After Everest Page 3

  Ed described being haunted by the sight of Lowe’s disappointed face as the party split up. For himself, he had lost the chance to fulfill a dream with his best friend; he would instead be travelling with a fellow climber he admitted he disliked.

  Ed sent a telegram to Percy telling him the bees would have to get on without him. Although Ed was now in his thirties, he still felt dominated by his father, and the letter included a plea to ‘forgive your erring son’. Not that there was any way Ed would change his mind.

  Ed would now have to prove to Percy that he was doing something worthwhile—a tall order when, for Ed’s generation, to be in your thirties and have neither a job nor wife and children was out of the ordinary. According to Tom Scott, Ed at this stage felt like a borderline failure, which of course only fuelled his desire to prove himself.

  Shipton was an explorer to the core—he would never take the same route twice to a destination if he could try an alternative. On this trip, while some of the party were left to explore the forbidding Khumbu Icefall—the first obstacle to an ascent—he and Ed went climbing together and chanced upon the Western Cwm, a hidden valley that appeared to provide a previously undiscovered southern route to Everest. This was yet another turning point in the history of attempts on the mountain and would remain—along with his success in talent-spotting Ed and, eventually, George Lowe—Shipton’s greatest contribution to the ultimately successful effort.

  The party split up and planned to return to the area the following year. But this time, Ed made sure George Lowe was included. The 1952 group would not, however, be attempting the world’s highest peak. Hanging heavily over them was the knowledge that the Swiss had the right to attempt Everest this year. Britain’s turn would come a year later. Ed had a twinge of resentment when he first heard this—he was already experiencing proprietorial feelings about the mountain.

  Once he was back home, he saw to the paperwork and filed an expense claim with the Alpine Club in London; he even claimed reimbursement for money spent on cups of tea. In reply, the club gently explained to its colonial offspring that ‘gentlemen are expected to pay for their own cups of tea’. Ed was quick to point out that, being New Zealanders, he and Earle could not possibly be gentlemen—and the club eventually gave way on the point.

  The main focus of the Shipton group’s efforts in 1952 was an attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—on 8201-metre Cho Oyu. Ed, of course, did not stop at one mountain. He and George Lowe roamed the region, successfully climbing eight peaks, attempting the Changtse and exploring the Barun peaks, with the occasional day off in between. They concluded their peregrinations in the village of Sedua before floating down the wild Arun River on airbeds. George Lowe reported, in a piece he wrote for the NZAC Alpine Journal, that Ed punctuated the hair-raising journey by tossing off quips such as ‘How long can we last on a chocolate bar?’ and ‘Obviously we can’t go on like this forever.’

  The expedition also provided much valuable experience of living and climbing in high altitude and extreme conditions—knowledge that would be invaluable when it came time to take on Chomolungma itself. They were as well prepared as it was possible to be, and all the signs were favourable for a Shipton-led attempt to climb Mt Everest in 1953. Until Shipton was fired.

  His replacement was John Hunt.

  Britain was desperate for this mission to be a success and had already made numerous errors in earlier attempts. Leadership had been one of the problems. ‘They had put a lot of bad people in charge,’ says Pat Booth, the Auckland journalist who would cover Ed’s career over several decades. ‘An Australian climber by the name of George Finch [father of actor Peter] had got to 8320 metres in 1922 with Mallory. He was an expert on oxygen but he and Mallory didn’t get on and for various reasons he didn’t go again.’

  Hunt was a veteran of three previous Himalayan expeditions. He had won the Sandhurst Sword of Honour, commanded an Indian brigade in World War II and been awarded the DSO in Italy. He had trained troops in snow and mountain warfare, so was used to leading men in Himalayan-type conditions.

  ‘The Poms had just won a war, but lost the peace,’ says Tom Scott, explaining the mindset. In 1953, Great Britain placed much hope in the new Queen, who would be crowned that year. ‘England was still a bombsite with rationing and queues for this and that. It owed America a fortune. At the start of a new age with a beautiful young Queen they wanted to celebrate the coronation with a gift that would be the last terrestrial prize.’

