Everest & Conquest in the Himalaya: Science and Courage on the World's Highest Mountain

Pen & Sword Discovery

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Copyright © Richard Sale and George Rodway 2011

ISBN 978-1-84884-139-0

ePub ISBN: 9781844683192

PRC ISBN: 9781844683208

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Cover photograph: Tom Hornbein on the summit after the first ascent

of Everest’s West Ridge in 1963. (© Willi Unsoeld Estate)

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Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Early Quest for Extreme Altitude

Introduction

Laying the Foundation

Box: Discovering and Naming the World’s Highest Mountain

Box: Sir George Everest

Box: Oxygen and Altitude

Box: Alexander Mitchell Kellas

Mountaineering Equipment and Clothing

The Pre-Everest Years: Considerations of a Physiological Nature

Breaching the 8000m Barrier

The Lessons of the 1922 Everest Expedition

Everest: 1924 to the Second World War

Box: Did Mallory and Irvine Reach the Summit?

Chapter 2: Reaching the Highest Summits

Box: Frostbite

Box: Tenzing Norgay

Box: The Closed Circuit Oxygen System and the Ascent of Everest’s South Summit

Box: Ed Hillary

The Remaining 8000m Peaks

Chapter 3: The Next Generation

The Silver Hut

Everest in the 1960s and 1970s

Box: Tom Hornbein

Box: High-altitude Illnesses

Box: Reinhold Messner

Box: Peter Habeler

Box: Spirits on the Wind: Hallucinations at High Altitude

Box: Cosmic Rays and High-altitude Climbers

Chapter 4: The Slippery Slope

Commercialism

Ambition and Competence

Box: Dexamethasone

Morality and Ambition

Box: Sherpas

Chapter 5: Redefining the Game

Box: Finding Mallory

Box: Fast Ascents

Physiology in the New Century

Everest Today

Box: VO2 Max and Other Measures of Interest

Everest – The Risks

Box: Hypothermia

The Future

Notes

Index

Prologue

On 20 July 1939 two men lay outside the tent they had pitched, enjoying the warmth of the summer sun. So warm was it that the men lay naked on their sleeping bags. Apart, perhaps, from the nudity, there is little in this picture to surprise. But the tent the two had pitched was at 7940m, just 671m below the summit of K2, the second highest mountain in the world. The two men were Fritz Wiessner and Pasang Dawa Lama, and the previous day they had climbed to within about 240m of the summit.

Fritz Wiessner was born in Dresden in 1900 and emigrated to the United States in 1929, by which time he had established himself as a superb rock climber: at the age of 25 he had completed one climb in the Austrian Tyrol that was claimed to have been the hardest yet accomplished in the European Alps at that time. In the US he rapidly produced a string of climbs which raised the standard of American rock climbing. It was therefore no surprise that in 1939 he was invited to go to the Karakoram.

The Americans had already attempted to climb K2 in 1938, when an expedition under the leadership of Charles Houston had, in the course of a thorough reconnaissance of the mountain, identified the most promising line, up the Abruzzi Ridge. One member of the team, Bill House, climbed what proved to be a crucial chimney that allowed access to the peak’s upper slopes, but the team was forced to retreat from a high point of 7925m.

The original plan had been for the 1938 expedition to be led by Wiessner, but he was unable to participate because of other commitments. So, when a new attempt was scheduled for 1939, he was the logical choice for leader. He chose a strong team of American alpinists but for various reasons many dropped out, and the party he eventually led was inexperienced. Nevertheless they made good progress and by 18 July Camp IX had been established at 7940m, below K2’s final pyramid. Here Wiessner and Pasang Dawa Lama, the strongest of the team’s Sherpas, spent the night.

