Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (31 page)

19

A Man in a Hurry

“Your mother—she was a sweetie,” Sir Edmund Hillary told me when I visited him at his house in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2006. “Griff gave her a pretty rough time, I thought. He was very pleasant to me, but not so much to his family . . . He was a very complex person.”

In the years immediately after Everest, Ed Hillary was an occasional visitor to our Harpenden home, sometimes staying for up to two weeks. I had not seen him since I was a child, though his handsome face had smiled jauntily at me from countless ski-resort posters in Switzerland and France over the years.

Now, at age eighty-seven, the famous Everest hero struck me as big, burly, and benign. Rising to greet me from his armchair in the center of a light, airy sitting room, he grinned down at me from his great height. It was a slightly lopsided grin. The formidable barrel chest that had seemed extraordinarily large to my six-year-old eyes was no longer so imposing, for he had become rather portly. There was humor in his voice and a twinkle in his eye, and I could see at once why so many people felt great affection for him.

It had taken several years to set up this meeting. At first I had felt hurt when my letters, e-mails, and faxes addressed to Sir Edmund at his home in Auckland had elicited no reply, only a blank silence. Hillary had been on four expeditions with my father and had co-led one of them with him, so I had hoped and imagined that he would respond in some way, even if he did not want to meet me. In 2006, having failed to get any reaction, I decided to travel to New Zealand anyway, thinking I would knock on his door and beard him in his lair. Only then did it occur to me to make contact with Hillary’s second wife, June Mulgrew, who had met my father in England and in Nepal. His first wife had been killed in a plane crash with their daughter Belinda in 1975. Plucking up my courage, I rang Hillary’s telephone number. Lady Hillary answered. I explained who I was and asked to be allowed to interview her, rather than her husband. A friendly conversation ensued, which culminated in an opportunity to meet both husband and wife.

When Hillary and I settled down to talk and I began to question him about Cho Oyu and Everest, he immediately diverted the conversation to his memories of my father’s idiosyncrasies. Chuckling, he recounted a story about being driven to London in the 1950s in Griffith’s sports car:

When I stayed in your home . . . [Griff] had this little sports car and he would drive me into town and drop me off. On one memorable occasion he drove at an appalling speed . . . we whipped down this straight and I could see that there was a truck turning onto it. I thought [in terror], “Here we go” . . . then Griff put on his brakes and we ended up with the front of Griff’s car just under the back of the big truck. Another six inches and we would both have had it.

Behind the wheel Griffith behaved like the daring ski-racer he was in his youth. His silver-gray Austin-Healey 100, bought in 1953, was his pride and joy. All the Everesters and most of their wives were pressed into terrifyingly fast demonstration rides in it. When it was a month old, he fell asleep at the wheel on the way home from a boozy Everest reception and wrote it off. A plaintive letter in his correspondence file apologized to a certain Sir Edward Penton—one of “the good and the great”—for having failed to turn up at a lunch party Penton had arranged at the Garrick Club to introduce my father to some eminent personages: “I am so very sorry about missing lunch today. I had to go out of London to see about my car which has been smashed up and so did not look at my engagement book until too late. I hope you will forgive me!”
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There are countless similar letters of contrition among Griffith’s papers, covering innumerable car crashes and forgotten appointments. Many an Everest reunion party was enlivened by tales of “Griff’s fast cars, his crashes and his lady friends.”
²
If Hillary regarded Pugh as a terrifying driver, when it came to climbing expeditions the judgments were reversed. There were to be times in the years after Everest when Pugh found Hillary a disturbingly gung-ho expedition leader.

Hillary was instinctively attracted to small, flexible expeditions with the minimum of equipment and the maximum of spontaneity. He derived immense physical exhilaration from climbing, his enthusiasm frequently bursting forth in “exuberant shouts” and “wild New Zealand yells” of joy.
³

Having ascended Everest helped by oxygen on the back of a large expedition, it was always likely that he would feel that he had not yet really proven himself. Few climbers were completely immune to that dismissive remark of Bill Tilman’s: “When a man has to start inhaling oxygen, his spirit has already been conquered by the mountain and the limit of his capacity has been very clearly defined.”

