Chapter 36

By this time Bob Seger’s song was well known, and I was totally in tune with the lyrics: If I ever get out of here, I’m goin’ to Kathmandu.

I did.

Realistically speaking, Kathmandu was a lot more primitive than either Cayenne or La Paz, but it was worlds ahead of Bujumbura and Kinshasa – and the Himalayas surrounded it. Despite the location, it’s not terribly high in elevation, a little less than Denver. It was as big a city in population as La Paz, but considerably more crowded. It was and is one of the more interesting cities of the world, and I had very much enjoyed my brief stay there with Bruce after months in Antarctica years before.

The teaching was routine, and it was pretty much an average school. I had no doubt that I would not finish the term, since the husband of the woman who had to be evacuated to the States had a long-term contract there. I hoped that she would return by March or April, since spring is the best time to go trekking in Nepal, and I wanted to do some more of it.

I had been especially impressed by Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, which had come out a few years before. That trek had taken place in the Dolpo region to the west of Kathmandu; my previous trek there with Bruce had been eastward, to Namche Bazar and the Solo Khumbu region. If the woman I was substituting for got back in time, I could perhaps find a partner, hire some local porters, and explore some of that country. I might even see a snow leopard, which Matthiessen didn’t get to do.

As it worked out, she was back at the end of March, bringing a small baby with her, and very relieved to have had it. That freed me up to go trekking, and I went looking for a partner.

There were several agencies by now that organized treks such as I was planning to do, and it was easier to let them deal with the details than it was for me. I was just going into one of the agencies to do some searching when a familiar voice stopped me: “Joan? What are you doing here?”

I looked up to see my old Antarctic, New Zealand, and Himalayan trekking buddy Bruce. I hadn’t seen him since the last time I had been in Kathmandu, although we still had each other’s addresses and sometimes exchanged letters. “I’ve been teaching here the last few months,” I told him. “It was a temporary deal and I just got laid off.”

“What are you going to do? Head back to the States?”

“Not right away. I’ve been looking into doing some trekking in Dolpo. Would you be interested in coming along?”

“Not right now,” he shrugged. “Joan, have you been doing any climbing? Still active?”

“Not as active as I would like to be,” I admitted. “I did quite a bit in the States last summer, and I’ve been up Kilimanjaro, Denali, and Aconcagua since I saw you last.”

“Joan,” he smiled. “Let’s go get a cup of tea. I think I have a proposition that might interest you.”

Oh, did he ever! He was talking Mount Everest!

The background to this is complicated, but I will try to simplify it as much as I can. The best Himalayan climbing seasons are in the spring and fall – the winter is too cold, and the summer brings monsoons, which at the higher elevations means lots and lots of snow and even more rain at the lower ones. At this time the Nepalese government only allowed two Mount Everest expeditions a year, one each in the spring and fall seasons, and these were booked up years in advance.

Usually these were big expeditions, sometimes twenty or thirty climbers and support people and hundreds of porters and Sherpas, who were high-altitude porters at the time but getting more experience as true mountaineers to the point where they could do most of the support work without close climber supervision.

The big expeditions were expensive, and usually required plenty of sponsorship – sometimes even government support, but newspapers and companies such as banks using the expeditions for advertising purposes picked up the majority of the costs. Since a lot obviously depended on success, in theory the expeditions were made up of the best climbers available to the pool that sponsored them. But there was a lot of favoritism involved since the people organizing the expeditions usually chose people they knew, and often friends. The climbers might not get paid for their time, but the trip was usually for free.

The problem with that is that it left other people who would like to do an Everest climb out in the cold, since they weren’t bosom buddies with the guy who had been able to get the permit. Naturally, that upset a lot of people.

The old system was breaking down by this time. There were climbers who could self-fund a trip like climbers have always done, but that didn’t mean they could get on a trip. Well, usually, and Bruce and a couple of friends had come upon one of the exceptions to the rule. There was an “international” expedition scheduled for the spring, but the organizers had run into severe funding problems, so had reached out to some of those independent climbers and invited them along – for a fee, of course, to help make the expedition’s nut. Since the climbers were paying, they had a little more say in what they would do on the mountain, and the so-called leader was mostly a coordinator who had little or no command authority.

This was a step on the way to actual commercial climbs on the mountain, which were not far off, and which in my view have taken away a lot of the cachet that Everest once could claim – and led to a lot more accidents and deaths. The mountain is a difficult and dangerous place at the best of times, and it is no respecter of wealth, nor much of one toward skill.

Now, I already knew most of that. It was common knowledge among the climbing community, especially the climbing community in Kathmandu, of which I was a fringe member.