Wiessner scanned the route above the camp for a line to the top. There were two options. One moved right to gain a snow corridor that led diagonally to the top. The second option was to tackle a rock headwall, taking its left edge which appeared to lead to the final summit snow slopes. Wiessner was concerned about the threat posed by the huge ice cliffs overhanging the first route, and as a rock climber he was naturally drawn to the second line. So on 19 July the two men, using no supplementary oxygen, set out for the rock wall. It was 9am, a late start – very late indeed by modern standards – and ice on the rocks slowed the progress of master rock climber Wiessner. But he persevered, and by 6pm had arrived at a point from where he could see that only a final rock pitch separated him and Pasang Dawa Lama from easy-angled snow slopes. Wiessner reckoned that another 3 or 4 hours of snow trudging would see the pair on the summit. The two men were not too exhausted and the weather was set fair so, despite the novelty of the idea, Wiessner saw no problem in continuing to the top and descending through the night.

But Pasang Dawa Lama would have none of it. In his account Wiessner comments that, with nightfall approaching, the Sherpa had lost heart for the climb and refused to continue. Later accounts, apparently based on conversations with Pasang, have suggested he was fearful of the revenge the mountain gods might exact for the two men’s temerity in advancing on their citadel in darkness.

The two men therefore descended, safely but not without incident: at one point, as Pasang extracted himself from a tangle of ropes, he lost the pair’s crampons. It was 2.30am on 20 July when the two reached camp, which was one reason why Wiessner decided to rest that day. A leisurely breakfast and a laze in the sun would restore their energies, ready for another attempt the next day. But on 21 July the climb did not go well. Wiessner this time took the snow corridor. Without crampons, steps needed to be cut in the snow and Wiessner knew he had neither the time nor the energy to do so. The pair retreated to Camp IX and the next day climbed down to Camp VIII. By now Pasang Dawa Lama was exhausted, but Wiessner was determined to have one more attempt with a different companion and so left his sleeping bag at Camp IX.

At Camp VIII the retreating climbers found none of the supplies they had anticipated and, much worse, they found Dudley Wolfe, who had been alone in the camp for five days. With no matches to light a cooker, Wolfe had had little to eat and had only been able to drink water melted by the sun on his tent’s fabric.

Dudley Wolfe was 44 years old, heavy and clumsy, a rich socialite with limited mountaineering experience, all of it as a guided climber whose guides tended to have to haul his corpulent frame up the hill. His presence on the expedition can be put down entirely to his wealth, which underwrote the trip. But he shared Wiessner’s dream of reaching the top of K2. That dream – and his cash – had allowed Wolfe to avoid much of the effort the others had put into climbing the mountain. He did no lead climbing and when not climbing upwards seems to have spent his time in his sleeping bag.

The lack of supplies at Camp VIII meant Wiessner was forced to descend further. The three men took a heavy fall on the way and then, to their dismay, found that one tent at Camp VII was wrecked, the other collapsed. Worse still, the camp had been almost completely cleared of equipment. The three men were forced to share a single sleeping bag – Wolfe having lost his in the fall – and spent a miserable night. Next day Wiessner and Pasang Dawa Lama descended to Camp VI to fetch supplies, leaving Wolfe at Camp VII. Exactly why Wolfe was left behind is not clear, but it was a decision that would have dramatic consequences, as the two who went down found that every camp on the mountain had been stripped. Not until they reached Base Camp, utterly exhausted, could they get proper food and rest.

Wolfe was left at Camp VII on the morning of 23 July. Rescuers did not reach him until noon on the 29th. By then he was in a pitiful state, having had little to eat or drink. He had not left the tent once, using it as a toilet rather than leave the comfort of his sleeping bag for too long. He could not be persuaded to go down, telling the Sherpas who reached him to come back the next day when he would be ready to move; with no option but to obey, the Sherpas descended. Two days later three Sherpas (Pasang Kikuli, Ang Kitar and Pintso) again climbed up in an effort to rescue Wolfe. Neither he nor the Sherpas were ever seen again.

By 29 July Dudley Wolfe had spent 39 days at or above 6550m, and 16 days at or above 7530m. In all the time he had been on the mountain Wolfe had descended only twice, each time going down only one camp and for only one night. When he descended from Camp IX Fritz Wiessner had been at or above 7700m for seven days. He had been above 7700m for five days, including three at or above 7940m.

