Read Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain Online
Authors: Harriet Tuckey
Returning to base camp, he and Stobart found an unexpected visitor sitting on a stone just above the tents: journalist Ralph Izzard of the
Daily Mail
, apparently
looking for a scoop. Izzard had walked from Kathmandu to Thyangboche alone and then struggled to base camp in three days, without proper equipment or even a decent tent. Determined not to arrive looking down on his luck, he was clean-shaven, his hair neatly brushed, and he was dressed in a sporty jacket and silk cravat. He seemed quite unaware that his lips were blue and his eyes terribly inflamed. He appeared to Stobart to be in severe danger of “rapidly becoming snow blind.”
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George Lowe was the only person in camp when Izzard arrived, and because Hunt had designated Izzard an “enemy of the expedition,” Lowe had steadfastly ignored him for three hours. However, Pugh found the situation highly amusing, and Stobart was amused by Pugh’s amusement: “‘Awkward!’ said Griff, in a way I knew meant, ‘How lovely—what a lovely situation,’” Stobart recalled. “Griff was a tolerant man filled with secret amusement about many things, and liable to poke fun.”
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Disregarding Hunt’s orders to have nothing to do with him, Pugh took pleasure in inviting Izzard to tea. “Pugh greeted me in a very kindly fashion,” the journalist remembered, “and led me to a tent where I met George Lowe and Tom Stobart.”
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After tea Izzard set off back down the mountain. Concerned for his safety, Stobart remarked to Pugh: “I hope he makes it,” and enjoyed Pugh’s response: “‘He’ll make it,’ said Griff, mentally rubbing his hands. ‘But what a lovely case of anoxia! Absolutely classic symptoms.’”
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The Triumphant Ascent
The expedition’s main stores arrived at base camp two weeks after the advance party. Pugh noticed the expressions of intense gratification on the faces of the porters as they signed off and collected their pay.
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The push to climb the mountain would soon begin. Camp Three was already being put in above the icefall, and teams of Sherpas working in relays were about to start ferrying supplies up the mountain as each new camp was established.
Base camp was now very crowded, and Pugh did his best to ensure that the hygiene rules he and Ward had prescribed were properly observed. He told the Sherpanis (the female Sherpas) and some “boy porters with streaming noses” not to go into the cookhouse, and persuaded Tenzing to lecture the cooks yet again about boiling the utensils and washing their hands.
Amid all the activities, Pugh had been anxiously sounding out the climbers and the Sherpas about how well his dietary innovations and new equipment were performing in the field. Earlier, after a violent storm on the march-in, he had noted happily in his diary: “I was glad to find the tent material completely waterproof.”
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He was relieved that the rations seemed to be “proving a success,” and that the clothing and airbeds appeared to be going down well too: “All are very pleased with their windproofs and down clothing, tents, and especially their double-level inflatable sleeping mats.”
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But the same could not be said for the Lawrie climbing boots intended for intermediate altitudes, which had been chosen by Hunt after the trip to the Jungfraujoch. Pugh asked the Sherpas for their views. Dawa Tenzing volunteered the opinion: “Well, they are cold boots, but I expect they will be alright during the warm months of the year.”
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Everyone agreed that the boots were not warm enough.
The high-altitude boots were different. Pugh himself had been closely involved in their design and was eager to try them out, though he had trouble obtaining a pair. “We haven’t tried the high-altitude boots yet—I am annoyed to find that Wiley did not order a pair for me, although I expressly asked him to do so. This was because they were originally intended to use only on the Lhotse Face and above. In fact, they will be needed all the way above the Ice Fall.”
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When he got his hands on some, he wore them for a whole day, finding to his satisfaction that they gripped the snow as well as the conventional Lawrie boots, and were warm and comfortable. “Sitting in the mess tent after supper I had warm feet for the first time,” he noted in his diary.
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He was also delighted to find that the open-circuit oxygen equipment was working well, even over extended periods: “Oxygen has been tried for 4–5 hour periods at 18–19,000 feet. Most people have succeeded in sleeping in their masks, no back pressure [i.e., no resistance to breathing] during work.”
