over my forearm to mop away sweat, even as we just stand here on the hillside below the vertical face, one arm around the fixed rope, both forward sets of crampon points and our left ice hammer holding us in place.
Jean-Claude grins, shakes his head, and looks up at the rest of the climb above him. Then he begins moving again, pausing more frequently now, moving a bit more slowly, but still climbing steadily.
Fifteen minutes more and we watch him thrust himself up, weight on his crampon points, and lean far over the lip of the North Col, sinking his right ice hammer deep into horizontal ice we can’t see. Then he’s gone.
A moment later, when he’s obviously tied in to some anchor he’s set on the surface of the Col, his head and shoulders reappear and a second rope begins snaking down.
“Send up the ladders!” shouts Jean-Claude.
We do, but not before all eight of us sitting and standing on the ice cliff below the last vertical wall send up a cheer for him.
The caving ladders are in 50-foot sections, and it takes all four of them to reach the lip of the Col. Not trusting just the attachments from one section to the next, J.C. comes down each 50-foot section and secures the next with short-cut strands of Miracle Rope, ice screws, and more pitons. It’s hard work, and J.C. is pouring perspiration as the last ladder is fixed in place. Then he’s at the bottom of the ice wall with us and we’re pounding him on the back and shoulders, voices hoarse in the high, thin air but filled with our congratulations.
The Deacon shows the Sherpas and the rest of us his total confidence in the rope ladders by unhooking from the common rope and clambering up, his crampons biting into the wooden rungs. One by one we follow, Reggie falling back to come up last behind the final Sherpa. I fall in behind my old friend Babu Rita, who clambers monkeylike up the rope-and-wood ladders, looking down and grinning at me until I become nervous for him. I want to shout up to him to remember the three-point rule—always keep three parts of you in touch with something solid while climbing (e.g., two feet, one hand; two hands, one foot; whatever)—but I’d have to remove my oxygen mask to make the shout and I’m still enjoying the benefits of English air. Babu completes his ascent without incident, and his hand is stretched out and waiting for me as we make the last, mildly nervous-making lurch up and over the lip of the North Col from the ladder. Babu grasps my hand and forearm in both of his strong hands and helps me to my knees and then up.
I move a few paces away from the top of the ladder and look at the dizzying sight.
We’ve climbed to the “Shelf,” where previous expeditions had set their tents—a sort of slumped area on the north side of the North Col where the upper ice ridge makes a nice protective wall. But where there had been room for dozens of tents in 1922, shrunken to a 30-foot-wide ice shelf good for only a thin row of tents in 1924, now the shelf is less than ten feet wide. Too exposed to the drop and too narrow now to serve as our Camp IV.
Still, it’s a good place to rest, and almost everyone is sitting slumped along the south wall of the shelf. I find my way down to the end of the line and slump along with them until Reggie comes up with the final three Sherpas. She warns them in Nepalese and Tibetan not to shed their loads yet—that they have to climb up and off this thin but sheltered shelf—and then she sits down next to me and tells me what she’s just told
Winds and avalanches have swept the ice shelf free of all the previous expeditions’ tents and signs of occupation other than for one collapsed green tent—wind-torn to rags, one tentpole still sticking up at a wild angle—right at our feet. I poke at the green canvas with my crampons and say to Reggie and Jean-Claude, “Just think—Mallory may have slept in there.”
“Not bloody likely,” says Lady Bromley-Montfort. “That’s the tent that Pasang and I brought up and shared last August when we were stuck up here for a week.”
I’d shut off my oxygen flow and pulled the mask down to my chest, but now I wish I’d left it in place; it might have hidden this sudden, absurd blush. For a long moment we all just sit there staring out at the incredible view —most of the East Rongbuk Glacier winding away at our feet (we can see all the way back to Camp I from here) and the mass of Changtse seeming to hurl itself skyward to our left, the overhanging bulk of Everest’s shoulder and North East Ridge cutting the skyline into steep, serrated segments to our right.
Jean-Claude looks around at our sitting line of Sherpas and says, “Where is
“Mr. Deacon?” says Reggie. “He went off with Nyima Tsering, Tenzing Bothia, and a stack of bamboo wands to find a better place for Camp Four.”
“What are we sitting here for?” I ask.
J.C. and I laboriously get to our feet, I turn my oxygen flow back on, and we walk on a narrow strip of ice separating the Sherpas’ outstretched legs and crampons from the 1,000-foot drop to the glacier to where we can follow the Deacon’s and his two Sherpas’ footsteps up and out of the shelf area, onto the North Col proper.
When we reach the level of the actual Col, Jean-Claude and I both have to stop and gape for a few seconds. The full North Face of Mount Everest is now revealed to us as if someone had drawn back a theater curtain. To our left, beyond the last giant snow seracs, the North Ridge rises from this saddle of the North Col in a 4,500-