Today the effect of altitude on the human body is much better understood than it was in 1939. Now it is known that at altitudes much in excess of ~5300m (and possibly even a bit lower), most people physically and mentally deteriorate over a period of weeks and months, even if well catered for in terms of food, drink and warmth. Not surprisingly, the higher the altitude of ‘residence’ for humans above this mark, the faster the rate of deterioration. Thus, it is well understood today that Wiessner’s ‘rest day’ at Camp IX would have offered no rest at all: the surprise is that he functioned so well the day after, and that he survived the fraught descent to Base Camp. That Wolfe survived so long in such poor conditions is astonishing, but it is not surprising to learn that by 29 July he was in no fit state to contemplate descent. He would not have been capable of it had the Sherpas been able to reach him on 31 July. The sadness is that three brave men were lost trying to rescue him, and this unpleasant aftermath of the expedition meant that Wiessner’s superb attempt on the summit, which so nearly succeeded, has been overshadowed by tragedy.

The 1939 expedition showed that the effects of high altitude on the human body were inadequately understood despite the great height reached. Likewise for the heights reached on Everest during the ‘early’ expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s – these climbers were simply ‘pushing the envelope’ beyond the bounds of the known world, scientifically speaking. Ironically, the war that began soon after the survivors of the K2 expedition had returned home was to provide valuable information. In particular, the Second World War stimulated much altitude-related research as aircraft and their crews were required to fly ever higher for combat purposes. Much of this work translated nicely to the needs of high altitude mountaineers, and such knowledge was exploited and expanded upon in the immediate post-war years to pave the way for successes on the Himalayan giants such as Kangchenjunga, K2 and, of course, what many consider the most prized peak on earth, Everest.

Introduction

Mountaineers struggling their way to the summit of Mount Everest have little energy to spare – and likely not enough to imagine their straits if they had somehow been instantly transported from sea level onto the upper slopes of the mountain. While climbing Everest has increased in popularity over the years since the first ascent in 1953, it is an activity in which only a small fraction of the world’s population participates. However, ever-increasing numbers fly in commercial jets at and often above the altitude of the summit of Everest. Any of us who have ever paid the least bit of attention to a flight attendant’s routine instructions about emergency procedures knows that the not-exactly-confidence-inspiring oxygen masks (that look like insubstantial plastic cups attached to thin plastic bags) that are supposed to drop down to passengers in the event of a loss of cabin pressure have an important function. In fact, a total loss of cabin pressure that immediately exposed passengers to the ‘thin air’ (or, more specifically, extremely low barometric pressure) of extreme altitude would render them unconscious within the space of approximately 100 seconds or less (with death following in a matter of just a few minutes) – and the higher the altitude, the quicker unconsciousness occurs. Under such circumstances, our bodies would be exposed to very low levels of oxygen, much less than is required to maintain consciousness and life processes, from the ambient atmosphere. There have been documented incidents, as in the case of the demise of a world-famous golfer several years ago, where insidious decompression (and thus exposure to the aircraft’s cruising altitude) went undetected by the flight crew and left crew and passengers quickly insensible and, in short order, dead. But it is the low atmospheric pressure at high altitudes, and not a lack of oxygen per se, which causes this failure, because the Earth’s atmosphere contains approximately 21 per cent oxygen regardless of the altitude.