“The problem,” Bruce explained, “Is that one of the blokes had to drop out. Cancer, damn it, at his age. Now we’re short a hand.”

“And you’re asking me to take his place?”

“Not so much asking as exploring the idea for the nonce,” he smiled. “Do you think you’d be interested in a shot at the big one?”

That stopped me for a moment, and I sipped at my tea while thoughts churned through my mind.

I had seen Everest years before – in fact, Bruce had been with me when I did. It was a dangerous and scary-looking mountain. In technical difficulty it is not terribly high, but the altitude makes things a lot different. It’s up in what mountaineers call “the death zone” where the combination of cold and thin air debilitates people rapidly. Some people can’t survive it unless they can get lower down the mountain, and quickly. In addition there are other dangers, most of which aren’t unique to Everest but are once again made worse by the extreme altitude. Add it all up and it was pretty risky.

But risk is always present in mountaineering, or even in bouldering. It’s more a question of how much risk you’re willing to accept. For instance, at my best I had probably been capable of doing the North Face of the Eiger, for example, a pretty hairy climb at the best of times and frequently a killer in the past. There even had been suggestions that I try it – joking ones, to be sure, but still suggestions. But the risk had just seemed too high to me, so I never even seriously considered it. The risk was going to be high on Everest – but was it a risk I could accept?

“South Col route, right?” I asked. It was the most common route up the mountain, and the one that had produced the most success.

“Too right. Nothing dodgy.”

“What’s it going to cost?”

“That is a bit tricky,” he shrugged. “The bloke who can’t go has already paid his mite, but he’d like to recover some of it. I think if you’d offer him eight thousand American he’d be tickled to see that much of his tucker back. It doesn’t have to be right away.”

That was not a bad price, considering all the expenses I knew were going to be involved. At that it was a discount. I could easily afford it; it wouldn’t even cost me what I had gained from teaching in Kathmandu over the winter, and I had planned on spending part of that money trekking in Dolpo anyway. I might not get all the way up the mountain, but I could say I had been on it, which is more than most climbers could say.

“What the hell,” I told Bruce. “Let’s do it.”

“Fine with me,” he smiled. “I should tell you that there are a few other problems. Nothing unsolvable, but there are some awkward bits. Like all the paperwork has been done, and you’re obviously not this bloke. But you’re going to have to tell the liaison officer that you are. But Nepalese don’t often understand the difference between Western male and female names, just as we don’t always understand the differences in theirs.”

“What happens if he asks to see my passport?”

“Then don’t have it with you. Tell him you left it here in Kathmandu because you saw no need for it. They expect Westerners to do stupid things.”

“I suppose,” I sighed. “What’s the logistical setup like?”

“The main group is providing the food, oxygen equipment, tentage, and the like, as well as providing high-altitude Sherpas. That’s what we’re paying for. They’ll also coordinate the porters for the carry up to Base Camp. Unlike the old days, the gear will be flown into the new airstrip at Lukla, so there goes the need for a month’s walk in with hundreds of porters. We’ll fly in there too, and do our acclimatization there and on up to Base Camp over a period of a few weeks.”

“I almost miss the idea of walking in, but then you and I have done it before.”

“Right, and it would be considerably less fun in the middle of an army of porters that size.”

“How soon do we leave?”

“We fly into Lukla in four days.”

“Look, Bruce, all this is well and good, but my high altitude gear is still all in the States. I mean, gear good enough for Denali and then some. But there is no way in hell I can get it here in four days.”

“We ought to be able to solve that,” he shrugged. “You’re about the size of the average Sherpa, and I know a lot of their gear from previous expeditions shows up in the bazaars here in Kathmandu. It might prove to be a motley kit, but let’s go shopping.”

I could write a book about the next few weeks and several times have been tempted to, but fear of libel charges and other nastiness, even with assumed names involved, kept me from doing it. It is much too long to go into the details but I will try to give a brief overview that unfortunately will protect the guilty as much as it will the innocent.

It was actually five days before Bruce and I flew into Lukla, along with Alan, an Australian who had been in on the deal from the beginning. The flight was in a single-engine Swiss Pilatus Porter, the only plane that could dare to use the tiny, steep dirt landing strip originated by Sir Edmund Hillary a few years before. Weather and the amount of gear meant that it took several trips to get everything to the airstrip from Kathmandu, and we were the last trip to arrive. It was quicker than walking, but flying into that tiny place was pretty scary all by itself.

It was at Lukla that I met the rest of the expedition for the first time, and I immediately had questions about whether I’d done the smart thing by agreeing to do this at all.

