Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (18 page)

An induction program had been arranged for Hunt’s first week in London, which left no room for doubt that the Himalayan Committee expected him to rely heavily on scientific advice. His first meeting was with Kirwan, who made clear his belief that it would be better not to go to Everest at all than to do so without decent oxygen equipment and full physiological support. Goodfellow had already warned Hunt of the importance of aligning himself with Kirwan’s priorities: “Kirwan needs careful handling . . . He is exceedingly competent in expedition organising matters and knows his way about high quarters in London. An ally you cannot do without.”
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Next, Hunt was to meet Sir Harold Himsworth of the MRC. Himsworth came away convinced that Hunt “was quite clear that unless serious attention was paid to the physiological and medical considerations involved, the expedition had no chance of reaching the summit.” He was also confident that Hunt had accepted that the expedition “had to justify itself by providing opportunities for scientific work.”
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To Himsworth this meant not only that Pugh would go to Everest with the team, but also that Hunt—unlike Shipton—would ensure that he had the facilities to carry out his research. Himsworth even tried to persuade Hunt to accept a second physiologist in addition to Pugh.

The following day, Hunt spent several hours with Pugh, and two days later he went to Cambridge for his first meeting with Bryan Matthews’s MRC High-Altitude Committee (HAC), which was officially in “control” of the expedition’s oxygen policy, and official adviser on “the physiological aspects of equipment and rations.”
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Matthews did not intend to allow Hunt any room to deviate from the committee’s plans for oxygen, and wanted him to declare immediately that he fully accepted the committee’s oxygen strategy. Hunt complained afterward about being asked to commit himself at such an early stage.

Hunt selected his thirteen-strong team very quickly—a provisional list was ready by October 28. At its core were the Cho Oyu climbers: Tom Bourdillon, Charles Evans, Alf Gregory, Ed Hillary, and George Lowe. One man who did not get chosen as a “full climbing member” was Michael Ward. Ward had played a vital role in finding the route up Everest and in instigating the reconnaissance. He possessed previous Himalayan experience, was well liked, and was, by common consent, one of Britain’s top climbers, but Hunt had made him the expedition doctor. Perhaps he had expressed a little too much enthusiasm for physiology in his selection interview.
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Apart from Alf Gregory and New Zealand climbers Ed Hillary and George Lowe, the rest of Hunt’s team met the traditional British criteria of having been educated at public school and either Oxbridge or Sandhurst. Three—Hunt, Wylie, and Ward—were from the same school, Marlborough College.

The tradition of ensuring that Alpine Club members were not exposed to the “wrong” sort of people went back a long way. Since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the Alpine Club had always endeavored to maintain a “gentlemanly,” “socially harmonious” character. Until 1938, the year of the seventh Everest expedition, would-be members of the club had to meet a set of “mountaineering” entry criteria, but they also had to survive a members’ ballot, in which the practice of “blackballing” allowed for socially undesirable candidates to be quietly excluded.

The Alpine Club shared its social exclusivity not only with most other gentlemen’s clubs of the era, but also with many of the amateur sporting clubs and associations. The Amateur Athletics Club, formed in 1866, denied membership to “mechanics, artisans and labourers”; and the Amateur Rowing Association, formed in 1878, excluded anyone who was or had been “by trade or employment for wages, a mechanic, artisan or labourer.”
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Some of these class-based restrictions were not abandoned until after World War II.

Blackballing—the voting practice in which each “black” negative ballot cast against a prospective Alpine Club member canceled out five votes in his favor—was a more subtle method of vetting prospective members because it did not require the qualities of “a good chap” to be explicitly stated. Shortly after being admitted to the Alpine Club in 1935, Scott Russell was taken aside by one of the club’s vice presidents and told: “I hope your proposers told you that in addition to being the oldest club in the world, the Alpine Club is a unique one—a club for gentlemen who also climb.”
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Russell’s mentor illustrated his point by pointing at a street sweeper outside the window and explaining, “I mean, we would never elect that fellow even if he were the finest climber in the world.”

Blackballing initially prevented one of the greatest climbers of his era, Alfred Mummery, from being accepted into the Alpine Club, on suspicion that he owned a shop in Dover and was therefore tainted by his association with “trade.”
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It was finally abandoned in 1938, the year of the last prewar Everest expedition.

Establishment secrecy and public deference being the norm in the 1950s, news of the preparations for Everest in 1953 was carefully managed. The key decisions were made behind closed doors. Pugh’s advice to the expedition was kept out of the public domain. His preliminary paper setting out the basic guidelines for the Himalayan Committee was never published, nor was his subsequent report on the Cho Oyu expedition. Only eight copies were produced, and the report was not shown to the climbing team (except for Michael Ward). Apart from Hunt and Wylie, few of the climbers knew how much work Pugh was doing for the expedition.

Three weeks after arriving in London, John Hunt produced a draft plan for the expedition that bore the hallmarks of Pugh’s influence on almost every page.
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As Pugh had advised, Hunt stipulated that open-circuit oxygen, delivered at a rate of 4 liters a minute, should be provided for the climbers and their Sherpas above 23,000 feet, and should be available at lower rates for climbing down and also for sleeping at high altitude.

In his report Pugh had explained why he felt oxygen should be provided for descent as well as ascent: “It must be emphasised that the descent from high mountains, owing to the cumulative effect of cold and fatigue, may be more dangerous than the ascent.”
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The use of oxygen for sleeping at high altitudes had a longer history. When in 1922 George Finch found himself pinned down for two nights at 25,500 feet, in a flimsy tent in appalling weather, he found that breathing small quantities of oxygen during the night was a “heaven-sent” lifesaver. George Mallory may also have tried it in 1924, but it had not been used again for sleeping until Pugh tested its effects on Cho Oyu. He found that it helped the climbers sleep better, and had a very beneficial effect on their ability to keep warm and recover from fatigue. Equally important, it did not significantly impair acclimatization to altitude, as many people had feared. Pugh recommended its use at 1 liter a minute, with a mask on, in camps above 23,000 feet.