  Firing Shipton had been a tough decision for the organisers, and was a terrible personal blow not just for Shipton but for Ed, who was distraught at the news. But history shows the choice was correct, even if it was hard to see at the time. It also taught Ed a valuable lesson—that affection and sentiment were not sufficient qualities to earn someone a place in a team. When it came to choosing the right man for a job, it was talent and ability alone that would decide the matter. Feelings didn’t come into it.

  Despite two concerted efforts, the Swiss did not reach the summit of Everest during their year. But they came close. Included in their team was a most experienced Everest hand—the Sherpa sirdar (head man) Tenzing Norgay, who had already been involved in four attempts on the mountain. He and Swiss climber Raymond Lambert had been forced to turn back just 300 metres from the summit the previous year.

  According to Scott, Ed and Lowe had thought it unsporting of the Swiss to have two tries—one in the spring and one in the autumn. ‘They were sick with worry the Swiss would get there. Ed desperately wanted that mountain. He was the best climber in the world. George was the second best. So when the Swiss failed Ed was delighted. Next it was the English turn. In 1954 it would be France’s turn. They had only one climbing season in which to do it.’

  Looking back at the failed Swiss attempt, Ed used the special tone of patronising graciousness that he reserved for people who tried and failed to do something that he achieved. ‘We wished the Swiss no harm at all and they’d really put in a very good assault on the mountain,’ he told Tom Scott in his documentary Hillary: A View from the Top.

  The story of Everest is populated by many ‘nearly men’—climbers who almost got there but, for one reason or other, did not. Some—such as the gifted New Zealand climber Norm Hardie, one of the few men in the world besides Ed, Tenzing and Lowe who probably could have made it to the top—did not even get to Nepal. Others, such as George Lowe, were selected for the party but not for the attempt. Harry Ayres missed out for political reasons. He was on the long list and Ed desperately wanted him to come, but Hunt decided to limit the number of New Zealanders to two. And then there were Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon, who came within two hours of the top but turned back because they would not have managed the descent if they had continued.

  Norm Hardie still feels the disappointment of not being included in Hunt’s team. There is no questioning his ability. He was in the group of four who were first to climb Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, believed by some to be a more difficult ascent than Everest. Unfortunately, as Hardie says, ‘People still don’t know where Kangchenjunga is. They mix it up with Kilimanjaro . . . even very few in Nepal know about Kangchenjunga.’ According to journalist Desmond Doig, when Hardie reached the top of Kangchenjunga ‘in respect of local sentiment he left the last few tantalizing feet unscaled’.

  Hardie might have expected to get the opportunity to join the team. He was a good friend of the expedition’s deputy leader, Charles Evans. ‘When the Everest thing came up Evans pressed Hunt to include me,’ says Hardie. Hunt interviewed Hardie, who made a good impression. But the expedition leader was frank and told the climber that Evans was the only one pressing his claim. He pointed out that Hardie had no Himalayan experience; and he told him he had already accepted Ed and Lowe as members of his expedition. At the time there was no shortage of English climbers from well-established clubs fighting to be included and Hunt was under pressure not to include any New Zealanders at all, let alone three.

>   This background of national selection helps explain why Hunt chose who he did to make the eventual final assaults on the peak. His first choice was the more politically palatable pairing of his British deputy, Charles Evans, and his British oxygen expert, Tom Bourdillon. His second choice was a Sherpa and a New Zealander, who had shown themselves to be the toughest climbers in the group.

  By 13 April base camp had been set up below the Khumbu Icefall. They had six weeks within which to achieve their goal.

  The impression of Ed at this time of his life as an energetic mountain goat bounding around the Himalayas from rock to rock is reinforced in a tribute party member George Band wrote at the time of Ed’s death: ‘Ed would be among the first to enjoy a quick dip before breakfast in one of the icy streams flowing down from the glaciers to the north. Then to warm up, he might borrow Mike Westmacott’s butterfly net to try to chase and capture an elusive blue morpho.’