Even from the beginning the expedition looked a little on the thin side to me. In those days there was the vision of an Everest expedition being a huge herd of people with mountains of equipment. This was not the case here by any means. We had no scientific instruments, we had no movie crew with tons of cameras, and we didn’t even have radio transmitters or walkie-talkies to communicate with on the mountain. Our weather information involved a small transistor radio. We were under-equipped in every category you can think of, food, clothing, tentage, and oxygen. On the big expeditions up to that point everyone had been issued clothing and other gear; we provided our own, and nothing matched. Since I had been outfitted in the Kathmandu bazaar, I looked more like a walking rag bin than I did a heroic Himalayan climber.

There were only eight of us “sahibs,” which though not politically correct in that day and age was the term that was used, and still is as far as I know. Only Bruce, Alan, and I spoke English as a primary language, and some of the sahibs didn’t speak it at all. One of those spoke Spanish, and another French as a second language, and I was the only one of the party who spoke all three.

The official leader of the expedition was named “Piotr” and I’m deliberately using a pseudonym for good reasons. Piotr was all about Piotr, and this expedition, as far as he was concerned, was for his own glorification in his own country. His experience was thin, and his leadership skills were nonexistent. To bring this off Piotr had cut every corner he could, and most of those he shouldn’t have; I was to find out later that some of those corners had been cut with the Nepalese government, and I suspect greased palms were involved.

I will be honest: I took one look at the group and the supplies that had gathered there at Lukla, and thought about hiking out. I told Bruce that, but on reflection, I had come this far, so after some discussion we decided to proceed onward to Base Camp. I doubted that we could make it to the top of Everest, but I thought that perhaps I could at least get on the mountain.

It is normal practice, then and now, to take several days to get the forty or so miles up to Everest Base Camp from Lukla. Trekkers planning on going no higher usually take ten days one way to acclimatize themselves to the elevation. The plan was for us to take three weeks to get established in base camp, climbing higher whenever possible to speed the process. Bruce, Alan, and I had the most experience at high altitude – although much lower than Everest, of course – so we worked the hardest at building ourselves up.

In order to save money – always a priority – Piotr had cut the porterage and the Sherpa support to a minimum, so we were under strength in that department for a party of our size as well. For that reason, not all of what little we had in the way of supplies made it as far as Base Camp. Sherpas are natives who live at high altitude, and thus have spent their lives in conditions that left the Westerners flagging. Only a few expeditions over the years haven’t used Sherpa support in one way or another.

As I said before, Everest is a dangerous mountain, and one of the most dangerous parts is the Icefall just above Base Camp. This is a glacier coming down out of the Western Cwm, the valley to the south of the mountain. The glacier hits a dropoff and it literally falls, but slowly. It is forever changing, especially at that time of the year, and it’s full of crevasses and pinnacles of ice that can fall without warning and often do. At that, it’s actually safer than the other possible route of sneaking along the edge of the icefall, which is frequently swept by avalanches; the dangers are so obvious that no one has ever attempted that route.

By this time Sherpas could usually be relied on to pioneer the route up through the icefall, as is normally done today. We made it without any incidents although I have no idea how. About halfway up the Cwm we established an advanced base camp, or Camp II. We were so under strength that it took a combined effort of all of us to get up to Camp II with a minimum of supplies.

The problem we now faced was to get enough supplies up to the South Col, a ridge high above the Cwm on the shoulder of Everest itself. The first part of this route is no problem, but the second steeper part of it up the Lhotse Face, the mountain next to Everest, is very steep and dangerous. On bigger expeditions fixed ropes are usually placed along the route; a climber can go up these ropes with what are known as Jumar ascenders on the ropes to prevent falling. But we had no fixed ropes except for a few we’d found left over in place from previous expeditions. I was no stranger to Jumars; Cat and I had used them to climb up the rope to our room when we sneaked out at night clear back at Venable College. Still, over a period of days we got a minimum of supplies up to the Col, where we placed Camp III, which was nothing more than a couple of tents and a little pile of supplies.

I was actually surprised we had made it that far. The South Col is just shy of 26,000 feet, well up into the Death Zone. It was the highest I had ever climbed, well above my previous record on Aconcagua. After making the carry, we retreated back to Camp II to decide what to do next.

By now the party was pretty well shot. Bruce, Alan, and I were still going reasonably well although we were not exactly in perfect shape, and we were in the best shape among the sahibs. Even the Sherpas were going poorly and were about done in, partly because they weren’t exactly front-line Sherpas in the first place. Piotr and the other sahibs were all for heading on down and calling it a bad job, but the three of us, led by Bruce, felt that we had enough supplies up at Camp III to make a single attempt at the summit. Nobody else felt up to trying it, even in support by climbing up to Camp III; in fact, they called Bruce’s idea “suicidal.” I’m afraid that things got a bit tense there, and Piotr’s leadership, never good, fell apart now.

