Bear Grylls (32 page)

‘Are you scared?’ Allen asked me quietly. They were the only words any of us had spoken so far. The words seemed faint through his mask.

‘Yes, a little,’ I replied, ‘but not as scared as I would be if I could see the angle of this Face,’ I added, peering out into the black. It was true. It was too dark to
see the danger; all you could see was the intensity of the snow and ice, lit brightly by your torch in front of you. We stood and turned into the Face again and carried on up.

As we climbed I seemed to lose myself in this surreal world of torchlight. Two steps then a rest. Was my grip secure? I shuffled. Neil and Allen were only yards from me, but somehow we were each
alone. It was the most lonely work I had ever done. I clung to their heels even when my body said rest. I didn’t want to lose them. They were all I had up here.

At midnight we came across this deep powder, drift snow. We hadn’t expected this. It drained our reserves as we floundered about in it. Each step we took forward, our feet would slide back
in the loose snow. It took three steps just to make the ground of one. Snow filled my mask and gloves, and my goggles began to steam up.

I swore to myself. Where the fuck is the Balcony? It must be soon. I looked up and the ice and rock ledges disappeared above into darkness. I shook my head. I knew I was tiring.

For the next two hours, I resigned myself to the fatigue. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t swear when snow filled my goggles, or as I slid backwards; I wouldn’t swear when the lip
ahead was another false horizon. I just kept following and forgot everything.

At 1.00 a.m. we came over one more ledge and collapsed in the snow of the Balcony. A sense of excitement refilled my body. We sat now, as high as Lhotse. We were now at 27,700
feet above sea-level. I turned down my oxygen to 1 litre a minute as we weren’t moving, and waited. I lay back against the snow and closed my eyes. It was to be a long wait.

We had to wait for the Sherpas to arrive. They were bringing spare oxygen canisters. We would swap our half-empty ones for fresh tanks. Those should then last to the summit and back to the
Balcony. It would give us about ten hours to complete the round trip. The time factor up here was your oxygen. If you weren’t going to make the summit and back in that time, you had to have
the self-discipline to turn around. But discipline can get blurred when the summit is in sight; it is why people die.

The three of us sat huddled in the snow and waited for the Sherpas, Geoffrey and Michael to arrive. It was bitterly cold, a deep, chilling cold. It was – 45°C.

I curled into a ball and tried to keep warm. My toes began to feel numb even when I moved them.

At 2.00 a.m. there was still no sign. None of us talked. We buried ourselves in our own worlds, trying to fight the cold and the likelihood of frostbite. On such a small flow of oxygen,
frostbite comes easily. I wiggled my toes again and held my hands close to my chest. ‘Come on.’

Suddenly the entire sky lit up before us, the mountains flashed as if in daylight, then disappeared again. I looked up sharply, then looked at Neil. The lightning flashed across the horizon once
more and the thunder then rippled through the valleys below.

This shouldn’t be here, I thought, what’s going on?

Seconds later the sky flashed again. It was an electric storm. It was moving up through the valleys. We sat some 5,000 feet above it. I had never seen anything like it in my entire life. I
stared, open-eyed in disbelief. We looked at each other nervously and knew what it meant.

If that came up towards us it would be fatal. It would turn the mountain into a raging mass of snow and wind. ‘It can’t come over us. It mustn’t,’ I mumbled.

Unbeknown to us three, huddled into the snow at the Balcony, Geoffrey and Michael were also fighting a battle on the slopes way below us.

Geoffrey was having problems with his oxygen set. The flow wasn’t running properly. It choked him and his pace slowed drastically. Alone, and separated from Michael, he moved tentatively.
He turned to see what the flashes were. The storm below shocked him. He struggled on but soon realized it was futile. He would never make it at this pace. He faced the frightening possibility that
he might have to retreat from the mountain. He sat and tried to think, his mind swirling in indecision.

He, though, had the courage and discipline to do what others before had refused to do and ended up paying for with their lives. He got to his feet and slowly turned round. He had to retreat to
the relative safety of Camp Four. His attempt was over. He had no choice. He was too alone.

