of J.C.’s jumars, we’ve strapped on our 12-point crampons (despite the fact that most of the way to Camp II is on moraine rock), and it’s cold enough and snowy enough today that we’re wearing our Finch duvet jackets and Reggie eiderdown pants under our outer Shackleton anoraks and snow pants.
We shake hands with Pasang when we leave, and then we’re walking up the stony valley between walls of dirty moraine ice and the occasional ice pinnacle. The weather remains lousy, and visibility is down to about 15 feet. The wind is even stronger here than out in the Rongbuk Valley, and while the falling snow doesn’t seem to be accumulating much, hard pellets of the stuff sting our faces like buckshot.
Tied together by 40 feet of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, more rope slung over our shoulders, with me in the lead, Jean-Claude and I head up the twelve-mile valley and glacier to the North Col.
J.C. and I exchange only a few necessary words during our long trek up the Trough, then the glacier above Camp II. We’re each lost in our own thoughts.
I’m thinking about death in the mountains. Beyond my real sense of guilt at Babu’s useless death during our clowning around, I’m remembering other mountain deaths and my reaction. I’m not totally new to sudden death on a mountain.
I’ve mentioned before that the Harvard Mountaineering Club didn’t formally come into existence until last year, 1924, but when I attended Harvard from 1919 to 1923, there were a few of us—the Harvard Four, as we were known in climbing circles—who spent every vacation and spare moment climbing in the nearby Quincy Quarries in the spring and autumn and in the New Hampshire mountains during the winter.
Instructor Henry S. Hall, who would found the formal club in ’24, was our informal leader, and our ad hoc climbing group met in his home. The other two members of our little group were Terris Carter (same year as me) and Ad Bates, a year behind us and a tough little mongrel of a climber, all knees and elbows and flying heels, but strangely skillful.
Professor Hall, with his older and more experienced mountaineering pals, specialized in climbing in the Canadian Rockies and, on rare occasions, in Alaska. During a school break in the early autumn of my junior year, the four of us were climbing on Mount Temple in Alberta, doing the East Ridge—which today would be classified IV 5.7 or so—when Ad slipped, snapped the 60-foot rope connecting him to Terris and me, and fell to his death. We hadn’t been set for belay, and Ad’s fall was so sudden and so vertical that if the rope hadn’t snapped, Terris and I would almost certainly have gone over the north face to fall with him.
We mourned Ad’s death, of course, in the way that only the young can mourn the death of someone their own age. I’d tried to talk to Ad’s parents when they came to Harvard to pick up his things, but all I could do was sob. I started missing classes when school resumed, just sitting in my room and brooding. I was sure I’d never climb again.
That’s when Professor Hall came to see me. He told me either to get back to my classes or drop out of school. He said I was just wasting my parents’ money the way it was. As to climbing, Hall told me that he’d be taking student climbers to Mount Washington as soon as the first snow fell and that I should make up my mind whether to continue climbing—he thought that I had some skill at it—or run away from it now. “But dying’s part of this sport,” Professor Hall told me. “That’s a hard fact—unfair—but it’s a fact. When a friend or partner on the rope dies, if you’re going to continue to be a climber, Jake, you have to learn how to say ‘Fuck it’ and move on.”
I’d never heard a teacher or professor use that word before and it hit me hard. So did the lesson he was imparting to me.
But over my last few years of climbing, I’ve learned—at least partially—how to say “Fuck it” and move on. During my months in the Alps with the Deacon and J.C., we’d been involved in no fewer than five attempted rescue missions, three of which ended in tragedy for someone. It’s true that I didn’t know any of the dead climbers well, but I did get to know the terrible damage an alpine fall will do to the human body: fractured, splayed limbs, clothes torn off by jagged rocks on the way down, blood everywhere, crushed skulls or heads missing altogether. Death by falling from a great height is never a dignified thing.
Babu Rita hadn’t fallen from any height; he’d just followed two idiots in glissading down a slope that one could find with a toboggan run in any snowy American city’s municipal park. Only toboggan runs don’t usually have boulders concealed under the snow.