There had been a lot of talk in the High-Altitude Committee—not just about oxygen-flow rates and night oxygen, but also about which type of oxygen set to use: open-circuit or closed-circuit. The open-circuit might be reliable, but it was also wasteful of oxygen; any oxygen not taken up by the climber’s lungs was lost into the atmosphere when he breathed out. Some people, particularly Tom Bourdillon and his father—encouraged by Tom’s experiences with 100 percent oxygen on Cho Oyu—seriously doubted whether a mere 4 liters of supplementary oxygen, the maximum Pugh felt was practical to supply using the open-circuit system, would be enough to get climbers up Everest.

With the closed-circuit system the unused oxygen in the climber’s exhaled breath was filtered and recycled back to him. This was so much more economical that it permitted virtually 100 percent oxygen to be fed to the climber without requiring him to carry an impractically large load of oxygen on his back. And as Bourdillon and Secord had discovered on Cho Oyu, breathing 100 percent oxygen felt very good indeed. Even better, it enabled them to climb much faster.

On the other hand, the closed-circuit system was plagued by problems of its own. The soda-lime powder filter increased resistance to breathing; the filtering process gave off heat and water, which bubbled in the tubes and tended to freeze the valves; channels and gaps sometimes formed in the soda lime, allowing carbon dioxide to flow through and escape back to the climber; and the system required a completely airtight mask, which had not yet been satisfactorily developed. Whether the Bourdillons would succeed in solving these problems remained an open question.

Like the Bourdillons, Pugh and Bryan Matthews were very impressed with the closed-circuit. It was only because the system was blighted by technical difficulties—and the Bourdillons’ modified version was not even finished, let alone proven at high altitude—that they decided to give firm priority to the tried-and-tested open-circuit. Pugh had written in his Cho Oyu report: “It would be highly desirable to have closed-circuit sets available for trial on the next Everest expedition, but quite unsafe to rely on them as the sole method of applying oxygen.”
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Hunt, in turn, was persuaded that some closed-circuit equipment “should be prepared now for eventual experiment in the field” by the two Bourdillons.

Pugh’s recommendations on acclimatization were also central to the planning of the expedition. On Cho Oyu, Shipton had blithely taken his climbers from 12,000 feet to 21,000 feet with barely a pause along the way, and the Swiss had made the same mistake on Everest. As a result, Pugh believed, both teams had deteriorated more rapidly and profoundly at the assault stage of their expeditions than they would have done if better acclimatized. His advice was that a period of roughly four weeks should be allowed for acclimatization. This would have the added benefit of giving the British climbers, whose lack of fitness had shocked Pugh on Cho Oyu, a chance to improve their physical condition.

To ensure that acclimatization helped to improve fitness and stamina, Pugh suggested three guiding principles: The climbers should feel well at all times; they must not lose their appetites; and they must not suffer from altitude sickness. All the climbers should sleep at altitudes of approximately 12,000 to 13,000 feet for the first fourteen days, followed by another fourteen days no higher than 15,500 feet. During this time the climbers could climb as high as they liked during the day but should sleep at the recommended altitudes, which Pugh expected to be “comfortably within their tolerances.” If, in the third fortnight, camps up to 20,000 feet were established, the climbers should only stay there for two or three days, followed by a rest at a comfortable altitude before going higher.

Recognizing that there were wide variations in responses to altitude, and that illness might slow down acclimatization, Pugh emphasized that his recommendations were guiding principles rather than rigid rules.
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Clearly following Pugh’s advice, John Hunt’s plan underscored “the absolute need for a period of acclimatization” of “up to four weeks.”

Another of Pugh’s defining contributions was his policy on fluid intake. Historically, high-altitude climbers of all nationalities consumed far too little fluid. In the spring of 1952 the first Swiss assault team—Tenzing Norgay and Raymond Lambert—only had a candle to melt snow for drinking water and became desperately dehydrated.
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The autumn assault team, which failed partly because of bad weather, spent three days on the South Col, drinking only half a liter of liquid a day each, and eating very little. This left them so weakened that they were in no fit state to go higher, whatever the weather.

Nobody before Pugh had fully understood that dehydration, which causes the blood to become thicker and more viscous, also makes the blood less efficient at transporting oxygen around the body, leaving the climber increasingly debilitated. He insisted that the climbers must drink between 3 and 4 liters of water a day to avoid dehydration, and ensured they had the means to do so.

Previous expeditions had tended to drink too little partly because the stoves they used for melting snow were slow and inefficient, and they often ran short of fuel. Pugh had already designed a more efficient, lightweight stove for his commandos in Lebanon, and the same design was used for the 1953 expedition.
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Two sizes were provided: a larger stove for the lower camps, and a small one for high altitudes, where weight was a vital factor. Pugh worked out precisely how much kerosene was needed to melt enough snow per climber, per day, and calculated the energy cost of carrying the kerosene; all the calculations were factored into the planning of supplies.
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Already the official adviser on acclimatization, fluid intake, and the strategic use of oxygen, Pugh also became deeply involved in modifying the expedition’s clothing and equipment, and had already planned the expedition’s diet when, curiously, he received a letter from John Hunt, saying: “I would very much like you to take on responsibility for the whole diet problem. I very much hope you will be willing to agree to this.”
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