The Everest Years by Chris Bonington

Author:Chris Bonington [Bonington, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911342472
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Published: 2017-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

– CHAPTER 11 –

Pushing the Limits

I was down to ten paces, then a rest. It was all I could do to force out the eighth … then the ninth … I just slumped into the snow, panting, exhausted. I couldn’t even make that target. Joe had drawn ahead long ago and I was on my own on this huge, endless ridge that had so sapped our strength in the preceding weeks. The North-East Ridge of Everest soars like a vast flying buttress up from the Raphu La, the col to the north-east of the mountain. I had dreamt of climbing it with a small team, a repeat of what we had done on Kongur, but the reality of scale and altitude were beginning to weigh heavily upon me.

Sitting crouched in the snow, I was already higher than Kongur. The North Col was far below and even the summit of Changtse now seemed dwarfed. I could gaze out over the peaks to the north-east to see the rolling hills of the high plateau of Tibet stretch in a perfect arc and yet we had another thousand metres to gain, to reach the summit of Everest. More than that, we had to cross the serrated teeth of the rocky pinnacles that guarded the final stages of the unclimbed section of the ridge. It was joined at 8,400 metres by the North Buttress, the route from the North Col, attempted by all those pre-war British expeditions and finally climbed by the Chinese in 1960. From there it would be comparatively straightforward, but it was also a long way.

We had started out that early March so full of hope, just four of us, myself, Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker and Dick Renshaw, a newcomer to my expeditions. Four pitted against the North-East Ridge. Charlie Clarke and Adrian Gordon, who had been with us on Everest in 1975 as our advance base manager, were coming in a purely support role, but we didn’t envisage them going beyond Advance Base at the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier.

We had never considered attempting the entire climb alpine-style. The route was too long and the Pinnacles were obviously going to be time consuming. To climb successfully with alpine techniques at extreme altitude, you need to move quickly, particularly above 8,000 metres. You can’t afford to spend more than a night or so above that altitude, because of physical deterioration. We therefore decided to make several forays on to the ridge, to gain a jumping off point at about 8,000 metres from where we could make a continuous push for the summit, carrying bivouac gear.

It had seemed a sound strategy back in Britain but, faced with the colossal scale of the ridge, the effects of altitude and the debilitating wind and cold, we were all beginning to have our doubts. At night, even on the glacier, it was down to –20°C, and during the day the temperature never crept above freezing. Only the day before, Pete had commented that we

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