Seven Summits (46 page)

“Chris and I had a long talk about it, and it's clear to me now my responsibilities lie with the safety of the aircraft. As much as I would love to be with you, and love to climb this mountain, we'd all be in deep shit if a storm came up and something happened to that plane.”

As Kershaw disappeared in the distance toward the plane, Bonington said, “One of the things I like best about these trips is meeting new people. I’ve a feeling Giles and I will become good friends.”

Leaving one of our tents at base camp, we loaded our backpacks and set off once more up the gully. Once again Bonington and I fixed the climbing ropes and the others followed. All except for Marts, who, as he often did, was climbing off on his own, at the sides of the gully, to get the best camera angles. He was indefatigable at his task, climbing quickly ahead of everyone, setting up his camera and shooting, then breaking down, packing, and once more scurrying to get ahead, climbing confidently without a rope.

Our two Japanese teammates, Yuichiro Miura and his cameraman Tae Maeda, were also climbing strongly. Miura had perhaps the heaviest pack of anyone, as he was also carrying his downhill ski equipment for his planned descent off the top of Vinson. By now all of us realized how lucky we were to have Miura and Maeda on the trip, for they were both even-tempered, hard-working, and companionable. Fortunately, too, they both spoke good English although Dick was always practicing his traveler's Japanese.

We made better time up the gully, and soon we were across the basin and at the site for camp 1. We pitched tents, then crawled in our snowcave to fetch the food bags cached the previous day. It was 3:00
A.M.
in the sunlit Antarctic night when we finally had dinner and brews finished. Before turning in I crawled out to pee, and Bonington called out to ask if I could guess when the sun would break above the ridge crest above camp.

“Looks like a half hour or so.”

Then I realized I was miscalculating the direction the sun was moving. It wasn't really rising and setting, but rather making a sideways crab-crawl above the horizon.

“Make that two or three hours. We won't see sun until it moves sideways into that col over there.”

“Let's get a few hours sleep, then get up and finish the bolt hole,” Bonington said. “There's really no sense going any higher until we see what this sky brings, anyway.”

The faultless clear sky had been replaced by a portentous veneer of thin cirrus, and when we awoke at 10:00 the next morning the sun was backlighting a glitter of sprinkling snow, the kind mountaineers call angel's dust. After breakfast we finished the snowcave, and by mid-afternoon conditions were the same.

“I wish it would either storm or clear,” Bonington said. “This is frustrating.”

“But not so bad,” Miura added. “I think maybe okay to climb to next camp.”

We considered Miura's suggestion. With the comfort of knowing we had a bombproof snowcave in the neighborhood should a storm move in, we agreed it made sense to risk moving up. At six in the evening we were packed and ready to leave. What a great treat it was to be able to ignore the clock and climb at whatever time of the day we felt like moving.

We were all optimistic that in another twenty or thirty hours we would be on top. Our plan now was to carry everything we would need to make the next camp, and there pitch our tents, sleep a few hours, then continue without packs to the summit. That would put us back down to the plane only six days after arriving, not far off our original estimate. There might even be enough time for Bonington and me to attempt Mount Tyree, or perhaps a climb up nearby Epperly Peak, which we guessed to be the highest unclimbed mountain in Antarctica.

Above camp 1 we negotiated a short icefall, scouting a route between several seracs, some the size of small houses. Above this the slope lay back as we approached the broad, flat col between Shinn and Vinson. The sun inched behind Vinson. As we climbed into shadow a slight breeze blew out of the col, and the combination was suddenly numbing. Stopping to put on another layer of clothing, the cold penetrated my torso and I was anxious to keep moving. We now turned and climbed toward Vinson, following a slope that was only moderately angled but riddled with hidden crevasses. I was leading, and it took vigilance to sniff out the crevasses and steer around them. I was getting colder, and it occurred to me that this temperature— at least thirty below—was cold enough to be dangerous. If I were to pop in a crevasse, and had to jumar out, I might freeze up before I could complete a self-rescue. It was a sobering thought, and I was all the more careful to keep a watchful eye for the telltale depressions in the snow's surface that pinpointed the black chasms.