The Everest oxygen was one of the topics I wanted to broach with Hillary, but he seemed unwilling to dwell on it. “Griff didn’t have much to do with the oxygen, I don’t think,” he said, dismissively. When I pointed out that Pugh had “set the flow rates,” his only response was that he personally had used less oxygen than Pugh had recommended: “Griff decided that the correct amount of oxygen at altitude was four liters a minute, but I didn’t use that. I used three and it worked very well. In actual fact four liters is what they use now.”

This boast of his prowess only made me aware that there must have been times after Everest when Ed Hillary felt under pressure to affirm that he deserved his soaring reputation as a high-altitude climber. Everest 1953 had turned him into a worldwide celebrity. With his engaging, unpretentious manner, craggy good looks, and tall, lanky physique, this proved to be something he was very good at, though he always modestly claimed not to enjoy his fame. He traveled the world telling the Everest story to rapturous audiences, receiving medals and awards.
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And, in the bright glow of the Everest spotlight, he came to be viewed as a high-altitude climber of unparalleled skill and courage, though in reality his experience of climbing at extreme altitude was still limited. Before 1951, all Hillary’s climbing, with the exception of a brief trip to the European Alps in 1949, had been undertaken in the mountains of New Zealand, where Mount Cook, at 12,316 feet, is the highest peak.

Born in 1919, Hillary was one of three children of an independent-minded, forcefully moralistic man who once ran a small-time newspaper but later became a professional beekeeper. Hillary emerged from a strict, ascetic upbringing under his father’s watchful eye, by his own account shy, unconfident, lacking in friends, and resentful of his uncompromising parent, though deeply fond of his gentler mother. A lackluster career at Auckland Grammar School, during which he felt persecuted and inferior, had been made bearable by reading and dreaming: “Books of adventure became my greatest support—Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rider Haggard, John Buchan . . . In my imagination I constantly re-enacted heroic episodes, and I was always the hero. I died dramatically on a score of battlefields and rescued a hundred lovely maidens.”
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School was followed by “two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science” at the University of Auckland before he dropped out to join the family beekeeping business. At the end of the 1930s he began trekking and climbing in the New Zealand mountains and at last found a milieu in which his physical prowess and limitless energy enabled him to excel: “I was . . . happy to carry any load, push anybody up hills, rush off on any reconnaissance, make any trail . . . I knew I had more physical energy than most and I revelled in driving myself to the utmost.”
⁶

After a spell in the New Zealand Air Force toward the end of the war, seeking out opportunities to climb in his spare time, Hillary returned to beekeeping, disappearing to the New Zealand Alps whenever he could get away. Through climbing he met a community of like-minded New Zealanders whom he described as “the first real friends I ever had.” Taken under the wing of the renowned New Zealand guide Harry Ayres in the second half of the 1940s, he improved his skills as an ice climber, and learned “a little of that subtle science of snow- and ice-craft that only experience can really teach.”
⁷
He was on his first trip to the Himalayas in 1951, when the invitation came from Eric Shipton to join the Everest reconnaissance. Neither Shipton’s expedition of 1951 nor the Cho Oyu expedition of 1952 took Hillary above 23,000 feet, and this was the limit of his experience of extreme altitude, until the Everest triumph catapulted him into unexpected stardom as one of the greatest high-altitude climbers the world had ever seen.

The newspapers swooned about Hillary’s “immense strength.” He was “as tough as a plaited steel hawser,” “as quick-witted as a champion fencer,” “as fit as a highly trained Olympic athlete,” “a born climber,” “a man utterly without fear,” “a hugely experienced mountaineer,” “one of the most powerful climbers in the world.” In Britain, Germany, America, South Africa—wherever he went—the one question on everyone’s lips was “What next?” As a Welsh newspaper asked its readers, after Hillary had lectured to wildly enthusiastic audiences in Cardiff:

Had you climbed Everest, would you be satisfied?

