It is just Jean-Claude and me leading and our personal Tiger Sherpas, Lhakpa Yishay and Norbu Chedi climbing roped with J.C., Ang Chiri and Babu Rita roped with me, who have made this first trip from Camp II to Camp III. We stop a bit short of the actual campsite—marked, as always, by the fallen tentpoles and torn canvas of demolished and snow-covered old tents and other expedition detritus—and look ahead at the more than 1,000-foot wall of ice and snow leading to the North Col that connects the North Ridge of Mount Everest to the south ridges of Changtse. “Col” is a Welsh word meaning “saddle,” but this is certainly the highest mountain saddle I’ve ever set eyes on.
While the Sherpas sit on boulders and pant, worn out, J.C. and I look through his binoculars at the huge wall of snow and ice that rises beyond the Camp III site. I feel happy to be with just my French friend and the Sherpas. Reggie is back at Camp II today, supervising the Team Two Sherpas with their loads to carry up here to Camp III now that Jean-Claude has marked the way across the glacier with bamboo wands. The Deacon’s all the way back at Base Camp, shuttling back and forth to Camps I and II with Tiger Team Three.
“Mallory’s ice chimney is gone,” Jean-Claude says and hands me the small field glasses.
A year ago, Mallory had free-climbed those last 200 feet or so up through the ice chimney to the North Col, and it was in that crack in the vertical ice face that they’d dropped Sandy Irvine’s ingenious rope and wood ladder—the same one that Bruno Sigl had lied about his men using; the same one that Reggie had admitted to climbing with Pasang, despite the ladder’s frayed appearance, a year ago this coming August. The ladder had allowed the scores of porters on last year’s huge expedition to climb to the North Col without someone constantly cutting steps for them.
Now both ice chimney and ladder are gone, folded into the churnings of the ever-shifting ice wall and glacier. The last 200 vertical feet to the ledge on the North Col where both previous expeditions have set their tents is once again a slick, solid 90-degree ice wall. But the more than 800 feet of snow and ice below that look bad as well.
“The snowfields look deep headed up to the ice wall,” I say between ragged gulps for air. We’ve been climbing this last hard bit between Camps II and III without oxygen—the last such oxygen-tank-free climbing we’ll be doing if the Deacon sticks to his plan—and I understand why the Tiger Sherpas with us have all but collapsed where they sit, lying back against their loads, too tired to remove the bulging thirty- to forty-pound packs from their backs.
J.C. removes his Crooke’s-glass goggles and squints up at the wall.
“Don’t go snow-blind on me,” I say.
He shakes his head but continues studying the 1,000-foot snow and ice wall while holding his hand above his eyes and squinting. “More fresh snow there than on the glacier,” he says at last, pulling up his goggles. “It’s probably as bad as…”
Jean-Claude stops before finishing his thought, but I can read his mind well enough by now to hear the unspoken parts of that sentence: It’s probably as bad as the snow slope conditions in 1922 when the avalanche killed seven Sherpas. We won’t know that for sure until the Deacon finally gets up here to Camp III, but I suspect the worst.
“Let us get our friends back on their feet before we lie down beside them and we all take a cold final nap,” says Jean-Claude. He turns and starts coaxing the four exhausted Sherpas to their feet, the men sagging under their loads. “It is only a few hundred more yards and downhill from here,” he says to them in English, knowing that his Sherpa Norbu and my man Babu will translate for the other two.
As we stagger out onto the moraine from the forest of huge ice pinnacles at the base of the glacier, all of us wearing crampons today— 10-point for the Sherpas and full 12-point for J.C. and me—and keeping them on even though we’re now ready to cross moraine rocks, I point to the open spot just ahead of us and about 200 feet short of the campsite and say, “This must be about where Kami Chiring confronted Bruno Sigl a year ago.”
Jean-Claude only nods, and I sense how very tired he is.
The three miles of climbing between Rongbuk Base Camp and Camp I amounts to hiking uphill on lateral moraine beds and across fields of shallow ice between hundreds of the penitente ice pillars. The three uphill miles between Camp I and Camp II are a mixture of moraine and actual glacier crossing, but the majority of the way is along the Trough among and between the ice pinnacles at the bottom of the valley. But almost all of the almost five hard miles uphill from Camp II here to Camp III at the base of the wall is on the ever more steeply rising glacier.
And the glacier is filled with hundreds of crevasses covered over with new snow.
I’ve followed J.C. for two days now as he’s threaded our route through those invisible crevasses, leaving only our footsteps in the deep snow—much of the time Jean-Claude was breaking trail through snow up to his thighs or waist—but also marking that route with wands and fixed ropes for the steeper parts.
Both days have been sunny, and through my goggles the glacier snowfields are merely a maze of sastrugi drift-ripples and corresponding blue shadows everywhere. Some of those blue shadows are shadows. Many are crevasses under their thin coverings of snow—gaps that would drop a man (or woman) hundreds of feet into the heart of the glacier. Somehow Jean-Claude always seems to know which shadow means what.
Twice between Camps II and III we’ve had to detour around crevasses too extensive to flank. The first time, yesterday, J.C. finally found a snow bridge that he judged would hold our weight. Jean-Claude crossed first while I belayed, my ice axe sunk deep in the ice, and then we rigged two strong, waist-high guide ropes across along with jumars that would carabiner onto the Sherpas’ new climbing harnesses.
The second crevasse had no snow bridges, and trying to detour around it either way just led us into endless fields of more hidden crevasses. Finally I belayed J.C.—while the Sherpas belayed me—with an extra ice axe laid across the lip of the crevasse so the rope would not cut into the snow. Jean-Claude used his new, short ice axes and 12-point crampons to descend 60 or 70 feet into the terrible crack until he reached a point where the walls were close enough together that he could take one huge step (for a short man) and slam his right ice hammer and right crampon front blades into the opposing ice wall. Then he swung his left arm and leg across a widening abyss that dropped into absolute darkness, kicked both crampon fronts into the blue ice wall, and began climbing with his short axes smacking into ice, each one higher than the other, up the opposite wall.
Once J.C. climbed out and was standing on the other side of the crevasse, I threw a coil of strong rope across and then two of the long ice axes, which he used to anchor the ropes. Then I used two axes and several long ice screws to anchor the ropes on our side of the crevasse. J.C. was wearing one of the climbing harnesses that none of us had tried on the mountain yet, and now he clipped carabiners from the harness onto one of his jumar thingies, lifted his cramponed boots up and over the rope, and just scooted hand over hand, butt first, back toward us along the doubled rope across the bottomless drop as if he were a child on a playground.
“The Sherpas can’t do that with their loads,” I gasped out when he unclipped from the ropes and moved away from the treacherous edge.
Jean-Claude shook his head. He’d been doing all the climbing and work, and I was still the one gasping and panting. “We have our fine fellows dump their loads here for now and we go back to Camp Two. Reggie should have had her team of nine porters bring up the ladders to Two by now. We lash two of the ten-foot ladders together, provide guide ropes as we did on the snow bridge, and…voilà!”