Read Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain Online
Authors: Harriet Tuckey
While Hornbein and Unsoeld were on their way up the last leg of the West Ridge, Bishop and his partner Lute Jerstad climbed to the summit from the south. They then descended to the South Summit where, late in the day, they waited for Hornbein and Unsoeld to join them. Two hours later, as the four men set off down the mountain in the dark, Bishop felt his strength draining away: “Our plight is precarious and we know it. With oxygen all but exhausted, and with Tom’s expiring flashlight, we feel our way with cramponed feet and ice axes down the knife ridge of snow . . . In our weakened condition we can barely tell one side of the ridge from the other.”
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At about 10:00 p.m., unable to go on, they stopped and bivouacked at 28,000 feet, a thousand feet higher than any previous Everest bivouac. The temperature was –4°F. They had no tent and they had run out of oxygen. Bishop continued: “By this time Lute and I have slipped into a stupefied fatigue. My feet have lost all feeling and the tips of my fingers are following them into numbness. We curl up in our down jackets as best we can. With his frozen fingers, Lute cannot even close his jacket. He wraps it tightly and hopes for the best.”
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By extraordinary good luck, there was very little wind that night. If there had been, they probably wouldn’t have survived. They did, but Bishop lost all his toes, and Unsoeld lost nine of his and spent a long time in the hospital, recovering.
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Their survival intrigued Pugh, who got a firsthand account of it from Bishop. His notes of the interview included details of Bishop’s clothing: “String vest, shorts and singlet; then he had a cotton and wool vest, shirt, down underclothing similar to that used in 1961 [at the Silver Hut], then short climbing trousers, down trousers and anorak. He was carrying a down jacket which he put on for the night. Boots were the same ones he used in 1961.”
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It was all grist to the mill of Pugh’s fascination with survivors of extreme conditions. A few years earlier, Pugh’s old friend Jimmie Riddell from Cedars was leading a party of skiers on a high route between Saas-Fee and Zermatt in the Swiss Alps when they were pinned down by a ferocious blizzard. They were not equipped for an overnight bivouac, and the weather was so appalling that many people feared they were dead. But Riddell was the ideal person to be lost in a blizzard with. Shepherding his group into a crevasse, he kept them sheltered for twenty hours while the storm raged, and they turned up in Zermatt safe and well, once it had blown over. Hearing the story, Pugh arranged to cross-examine every member of Riddell’s group.
Riddell and Bishop only confirmed for Pugh what was already perfectly obvious from polar exploration and high-altitude mountaineering: that people can survive in extreme conditions without dying of cold. Yet during the 1950s and ’60s, people were regularly dying of exposure in far less severe weather in the hills and mountains of Britain.
Hill-walking and hiking had become popular pastimes in Britain. Better transportation, rising prosperity, and more leisure time allowed more and more people to visit wild, remote areas, and the number of accidents was also rising. There were no accurate figures, but estimates suggested that deaths from exposure were running at between thirty and sixty a year.
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Why there were so many fatalities in Britain’s relatively low landscape and mild climate was a mystery; despite the research carried out during and after the war, there was no consensus about how to avoid hypothermia. Worse still, effective methods of rescue, treatment, and resuscitation had not been established, so if exposure victims did not die on the hillside, they often succumbed while being rescued.
Pugh, with his expertise on hypothermia, was asked to join a “Working Party on Accident Prevention and Life Saving” established by the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1961, and he soon became hooked on the subject of exposure accidents among hill-walkers and trekkers.
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Adventure recreation attracted more than its fair share of folk imbued with the romantic-heroic ideals that Pugh had battled with in his Everest work. Here, once again, Pugh, with his pragmatic approach and open-minded curiosity, would find himself facing opposition from old-school, antiscience stalwarts, who chose to believe that susceptibility to hypothermia was largely the result of a poor mental attitude.