  Ed had natural gifts that made him the right man to reach the top of Everest first. He was extraordinarily strong—an everyday strength, not from working out in a gym but borne of day after long day of hard work from an early age. ‘He could lift honey boxes on and off trucks at the age of ten, and they are really heavy,’ says Tom Scott. ‘He had a raw-boned farmer’s strength. That sort of work builds stamina as well. George Lowe was incredibly fit, and he said when tramping no one could compete with Ed or keep up with his phenomenal pace.’

  He had also got used to working at high altitude where, at 8000 metres, for example, the oxygen is 75 per cent less than at sea level. ‘I was hoping for the documentary to film his fountain pen diary,’ says Scott. ‘I thought, this will be great, we’ll film pages of his diary at base camp and then later film his handwriting deteriorating [as he got higher]. Here is proof of what altitude does. And he gave me his diary and it was as literate and copperplate at 27,500 feet as lower down. That’s how fit he was.’

  Ed was fully conscious of his own physical and psychological advantages on the trip. ‘I knew I could go up the mountainside faster than anybody else,’ he told the New Zealand Listener in 2007, ‘and this also gave me a great deal of confidence—probably why I got to the top of Everest . . . I knew that I could move fast, even at high altitude, and faster than anyone else in the team who were good climbers. I was also somewhat competitive, I have to admit. I was quite prepared to compete with companions on the trip. We were off on a climb up a ridge to get a good look at the possible routes on the mountain and then we would rush down again and I always made sure that I got up higher first and that I got down first. There was simply no doubt in my mind that that’s what I was going to do and I did it. So you know that gave me a great deal of confidence when I knew that even these renowned climbers—that I could leave them for dead if I had to.’

  When Ed was roped to Wilfrid Noyce, who was in charge of boots on the expedition, and Noyce was following faster than Ed liked, Ed sped up until the rope was taut, and he made sure it stayed taut.

  The expedition used aluminium ladders to get across the many crevasses they had to negotiate. It was a hair-raising means of transport that involved placing the ladder across the gap then gingerly crawling over rung by rung. Ed insisted on being first across.

  Other members might have been fitter, or more ambitious, or had more experience. Some were definitely better technical climbers. But Ed had the right combination of qualities to get to the top.

  ‘He resented being classified as a simple uncomplicated climber who happened to be in the right place at the right time,’ says Scott. ‘There was more to it than that. No Ed Hillary, no Everest. There are defining moments on that mountain where if Ed hadn’t been there it would not have been climbed. He was resented for it, but he was just so much better than the others. It’s hard to handle when someone is that conspicuously better. The Poms thought it was their mountain, but there was one Pom who . . . knew he could get to the top and gave him uncritical approval—Eric Shipton. He knew Ed had greatness in him.’

  Initially Ed and George Lowe did much together, but Ed was planning from the start to maximise his chances of getting to the top and knew Hunt would be unlikely to send two New Zealanders under any circumstances.

  ‘When it became clear to me I wouldn’t be allowed to climb with George Lowe,’ says Ed in A View from the Top, ‘I looked around for someone of equal fitness and strong motivation. The most likely person seemed to be Tenzing.’

  If there was a moment when Ed and Tenzing became a team, it was when they were moving roped together and Ed, instead of crossing a crevasse on the nearby ice bridge, decided to jump across. As he did the edge of the ice snapped and he fell. Tenzing jammed his axe into the snow, the rope between the two went tight and Ed gradually returned to the surface. As John Hunt wrote: ‘That no harm came of it was due to the foresight and skill of Tenzing.’

  Fellow climber Graeme Dingle says Ed and Tenzing had one unlikely characteristic in common that played a part in their success. ‘Curiously both Tenzing and Ed carried a similar kind of chip. In spite of the drive that the British should be the first at the top, the irony is they didn’t get there. The two foreigners got there first and they both positioned themselves to do that. They both had sufficient inferiority complexes to achieve it and the physical ability to do it.’

