Reggie and her Tigers—I can see Babu Rita’s white grin from 50 feet away—catch up, a heavy coil of Miracle Rope is passed up to me, and after we’ve all had another minute or two of rest, I tighten my oxygen mask and start my own crampon-and-ice-hammer ascent.
Fifteen minutes into this I realize that I’ve never felt stronger on a mountain. My headache is gone. My arms and legs are suffused with a new energy even while my spirit is filled with a renewed sense of confidence.
This new type of ice climbing which J.C. says he’s stolen from the top German climbers is fun. I pause every 30 feet or so to set out and anchor the next strand of fixed rope—now dangling almost vertically past us—but I no longer need the rests to gasp for air after only four or five kicked-in steps. I feel as if I could climb like this all day and all night.
For the first time I’m beginning to believe that our little band might have a real chance at summiting Mount Everest. I know that the Deacon has been considering moving out onto the North Face from Camp V or VI, duplicating Colonel Norton’s 1924 attempt on the Great Couloir—traverse off the ridge to the right above the Yellow Band until reaching the scar of snow that stretches straight up to the snowfield below the Summit Pyramid—and if the quality of the frozen snow in that couloir is anything like that of the North Col face here, such a plan would seem to make sense. Climbing on oxygen, leaving the tent before sunrise—trusting our Finch-and-Reggie down clothing to keep us alive in the unrelenting cold—we could easily make the summit and be back before sunset if the climbing were as straightforward 12-point crampon and ice hammer work as today’s has been.
I pause in such thinking before my dreams outrun reality’s headlights. Even now, part of me knows that nothing really will “come easily” on Mount Everest. I’ve learned from listening to the Deacon and through reading and listening to others—as well as through our hard experience at Camp III—that everything this mountain gives, she plucks away just as quickly and certainly. Perhaps the Great Couloir will be part of our plans, but I remind myself that no part of this ascent will turn out, in the long run, to be “easy.”
Suddenly we’re at the vertical ice. I pause again, breathing heavily but not gasping into my mask, allow the Deacon just below me to bang in the ice screws for the last section of fixed Miracle Rope, and—trusting my crampon points and the sunken adzes of the two ice hammers far more than I would have thought possible before today—lean far back to stare up at the gleaming wall of ice that is the North Col’s last full barrier before we beat her.
It seems impossible. To my right a few yards, I can see various cracks and tumbled ice boulders—all that is left of the ice chimney that George Mallory had free-climbed a year ago. I’d seen one photograph of that climb and heard Deacon’s description of it—Mallory’s moves being one part spider to two parts gymnast, his fast, vertical scuttle impossible to imitate even by the expert climbers coming up behind him. That’s where Sandy Irvine’s rope ladder had come in so useful to the porters and later climbers. We’d brought rope and wood caver’s ladders for just that purpose, but the plan was to lower them from the top of the North Col ledge, not fix them as we ascend.
I give the Deacon a thumbs-up—I can still take the lead onto the vertical ice if he wants—but he shakes his head and looks up and beyond me at J.C., who is directly above both of us now on the extremely steep slope. One gloved palm up—the Deacon is questioning whether Jean-Claude has enough energy for this final assault. I know that the Deacon himself will lead this 200-foot vertical pitch if Jean-Claude can’t. It’s the main reason that the Deacon hasn’t yet taken the lead on this morning’s climb.
J.C. gives a thumbs-up—his oxygen mask, goggles, and leather flying helmet hide his expression and features—and passes his rope and other loads down to Nyima Tsering next in line.
Once again he and I trade places, but much more gingerly this time since a slip here would lead to an 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 not to watch Jean-Claude in this, his tour de force.
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 dak bungalow wall. For the first 50 feet or so he’s still tied on our rope—both the Deacon and I with our full-length sunken ice axes braced for belay—but at the end of that extra-long rope length, he drives in an ice piton, unties from our belay, and ties in his Miracle Rope for protection. He’ll do this every 50 feet or so on the 200-foot climb, since if he falls it will be vertical free fall, and not even the Deacon’s Miracle Rope could hold his weight without snapping after a 400-foot vertical fall.
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.