I think so!

But not Sir Edmund Hillary, the man who made the ascent! His one thought is to continue climbing; to attempt Everest from the north col and also to lead an expedition to Makalu . . . This is the kind of spirit that has brought such fame to the modest bee-keeping New Zealander.
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In March 1954, Hillary deserted the lecture rostrum to take on the leadership of his own Himalayan expedition for the first time. It then became evident that the Everest experience had failed to convince him of the importance of the acclimatization and hydration strategies devised by Pugh for climbing at high altitudes.

In a venture organized by the New Zealand Alpine Club—with sponsorship of Hillary from
The Times—
Hillary, with Charles Evans, Dr. Michael Ball, New Zealanders Norman Hardie and George Lowe, and five of their compatriots, set off for the Barun Valley, 15 miles from Everest, which Hillary had visited with Eric Shipton after the Cho Oyu expedition.

The plan was to bag some of the moderately high unclimbed peaks in the area and carry out a survey. But while they were there, they discovered a promising approach to Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, which was then still unconquered. The 27,825-foot Makalu is more difficult than Everest and was not included in their original plan, but they could not resist the idea of rushing this formidable mountain.

The consequences for Hillary made this—in his own words—an “unbelievably stupid” decision. A few days earlier he had injured his ribs in a failed attempt to rescue a member of his team from a crevasse. He had tried to conduct the rescue by tying a rope around his waist and having five Sherpas lower him into the crevasse where Jim McFarlane was lying injured. But Hillary had failed to realize that his weight would cause the rope to rise up his body and crush his ribs—a symptom of his inexperience. (It was standard practice to wear a harness for such an exercise, or to loop the rope beneath the feet.) McFarlane, who was left in the crevasse overnight and successfully rescued the next day, lost half of each foot, both his little fingers, and all the outer tendons of the others to frostbite.
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Shortly afterward, despite his injured ribs and with scant regard for whether his team was properly acclimatized or equipped, Hillary hurled himself enthusiastically into the assault on Makalu, climbing to a height of 23,000 feet as fast as he could. “I couldn’t bear to be left out,” he later wrote, adding with relish: “Despite our lack of acclimatization we hacked our way up . . . we didn’t have the equipment to go really high but the party threw itself into a vigorous reconnaissance.”
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The ascent came to an abrupt end at 23,000 feet when Hillary collapsed and fell into a state of semiconsciousness. Since they had no oxygen for emergencies, he remained semiconscious for four days while he was carried down to a lower camp, suffering from “terrible hallucinations” and “a terrible feeling of suffocation and extreme dehydration.”
¹¹
Only then did he come around. Brian Wilkins, one of the New Zealand climbers, later claimed that Hillary had been in “indifferent health and not eating well” even before he “rushed the crevasse rescue.” His life as an after-dinner speaker had probably “taken its toll on his fitness.”

The previous year, John Hunt had made sure that all the climbers in the Everest team adhered to Pugh’s altitude regime, but Norman Hardie remembered Hillary and George Lowe in early 1954 boasting that they themselves “had not taken Griff’s advice very seriously.”
¹²
Then Hillary threw caution to the winds, dashing up Makalu when he was neither fit nor acclimatized, and was clearly dehydrated.
¹³
He had performed exceptionally well on Everest, but after the Makalu incident he had difficulty tolerating high altitude for the rest of his life: “I believe my experience on Makalu started the deterioration of the ability to acclimatize I had shown on Everest,” he reflected later.
¹⁴

In 1955 Hillary joined the British and Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE), led by British geologist Vivian (Bunny) Fuchs. Antarctica is mountainous, but its highest peak is only 16,050 feet, offering little scope for high-altitude climbing. The aim of Fuchs’s expedition was to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent.
¹⁵
This kept Hillary busy until the summer of 1958. By the time the project came to an end, nearly all the major Himalayan summits had been vanquished, and the world’s elite mountaineers were already moving on to the challenges of climbing the highest mountains by the more difficult routes, and climbing them without oxygen.