Read Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain Online
Authors: Harriet Tuckey
When, in July 1960, they gathered to train and to collect baseline data from the members of the expedition, Pugh expected them to keep up with him intellectually, even on unfamiliar territory. He would accept only the highest of standards, but they admired his rigor and matched it with their own. They teased him about his absentmindedness and reacted calmly to his outbursts of temper: “When he occasionally lost his temper,” Milledge and Ward later recalled, “it was like a flash flood, overwhelming at first and then disappearing without trace.”
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John West thought him “a very lovable person”; Sukhamay Lahiri found him “gracious and considerate”; and Milledge remembered affectionately: “Fifteen months closely associated with Griff are among the happiest in my life.”
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Pugh, in turn, rose above the awkward side of his nature and became an inspirational leader and mentor.
In December 1959, Hillary had flown to Kathmandu and secured permission from the Nepalese government to attempt Makalu in the record time of four days.
Though it seemed contradictory to Pugh’s plan, Hillary had decided not to remain at high altitude over the winter himself. He planned to lead the Yeti hunt in the autumn of 1960, establish the scientists and climbers in their winter quarters, and then return to New Zealand, rejoining the expedition with a team of fresh climbers in the spring. The performances of the fresh climbers could then be compared with those of the men who had been at high altitude all winter.
Like Pugh, Hillary was fascinated by the question of how to accommodate the winter team. The higher of the two high-altitude huts, where most of the scientific work would take place, would need to house a laboratory and provide comfortable living quarters for up to eight people. It would have to be strong enough to withstand violent winter storms, yet light enough for Sherpas to carry.
Hillary favored a wire-and-canvas structure, but Pugh maintained that good science could only be done properly at high altitude in comfortable surroundings.
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He insisted on a prefabricated hut to be assembled on-site, and then worked for six months on the design with Ezra Levin, chief architect of the Timber Development Association.
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The result was a tunnel-shaped structure made up of about 100 component parts, each weighing roughly 46 pounds. The finished hut, made of 4-inch-thick plywood panels insulated with plastic foam, was nearly 23 feet long and 10 feet wide. The outside was painted silver to provide further insulation, and it soon became known as the Silver Hut. When Hillary came to London in May 1960, he, Pugh, and several other members of the team did a trial run of assembling it. True to character Hillary viewed it as a race, writing afterward that “the dour little foreman” had expected the job to take seventeen hours. “But he had underestimated the skills and resourcefulness of my party. In six hours of vigorous labour we had everything up, and a fine job it looked too.”
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Afterward they all went to tea with John Hunt at his house in Henley-on-Thames.
As overall leader, Hillary undertook the basic organization for the expedition, buying food, fuel, supplies, and equipment, and arranging for transport. Pugh was intensely busy planning the scientific program and assembling the huge amount of equipment required. He also designed the high-altitude rations for the assault on Makalu and procured oxygen equipment for research and emergency rescue.
The preparations were going well, until, in early August 1960, Pugh noticed newspaper reports about the expedition that touched a very raw nerve indeed. Hillary, it seemed, had been telling journalists that the scientific side of the expedition was his own concept, and that Pugh was merely his adviser—his “senior physiologist.”
Pugh had entered into what he had understood to be a jointly conceived expedition. Hillary had secured the financial backing, but without Pugh he could not deliver the scientific program. It was Pugh’s status as an acclaimed physiologist with unique experience of Himalayan research that had attracted first-rate scientists and won the collaboration of the MRC and the Oxford School. Now Pugh feared that he was about to be the victim of a replay of the Everest experience at the hands of John Hunt. In an indignant letter to Hillary he told him that he had found the newspaper reports “distressing,” and threatened to resign if his status wasn’t properly recognized.
So please send me assurance (a) that you will see that my position and work for the expedition are properly recognised, and (b) that I am referred to not as Senior Physiologist, which, so far as the press is concerned, means the oldest physiologist, but as Director of Medicine and Physiology for the expedition . . . I have come to feel that this is so important to the success of the physiological programme that I cannot allow any MRC equipment to be shipped until I get your answer.
