The Lost Explorer (23 page)

At the top of the Third Step, I set up a rappel. I rigged Dave’s rappel device for him, so that all he had to do was clip it in to the rope. But when he came down, I saw that he’d just wrapped the rope around his arms; he hadn’t used the rappel device at all. When I pointed this out to him, he said, “I’m fine. Leave me alone.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Dave, this is a really serious situation. We need to team together and do this right. The rig I set up for you is going to help you out.” If he’d clipped in with his rappel device, even if he lost control and started to fall, I could stop him by pulling the bottom of the rappel rope tight. Since
he’d only wrapped the rope around his arms, if he’d fallen, he might have gone flying right off the mountain.

I was moving all right without oxygen. I hadn’t planned to use it on the descent, because I wanted to see my feet as clearly as possible. Below the Third Step, we started across the Plateau. It was about 4:00
P.M.
Now Dave got even slower. He was really out of it, stopping and sitting down. He was deteriorating even further. I kept calculating our pace, the amount of oxygen Dave had, and the hours of daylight we had left. At all costs I wanted to avoid a bivouac. A night out with neither tent nor stove at the least would have meant frostbite, at the worst, death. It seemed vital to get to the base of the First Step before dark.

A little before 5:00
P.M.
, I made a very hard decision. The Ukrainians had come to grief on May 8 in part because they had waited till 9:00
P.M.
before radioing for help. So I got on the radio to Simo. “Is it possible,” I asked, “next time you speak to Tap and Jake at Camp VI, you can ask them to grab some hot drinks, some oxygen, and some headlamp batteries and start cruising up the Yellow Band and meet us somewhere?”

Simo was great about this. At once he said, “Good idea. We need to do it.” He radioed Tap and Jake. By then, Ang Pasang and Dawa had already headed on down the mountain, planning to go all the way to ABC that night. I knew how hard it would be for Tap and Jake to head up again, just when they’d reached camp and settled into it. I was worried that at some point I’d run out of the energy it was taking to keep Dave going, and I’d have a hard time taking care of myself.

At the top of the Second Step, I tied the good 112-foot rope to the anchor, so that we could rappel down it. This time I made sure Dave was okay, that he was going to clip in with his rappel device after I had unclipped at the bottom. As I went down first on rappel, I had to pay the rope out ahead of me. At the bottom I tied off the end of the rope, then hollered, “Off rappel!” Dave was out of sight on the shelf above. So I repeated the call over the radio.

I began the task of stringing out the fixed rope that Dawa had carried up to here. Between the Second Step and the Mushroom Rock, there was a bad stretch I wanted to fix. The rope was pretty tangled, so I had to focus. I didn’t see Dave coming down
yet, which worried me further, but then the rope on the Second Step started jiggling, and I knew he was on rappel.

We got to the Mushroom Rock at 6:30, just as the sun was setting. I put on another layer of long underwear uppers. I was still in fairly good shape myself. Over the years, I’ve learned that I can go strong for about eighteen hours, which we were now approaching. After this I get a second wind and I can go another eight hours. If I stay out past twenty-six hours, my chance of returning unharmed is diminished. After forty-eight hours in these conditions, I would be totally cooked.

Dave caught up with me at the Mushroom Rock. He’d left his first oxygen bottle here, with a thousand pounds of pressure still in it. We switched his cylinders over and headed down.

Later, down at Base Camp, Simo was upset with Dave. He chewed him out for cranking his oxygen flow so high and running out of gas on the summit. It caused a lot of tension, and it took a few days for them to work it out. I just tried to stay out of the whole business. I didn’t think Dave had gotten in over his head, since we’d climbed together before. Eventually he and Simo were reconciled.

But the other thing they discussed was how to present what happened on summit day to the world. Eric said that we had to agree on an official account that would be what the public would hear, and that it would be a challenge for us to do this in a way that reflected positively on everyone involved. I think he felt that a near-fiasco might undermine the story of the successful search expedition he had led.

