Dead Lucky Page 2

  It was unbelievable that each of us was still alive. The rope, which Tim had tied to an aluminum picket hammered into the firm snow, had withstood the huge forces of the avalanche. If the picket had given way, Greg and Tim would have been killed. Instead, both men had not only survived but also continued on to the summit together one month later, achieving our expedition’s goal of climbing a new route without supplementary oxygen.

  THE HUGE AVALANCHE had come very close to killing the three of us, and the slope was still exposed to danger. Luck had come into play, and if luck is allowed to intrude into the dangerous sport of mountain climbing, sooner or later there will be bad luck and people will die.

  The first time I had allowed luck to enter the arena of my mountaineering had been in 1983, during our climb of Annapurna II. The mountain seemed to single me out. I was battered and bruised by a rock avalanche that cracked my protective helmet like an eggshell. In a separate incident I was struck by an ice block the size of a television and narrowly avoided being knocked off a cliff. After becoming the first climbers to reach Annapurna II’s summit via the mountain’s huge South Face, we were trapped in a snowstorm during our descent. The previous storm had lasted nine days, so we could not risk sitting this one out. For each of the next three days we battled our way down the mountain, not knowing if we would be alive at the end of the day, so great were the dangers from snow and ice avalanches and chest-deep snow. Luck had definitely come into play. When we were safely off the mountain, I declared that I would never again let myself be trapped by such dangerous circumstances.

  However, only ten months later I found myself on the Central Rongbuk Glacier, two miles away from the base of the North Face of Everest, with a huge avalanche bearing down on us. It had looked as though the avalanche would hit us, but by the time the clouds of snow reached us, they had lost all momentum and the snowflakes fluttered down around us. That was our introduction to the dangers of the North Face, dangers we had to face for the next two months.

  By the time we retreated from our highest camp at 26,700 feet, we had absolutely no resources left, not even the shortest piece of rope. It was a perilous descent, and if the weather had turned bad, it would have been the end of us.

  At the end of that expedition, with a new route, without oxygen in the bag, and despite gaining my credentials as a high-altitude mountaineer, I vowed that it was time to give up big mountains. I had managed to climb within a few hours of the summit without oxygen, but if I continued to climb at this level, where we pushed the boundaries of what was possible, I would find myself relying on luck yet again. After a year of narrow escapes, I decided to call it quits and to focus my energy on the safer and less uncomfortable sport of rock climbing.

  ONCE A CLIMBER, always a climber—or so it seemed. After becoming a father, I found that a day of rock climbing once or twice a month was enough to stop me getting restless. As my sons grew older and more independent, I became able to take a few weeks away to work as a guide on easier mountains in the Himalaya, the Andes, and Antarctica. The climbing of smaller Himalayan peaks nestled among the giants seemed like the perfect compromise—not too great a demand on my family, not too low-key for me. But there were times when I found myself looking up at the highest of all mountains, remembering how close I had come and what a great experience even retreating without the summit had been.

  PART ONE

  DREAM CATCHER

  One

  SINGAPORE 2004

  WE HAD BEEN LIVING in Singapore for almost two years when the phone call came. I was dripping with sweat, as I had not long returned from my evening run beside the canal behind our condominium complex. This evening I was content with my usual six miles, which came in at just under an hour’s worth of jogging, door to door. Not superfast times, but I was in my late forties and had only just discovered the joys of running. It might seem strange to take up such a sport while living one degree north of the equator in the perpetually sticky heat of Singapore. I had not planned it that way; the catalyst was our younger son, Dorje, developing a sudden passion for roller hockey.

  Dorje took to the game not long after we arrived. Already a keen inline skater, he picked up the new skills quickly and suddenly found himself in the selection squad for a hockey tournament in Canada. For a twelve-year-old, Dorje’s skills and game sense were good, but his fitness was lacking. My wife, Barbara, suggested he skate back and forth along the exercise track beside the canal, with me by his side offering moral support. My lack of enthusiasm for this idea carried no weight. Three times a week I found myself running along the canal, oozing sweat while my son skated. Of course, Dorje skated in the bike lane at three times my speed, creating his own cooling breeze. Soon I began to enjoy the exercise and took to running the same distance he skated, which meant he was showered and watching television by the time I got home.