Pugh also wanted the authority that went with the title. His experience on Cho Oyu had convinced him that he must have full control over everything that would impact on his work. Success depended on the proper management of the expedition as a whole—facilities, food, hygiene, discipline. Therefore, he wanted explicit acknowledgment that he would be overall leader during the winter while Hillary was away. “In your absence this can only be me,” he wrote. “As you know, dear Ed,” Pugh entreated, “I have always had the highest personal regard for you, and I feel sure you will understand my point of view.”
In subsequent private correspondence Hillary reluctantly acknowledged Pugh as “Director of Physiology and Medical Services,” but in public he repeatedly referred to him as “my senior physiologist.” The issue of who would be in charge during Hillary’s absence continued to fester until the expedition was well under way.
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“Only If I Have Complete Control”
With less than a year to prepare for such a complex project, Pugh was overburdened with work in the months before his departure, and paid less attention to home life than ever. Throughout this time he received the usual devoted support from Doey, who understood how much the expedition—which promised to be the greatest achievement of his career—meant to him. She made no fuss about the length of the trip and fiercely backed him when he took issue with Hillary about leadership during the winter.
He did not get to Kathmandu until the main part of the expedition had already left. Hillary and his Yeti hunters, equipped with trip wires, tranquilizer guns, “mating horns,” microphones, rifles, cameras, and telescopes, had set off for the remote Rolwaling Valley, 12 miles southwest of the Everest area. Norman Hardie, the experienced New Zealand climber, whom Hillary had persuaded to take on the logistics for Pugh’s winter project, was on his way to the Mingbo Valley with a train of 310 porters. Hillary felt Pugh should have been in Kathmandu in time to supervise the arrangements for this complex carry, which included precious scientific equipment as well as the Silver Hut parts.
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When Pugh finally reached Kathmandu and started to prepare the second baggage train, he did not find everything to his liking. He wanted radio contact with Kathmandu during the winter, both for emergencies and for ordering spare parts from London, but Hillary had failed to get a permit for a shortwave radio transmitter. He also thought that the rations Hillary had procured were deficient, and wanted to establish a helicopter link between Kathmandu and Mingbo to deliver supplies of fresh food. The plastic jerry cans Hillary had used for storing the fuel supplies were leaky too. A despairing note in his diary records his reaction: “Disaster! . . . The plastic paraffin containers . . . will never stand up to winter conditions. Even gentle pressure on the seams is enough to split them. We shall have to get 84 ordinary tin 4 gall[on] containers to replace them . . . whenever shall I get away? . . . Cannot leave until this problem is solved as our hut will be untenable without fuel.”
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By the time he had procured the cans, Pugh had made yet another exasperating discovery—Hillary’s choice of down clothing did not match up to his own high standards: “Putting on my NZ down jacket for the first time I am horrified to find it has no hood, no down in the arms & open sleeves. [The] protection against great cold [it offers] may be adequate for men cutting steps but certainly not for light activity.”
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On top of being too lightweight, the outer jacket did not fit him properly: “The windproof outer garments are of poor quality & sleeves of mine much too short. The old mistake over ‘sizing’ which was a feature of the Cho Oyu expedition & completely avoided on Everest.”
After shepherding his baggage train to Mingbo, Pugh finally caught up with Hillary once the Yeti hunt was over. There were several climbers in Hillary’s eleven-man party, including Mike Gill, a New Zealand medical student; Tom Nevison, a US Air Force physiologist; and Hillary’s great friends, Peter Mulgrew and George Lowe. Mulgrew had been with him on his dash to the Pole. The Yeti hunters had trekked back from the Rolwaling Valley over the Tesi Lapcha pass and were in the village of Khumjung near Namche Bazar to inspect a famous Yeti scalp.
The hunt had not produced any firm evidence of the existence of the Abominable Snowman. The most disappointing find had come when the hunters followed fox tracks over a ridge onto a sunny slope where they expanded into beautiful “Yeti footprints.” As soon as the tracks passed into the shade on the other side of the slope, they shrank back into fox tracks. It was only the intense heat of the sun on the contours of the tracks that had melted them into what looked like Yeti footprints.