It was the energetic lobbying of respected progressive educator Kurt Hahn—founder of Gordonstoun School, where the Duke of Edinburgh was educated—that had galvanized the Royal College of Surgeons into action.
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Hahn was one of the main catalysts behind the expansion of youth adventure training in Britain after the war. An advocate of the early-morning cold bath and the tough sporting challenge, he tapped into the postwar worries of the great and the good—that young people in Britain were irredeemably “slothful,” “unhealthy,” “unfit,” and “unruly.”
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Hahn’s answer was to bring the character-building benefits of the public-school sporting ethos to less-privileged young people through the Outward Bound movement, which he founded in 1948. Outward Bound centers in places like the Lake District and Snowdonia provided adventure-training courses usually lasting around four weeks. The veteran Alpine Club member Geoffrey Winthrop Young, onetime president of Gordonstoun, was an ardent supporter, and the legendary Everester Eric Shipton was warden of an Outward Bound center between 1953 and 1957.
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The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, created by Hahn in the mid-1950s and strongly supported by the duke, enabled Hahn’s methods to be promoted through youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides, and the Boys Brigade, and through schools, greatly extending his reach.
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The Everest hero Sir John Hunt helped to set it up, and was appointed its first director in 1956.
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But Hahn had run into the problem that the young people he was sending out on sporting adventures had been showing a distressing propensity to die of exposure. In January 1960, a party of boys with an instructor set out from the Eskdale Outward Bound center in the Lake District on a strenuous two-day hike. After a change in the weather, three boys became exhausted, and one died.
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The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme also suffered from repeated mishaps which invariably generated widespread publicity. “Youth dies on trek,” the
Daily Herald
trumpeted in February 1961, after three boys on a 30-mile ramble in the Radnorshire hills were overtaken by exhaustion and one died of exposure. “They were taking part in the endurance test which forms part of the Duke of Edinburgh’s scheme to encourage character, leadership and physical fitness among youngsters,” the paper reported, pointedly adding that the indignant coroner had demanded: “Had there been any training leading up to this fatal exercise? . . . I want to know who sends boys out on an exercise which is apparently beyond their strength, and why.”
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Neither John Hunt, nor the Duke of Edinburgh nor Kurt Hahn, had anticipated the high accident rates afflicting their young recruits. They were meant to be benefiting from the uplifting experience of pitting themselves against the elements, not dying.
In 1963, after three years of deliberation, the Working Party on Accident Prevention met to discuss its findings at a prestigious convention.
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Delegates came from all the royal medical colleges, the British Medical Association, industry, the armed services, trade unions, youth movements, and five government departments. The Duke of Edinburgh attended on the first day.
Most of the speakers on youth adventure, who included Sir John Hunt, were passionately in favor of it, peppering their contributions with grand assertions. “Adventurous initiative is part of the complete man and his health,” said one. “The challenge of adventure should be a necessary part of education,” said another.
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A consensus seemed to be emerging that hypothermia accidents among the young often stemmed from the mental state of the victim. “Mountains can frighten people to death; I know of several cases where they have done this,” one delegate announced firmly, adding that exposure went hand in hand with “a bad mental approach to the mountains.” “[Hypothermia] is often preceded by being fed up, tired and bored . . . and being made to do something you do not want to do.”
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Sir Arthur Porritt, the quintessentially establishment president of the Royal College of Surgeons, thought that there were five major causes of accidents—“selfishness, lack of interest in others, inefficiency, bravado and carelessness.”
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One speaker claimed that certain types of personality, such as “extroverts” and those with a “neurotic” predisposition, were responsible for much accident-prone behavior, and argued that psychological tests to establish personality traits were “obviously going to be of great importance from the point of view of research into accidents.”
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Kurt Hahn spoke of the need for young people to undergo “physical, nervous and spiritual conditioning” before undertaking adventurous sport.
Amid all the talk of psychology, one paper stood out—namely Griffith Pugh’s.