  After the tournament in Canada, Dorje let his training go. By that stage I was hooked on jogging, having learned how to manage exercise in the tropics. I chose to run after dark, when much of the sun’s heat had radiated from the tarmac path up into the sky. The hillside above the path was dense with jungle. The patches of yellow light that encircled the well-spaced street-lamps were flooded with moths and other insects. Every evening, not far above my head, bats made high-speed raids between the lamps, hunting their favorite moths and other strange equatorial insects. In such a setting it was impossible to forget the fertility of the tropics.

  I finished my run, returned to our apartment, and stood in front of the slowly rotating wall fan near the dining table. I jerked the string-switch twice to bring it to full speed and fed on the cooling blast of air. The refrigerator was five steps away in the kitchen, and after two minutes in front of the fan, I darted in there, grabbed a low-sugar, low-fizz isotonic drink, and returned to the fan. It generally took twenty minutes for me to stop sweating, but tonight, after ten minutes, the phone rang.

  It was Michael Dillon calling from Sydney. He was a good friend I hadn’t heard from since we had moved to Singapore in 2002. In 1984 we had been on Mount Everest together, with Mike as cameraman and me as expedition organizer and climber; in 1993 we had the same roles in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya. In Irian, our small team made the first-ever film of climbing Carstensz Pyramid, the highest peak in Australasia. That was an amazing expedition, involving Dani locals as guides, thick jungle, jagged limestone peaks, and glaciers only three degrees south of the equator. Mike was the ideal adventure cameraman. He had made several films with Sir Edmund Hillary, and almost a hundred other documentaries, many of them his own projects. Softspoken and terminally polite, Mike carried a camera at all times when he was working on a film, but he was as unobtrusive as a black dog on a dark night, which made him a great filmmaker—that and his superb ability to visualize exactly how each scene should be shot.

  I was delighted to hear from him. Mike is not one for small talk. At school he would have been one of those children who speaks only when spoken to. This evening he had something to say. He wanted to talk to me about a documentary he was working on about a teenager from the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. At the age of fourteen, Christopher Harris wanted to climb the highest mountain on each of the continents, a quest known as the Seven Summits. Of course, the most difficult of these is Mount Everest. Mike did not exactly invite me to get involved with Christopher’s upcoming Everest climb, but he made it clear he needed a high-altitude cameraman, a role I had performed on several mountains.

  When the call was over, I went down the few steps to our bedroom and onto the balcony, which overlooked the pool. My sweat had cooled me by now. Our eldest son was noisily completing twenty laps. Dylan was a naturally strong swimmer, but he disliked the idea of doing laps. Much of his non-school time was spent at his computer, managing a gaming clan on the Internet. While in Singapore, he had begun to play Battlefield 1942, a game that is at its most exciting when two teams of twenty or thirty players battle it out across the Internet. Dylan realized that t
his particular game had much more to offer than the popular shoot’em-up games. It became such a favorite that he set up a website and began to recruit a clan of gamers. There was something about Dylan’s site that hit buttons around the world, and from a few dozen players he soon had hundreds. Within a year there were eight thousand members in his clan, and his site hosted forums covering half a dozen different online games. Management of the clan threatened to overwhelm his life, but at age fifteen Dylan was still young enough for us to enforce some rules—namely, that he not forsake his natural athletic skills for a life in front of his computer.

  Dylan dragged himself out of the pool and headed toward the balcony. Our building was on a slope, so although I had jogged up two flights of stairs to get to our front door, the balconies at the rear were only ten feet above ground level. A change in levels between the living room and the bedroom allowed an acrobatic shortcut into our apartment, thanks to the railing beside the steps that led down to the pool. Dylan clambered onto the handrail, carefully stood up, then stretched a hand out to the wall for balance. Next he stepped across to the top railing of our balcony and hopped down beside me. It was the kind of technique you developed when you had a mountaineer as a father. The alternative was to walk around to the front entrance of our apartment and up the stairs.