Asked for their views on the oxygen, the Sherpas told him: “You don’t have to breathe so fast & you don’t have to breathe so deeply; and going uphill is like walking on the level.” These he regarded as deeply insightful observations.
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However, when Alf Gregory’s air mattress proved to be faulty, Pugh was frustrated to find there were no spares: “Greg’s Lilo is defective and there are no spares! I begged Hunt & Wiley to order 1/2 doz. spares before we left UK but they didn’t do it. Now someone has to suffer for it.”
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But he kept his opinions to himself, only revealing in his diary and in his letters to his MRC boss, Edholm, that he considered Hunt and Wylie incompetent in matters of equipment: “I am afraid wherever Wiley and Hunt were left to themselves they have made a mess of things viz. the Lawrie boots, snow goggles [not provided for porters], and knickknacks.”
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Despite the problems, frustrations, stresses, strains, and jokes, with the expedition well under way, Pugh felt able to tell Edholm that a breakthrough had occurred: “Now, after a month, I am fairly satisfied that physiological thought has somehow permeated and influenced the minds of what we call the ‘O group,’ consisting of Hunt, Hillary, and Evans, who do the planning . . .”
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There had been a secretly triumphant moment at Lobuje—the team’s pleasant recuperation camp below base camp—when Pugh had listened in to Hillary, Gregory, Westmacott, and Noyce having an animated conversation about how, in ideal circumstances, they thought oxygen ought to be used for the final assault. None of them had been favorably disposed toward oxygen at the start of the expedition, but now, Pugh noted with amusement, “The party thinks that the assault should be made on open-circuit . . . breathing oxygen all the way from base camp!” Clearly they had completely come round to the oxygen.
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Hunt had given Bourdillon, rather than Pugh, the task of teaching the climbers about altitude. Pugh had to “listen to Tom Bourdillon holding forth at base camp about the effects of anoxia and the use of oxygen at high altitude.” But his pleasure and relief that the ideas were being disseminated far outweighed any irritation he may have felt at being usurped as the altitude expert.
Pugh’s first attempt to carry out experiments above the icefall ended in a fiasco. Setting out on his own with a few Sherpas, he climbed to Camp Three, just above the top of the icefall, intending to set up a makeshift laboratory. His equipment, packed in a ration box, was carried up by Sherpas. When it was opened, it turned out to be full of bottles of mango chutney.
Mango chutney was Pugh’s favorite relish, brought along on his express instructions as one of the expedition’s luxury foods. He was convinced the climbers had deliberately swapped the boxes. When he arrived back at base camp, he found them helpless with laughter, and described the incident in his diary as “a tiresome and time wasting joke which caused much merriment.”
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A practical joke it may have been, but there was a lingering suspicion that, without the tacit approval of Hunt, the climbers would not have tricked Pugh and the Sherpas carrying his gear into making a pointless five-hour climb up the dangerous and unstable icefall.
Above Camp Three, the Western Cwm (pronounced
coom,
Welsh for “bowl-shaped valley”)—a wide valley with sloping sides and a crevassed glacial floor—rose gently for about 3 miles to the foot of the 4,000-foot Lhotse Face.
Camp Four, the advanced base camp and command center from which the assault on the summit was to be directed, was created near the top of the Western Cwm, at 21,200 feet, on May 1. From here, the route led up the steep Lhotse Face—a wall of hard-packed snow, ice, and rock—to the South Col, where the main assault camp would be established at 26,000 feet, still 3,000 feet below the summit. The route had to be reconnoitered, steps cut, fixed ropes placed, and camps put in before the Sherpas could safely ferry their loads of equipment and oxygen up to the South Col.
Pugh remained at base camp during this period, conducting experiments on water loss from the lungs, analyzing samples, monitoring the physical condition of the climbers coming down from the Western Cwm and the Lhotse Face, and taking copious notes on how their oxygen sets had performed. He reported to Edholm:
The anti-fatigue effect of O2 is very striking. Hillary and Tenzing went from here (base) to Camp Four—22,000 feet—on 4 litres a minute O2 in 5 hours (including half an hour’s rest) without fatigue, and returned the same evening in a snowstorm. They did not use O2 on the descent, but they say they would never have risked the descent under the conditions prevailing, had they not felt remarkably fresh.