Michael had also turned back just before him. He was just too tired. He had climbed all his life and knew when it was wrong. In his own words he admits: ‘It just didn’t feel right.
The sight of the lightning boded badly. I didn’t want to carry on. My body couldn’t go on. The effects of the illness were still with me. I would never have survived.’ And so
another brave mountaineer turned round. It takes courage to do this. Only the three of us now remained alone at the Balcony. We still waited; we had no idea they had turned back.

At 3.00 a.m., shivering uncontrollably and on the threshold of our ability to wait much longer, we saw the torches of the Sherpas below.

‘Thank God, oh man, thank you,’ I muttered wearily to myself. I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to sit motionless much more. I felt numb with cold.

When they arrived we struggled desperately to change our tanks. This involved removing the regulators from our existing ones and putting them on the fresh canister. At Base Camp we had got this
process down to a fine art. We could do it blind. Up here, in the dark and cold, it was a different game altogether.

I removed my outer mitts to be able to grip the regulator. My hand shook with the cold. I twisted it off and tried to line it up on the new tank. My shivering became frantic and in despair I
screwed it on carelessly. The screw-threads jammed. It wouldn’t budge. I swore at it out loud.

Neil and Allen were ready by now. Allen just got up and left, heading up the ridge. I fumbled crazily. ‘Come on, damn you, come on.’

I felt the whole situation begin to slip away from me. I was losing patience and concentration as well. We had come too far to fail now. Too far. Neil shivered next to me uncontrollably. I was
holding him up. He had been ready a while now.

‘Come on, Bear, fucking get it working,’ he stuttered through his mask. But it was jammed – there was nothing I could do. Neil had now lost any feeling in his feet. He knew
what that meant. He was getting badly frostbitten with every minute I kept him waiting. He squeezed his toes tight but only felt a numbness come over them.

We both huddled above the tank, fumbling frantically, and then suddenly it came loose. I lined it up and tried again. This time it fitted snugly. My hands were freezing now and before tightening
the regulator, I thrust them inside my down jacket to try and warm them up. Ten seconds later I tightened it all, squeezed the tank into my pack and heaved it onto my shoulders. We had lost
precious minutes. We knew that if we were to have even a chance of the summit we had to get going soon.

One of the three Sherpas who were meant to continue then suddenly stood up, turned and headed down. This wasn’t meant to happen. They should stay together as a team. What was happening?
The Sherpa felt worried by the storm and the winds that were beginning to rise. They were too dangerous. He wanted to go down. There was nothing we could do.

The other two Sherpas would continue, but they wanted to rest at the Balcony for a few minutes. We couldn’t argue. Neil and I turned and headed up after Allen onto the ridge that would
eventually lead us to the South Summit.

Those first few minutes after we climbed over the Balcony Ledge onto the ridge, I began to warm up. I felt the blood now reach into my feet again and my legs lost the stiffness that the wait had
caused. My breathing reached that level again where you just heave aggressively into your mask. My eyes stared at the snow in front of me. I noticed that it was getting lighter and that the storm
had passed. As we were drawing closer it seemed as if now the mountain was beginning to open her arms to us. I felt an energy now that I had not had before. I pushed the pace on.

I moved past Neil and mumbled to him that I had to keep moving. The faster pace was keeping me warm. He nodded slowly and tiredly at me as I went past. His head was low and he looked deeply
exhausted. But I knew he wouldn’t stop, he was too close and he knew it. Today was 26 May, the day that his father had died some fifteen years earlier, when Neil was only nineteen. The fact
that this early dawn at 28,000 feet Neil was struggling with every sinew, one last time, to achieve what had so cruelly eluded him now twice, was all the more poignant. His father somewhere up
above would be cheering him on; of that I was certain. He leant over his axe, heaving into his mask. I knew, though, that he would not turn round, so carried on.

The energy that I was experiencing worried me. I thought that perhaps I was getting too much oxygen; maybe my regulator was giving me 3.5 litres per minute not 2.5. If that was the case then I
would soon find my tank empty. My mind raced with the possibilities. I checked the gauge again. It firmly read 2.5. It had to be right. The memory of what happened to Mick loomed in my mind. All I
could do was hope that it wouldn’t fail; not now, not so close.