“Fuck it,” I hear myself whisper. “Move on.”
The wind howls between the ice pinnacles of the Trough, and once up on the glacier, we have to dig out fixed ropes for security between crevasses, but the flagged bamboo poles show us the way.
We get to Camp III before daylight starts to fade, but Reggie and the Deacon aren’t there. There are now six tents at Camp III—two of them oversized Whympers—but we find eight Sherpas curled up and sleeping in the smaller Meade tents. Pemba moans that none of them feel well: all have been struck by “mountain lassitude”—our word for altitude sickness in 1925. Those not in sleeping bags are wrapped in heavy layers of blankets. Pemba says that Lady Memsahib and Deacon Sahib are up at Camp IV on the North Col with Tejbir Norgay and Tenzing Bothia. The winds up there, says Pemba, are very terrible.
Jean-Claude and I step back out of the odiferous Meade tent and confer. It’s late in the day, and it will be dark by the time we reach Camp IV. But we’ve brought our Welsh miner headlamps, I have an extra hand torch in my gas mask bag, and we both feel strong and impatient.
The hardest part of the climb, oddly enough, is the postholing from Camp III to the base of the slope and then trudging up the two hundred yards or so to the steep part where the first fixed ropes begin. The heavy snow and dimming day hide the boulder that killed Babu, but I can’t help imagining a layer of frozen blood under the new-fallen snow, like strawberry jam spread thin beneath white bread. When we reach the steeper fixed-rope part of the route, we have to use our ice axes to dig through the new snow until we can find the fixed rope and tug it up and out. Then we dig through our canvas bags and don our headlamp rigs and take out the ascender device that Jean-Claude named “jumar” after a dog he had as a kid. Or so he’s said.
As J.C. double-checks to make sure I’ve clipped the jumar onto the Deacon Miracle Rope properly, I say, “Did you really invent this doodad?”
My friend grins. “I did, but in collaboration with my father, who was helping a young French gentleman named Henri Brenot, who wanted some sort of mechanism for climbing free-hanging ropes in caves. Since it was just for one person, my father didn’t think to patent it, nor did Brenot, who called his larger cave rope-ascender devices
“But ‘Jumar’ was really your dog’s name?”
Jean-Claude only grins more broadly and begins mechanically ascending—I’ve already begun thinking of it as “jumaring”—up the fixed rope.
A year ago, it would have taken Mallory or Irvine or Norton or any of the others four or five hours to get up this ice wall to the North Col, especially in a swirling snowstorm such as J.C. and I have just climbed through. Mallory would have spent much of his time on the ice face bent almost double, dutifully and exhaustingly using an ice axe to chip new steps out of the snow and ice. J.C. and I kicked in the front spurs of our new 12-point crampons and jumared up in less than forty-five minutes—and that included a time-out halfway up to hang from the rope and eat bars of chocolate. We did use our long ice axes, but only to stab into snow with our left hands for balance on the way up or to bat away the ice and snow covering the next few yards of fixed rope above us.
The traverse from the ice shelf across the North Col to Camp IV at the northwest corner under the tall seracs should have been worrisome in so serious a storm, but the Deacon and others have done such an excellent job of setting out permanent bamboo wands and red pennants that even in high winds and the near whiteout, it’s as easy as walking along a well-marked eight-foot-wide highway between invisible 100-foot drops into crevasses.
Camp IV now consists of one medium-sized Whymper tent, brought up in separate loads, as well as the RBT—Reggie’s Big Tent—and two smaller Meade tents in which the Deacon planned to store loads for higher carries. When some of this stuff goes up to Camps V and VI, the Meade tents as well as the Whymper tent here will host Sherpas on their way up or down in the theoretical supply line.
The Deacon and Tejbir Norgay look up in surprise as we come through the Whymper tent door, shaking snow off our outer layer into the small vestibule before joining them. I imagine we’re a sight in our high-cinched eiderdown hoods, full-face leather flying helmets, glowing headlamps, iced-over goggles, and snow-rimmed