But Dave said, “If we don’t tell the whole truth, Conrad doesn’t get the credit he deserves.”

I said, “It just doesn’t matter.”

Now, at the Mushroom Rock, the fresh oxygen bottle rejuvenated Dave. He started coming back. With the ropes fixed below, we moved pretty well. We got off rappel at the foot of the First Step just at dusk. Now we were on easy terrain. Rather than take a break to put on our headlamps, I said, “Dave, let’s go, let’s really make time.”

For the first time, as Dave started getting his energy back, I stopped being so worried. Things were going to be okay. I knew that Jake and Tap were on their way up, because by now we were talking to them on the radio. The one tricky place left was
the top of the Yellow Band—you’re tempted to cut down too soon, but you need to find the top of the fixed ropes that take you through the Band. I got a little off route here, which led to a macabre moment. I came around a cliff and looked into a small cave right next to me. There was a dead man lying in there—somebody who’d holed up there trying to bivouac and had frozen to death. I have no idea who he was.

With this victim fresh in mind, I asked Dave, You’ve been here three times before—can you find the exit cracks at the top of the Yellow Band? He located the pickets that marked the top of the fixed ropes.

Tap and Jake met us midway through the Yellow Band. They had a fresh oxygen bottle, hot drinks in a Thermos, and some food, though nobody wanted to eat. We just sat there, chatting quietly, with every now and then an outburst of enthusiasm. It was a good little meeting.

I got down to Camp VI by 9:15, the other three twenty minutes later. Once we were in our sleeping bags, Dave leaned on one elbow and said wearily, “Man, thanks for looking after me.”

But the experience didn’t really hit home till late the next day. In the morning, Dave and I slept in, feebly brewing pots of hot water, before climbing on down to ABC. On the snow field below Camp VI, we crossed paths with climbers from other expeditions heading up; they greeted us with big smiles and hearty congratulations.

At the moment when we got off the last fixed line at the base of the North Col, with all the dangers behind us, in the middle of a snow flurry, Dave and I turned to each other and embraced. We’d made it.

CA

W
HEN WE GOT DOWN TO
ABC, the whole team, film crew and Sherpas and climbers, had a big celebration. Sherpa Pemba had baked us a two-layer cake. I was happy and proud of what we had done, not so much because we’d summitted as because we’d come off the mountain with no frostbite, no serious injuries, no fatalities.

Yet the celebration was muted by what was going on higher on the mountain at that very moment. As we’d descended, two other expeditions—a Polish one and a Belgian one—were headed up for their own summit attempts. On the afternoon of May 18, the day after Dave and I summitted, three climbers from the Polish team and two from the Belgian got to the top.

We’d seen them on the afternoon of the eighteenth along the summit ridge. They were going at a good pace, and then it was as though they suddenly hit a patch of glue. The exertion they’d already made took its toll: they were slowed almost to a crawl. On the way down, apparently, they got strung out and separated.

The same thing happened to the Poles and Belgians that had happened to the Ukrainians on May 8. Only one member of each party got back to Camp VI the night of the eighteenth. Two Poles and a Belgian had to bivouac.

One of the Poles, Tadusz Kudelski, may have slipped and fallen off the ridge somewhere between the First and Second
Steps; he was never seen again. The other Pole who spent the night out was Ryszard Pawlowski, a very strong climber who’d summitted before on Everest. He made it back to Camp VI on May 19, but with serious frostbite. His ordeal proved once more just how formidable Everest is.

Even the Belgian team member who made it back to camp on the eighteenth—actually a Portuguese climber named João Garcia—got frostbite on the nose, soles of feet, and hands. The other Belgian was their expedition leader, the well-known veteran Pascal Debrouwer. Some Sherpas went up to try to rescue him and found him near the base of the First Step. They couldn’t rouse him: he was essentially comatose, so they had to return empty-handed. And then—this is speculation—I think the warmth of the afternoon sun must have brought Debrouwer around, because he got up, took a few shaky steps, lost control, and fell off the ridge. We know this because some climbers at Camp VI witnessed his fall.