Atmospheric pressure is about 760mmHg at sea level, meaning that the pressure of the air can support a column of mercury (Hg) 760mm high. As a climber ascends, this air pressure drops because, of course, there is less air above them. If air was incompressible, then the drop in pressure with height would be linear. But air can be easily compressed, as anyone who has inflated a tyre on their car knows, so as the amount of air above the climber decreases, the compression also decreases, so that the way in which air pressure varies with altitude follows a curve rather than a straight line. The variation of pressure with altitude is also dependent on other factors. Despite what might be imagined, the coldest air in the Earth’s atmosphere sits not above the polar regions but above the Equator. The effect of the cold mass in the upper atmosphere above the Equator is to increase the air pressure near the earth’s surface, because a cold air mass will always try to ‘sink’, resulting in compression of the warmer air under it. As the Himalayan peaks are (relatively) close to the Equator – Everest is at 28°N – this effect is an advantage to climbers; if the peaks were much further north, climbers would be at a much more severe disadvantage. As an example, the difference in air pressure between an equatorial and a theoretical polar Everest is about 50mmHg for a given temperature. Air temperature in and of itself has an important effect as well, with air pressure dropping as temperature falls. This is particularly important for climbers on Denali, the highest peak in North America, which rises close to the Arctic Circle. Because the local temperature at Denali’s summit is colder than it is at a similar height close to the Equator (for instance, atop Chimborazo, which stands almost on the Equator and is a comparable height), the combined effect of temperature and latitude is to increase Denali’s effective height by several hundred metres relative to Chimborazo. It is also important to realise that the conditions of the local air mass (for example, high vs. low pressure system) around the mountain can influence just how large the effective height difference is on any given day.

Weather conditions also have an impact. An area of high pressure stationed above Everest might raise the pressure by ~5 per cent. But if a storm were to blow in, then in addition to the problems of high winds and blizzard conditions, a summit climber would have to contend with air pressure falling by a similar amount, perhaps even more.

The problem of thin air at altitude has long been known to humans. Ancient tales speak of the ‘headache mountains’ of Central Asia, so called because traders crossing them developed severe headaches – an early symptom of mountain sickness. Numerous remedies were tried to cure the problem: travellers who crossed the Nuksan Pass in the Hindu Kush (at more than 5200m) chewed raw onions which they believed would relieve the symptoms; in the eastern Himalaya the sniffing of certain yellow flowers was believed to be the cause of the headaches, and travellers would go to great lengths to avoid getting close to them; the Mirza of the Pamirs believed the cause of ‘dum’(as they called the problem) was a noxious wind and, if it blew, they would eat fruit in an attempt to gain relief.

The oxygen content of the Earth’s air has not been constant over geological time. A delightful letter to a medical journal¹ noted that during the Permian Age, when oxygen was plentiful in the atmosphere, a climber would have been able to reach 12,000m successfully without requiring supplementary oxygen, and ascents of Everest, at 8848m, would have been commonplace without bottled gas. But, of course, at that time, 250–300 million years ago, there were no humans and there was no Everest.

Today the Earth’s highest peak lies at the near-absolute altitude limit a human can reach without supplementary oxygen. If there were mountains just a few hundred metres higher than Everest, then supplementary oxygen would be required by any climber. Yet despite being at the limits of human capability, there are some climbers who not only are able to survive on the upper slopes of Everest without supplementary oxygen, but also find it possible to do the strenuous work necessary to continue the ascent of a demanding summit. At the same time, others are barely able to make progress while breathing bottled oxygen. How can human beings have such different responses to conditions at the same altitude?

The answer to that question is to be found in the story of how the understanding of human physiology developed. The development of knowledge regarding the function of the human body under hypoxic conditions has enabled climbers to reach great heights relatively safely, and that in turn led to the high peaks, once the preserve of the climbing elite, becoming more accessible. But science and technology can only do so much. When circumstances negate its value, the oxygen-poor environment of Everest quickly becomes lethal. The development of high-altitude science and the dangers posed by high-altitude mountaineering are the threads that bind the various sections of this book together.