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Setting aside all talk of character building, Pugh speculated that something as simple as wet clothes might be at the root of the hypothermia problem. There might, he said, be reasons for adopting completely new physiological—not psychological—strategies for preventing hypothermia in the field. “Experimental evidence is badly needed.”
After the convention Kurt Hahn took Pugh out to lunch and invited him to be a director of one of the Outward Bound schools and a member of the Outward Bound Safety Committee.
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The main outcome of the convention was the establishment in early 1964 of Britain’s first permanent “Commission on Accident Prevention and Life Saving.” Thirty-three distinguished members of the medical profession agreed to sit on six medical subcommittees devoted to topics like road accidents, accidents in the home, heart disease, and sports and recreation. All the doctors except Pugh and one other were members or fellows of the Royal College of Physicians.
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The commission had not even had its first meeting before another tragedy struck: In March 1964, the annual Four Inns Walk in the northern Peak District ended in disaster with the deaths of three boys.
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Two hundred and forty boys, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, took part in the tough, 45-mile competitive marathon walk organized by the Derby Rover Scouts. The race took its name from the four inns along its route—The Isle of Skye, The Snake Pass Inn, The Nag’s Head, and The Cat and Fiddle.
Walking in small groups of three or four, the competitors followed a route which took them over some of the roughest moorland in Britain, at altitudes between 650 and 2,000 feet. The race was in its eighth consecutive year, and three-quarters of the walkers usually finished the course successfully. The record finishing time was seven and a half hours, though most competitors took between nine and a half and twenty-two hours.
The competition was well organized, with regular checkpoints. Most of the entrants were not competing for the first time, and rescue services were on hand. There had been a few cases of fatigue in previous years, but no serious accidents or fatalities. The only major difference from previous years was that the weather deteriorated unexpectedly during the day, bringing strong winds and rain. This year only twenty-two boys finished the course. Many became fatigued and had to drop out. And, apart from the three who died, five more became so exhausted they had to be rescued, only narrowly escaping death themselves.
The organizers were bemused. The conditions were not exceptional, and the competitors who gave evidence at the inquest said they were quite used to bad weather, though perhaps not to being out in it for such a long period.
Pugh’s reaction was to drive straight to the Derbyshire Dales to look at the lie of the land. He then went on to attend the inquest at Glossop, contacting the parents of the deceased to secure more information. He followed up his enquiries with a series of experiments, and produced a report for the Accident Commission addressing the question on everyone’s lips—Why had these boys died?
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Reviewing previous research into hypothermia and the “insulation value” of clothing, Pugh realized that, whereas the impact of wind and of wet on the warmth of clothing had been studied separately, no one had yet measured the combined effects. And no one had studied the physical impact of wearing wet clothes in windy weather.
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Pugh put the actual clothes worn by the three dead boys onto his experimental subjects and had them walk on treadmills in a cold chamber in differing wind speeds while being sprayed with cold water. As they walked, he measured the impact on their temperatures and the amount of energy they were using. The guinea pigs found it very unpleasant indeed.
One of Pugh’s seminal discoveries was that when clothes got wet in windy conditions, their insulation value was reduced by 90 percent. The boys who died would almost have been better off naked than in the jeans they were wearing.
Once the clothes of the boys on the walk became wet, the only way to keep warm was to walk faster. The athletic, physically fit boys had no problem in doing so, and finished the race easily. But many of the competitors could not walk fast enough to keep themselves warm. When they tried they became tired and had to slow down, whereupon they got colder. Pugh had established in earlier studies that people can push themselves for long periods only at about 60 percent of their maximum capacity.
When body temperature drops too low, our bodies respond with an involuntary increase in metabolism in an attempt to warm up. Shivering is a part of this spontaneous reaction, which uses up a lot of energy in its own right, leaving even less energy for walking. Consequently the walker gets more and more exhausted. This chain of events explained why such a large number of boys in the Four Inns Walk became exhausted and dropped out.
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