Refusing to be discouraged, they had collected various Yeti relics, including some supposed Yeti skins, one of which was judged to be similar to the skin of a blue bear. The Khumjung Yeti scalp, a prized possession of the village, promised to be the star relic, although the press officer, British-born journalist Desmond Doig, and Marlin Perkins, the naturalist from the Chicago Zoo, both suspected even this of being a man-made artifact.
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Despite their doubts, Hillary was intending to take the scalp and the other relics on a whirlwind trip to be examined by experts in Chicago, New York, and London.
After a brief stay at Khumjung the full expedition moved over to Changmatang, near Thyangboche, where Hardie had established a low camp and store next to the path leading to the Mingbo Valley. On Hillary’s instructions Hardie had also put in a base camp at the bottom of the Mingbo Valley, and built the lower of the two high-altitude huts further up the valley—a staging post for the route to the Silver Hut, which would be constructed at the head of the valley. Pugh approved of the low storage camp and was delighted with the high-altitude hut, but he was not at all happy with the base camp, which he considered to be “on a thoroughly bad site with no level ground.” “I think I can make a success of my part of the expedition,” he wrote to Doey, “but only if I have complete control.”
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At the earliest opportunity, he tackled Hillary about the base camp, the helicopter, and radio, and crucially about the question of leadership in the winter, which had still not been resolved. Irritated perhaps by Pugh’s late arrival, Hillary prevaricated. Pugh reported to Doey that he had achieved “inconclusive results all round.”
Hillary was eager to press on with the work, and the largest remaining job was the erection of the Silver Hut. So he gathered together a handful of willing helpers and set off for the upper glacier without inviting Pugh to go with him. He was exhilarated at the prospect of heading up the mountain, and his companions had to struggle to keep up with him.
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A few weeks earlier, Hardie, charged with carrying the Silver Hut parts up to the 19,600-foot Mingbo La, the pass at the head of the valley where the hut was to be built, had immediately realized that the site was wholly unsuitable.
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The access, up fluted ice-avalanche runnels, was steep and dangerous, and the pass itself was excessively windy and lacking in shelter. After one sleepless night on the pass, in a flapping tent during a howling gale, Hillary conceded they should look for an alternative.
The next morning they chose a less-exposed position on the Mingbo Glacier at 19,000 feet, “on a small snow field . . . protected from avalanche danger by a large open crevasse.” By the end of the day they had created a platform for the hut; the next day they put together the hut’s tubular outer shell.
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Pugh, having received, as he put it, “no encouragement to join [the] hut party and no information about intentions,” had remained down at Changmatang with his nose a little out of joint.
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In Hillary’s absence he gossiped with Marlin Perkins and Desmond Doig about the New Zealander’s leadership qualities (or lack of them), and confided in a letter to Doey that Hillary’s habit of rushing off to do things without explaining his intentions was irritating the “older” members of the team: “He seems unable to delegate authority & yet does not communicate his plans so none of us know where we are.”
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Hillary, he complained, did not understand the needs of the “older and more experienced men” in the party—as opposed to the younger climbers.
The irritation led to unkind banter about Hillary’s apparent brashness and boorishness.
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Pugh quoted Doig saying that he was fed up with the low level of conversation permitted at Hillary’s table: “Talk is entirely anecdotal and intensely boring, any attempt to introduce new topics being frowned upon.” Pugh himself speculated, perhaps a little ungenerously, that Hillary was refusing to agree to the radio and helicopter links because he did not want the scientists to attract any attention to themselves during the winter by talking to journalists in Kathmandu. “I expect he feels ashamed secretly about going back [to New Zealand for the winter] and wants to keep things as dark as possible while he is away.”
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Suspecting Hillary of being more concerned with his public image than with the task at hand, he wrote: “Ed is a hopeless leader but good at forging on. He turns out to be much too small a man for an expedition like this.”
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