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The preparation of the route up the Lhotse Face was hindered by bad weather. Band and Westmacott, both Himalayan novices allocated to the task, became sick and had to go down.
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George Lowe and one Sherpa, “doing a climber’s job,” were left to prepare much of the path on their own, without oxygen, which was being carefully conserved. Others went up to help, only to retreat back down, cold and exhausted. Hunt had allocated only four days to the task; it took eleven. Lowe spent such a long time without oxygen at altitudes above 23,000 feet that Pugh began to fear he might suffer brain damage and remonstrated with Hunt.
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When, after seven days of hard work, the route up the Lhotse Face was still unfinished, Hunt felt compelled to drive forward regardless. Calling the team together at base camp on May 7, he announced his plan for the assault on the summit. The atmosphere became electric as he told them there were to be two summit assaults. The first, by Bourdillon and Evans, using closed-circuit oxygen, would be undertaken directly from the South Col with no intervening camp on the way up. The second, by Hillary and Tenzing, with open-circuit oxygen, would have an overnight stop at a high camp roughly two-thirds of the way up to the summit from the Col.
Pugh was not surprised by Hunt’s choice of climbers. Evans was the deputy leader; Bourdillon and his father had developed the closed-circuit oxygen. Hillary’s fitness, strength, and speed had already impressed Pugh on Cho Oyu; Tenzing had unique experience of the route, gained with the Swiss the previous year. The strategy of providing a high camp between the South Col and the summit for the open-circuit team, but not for the closed-circuit team, was no surprise either. Bourdillon and Evans, breathing virtually pure oxygen with the closed-circuit equipment, were expected to be able to climb fast enough to go all the way to the summit and return to the South Col in one day. Hillary and Tenzing, receiving much less supplementary oxygen through their open-circuit sets, would climb more slowly and would therefore need to spend an extra night high on the mountain in the high camp, where they would pick up fresh supplies of oxygen.
The decision not to provide a high camp for the closed-circuit pair proved very contentious. Ward and Gregory both argued strongly against it. Back in London many months earlier, Pugh and Bryan Matthews had both been adamant that the open-circuit oxygen sets must take priority on the expedition, but they had never been entirely confident that it would prove possible to carry enough oxygen cylinders up to extreme altitude to supply the wasteful open-circuit sets even for one summit attempt, let alone two. This was an important reason why the High-Altitude Committee had encouraged Hunt to take some of the Bourdillons’ relatively unproven closed-circuit sets to try out as well.
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Tom Bourdillon and his father had been arguing this case since the previous autumn.
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In October 1952, encouraged by the MRC, Bourdillon senior had secured a private meeting with Hunt at which he contended that since every summit attempt with open-circuit oxygen would need the support of a very high camp, and since Hunt would only have sufficient men and resources to supply one such camp, the only way to have two summit attempts would be for one of them to start out directly from the South Col without a high camp using closed-circuit oxygen.
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When they criticized Hunt’s summit plan, Ward and Gregory did not know that the Bourdillons themselves had done their best to convince Hunt that this was the only viable strategy. Nor did they know that Charles Evans, the deputy leader, Hillary, and Hunt had discussed the oxygen-supply problem interminably throughout the expedition, and had concluded regretfully that it would not be possible to carry enough cylinders up to very high altitude to supply two successive high camps.
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Pugh still doubted whether the Bourdillons had resolved all of the problems with the closed-circuit sets, but he did not criticize Hunt’s decision to try it for one of the summit attempts. A letter written by Charles Wylie on May 9 gives the considered view of most of the team, including Pugh:
Chas and Tom are being given first crack at the top direct from the S Col on CC oxy. I don’t think John [Hunt] (or anyone else) thinks they will make it, for he has described them as a scouting pair for our big guns—Tensing and Ed Hillary—who will follow one day later on open-circuit from as high a camp as we can carry on the Sth ridge. I think they have a good chance.
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