We climbed back into sunlight, and things cheered up. Soon we arrived at an inviting flat bench just below the edge where the slope dropped away down the steep west side of Vinson.

“Good-looking campsite,” I said.

“Except it's bloody exposed if a storm brews up,” Bonington countered.

“Well I think everything's going to be just fine,” Dick said. “The clouds seem to be clearing.”

The worrisome high clouds did seem to be dissipating. By the time we had camp pitched and dinner finished it was
2:00 A.M.,
and we were all confident we were only hours from success. We awoke at 6:00, and by 9:00 we were off, carrying only extra clothing and a few candy bars. The sky was clear, there was no wind, conditions seemed perfect. We climbed a steepening slope above the tents, and on top we followed the ridgeline that bordered the steep west face so we had a grand view of the ice cap 8,000 feet below. Behind us we could see the other peaks of the Ellsworth Range running in a line like an island archipelago frozen in an otherworldly icescape. Certainly there could be no similar or comparable vista on earth.

“This has to be the most fantastic day of my whole climbing career,” Bonington said.

Coming from perhaps the most experienced expedition mountaineer alive, that judgment put the austere beauty of Vinson in perspective.

We now left the ridgeline and traversed into a long, open basin that led to the summit pyramid; ahead we could see a notch on the right side of the pyramid from where it appeared we could follow the ridge to the top. The air was cold, but in direct sun, and with no wind, it was warm enough while climbing so that we wore only two thin layers of clothing under our parka shells. I took the lead from Bonington, careful to take a traversing line that would lead us at an even gait into the col. I was confident we would be on top in two or three hours.

Then I felt the first wind. It was only a breath, but enough to give the cold air a biting sting. It calmed for a moment, then puffed again. This time the puff, like an ominous portent, did not die. I raised the hood on my windsuit.

The wind built quickly, and soon we called a halt in order to pull heavy down parkas from our packs, and cover our exposed faces with masks. The gusts were coming at us through the col, hitting twenty, thirty, then forty miles an hour. We hunched over into the headwind, looking up only to verify our course. One gust hit hard, knocking me off balance, and I guessed that it was getting close to fifty miles an hour. We only had a few hundred more yards to the col, but then what? There we would be exposed to the full force of the wind, and if it were to increase any more, we might be forced back. I glanced around at the others and saw their figures blurred through the spindrift now scudding across the hard snow.

Dick was cursing to himself that he hadn't brought his face mask. With the clear skies and calm air of the morning, he hadn't thought to stick it in his pack when we left camp. Now he was forced to climb holding a mittened hand over his nose and mouth, careful not to direct his breath upward where it would instantly ice his goggles. Frank too was having trouble. He had his face mask, but it wasn't adequate to keep the wind from biting his cheeks and nose. He raised his mitten to hold over his face, and realized there was no feeling in his nose. It was the first time this had ever happened to him, and unsure whether it was any cause for alarm, decided not to say anything.

I was leading, and stopped to fasten the chin snap on my parka hood. I couldn't seem to get the two parts to match, and I motioned Bonington to give me a hand. By the time he had it secured the others had caught up, and for a moment we rested. It was so cold we couldn't sit so we walked in little circles, stomping our feet and swinging our arms to force blood into our numbing fingertips. We looked like a band of parka-clad primitives doing some kind of tribal dance.

Frank lowered his face mask to clean his goggles.

“Let me look at your nose,” Bonington yelled above the wind to Frank.

“What's it look like?” Frank asked.

“Completely white. First stage frostbite. You've got to go down immediately.”

Frank digested this news. If he went down, and the others continued and made it, that for sure left him without anyone to go with for another attempt. On the other hand, Dick would make it, so at least one of them would be successful. And obviously it wasn't worth losing his nose.

“Okay, I’ll go back.”

“Someone has to go with you. How about Steve?”

Marts immediately agreed, and Frank realized he had a chance for another attempt.

Then Miura and Maeda said they would go back, too, and accompany Frank on another attempt when the weather improved. It was unclear whether they were making their decision because the weather was bad, or because they were such polite men they wanted to help Frank. We suspected the latter.

