“Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Camp Three,” I say, “it was thirty below and we were all certain that the monsoon had arrived.”
“Not yet,” says the Deacon. “Not yet.” He slaps his wool-covered thighs and stands from his long crouch. “I’m going to look in on Ang and Lhakpa again, chat with Dr. Pasang for a moment, and take a few of these boys uphill with me. We’ll be carrying loads to Camp Three until well after sunset this evening.”
“Ree-shard,” says J.C. “Did you not forget to ask us something?”
The Deacon grins. “Well, gentlemen,” he says. “What lessons have we all learned from your little carry-to-Camp-Three adventure?”
After Jean-Claude and I laugh, but before we can speak, the Deacon waves one hand and strides back toward the infirmary tent.
Monday, May 11, 1925
It is a perfect day for an attempt to summit Mount Everest.
Unfortunately, we are just beginning our assault on the mountain’s flanks, trying to reach the North Col and establish a foothold there before the end of the day. We leave Camp III a little after 7:00 a.m. Tied in to our first rope are just Jean-Claude, then me, then the Deacon, then the Deacon’s strongest-climbing personal Tiger Sherpa, Nyima Tsering. The second rope is led by Reggie, followed by my smiling Sherpa Babu Rita and three more Tiger Sherpas after him, the string anchored by the Deacon’s big man, Tenzing Bothia. Pasang is still at Base Camp watching over Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay.
It turns out that the Deacon hasn’t been quite as lazy over the weekend as he’d promised us. With soft snow, just the trek from Camp III to the base of the huge slope could have taken two totally exhausting hours or more of wallowing through waist-deep snow. But the Deacon, Reggie, and some of the Sherpas broke trail yesterday in the heat, so we are at the base of the actual slope and ready to climb within thirty minutes.
Our hope of all hopes over the past few days has been that the sun would melt the outer inches of snow during the day and the freezing-cold nights above Camp III would harden that surface snow to something like the consistency of ice for our new 12-point crampons. Now is the test…and J.C. and I are soberly aware that we’re no longer horsing around in Wales, pretending to be real Himalayan mountaineers. Jean-Claude’s newly designed crampons, ice hammers, jumars, and other devices—not to mention the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, which we’ll be betting our lives on each time we set up a rappel rather than chop steps for a descent—will either work and save us days of repeated effort, or prove to be a costly, perhaps fatal mistake. One fact looms large: achieving the North Col soon is absolutely essential if we are to come close to meeting the Deacon’s summiting date of May 17.
The first 300 feet or so of elevation consists of little more than a steep slope. Mallory and the others before him—including the Deacon—had spent entire days using their ice axes to hack footholds into the icy snow crust for the porters. Even then, the steps would soon fill with spindrift and new snowfall and would require more days of “maintenance” hacking—heavy work above 21,000 feet. And to minimize the exertion of the porters, the climbers had hacked the steps back and forth across the face of the snow slope in easy switchbacks.
Not today.
Jean-Claude is as good as his word and forges a crampon-kicked path straight up the 1,000-foot incline, keeping the line a hundred yards or so to the right of where the seven Sherpas had died in the avalanche in 1922. Even this close to the bottom, we’re putting in fixed ropes—the lighter three-eighths-inch cotton “Mallory rope” for this more casual incline at the base of the steeper slope—and every 50 feet or so Jean-Claude pauses as I use a wooden mallet to pound in tall, sharpened wooden stakes with eyelets atop them. We’re all carrying heavy coils of rope (with more in the rucksacks), and the thinner cotton rope goes quickly.
Even though “breaking trail” with 12-point crampons is infinitely easier than wallowing waist-deep in snow and hacking out steps, I can soon hear Jean-Claude’s heavy breathing. All of us fall into the rhythm of three paces, pause, gasp, then three more steps up.
“It’s time to go to the gas,” cries the Deacon the next time both ropes pause in our long vertical line.
This is the Deacon’s Rule—above 22,000 feet, all possible summit climbers will go to oxygen tanks. Rather than have us all climb with a full O2 rig, J.C. has separated out one tank of English air for each rucksack carried by us four sahibs, and one tank each for Tenzing Bothia, Nyima Tsering, and the other three Tigers climbing with us. Those full sets we’ll save for assaults above the North Col.
“I don’t really need the English air yet,” calls up Reggie.
“I’m still all right,” calls down J.C. from his perch above us.
The Deacon shakes his head. “Feel free to set the valves at their lowest flow, but we go on oxygen from this point on while doing heavy climbing.”
I feign reluctance, but in truth the headache I’d gotten rid of yesterday is trying to creep back in—the pain throbbing to my pulse as I gasp for breath during each short rest break—and I’m relieved when, with the mask covering my face below my goggles, I hear the soft hiss of air. The flow valve can be set to 1.5 liters of air per minute—the lowest setting—or 2.2 liters per minute. I choose the lower rate of flow.
Within a minute, I feel as if someone has given me a shot of pure adrenaline. J.C. doubles his climbing speed even as the snow slope becomes much steeper and more treacherous and a gap begins to open between the four of us on the first rope and Reggie and her four Sherpas. Babu Rita and the other three porters are carrying and climbing stolidly enough, but they soon can’t match the pace of those of us on oxygen.
We run out of the Mallory-type clothesline rope precisely where we’d planned to, and the Deacon signals for us to switch over to his heavier Miracle Rope. The slope is steep enough now that we could rappel down it—if we learn to trust the new rope for such previously unheard-of long rappels—and we begin feeding it out minus the eyelet stakes.
At our next pause around 11:00 a.m., as we wait for Reggie and her Tiger Team to catch up, I realize that we’re more than 600 feet up the 1,000-foot snow and ice wall. The exposure is severe—the Camp III tents look very small and distant from here—but the combination of fixed rope anchored by ice screws at intervals and the almost unbelievable grip of our 12-point crampons and short ice hammers gives us a sense of real security.
It’s during this rest about 200 feet below the beginning of the sheer ice wall that the Deacon gestures for J.C. and me to trade places. Jean-Claude signs that he still has plenty of energy to spare, but the Deacon merely repeats his hand commands. For a minute both J.C. and I are untied and unbelayed as we trade places in the vertical line. In the lead now, I switch my oxygen tank regulator from the 1.5-liter minimum flow to the 2.2-liter-per-minute full flow rate. There should be enough to get me to the North Col all right, but I’ll be lowering that flow before too long. I’m sure that the Deacon will want Jean-Claude to take the lead on the vertical face of blue ice looming above us.
I admit that my thrill at finally taking the lead on this expedition is mixed with some disappointment that I won’t be the first to climb an ice wall at this altitude with nothing more than 12-point crampons and a short ice hammer in each hand. J.C. had enjoyed that honor.
As we stay stuck to the steep wall below the vertical section, even though I’ve stripped off all goose down garments and stowed them in my rucksack and have been climbing with only a wool shirt and cotton undershirt on, I’m all but drenched with sweat. The entire upper basin of the East Rongbuk Glacier and the North Col have been in direct sunlight now for some time; the Camp III area more than 60 stories beneath us is a glaring basin of bright light.