We’d only had time to test it with two loads before the storm came in on Friday, but the bicycle worked well, in its own crude way. In the 1924 expedition, Sherpas had dropped ropes to haul loads up the chimney Mallory had climbed in the final 200-foot ice wall, but the loads had to be fairly light. Pedaling with one’s legs and feet, with leverage gained through reduction gears, was infinitely easier than using one’s back and arms, and the loads tied onto the continuously circulating 400-foot strand of Deacon’s Miracle Rope could weigh up to fifty or sixty pounds. The bicycle was serious exercise above 23,000 feet, there was no denying that, but we’d each tried it out, and with two men—one to pedal and the other to untie and dump the loads as they came up to the level of the ice shelf—moving entire tons of matériel up to the North Col was now a real possibility, without endless lines of load-hauling Sherpas gasping and wheezing and constantly resting on the rope ladder or fixed ropes.
“If I’d just been able to haul in a small petrol-powered generator,” said Jean-Claude.
But J.C. is ill and recovering lower today, so it is just Reggie and me working our way up the slabs toward sunrise and Camp V this fine Sunday morning. The last thing Jean-Claude whispered to me before we left camp, Reggie yards away and preoccupied with getting the flow valve working right on her hissing oxygen set, was—“Besides, mon ami, the Deacon, Tenzing, and Tejbir put only two small two-man tents up at Camp Five. With my luck, I’d end up sleeping alone.”
Reggie and I haven’t roped up and I’m not sure why. I suppose it is because the first few hundred yards up the snowfields from the North Col were just a kick-step exercise, and above that we’ve been on these damned black granite slabs that require little more than giant steps up very high curbs to ascend. The few arêtes and serious rock outcroppings we’ve come up against on the ridgeline are easily avoided by traversing out onto the equally downward-tilting granite slabs of the North Face until we’ve climbed up and around the rock outcroppings and moved back left to the broad ridgeline.
This is not to say that a fall from this North Ridge—or what the Deacon sometimes calls the North East Shoulder (as opposed to the North East Ridge far above that leads to the summit)—would not be a serious problem.
The winds are intermittent this predawn morning, unlike the constant gales that the Deacon and his two Sherpas encountered on Friday. Those three had been forced to lean forward into the hurricane-force wind so far that their heads were lower than their knees and their noses almost touching the rock slabs in front of them. Reggie and I can walk hunched forward just slightly—like French and British infantry I’ve heard about at the Battle of the Somme leaning forward as if into a wind while walking into enemy machine gun fire—but the occasional gust rocks us back on our heels and makes us pinwheel our arms for balance. Of course, a backwards topple here will be one hell of a topple. At one place on the ridge, the winds suddenly seem to batter us from both directions at once, and Reggie has to fall forward, her mittened hands seeking a grip on the icy slab in front of her, rather than let the wind tumble her backward for a long, long, long fall.
We should be roped up. I know it—every bit of mountaineering sense and experience I have tells us that we should—but for some reason I can’t seem to suggest it to her or insist upon it. Maybe it seems like too personal a suggestion.
For the first time, I appreciate the problem that the Deacon and his two Sherpas—and both the high-climbing British expeditions before this—had dealt with in finding a place for tents. To our right, the west, the edges of the steep ridge and the North Face itself are exposed to the full force of the near-constant winds perpetually blowing from the northwest. A tent wouldn’t survive an hour there. But there is no flat place to pitch a tent, even a small tent, on the west side of the North Ridge at any rate.
To our left, the east, the ridgeline blocks some of the wind, but there is nothing on that side of the ridge other than very steep and very exposed slopes, snow couloirs that end abruptly in 5,000-foot drops to the main Rongbuk Glacier, the couloirs dappled with a giant jumble-maze of tilted rock in which a climber could quickly get lost, especially in bad conditions.
The Deacon and Mallory in ’22 and Mallory in ’24 had been worried about descending climbers taking a wrong turn into one of these dead-end, sheer-drop couloirs, and for that reason, Reggie and I are carrying more red-flagged bamboo wands this morning, embedding them deep along the main route wherever someone descending in a snowstorm might be tempted to take a wrong turn toward eternity.
We continue climbing toward the sunlight, our Crooke’s glass goggles still up on our leather-covered foreheads. The summit of Everest has been glowing gold since not long after we moved from snow to rock on the North Ridge, and now the tips of Changtse, Makalu, Chomolonzo, and other nearby high peaks blaze with light even while snowy summits far to our north also begin to welcome the morning. I’m eager for the band of morning light to reach our lower altitude along the ridge because it’s just so damned cold; even with all the new down clothing and felt-layered boots, only near-constant motion fights off the body’s insistence on losing core heat at this altitude, and near-constant movement is all but impossible.
The Deacon has demonstrated for all of us his and Mallory’s high-altitude trick of taking a deep breath—inhaling deeper and for a longer time than seems natural—then taking a step, exhaling while you pause, then inhaling deeply for the next step. But since both Reggie and I are using oxygen at the lower flow rate of 1.5 liters per minute, we can’t do this as dramatically as the Deacon has demonstrated for us. The regulators won’t allow it. Still, early on, Reggie and I loosen our masks long enough to try to make a full twenty paces before stopping completely to wheeze and gasp, but the best we’ve been able to do—on snow or these rock slabs—is thirteen short paces. And our pausing-to-breathe stops are growing longer and more frequent with every 100 feet of altitude we gain.
I keep looking down and around, rather than watching my feet as I should. I can’t help it. I’ve always loved the views from anywhere high, and nothing in my experience—nothing in my short life—has come close to this view from the North Shoulder of Everest as we approach 25,000 feet. The East Rongbuk Glacier valley, which holds our Camps I through III behind us, is still filled with heavy gray clouds that broil and roil and tumble over each other in the lower storm’s unsuccessful attempt to haul its heavy moisture-filled mass as high as the North Col. The air is so clear up here above those clouds that peaks 50 miles away look like they’re almost within reaching distance below and behind us. When I lean far over, I can see Camp IV on the North Col through the V of my down-covered and duck-canvased legs, the green tents already mere dark specks on the white snow saddle.
At the Deacon’s and J.C.’s urging, Reggie and I are doing this entire climb—including all the steep hiking up these interminable rock slabs—while wearing our 12-point crampons. At first I felt nervous climbing on rock with crampons rather than having solid boot soles beneath me—and the danger of catching the front points and tripping is always there if you quit thinking about how to lift your feet at each step—but after two or three hours of ascending, I’m clearly seeing the advantage of staying in crampons. There’s as much real contact with the rock as there would be with hobnailed boots, but the transitions to patches of snow and ice are much easier; you can kick your toe points in and keep climbing at the same rate as on bare rocks. Also, few of these rocks are actually bare; despite the high winds, the snows have left a thin glaze of ice on most of them. The crampons cut through and into that ice in a secure way that no hobnails ever could.