“If they're going back, I’m going too,” Dick yelled.

“What do you mean?” Bonington asked incredulously.

“I’m in this with Pancho here, and I’d like to get that movie footage of us together on top of this mother. So I’ll wait for better weather and we'll go back up together.”

Now Frank stepped back in. “What are you talking about? We may not get another chance. We're doing this together, all right, and that's why you've got to go up. So at least one of us will have made it.”

“He who fights and runs away,” Dick yelled, quoting Falstaff, “lives to fight another day, but he who in the battle is slain, will never rise to fight again.”

“Dick, don't be so flippant,” Frank yelled.

“Hell's bells,” Dick yelled back, “you're the one always saying you have more than one chance on these climbs. I want that picture of us together on this mountain.”

“I’m sure as hell not going to pass up the summit for a bloody movie,” Bonington yelled.

We were quite a sight, all of us stomping around, swinging our arms, yelling at one another above the wind.

Up to now I hadn't said anything, but suddenly I found myself in a quandary. I agreed with Bonington in that when you're on a climb, and you want more than anything to succeed, you have to take advantage of every opportunity. There was certainly no guarantee if we were to go down now the weather would improve in time to allow us another try. On the other hand, I felt an allegiance to Frank and Dick, who had put their pocketbook, their time, and their dreams into this climb. To increase their chances, I should stay with them.

“I’ll go down too,” I said.

“Don't be silly,” Frank yelled. “You're going with Bonington, and that's it. The rest of us will head back, although I still think Dick's crazy.”

No one said anything. Frank spoke with such final authority things seemed settled. So Frank, Dick, and the others turned downwind while Bonington and I lowered our heads and continued toward the summit.

An hour later Bonington and I reached the col and felt the full blast of the wind. Now my goggles were iced so badly that to navigate I was forced to stay on Bonington's heels, following the fuzzy form of his boots making one step, then another as we angled up a steepening slope. To save time we had agreed to unrope; there was an unspoken understanding each man was on his own.

Bonington braced as another gust blasted us. Temperatures were probably thirty below, and the gusts now approached sixty. That made the wind chill, what? One hundred below zero? Whatever it was, it was brutal.

Bonington stopped and turned back to me, “These have to be the worst conditions I’ve ever climbed in.”

I reminded him later that this judgment followed his earlier one—that it was the most fantastic day he had ever climbed in—by about four hours.

Bonington kept a strong pace, though, and soon I found I was having trouble not only with my goggles, but with my strength. What was it? Perhaps residual effects from the typhoid fever I had contracted in Borneo three months earlier? The body shock of going from equator to South Pole?

Bonington pulled ahead. I couldn't keep up. Then he disappeared, but I couldn't see enough through my iced goggles to know where. I took the goggles off, and squinting against the spindrift I saw he was traversing what looked like a picket fence of rocky towers. It was steep on both sides. I decided to go without goggles. I pulled the case for the goggles from my pocket, but it slipped from my mittens and fell on the slope. I reached for it and was about to grab it when a gust plucked it off the slope and hurled it straight up and out of sight.

I grabbed my ice axe and climbed to the first rock tower. I moved slowly but deliberately, placing my boots carefully on the footholds, testing each handhold. It was no good. My head was swimming; I was off-balance. I looked down. It was a several-hundred-foot drop on both sides. I hunkered in the lee of a rock, and tried to think.

I realized in my condition there was a good chance I might make a fatal slip. That settled it. I tried to signal Bonington, but he was once again out of sight. I turned and started back, glancing around after a few dozen yards. Now I could see him, past the rocky traverse, approaching the final slope to the summit. I waved, but he wasn't looking my way. I continued down, and past the col I stopped once more to study the summit block. Where was he? Then I saw him, a lone red dot. He was on the summit, perched on top the highest mountain in Antarctica. I smiled. At least the expedition was now a success.

The others were in the tents asleep when I arrived back at camp 2. Feeling completely exhausted, I dropped my pack next to my tent, and sat on it to take my crampons off.