On the nineteenth, we descended all the way to Base Camp. That evening we had another celebration—with a gallon of Scotch shared among the climbers and Sherpas; we got hammered, and everybody danced, including the Sherpas. But before I walked into our camp to start celebrating, I stopped at the Belgian tent. I found two team members there, really stricken. It was Debrouwer’s third try for the summit; and on this attempt he left behind a wife and children. His fate was a powerful reminder of the wrath of Everest. His teammates were starting to figure out how to contact his family. I offered them the use of our satellite phone, then spent half an hour trying to console them.

By now, the news of our discovery of Mallory had caused a sensation all over the world. The MountainZone Web site averaged a million hits a day for two weeks. The publication of photos of Mallory’s body in
News week, Stern
, and the English and Australian tabloids had cranked up the controversy a notch. We were still worried about whether the Chinese might impede our return from the mountain with arcane customs hassles, or even confiscate the artifacts.

In the end, our fears proved groundless, as various team members carried Mallory’s belongings in their baggage back to the States, where Simo put them under the curatorial care of
the Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma. Ultimately, both the Mallory family and the expedition members would like to see these objects form a permanent museum exhibition. The letters have been donated to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where they will be archived with the rich correspondence between Ruth and George.

A
LL THE WAY
to the mountain in March, we’d discussed whether Mallory or Irvine could have made the summit. Jochen Hemmleb was a walking encyclopedia of lore about all three expeditions in the 1920s, but he got so obsessive about the minutiae that sometimes he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. By the time we started up the mountain in April, I’d have to say that most of us were dubious about the possibility the two lost climbers had made the top.

Finding Mallory, however, had a galvanic effect upon my teammates’ judgment. After the expedition, Hemmleb said, “I give them a sixty-forty or a fifty-fifty chance they made the summit.” Tap Richards leaned further in their favor: “I think they made it. Odds are tough to calculate, but I’d say maybe seventy-thirty.” And Jake Norton was completely turned around. “Seeing George Mallory changed my mind,” he said. “He was awe-inspiring in death. Maybe it’s idealism on my part, maybe I just want to believe, but I’d say the odds are ninety-ten he made the summit.”

I’m sorry to say that I can’t agree with these sanguine opinions. I’d be as thrilled as anyone if irrefutable proof were ever uncovered that they made it. In hopes of making just such a discovery, Simo is already planning an expedition for the spring of 2001 to look for Irvine and the camera. I’m not going to go along—it’s time for me to get back to what I care most about, which is new routes on difficult mountains in the remote ranges.

Since the expedition, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing what we found last May, both at the site where we discovered Mallory’s body and in my effort to free-climb the Second Step. Two questions are paramount. How did Mallory die—what caused the accident? And did he and Irvine reach the summit? Thanks to our success last spring, we’re in a position to offer fuller answers to both questions than any investigation in the last seventy-five years.

One prominent factor in the equation is gear. Since the 1920s there have been many waves of innovation and improvement in mountaineering equipment. What I’ve tried to do is imagine, from my firsthand experience on the north face and northeast ridge, what it would have been like to be there with the equipment Mallory and Irvine had in 1924.

I think the most important piece of equipment would have been crampons. The 1924 team had crampons, but they never used them above the North Col. In an appendix in
The Fight for Everest
, called “The Organization of the Expedition,” Howard Somervell wrote,
“Crampons
.—These are useful, and in May 1924 were indispensable between Camps II and III, and desirable from III to IV. They are useless higher.” It’s odd that he should have used the word “useless”—time and again above Camp IV, crampons would have saved the men huge amounts of time on ground where they had had to chop steps. We know from Irvine’s diary and from other stray remarks that the real problem was that the crampon straps cut off circulation to the feet in the soft leather boots the men wore. Above the North Col, crampons were an invitation to serious frostbite.