Chapter 1

The Early Quest for Extreme Altitude

Introduction

In 1995 Johan Reinhard, an American archaeologist heading a Peruvian-American expedition, discovered the almost perfectly preserved mummy of a teenage girl near the summit of Ampato, a 6288m stratovolcano in southern Peru. The mummy, quickly named la Doncella, ‘the maiden’, in Peru and ‘the ice maiden’ in the English-speaking world, caused a sensation, not least because of the altitude of the discovery. But four years later, working on Llullaillaco, another stratovolcano close to the Argentine-Chilean border and the Atacama Desert, Reinhard made another discovery. At 6723m, Llullaillaco is the sixth highest mountain in South America and the second highest active volcano on Earth. Reinhard’s team discovered the mummies of three children close to the summit. It is believed that they were child sacrifices, killed perhaps 500 years ago to appease the Incan gods, or to thank them for a successful harvest. Llullaillaco was probably the highest point reached by humans in South America in the pre-Conquistador era, and also the highest point reached by humans until the late nineteenth century. In Tibet the summer snowline can rise to 6500m, though vegetation is very sparse beyond 6000m. Yaks and snow leopards have been reported to roam up to 6100m, and Tibetan gazelle and kiang (wild asses) are occasionally seen at similar altitudes, though they prefer to stay below 5500m. It is likely that early Tibetan hunters reached heights similar to those of their prey, and that traders crossing the high passes between India, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet also reached comparable heights. There is, however, no evidence for permanent or semi-permanent habitation above about 5,200m on either side of the Himalaya, and that is also likely to have been the limit in South America. Higher terrestrial elevations were truly terra incognita 150 years ago. Although a few very brave (and/or ignorant) men had ascended to altitudes over 8000m as early as 1862 in hot air balloons, these ‘exposures’ to the extreme altitude environment were short term, usually lasting little more than an hour or two. Nonetheless, their flights were full of near-misses as well as outright tragedy, as knowledge of the human body’s ability to deal with low atmospheric pressure and thus low tissue levels of oxygen, known as hypoxia, was extremely rudimentary.

Although some tentative steps had been taken towards an understanding of high-altitude physiology in the early years of the nineteenth century,¹ it was not until the work of Paul Bert² that the first giant leap forward was made. Bert, a Frenchman, was the first person to make an extensive study of the effects of barometric pressure. In the early 1870s he had a fortuitous meeting with Paris physician Denis Jourdanet, which was to have far-reaching consequences for the new science. Jourdanet was fairly wealthy and had travelled among the mountains of Mexico, where he developed an interest in high-altitude medicine. He and Bert shared enough medical interests to become friends and fellow-workers, with Jourdanet providing Bert with funds to establish a laboratory with a decompression chamber for the investigation of hypoxic phenomena. During the course of his high-altitude field experiences, Jourdanet had formulated the hypothesis that blood contained less oxygen on high mountains because the atmospheric pressure was lower, calling this theory ‘barometric anoxemia’. With Jourdanet’s financial backing, Bert aimed to put this theory to the test with a series of laboratory studies that would ultimately go an enormous distance in helping to sort out the puzzle of maladaptation to altitude that expresses itself, for instance, in the form of mountain sickness.

Although it seems so obvious today as to be easily taken for granted, Bert was able personally to confirm his deduction that mountain sickness is caused by exposure to an environment with low oxygen pressure. In a series of experiments, he allowed himself to be rapidly ‘taken up’ to a simulated altitude of approximately 5500m in a pressure chamber, and then breathed supplementary oxygen in order to successfully relieve his symptoms of acute hypoxia. Finally, he breathed supplementary oxygen during the course of being ‘taken up’ to the same altitude, finding himself untroubled by any noxious symptoms during the process, providing clear evidence that the use of supplementary oxygen in a low barometric pressure environment was based on a firm physiological footing.

Bert made other pioneering efforts of great interest to medical science, but his study of high-altitude (hypobaric) and high-pressure (hyperbaric) environments (such as deep-sea diving) is the work for which he is primarily remembered. This is no doubt due to the fact that, in 1878, he published his 1178 page magnum opus La Pression Barométrique, Recherches de Physiologie Expérimentale. This work contained not only Bert’s experimental results, but also an encyclopedic history of all that was then known or believed about high and low barometric pressures and mountain sickness. A very notable tribute to the lasting value of La Pression Barométrique is that it was of fundamental importance to aviation medicine during the Second World War. The need for an English edition at that time prompted its translation by the academicians Fred and Mary Hitchcock at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. This first English edition of the book – Barometric Pressure: Researches in Experimental Physiology – was finally published in 1943, 65 years after its original publication in France! Bert’s studies were without doubt a most important milestone in the ever-expanding canon of knowledge concerning the physiological effects of oxygen and its lack on the human body. As such, Paul Bert is widely recognised today as the father of ‘modern’ high-altitude physiology and medicine.

