– Chapter 2 –

The Idea and the Team

The thought of climbing Everest in winter had never entered my head. I had once finished an article on trends in mountaineering by mentioning the untapped potential of the Himalaya in winter, but my mind was occupied with other projects. In early 1979, with Pete Boardman and Doug Scott, I had climbed the third highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga, 28,208 feet, by a new route and for the first time without the use of oxygen equipment. Subsequently my thoughts were taken up with the return to K2, at 28,253 feet the world’s second highest mountain. In 1978 a team of eight of us had attempted the difficult west ridge, but we had abandoned the climb when our companion, Nick Estcourt, was swept to his death from 22,000 feet in an avalanche. In spite of the traumatic memories this mountain held for us, there remained the compulsion to climb it and a team of four of us planned a new attempt for 1980.

My days were filled, when back in Britain between expeditions, with a crazy mixture of ceaseless telephone calls, occupation with running a climbing equipment shop and endless preparations for the next expedition. Into my shop, the Magic Mountain, one day in the autumn of 1979, came Chris Bonington and Brian Hall, ostensibly shopping for gear of which Chris, after two-and-a-half decades of climbing, still does not seem to have enough. With Chris out of earshot, Brian quietly asked if I was doing anything during the winter of 1981-82 and, if not, would I be interested in going to Everest with a small group of people, which he and Alan Rouse were organising, to climb the west ridge.

Inevitably Chris Bonington’s name is associated with Mount Everest, but he is representative of an older generation with a more traditional approach to expeditions, having a formal leadership and hierarchical structure of command and organisation. By waiting until he was out of range of hearing, Brian was letting me know that he did not want Chris to know anything about the project. It was a non-verbal communication of the intention to form an expedition more along the lines of the successful expeditions we ourselves had grown accustomed to: lightweight in logistics, small-scale in terms of numbers and democratic in organisation.

Usually I have been involved with the planning of an expedition right from the start, or had a reasonable idea of the possibility of being invited. This invitation, however, came completely without warning. I had a moment in which to give a reply – Brian was getting a lift to the Lake District with Chris, who was in a hurry. I had a sensation of giddiness as the beauty of the idea, the breathtaking audacity of such a suggestion, hit me at the same time as a rapid vision of all the impossibilities – work involvements, lack of money, lack of time, personal relationships. It was the traditional dilemma of the climber, the conflict between his career, social life, love life and security and the fulfilment which comes from the all-absorbing commitment to some heady project. I gave Brian a quick ‘yes’ and agreed to speak to him later. A few days later I received, from Chamonix, a letter from Alan Rouse with details of their plans and a typed list, with my name and address already on it, of the eight members of the expedition. My consent had been taken for granted; asking was simply a formality!

The winter of 1981-82 seemed suitably far off, almost two-and-a-half years away, and I could comfortably shelve the idea until nearer the time. In the last eighteen months I had been away on three expeditions – nine months in total, hardly leaving myself time to unpack from one trip before re-packing for the next. My shop was being run on a chaotic basis, the days just not being long enough for all that there was to do, and I relied heavily upon the invaluable work of the shop’s manager, Alf. There had already been one casualty in my private life as a result of my absences abroad when I came back from a second expedition in six months, having had only a six-week period at home between the two trips, to find that my girlfriend had decided she had had enough of associating with someone whom she only saw every few months.

I was returning to K2 in the spring of 1980 and after that I planned to spend some time at home to concentrate on work and to generally get my affairs in some sort of order. A longish spell at home seemed very desirable, even offering the possibility of finding the leisure time to do some rock climbing, which expeditions preclude. At the end of that spell was the enthralling prospect of Everest in winter, which I had not focused on clearly but knew in the back of my mind was the next logical step for me.