  Ed did much to draw Hunt’s attention to his fitness and other exemplary qualities. He and Tenzing persuaded Hunt to let them do a fast climb from base camp to advance base and back to test the open-circuit oxygen equipment. This was a demonstration of ability and stamina that was clearly designed to show their suitability for a summit attempt. According to Alexa Johnston, ‘they had climbed 1,200 metres in just over four hours, instead of the usual nine hours spread over three days’. Hunt noticed.

  At another point, a group of Sherpas staged a kind of mutiny and refused to go on to complete an essential stage of the mission. Ed asked Hunt to let him and Tenzing go up—a four-and-a-half-hour trek—and spur them on. Hunt agreed. Tenzing exhorted his men to carry on and he and Ed accompanied them to their goal before returning. This was a major turning point in the expedition, and one that no other members would have had the physical ability or moral authority to bring about.

  Hunt had decided there would be two attempts on the summit. The first would be by Evans and Bourdillon using closed-circuit oxygen equipment. If that failed Tenzing and Hillary would be sent up with the open-circuit gear. The former system involved recirculating oxygen carried by the climbers; the latter used oxygen taken from the atmosphere.

  There was never any doubt Ed deserved his place—he was, simply, the best. Still, emotions ran high when the choice was made. Mike Ward, team doctor and superlative climber, was furious when he found out that he had been placed in the reserves, and lashed out at Hunt. George Band later described the New Zealanders as pushy. It’s an accusation seldom made against New Zealanders, but Ed and George Lowe would have been the last to disagree with the assessment.

  Before the final attempts there had been a lot of English courtesy on display: ‘After you.’ ‘No, no, after you.’ But mountaineering isn’t an activity that has a lot of room for such niceties. And Ed certainly had no room for it—he always sought to be out in front. While the others were debating precedence he would charge through the middle, yelling ‘Gangway!’ at the top of his voice.

  On their return from dealing with the Sherpa mutiny, Tenzing and Ed encountered Evans and Bourdillon beginning the first attempt to get to the top. Their attempt ended in failure, defeated by—among other factors—a diminishing supply of oxygen. It is possible that if they had used the open-circuit system they would have had sufficient reserves to get there and back.

  It is an indication of how Ed’s candour developed over the years that, whereas in Nothing Venture, Nothing Win he says he was pleased when the first party set off for the summit, in View from the Summit he says he was pleased when they returned without reaching it.

  Ed’s courage and impulsiveness were always
balanced with intelligence and planning. On the climb, he obsessively calculated and recalculated how much oxygen he and Tenzing had, could get away with, and needed. It was a great moment when he chanced upon two bottles that Evans and Bourdillon had abandoned, just as his stock was running low. He also felt sure that Tenzing and Lambert had failed to reach the top, a year to the day earlier, because they had not been sufficiently hydrated, having relied on cheese and snow melted over a candle for sustenance. Ed was in charge of melting snow on Primus stoves to provide water, and made sure everyone kept their fluids up.

  Ed told the story hundreds of times of how he and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to stand on the top of Mt Everest. He described the later stages to the BBC in 1999:

  ‘The oxygen equipment was not all that sophisticated. It only had a pressure gauge on it, so I never really knew just how much oxygen remained. I had to work out from the pressure how much oxygen remained. All the way up my brain was working fairly energetically . . . I don’t remember feeling any particular fear until about halfway along, where there was this rock step which is now called the Hillary Step.’

  This was the crucial moment, the very last obstacle between the climber and the summit. ‘The Hillary Step was one of the harder bits of the climb of the mountain and I decided that I would pioneer it, as it were,’ he told the Listener. ‘It had a rock face on one side and a big ice face on the other and I decided that I could scramble up between the rock face and the ice face. So that’s what I did and I got up and got to the top and then I yelled out to Tenzing to come on up and he duly came up and then I carried on cutting steps. I cut steps almost from the top to the bottom of the mountain and I cut steps along the final narrow ridge along the top with Tenzing not too far behind.’

  And with that, at 11.30 am on 29 May 1953, placing first one size 12 boot and then the other where no one had ever set foot before, Ed Hillary, closely followed by Tenzing Norgay, achieved what so many others had only dreamed of doing.