Lockdown on Everest

Lockdown on Everest

Camp 2, at 22,000 ft high in the Western Cwm, was Advanced Base Camp. It was a long slog to get there via the rather frightening Khumbu IceFall – in the middle of which was situated the dangerous Dump Camp – up to Camp 1 at the lip of the Cwm and then a long gradual climb up the Cwm itself. The Swiss in ’52 had dubbed the Western Cwm as The Valley of Silence but we soon became familiar with the creaking of ice, the moaning of wind and the rumble of small avalanches. But then they were there post-monsoon.

Camp 2 had not been long established and every day we worked in teams and ferried food, fuel, oxygen bottles, rope, climbing equipment and what-have-you up to the camp – a two day carry – it was early days and so far the Camp had not been fully stocked. Already climbing teams were pushing up the two routes we were attempting on the mountain, the S.W.Face itself above the Camp and the West Ridge via the complex slopes leading up to the W.Shoulder. 

Camp 2 was where the action was, and understandably perhaps, too many climbers had moved up there unnecessarily early and had an effect on the logistic build-up. As the climbing film-crew, Pin and I were up there of necessity.

All India Radio forecast a major storm. It hit us late afternoon. Harsh Bahuguna (an Indian climber) and his rope mate Wolfgang Axt (an Austrian climber), both exceptionally strong climbers, had exhausted themselves establishing Camp Three West on the West Shoulder and were descending to Camp 2 when the storm caught them in all its fury. Much of the descent was on fixed ropes on the steep broken slopes of jumbled seracs and little ice walls; some of the ropes had been newly placed by a support party the previous day.

It was snowing hard, with wind. Visibility was white-out. And it was getting dark. At Camp 2, we heard distant shouts, and then Axt stumbled alone into the mess / cook tent. “Harsh is coming“ he managed.  

But he wasn’t. 

Everyone pulled on their boots, grabbed torches and rope and this ad-hoc ‘rescue party’ rushed out into the storm. Heads down into the force of the wind, we followed Axt’s rapidly disappearing tracks across the glacier to the foot of the fixed ropes, marking the route with a line of ski poles, placing one each time the previous one disappeared into the murk.

To cut a long story short, Harsh was stuck a little way up on a fixed rope, unable to continue and in a bad way. Don Whillans had been the hero, had reached him but had been unable to move him in the fierce conditions and with the equipment he had. Very sadly Harsh died of exposure. And the ‘rescue party’ struggled back to camp with some difficulty as the storm intensified.

And the storm continued, for some ten days, night and day. I shared a tent with John Evans, the director of Colorado O.B., a great companion. Most of the time the tents were covered with snow and we would shake and shovel it off only for the next fall to cover it again. We had triple sleeping bags and slept in our down clothing of course. We would wake in the morning with the tent insides thick with ice, which as the temperature warmed a little during the day would melt and drip onto our sleeping bags and clothing, which gradually got damper and damper. Prime pneumonia conditions. We would dig out a pathway to the mess tent and sit around trying to get warm. Someone had a paperback of Jerome K.Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat which we divided into folios and passed round - no one had expected to have time to kill.  

One day in a short let-up, a team went out and was able to bring Harsh down from the fixed ropes. We wrapped his body in a tent fly-sheet and marked with a ski pole, he lay covered in a drift at the edge of the cluster of tents. Then the weather closed in again.

As a Brahmin he was supposed to be cremated within two weeks of death which given the circumstances was problematical. Twice, we tried to break out downwards, a small group of us ploughing a trail carrying his body. But each time after an hour or so we ground to a halt, it was not only dangerous trying to avoid the now invisible crevasse bands, but the deep new snow made it physically impossible. We had to turn around.  

By now our H/A medic – Dr Dave Peterson from Seattle – was getting worried. What with no exercise - essential at altitude – and reduced rations, Vaucher had developed phlebitis, Pin and Garry Colliver had developed retinal haemorrhages while others has associated health problems. Indeed, everyone except Whillans had incipient pneumonia, some worse than others. Food was very short and inadequate given the situation, and then crucially fuel eventually all but ran out – thus no ice melt for water. The matter looked serious. But somehow we made it through the ten days of lockdown.

Then All India Radio forecast decent weather. The sun appeared and with it a fantastic wind that picked up the snow and whirled it round so that the Cwm became a great tunnel of blowing powder snow. We finally restored radio contact. Somehow we managed to lower Harsh’s body down through the IceFall with dignity and he was cremated as was appropriate on a pile of pine logs at Gorak Shep, a flat place beside the glacier, the first vegetation below Base Camp. It was the fourteenth day.

Fifty years later, I can accept lockdown in the Wiltshire countryside with equanimity, though at nearly 85 years old it comes with different challenges…. But my goodness it does bring back memories…    

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? John Cleare : January 29. 2021