Some months after I was invited we learnt that the winter period of 1981-82 was not available to us, making our options 1980-81 or some date five years hence. Suddenly the leisured approach to Everest vanished – a hard decision had to be made. The later date was hardly worth considering, for by then the route may well have been climbed, taking away some of the unknown element. The 1980-81 date, less than twelve months away, was a little too close and we would be hard pressed to raise the money and organise the equipment for then. For my part I was already committed to an expedition to K2 which, all being well, I would only be back from three months before we needed to leave. Life was going a little too fast. It seemed clear that 1980-81 was the only sensible choice and, faced with a decision, I realised that it was all-important for me to go on the Everest winter expedition because it promised to be extremely hard and improbable – the finest challenge in the sport that I could conceive of. It was so obviously the next logical step forward in mountaineering, to climb in the Himalaya in winter, that I felt the idea had been part of my consciousness for years. Come what may, I decided to go.

The team was to be made up of a small group of friends, most of whom had climbed together for a number of years. The birth of the original, daring idea was due to Alan Rouse and Brian Hall, who had taken part in a bold, lightweight ascent of the 25,300-foot Jannu in eastern Nepal. Both Alan and Brian had climbed all over the world and had first ascents and impressive repeats to their credit, particularly in South America where they had spent many months. They had used their worldwide experience to start a guiding service which had the whole world as its territory.

Alan, in the early 1970s, had been representative of a volatile new generation of rock climbers. Whilst still in his early teens, endowed with a fine natural ability which was belied by his studious air of abstraction, he was instrumental in setting a new trend in climbing with the boldness of some of his ascents. Unusually for someone who excelled in one facet of the sport, he began to transfer his attention to the bigger mountains, disclosing a drive and imagination beneath the deliberately cultivated exterior of a person dedicated to enjoyment and anarchy. He seems a complex character, able to engage in the most serious of discussions and gain the respect of people from all walks of life, yet sometimes finding himself inexplicably involved in the most outrageous of escapades. Whatever he embarks upon, he wants to go to the limit with it. He had studied mathematics at Cambridge and one sometimes gets the impression that he tolerates, good naturedly, conversations on any subject but that his mind is flying along at a rapid pace and that he can assimilate concepts and spit out answers with the speed of a computer. Attacking Everest in winter was an astonishing idea but it was typical of Alan’s cheek that he should have come up with it.

For a number of years, Brian and Alan had been close friends, Brian providing a sound, organisational sense to counterbalance Alan’s prolific ideas. There is a contradiction in Brian in that he has acquired a reputation for outlandish and wild behaviour, but when he turns his attention to organising such a thing as an expedition, he displays unsuspected responsibility and a forceful persuasiveness which ensures that his side of a job is always completed.

Alan and Brian had climbed in South America with the Burgess twins, Adrian and Alan, two of the climbing world’s most colourful characters. Identical twins, tall, broad and blond, of Viking descent and seeming to have inherited their forebears’ predilection for rape and pillage, they are known as strong and resourceful mountaineers, specialising in survival. Alan Rouse used to say of them that they were the best people he had ever met as companions on a mountain. They were an automatic choice.

Paul Nunn is a prominent figure in mountaineering, not least for his infectious laugh, which accompanies each tale from his vast repertoire of anecdotes and tall stories. Paul has been an established figure in climbing since many of us could remember. There is a restless energy about Paul which sends him off every year to some part of the world on a filming, if not a climbing, assignment, and the same restlessness, the same determination not to miss anything that might happen, keeps him up ‘til all hours of the night to be the last one to leave a pub or party. He has an endless capacity for conversing on any topic imaginable and a wry scepticism about life in general. Paul, without being overweight, is a solid bulk. His massive hands wrapped round a mug of beer seem to demonstrate a strength of personality as well as of physique. His experience over many years covers most of Europe, the Pamirs, the Caucasus, the Karakorum and the Indian Himalaya. As a lecturer in economic history, he has a respectability that many of us lack, and Alan asked him along on account of his solid background as a mountaineer as well as his...