While the hard-earned knowledge of Bert and other scientists was useful as mountaineers started to push the altitude ‘envelope’ to near the 7000m barrier by the end of the 1800s, mountain climbing exposed people to the hypoxia of high altitude over much longer periods (days, weeks or even months), and thus adaptation to altitude and deterioration from altitude were still unknown quantities. It should thus come as no surprise that early attempts to climb the world’s highest peaks, particularly K2 and Kangchenjunga, very early in the twentieth century were unsuccessful.

Laying the Foundation

In 1786 Mont Blanc (the highest peak in the European Alps, at 4810m) was climbed by two Chamonix residents, Dr Michel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, after the aristocratic Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure had offered a sizeable reward to the first ascentionists. Though their achievement is often regarded as the start of alpine climbing as a sport, another 70 years would pass before the ‘Golden Age’ of climbing in the European Alps began. Those early climbers, who were chiefly British, though invariably employing local guides, wore little more than old street clothes and concentrated on finding the most straightforward route to any summit they attempted.

In the Himalaya climbers were preceded by the map-makers of British India’s Great Trigonometric Survey (GTS). Work began in 1802, and just seven years later, while exploring the upper reaches of the Ganges, Lieutenant William Spencer Webb, a Survey employee, surveyed a peak known as Dhawala Gira (now known as Dhaulagiri) and found it to be 26,826ft (8190m). Astonished, he returned the following year to check his result: it was correct. But, rather than being excited by the finding of the world’s highest peak, the geographers of Europe scoffed at the absurd height calculated by this amateur surveyor: everyone knew that the world’s highest mountain was Chimborazo in the Ecuadorean Andes. In the years that followed GTS surveyors worked their way towards the border of forbidden Nepal. From close to the border they set up survey stations from which they were able to fix the height of the great peaks of the Himalaya. One, Peak X V, they discovered to be the highest mountain in the world. It was named after George Everest.

Occasionally, the survey stations set up by the GTS were at high altitude: some on the high Karakoram peaks were at over 6000m. As a consequence, exactly when climbers, rather than explorers or map-makers, came to the Himalaya is a matter of opinion – when does an explorer become a climber? Why does a map-maker choose one peak rather than another, or decide to press on to the summit when a lower shoulder would be adequate for his purposes? One of the most striking examples in this grey area was William Johnson, who was a member of the GTS but seems to have climbed as much for the thrill of it as to set up triangulation stations. In 1865, on an unsanctioned journey into China’s Kunlun Shan (a journey that eventually led to his resignation from the GTS), he claimed to have climbed a 7284m peak. More recent surveys give the peak’s height as 6710m and some, both at the time and today, question Johnson’s claim, though it is beyond doubt that he did achieve such altitudes elsewhere.

It is now generally agreed that the first ‘pure’ climber to visit the Himalaya was W.W. Graham in the spring of 1883. At that time Bhutan and Nepal were off-limits, Sikkim vaguely hostile and the Karakoram both remote and politically sensitive, the borders of Russia, Afghanistan and British India having still to be defined. Of the Himalaya only Himachal Pradesh and northern Uttar Pradesh (Garhwal and Kumaun) were easily and safely accessible. It is therefore surprising that Graham, accompanied by his Swiss guide Joseph Imboden, chose to go to Sikkim. The pair explored the southern approaches to Kangchenjunga, but then Imboden fell ill and had to return to Switzerland. Graham next employed two Swiss guides, Emil Boss and Ulrich Kauffmann, and headed for Garhwal. The trio arrived in July and apparently completed two climbs which, if true, were astonishing. Graham claims to have reached 6900m on Dunagiri (7070m, and not climbed until 1939), and then climbed Changabang (6864m), the peak whose fierce granite spire dominates the Ramani Glacier. This ascent of Changabang (which was not officially climbed until 1974) is now given no credence; indeed, it was being questioned within 15 years of Graham’s trip. The claimed height on Dunagiri is also disputed: many