After an hour on the ridge we hit this deep drift snow again. I cursed. The energy that I had felt before began to trickle from my limbs with each step forward. I could see Allen just ahead,
floundering in the powder. He seemed to be making no upward progress as he slid back down into the deep snow beneath him. I looked up and the Face just soared away above. It was drift snow as far
as I could see.

To our right, the Face dropped sharply away. The gradient was extreme. Nothing lay between us and the plains of Tibet, 8,000 feet below. I looked back down at my feet.

I hardly even noticed the magic of the views up here, of the entire Himalaya stretched below us, bathed in the pre-dawn glow. I didn’t have the energy. My mind and focus were entirely
directed on what my legs were doing. Summoning up the resolve to heave one’s thigh out of the deep powder and throw it a step forward was all that seemed to matter. An anger filled my head
each time the snow would sink up to my waist. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do this for much longer.

Somewhere beneath the South Summit we found the ropes that had been put in on the team’s first attempt. I clutched at them eagerly. They posed some vague sense of comfort as I stooped and
clipped in. I clipped a jumar on to the rope as well; it would stop me slipping back. Exhausted, I allowed myself to rest. The harness took my weight and I sat slumped in a ball, breathing. I
closed my eyes.

As we approached the South Summit, the wind began to pick up. I noticed it at once as it swirled around my feet. It howled and whipped the surface snow up into a frenzy.

Noel Odell, one of the climbers who had attempted Everest in the pre-war years, spoke of the sight above here like this: ‘the mighty summit seemed to look down with cold indifference and
howl derision in windy gusts.’ Nothing seemed to have changed in seventy years. I kept moving slowly, driven by the knowledge that the South Summit wasn’t far.

In many ways those last few metres to the South Summit were the hardest of my life. I wasn’t close enough to feel the adrenalin of being near the top. Instead, though, I just felt this
deep pounding fatigue that reduced me to two steps at a time. It was all I could manage.

Neil was soon close behind me again. I had to keep moving. Just get to the South Summit, was all I thought, just get there. You’re so close. Allen in front had already staggered over the
snow lip and reached it. But still it never seemed to arrive.

I felt every ounce of energy now being sucked from my body. I knew that this is what it must be like to drown. My body, more than ever before, screamed at me in desperation to turn around. I
moaned out loud for the first time, as if I was venting the voice that told me to turn back. I couldn’t, not now.

In a drunken stupor, barely aware of anything around me, I collapsed in a small hollow on the leeward side of the South Summit, at 28,700 feet. My head leant back on the ice behind me, my eyes
were tightly closed. My head then fell forward and I began to hyperventilate. My body desperately needed more oxygen; but all I had was the 2.5 litres that trickled past my nostrils every minute.
It wasn’t enough, but it was all I had, and the tank was getting lower by the second.

Over the top of us, arctic hurricane-force winds blew like I had never experienced before. They seemed to howl as the three of us sat huddled together. I was worried that I was low on oxygen. I
couldn’t reach the tank to check the gauge, it was buried in my pack; it was too cold to start fumbling around just to confirm what we should already know. I should be able to calculate it. I
tried to work out the mathematics in my head. The thin air robbed me, though, of the ability to do these basic sums. I gave up, frustrated at how slow my mind was working. I would have to take the
gamble. It was a chance that I had to take. I hoped it was the right decision.

Ahead I could see the final ridge and the Hillary Step that lined the route to the true summit. Only 250 feet higher above this Step was the place of dreams.

Snow was pouring from the top, as these winds raced over it. A vortex of cloud hovered below the leeward face, protected from the wind.

Staring at it, my body just felt empty, all energy had been ripped from me. The ridge was a haze in front of me. Yet somehow in the few minutes that we lay there, in the midst of all that sought
to stop us, I felt a peace. Something deep inside knew that I could do it. I would somehow find the energy. The more I looked at the ridge the more I felt this energy flooding back. Hillary once
said that the mountains gave him strength; until this point I don’t think that I had really understood this. But lying there, at my weakest moment, I found the mountain giving me a strength I
had never experienced before.