  “Not too bad, was it?” I asked, a reference to his reluctance to go swimming.

  “Nah, it was good.”

  It was classic Dylan—he enjoyed whatever he did once he got into the rhythm of it. A typical teenager, he shook his head in order to shower me with the water from his hair. He stepped into our bedroom and left a line of wet footprints across the tiles as he left the room.

  I turned back to the pool and watched the water settle until it became as still as glass in the breathless tropical air. In the background I could hear the pok-pok of tennis being played under lights at the back of our condominium.

  It was time to talk with Barbara. I found her standing in the kitchen, a cookbook open on the counter in front of her, checking the details of a recipe. I slipped my arms around her waist from behind, and being considerably taller, I was able to look over her shoulder. The book was open at a picture of stir-fried Asian greens with cubes of tofu, bright red slivers of capsicum, and slices of strange-looking mushrooms. My head was next to hers and I could smell Givenchy perfume on her neck. I had bought if for her about a year ago, choosing the largest bottle in the range because it came with a free shoulder bag. Barbara had been pleased but had asked if I wanted her to smell the same for the next three years. I didn’t answer at the time—I tickled her instead—but a year down the track the bottle was a third empty; I knew this because she kept it in the fridge door, next to the sports drinks. Silently I sniffed her neck again, and it smelled as good as ever.

  “That was Mike Dillon on the phone,” I said, releasing her from my arms. “In Sydney. He was telling me about a fourteen-year-old Blue Mountains boy who wants to climb Mount Everest.”

  She turned around to listen, engaging me with her spectacular blue eyes, the kind of eyes that stun everyone who sees them.

  “Fourteen’s very young,” she said.

  “Yeah, but he’s climbed quite a few mountains, including Mount Cook when he was twelve, and that’s no easy climb.”

  “But still no comparison with Everest.”

  “No.”

  I hesitated. “Mike’s planning to make a doco about it and wants to know whether I am interested in being the high-altitude cameraman.”

  “When would this happen?”

  “Next season, which is April and May next year.”

  “And you’d like to go, obviously.”

  “If it happens, yeah.”

  I played it down, wanting to get her opinion, uncolored by any enthusiasm I might show.

  Barbara said nothing for a moment, and then, “That would be okay. I know you’re always careful.”

  “But what do you really think?”

  “That you’ll make the right decisions. And I guess I’m happy to support you in achieving a dream you’ve had for such a long time.”

  I kissed her and gave her a big hug. As I pulled away, I said, “It’s only an idea at this stage, so we’ll just see how it pans out.”

  With a touch of a smile she held my eyes, and I could tell she knew I was not as casual about it as I pretended to be. Those extraordinary eyes—I could never escape them. Then she cut me free by turning back to her recipe book.

  I walked out to the balcony that opened off our living room and leaned on the railing next to my sweat-sodden T-shirt. The view at this level was across a wide lawn with huge condominium towers silhouetted by the lights from the freeway across the canal. The blackness between the canal and the freeway signified jungle.

  I thought about the richness of the life in that jungle, and it reminded me of the incredible rainforests of Borneo. A few months earlier we had enjoyed a great family holiday climbing Mount Kinabalu with Margaret Werner, one of our closest friends. Although not a technical climb, Kinabalu is one of the highlights of my thirty-year climbing career, largely because I shared it with my family. Each of them experienced the gamut of feelings that comes with a major climb—initial intimidation, growing confidence, patches of fear on the tricky sections, and the huge feeling of achievement upon reaching the summit.