I’m not going to detail the argument here; let’s just say that it was long, pointless, and nasty and leave it at that. The upshot of it was that the three of us decided to make a “forlorn hope” dash for the summit.

About the only other thing that had come out of the meeting was that most of the party would start for Base Camp in the morning. However, a couple of sahibs and a couple of Sherpas would wait at Camp II until we returned – if we returned, which was by no means certain, and they would only give us a few days. The next morning the three of us loaded up our packs as heavy as we thought we could manage, and at that we were cutting the gear on the thin side. We were just about getting ready to go when a small voice said, “I go with you.”

As far as I am concerned, Ang Dori was the hero of the expedition. She was small even for a Sherpa woman, or Sherpani as the word is used, but she had been one of the towers of strength of the expedition so far, especially since no one expected it of her. She felt she had a point to prove, and she was going to prove it.

In the past women had frequently been porters below Base Camp, but few if any had ever been allowed past there – it was a male chauvinist thing among the Sherpas; women couldn’t be high Sherpas, or so it was thought. Ang Dori wouldn’t have gone beyond Base Camp either, except for the fact that she had been one of the strongest porters on the trudge up from Lukla. Even though she was considerably smaller than I was, and I am not large, she normally carried loads that were a good three or even four times what I was comfortable with. Since we were desperately under strength and she was going well, she was allowed to carry to Camp II. The same thing held true going to Camp III; in fact, of all the Sherpas, she was the only one who was willing to attempt Camp III a second time on this expedition.

The only reason the four of us made it back to Camp III was that Ang Dori carried more than her fair share of the load, some of it the things that we three sahibs would have had to carry. We stumbled in late, crawled into the two tents that had been put up on the previous carry, and tried to sleep with the help of oxygen to get us through the night, with the guys in one tent and Ang Dori and I in the other.

The South Col is absolutely barren, windswept and cold. There is little snow, because it usually gets blown away. Old tent frames and junk left behind by previous expeditions littered it, and that made it even worse. Some have called it “the worst place in the world” and I’m inclined to agree.

When Hillary and Tenzing first climbed Everest they set up an even higher camp. However, by now it was understood that if you got a real, real early start in the morning and kept moving, it was usually possible to make it to the top and back to Camp III before nightfall. Since we had a pretty good moon expected that night we agreed to get moving as soon as it lit the sky. Ang Dori and I got a few hours of poor sleep, and we were getting ourselves together as soon as we realized it was in the sky. It was not a simple process, even though we had undressed little from the night before; mostly we thawed a little snow for water to drink, had a cup of soup that provided a little nourishment, and started gearing up.

As we were close to ready to go, I noticed that Bruce and Alan were far behind us in getting organized. The original plan had been for us to all go together, but when I called over to them, Bruce replied, “We’ll be a bit yet. You go on. We’ll catch up.”

So, in the light of the rising moon, Ang Dori and I got loaded up and started up the mountain, farther than I had ever believed we would get. Only now were we actually on Everest, and even with the moonlight the going was slow, but we kept going. It’s only about three thousand vertical feet from the South Col to the top of the mountain, but they are slow-going feet even if there are only a couple of spots where the climbing gets a little technical. We threaded our way upwards, and not far below the South Summit I looked back and could see no sign of the guys as we stopped and rested for a moment. Finally, I caught a glimpse of them far below, barely above the Col.

They were far enough below, and running late enough, that I doubted that they could ever make the summit and return in daylight. I turned to Ang Dori, who had seen them just as well as I had. “Up go?” she asked.

We were truly on our own. By now, we were less than five hundred vertical feet from the top of Everest, but whether we made it the rest of the way would depend on us. It only took a moment to decide: “Up go.”

From the South Summit there is only one route, along a knife-edge ridge with huge snow cornices. Even with oxygen we weren’t going well; take a step, perhaps two, rest, take a step or two, rest, repeat for what could literally be the rest of our lives. After a while, we reached the Hillary Step, the last obstacle to getting up, a thirty-foot climb up a rock ledge. If this had been at the quarry near Venable it would be simple indeed, but that high in the death zone, it almost stopped us. Fortunately, there was an old fixed rope from an earlier expedition, so we managed to make it up with the help of that, and from there on it was easy.

I don’t know what time it was that we topped out. The view was grand in all directions, but we were too tired to really enjoy it. We couldn’t stay long. “Well, Joe,” I said to myself mentally, “You wanted to do something different and I guess you did.”

A stray thought crossed my mind, and on a whim I sat down. “You OK?” Ang Dori asked. Her face was hidden behind a balaclava to keep away the cold, but I could feel her frown.

I didn’t think she would understand me, but I told her anyway. “In my country we have a phrase, ‘sitting on top of the world.’ Now I’m doing it.”

“OK,” she replied. “Down go?”

“Let’s get some pictures.” I handed her my camera, which was pretty automatic, and she got a couple of snaps of me sitting there. I got to my feet, took the camera back, and took some of her. I put the camera away, and we started back down the mountain, knowing that I would never climb any higher.

We had not brought enough oxygen with us, but we had banked on the idea that we could get away without it while going down. Sure enough, what little I had ran out even before we made it to the South Summit; I took the bottle out of my pack and threw it away so I wouldn’t have to carry the weight. We struggled on downward, but Ang Dori began to understand that I wasn’t going well, so she offered me her bottle; as a Sherpa, she was in a little better condition to go without supplemental oxygen at that level. Still, we were no more than halfway back to Camp III when that gave out, too. The day was getting late and I was starting to worry about making it to Camp III when we found two partial bottles of oxygen sitting right in the path; I realized that Bruce and Alan must have left them there when they turned back.

With oxygen flowing again, it was easier. It was still light when we got back to the wind-battered tents at Camp III, to find Bruce and Alan there, making some hot soup for us. We were wind-burned, exhausted, and had some minor frostbite, but Ang Dori and I had done it!

We used the last of our oxygen trying to sleep that night, and some of what we used came from partial bottles abandoned by earlier expeditions. The next morning we started back down, going pretty well – and discovered that Camp II was empty! No one was there, and that was troubling. We had been gone just about the minimum time possible to summit from Camp II, so it looked like Piotr had pulled out right after we’d started upward.

Fortunately there were tents left behind and we were able to find a little food and some fuel to cook it – and we could eat a little now, something we hadn’t been able to do at higher altitude. We spent the night, and in the morning went on down to Base Camp, to find it deserted, too. Everyone had pulled out, and even our gear and personal belongings were gone. Again, we managed to find a little food, and in the morning started for Namche Bazar, where we found that the expedition had hiked through three days earlier on their way to Lukla.

It was only another day down to the airstrip, where we discovered that they’d finished flying out the day before. From some Sherpas Ang Dori talked to, it appeared Piotr had given us up from the beginning as being on a suicide run, so as soon as we left Camp II he and the rest of the expedition had loaded up and ran the other way.

Now we were in a pickle. There were no more flights expected into Lukla anytime soon since the pilots were not about to fly in there just to see if someone wanted a ride. We might be able to hike to Kathmandu in a few days, but we were essentially without money, and our only gear and clothes had mostly been to the South Col or higher with us. We had no food now, either.

Once again Ang Dori saved us. She only said, “I go with you,” again. She had the little money that she had earned as a porter on the way up, and some she was able to borrow, but the four of us started down the trail to Kathmandu. Most of the way we had to eat the local tsampa bread that Ang Dori bargained for, and really, it was a starving trip. In later years Bruce was to call it “the Kathmandu Death March.” But we made it, thanks to our little Sherpani friend. Once we got to my belongings still at the school in Kathmandu, I was able to pay her, and it was probably more than the rest of her fellow Sherpas had earned on the whole expedition combined, a veritable fortune for her.

But more important to her were prints I had made of the pictures that I had taken of her on top of Everest, and she had them in her pack when she started back for Namche Bazar a few days later. I never heard how that came out, but I’d be willing to bet more than I paid her that she rubbed a few noses in them.

Now, the interesting part to this is that officially I never climbed Everest. I was under an assumed name thanks to the goofy way the thing started, and Piotr blew out of Kathmandu just about as soon as he landed there. The government had found out quite a bit about the screwed-up way things had happened, and they wanted to talk to him. I also suspect that he hadn’t greased the right palms enough. The rumor was that he hitchhiked out on a truck to India, and so he never filed a report – and for that matter, he never actually knew that I had made it to the top in the first place. But I still have the photos that Ang Dori took of me on the top of the world, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s all I need.

There is a coda to this story: a couple of years later, Piotr was found in an alley in Chaminox, beaten to within an inch of his life. As far as I know he never fully recovered. I know that Bruce and Alan were climbing in New Zealand at the time, and I was in the States. I am very satisfied about what happened to him, but officially I know nothing.