  Mike’s phone call had triggered some of these emotions in me, so it was not surprising that I should think of my most recent climb. Then my thoughts returned to the mountain of mountains. As I had said to Barbara, the Everest expedition was no more than an idea at this stage, but I had not added that it was an idea that excited me greatly. Why had I played down my excitement and talked to her about it so casually? I had some unfinished business with Mount Everest, but I also had a wife whom I loved passionately and two amazing sons. How could I consider leaving them for two months while I returned to the dangerous, inhospitable environment of the world’s highest mountain?

  The answer could be found in the way that, decades ago, climbing had captured my soul.

  Two

  RETURN TO EVEREST

  WITH OUR THREE-YEAR STAY in Singapore coming to a close, decided it was the perfect time to act on a long-term dream. For years I had thought about a trek to Everest Base Camp. Now, with the possibility of a full-scale climbing expedition the following year, I was even keener to visit the region with Barbara and the boys. I wanted them to see Everest close up so they could appreciate its impossible enormity, while breathing for themselves the oxygen-starved air at Base Camp. I wanted them to understand how Mount Everest had been such a powerful force in my past, how it shaped my present, and how it might soon shape my future. But, of course, the boys were more interested to visit the world’s most famous landmark, which happened to be loosely linked to my name, along with those of many other climbers.

  My link to Everest came from my role in establishing only the second new route on the mountain to be climbed without the use of supplementary oxygen. The first such ascent had been accomplished by Reinhold Messner, the most influential mountaineer of modern times, who at the same time became the first person to climb the mountain solo. Our ascent had been an extraordinary team effort, achieved without Sherpa support, but because I did not reach the summit myself, I burned with disappointment immediately after the climb.

  Three years later I was the first person ever to stand on the summit ridge of Mount Minto. My five friends were climbing the final steep slope, but I waited for them so that we could trudge up together to the tip of the highest peak in Antarctica’s deserted Victoria Land. While I waited, I stared out over range after range of mountains, almost all of them untouched, our peak the centerpiece. Between us and the coast, the only signs of human presence were our camp on the far side of a high pass and one hundred miles of ski tracks and caches that led to our small yacht anchored against the sea ice in vast Moubray Bay. My disappointment at not reaching the summit of Everest seemed immaterial. The issue became an item
of unfinished business, just a candle in the twilight. Nevertheless, Everest remained a special presence in my life. My family did not know that on any day since October 1984 I could have closed my eyes and seen the summit pyramid as clearly as if I were back in Tibet, at the spot near our Advance Base Camp where I spent hours alone with my yoga, alone with my thoughts, staring upward.

  I could not expect Dylan or Dorje to grasp even a hint of what the mountain meant to me. Barbara understood at a spiritual level my connection but could not relate to my willingness to embrace such great dangers. She knew that climbing had shaped my character, and she wasn’t about to undermine the catalyst that had delivered to her the man with whom she chose to spend her life.

  IN LATE DECEMBER 2004 we caught an early morning taxi to Singapore’s Changi Airport, en route to Nepal. The flight to Bangkok was uneventful, and we were in luck on the next leg to Kathmandu. The high peaks of the Himalaya rose above a sea of clouds. First we saw Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-highest peak, and its outliers. The clouds maintained a level horizon obscuring all the ranges until we approached the Everest region, where the next cluster of giant mountains broke through. There was Makalu at number five, Lhotse at number four, the mighty Everest itself, and then Cho Oyu at number six. The mountains stood proud until we dropped into the clouds, the beginning of our landing in Kathmandu.

  My good friend Ang Karma Sherpa was waiting for us at the doors to the airport terminal. Eager porters wheeled our carts down the middle of the road to the carpark with taxis honking and minibuses spewing out black smoke. Chaos and confusion is a standard welcome to Kathmandu, but there was something different about the journey back to Karma’s house.

  “Where’s all the traffic?” I asked.

  “The Maoists have declared a strike,” Karma explained. “They threaten that anyone still doing business will get their shop blown up. And they bombed some stores. The only vehicles they let on the road in a strike are tourist vehicles. That is why we have the sign.”