Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (33 page)

The acclimatization program would begin with a three-month period in the autumn, living at “intermediate” altitudes of around 13,000 feet, near Sherpa villages. Over the winter the climbers and the scientists observing them would move higher up and spend a further three to four months alternating between the two high camps, attempting to achieve what Pugh described as “complete acclimatization” at 20,000 feet.

Toward the end of the program, a climbing party using supplementary oxygen would go ahead and forge a route all the way to the summit of Everest, putting in ropes and establishing and supplying the necessary high-altitude camps. Then, the star climbers would attempt the summit
without
oxygen, using the high camps and the prepared route.

Hillary seemed enthusiastic. But he was not prepared to return to the Nepalese side of Everest. Nor did he think he could raise the necessary funds: “I find the thought of returning to Everest from the South a rather dull one, and in any case I’m damned if I know if I could raise much cash for a large-scale expedition that would be required, seeing the thing’s been done several times before. The same might also apply to Makalu . . . although I would quite like a crack at that mountain.”
³
In late 1958, Hillary had applied to the Chinese for permission to attempt Everest from the north, though he and Pugh both knew that there was no real chance of his application succeeding.

Hillary’s lack of enthusiasm for repeating the 1953 route was well known to Pugh. The Everest hero’s fame as a high-altitude climber rested entirely on that one successful ascent. An attempt by the same route without oxygen—should it fail—would do his climbing reputation no favors. “It would have been difficult for Ed being in the public eye on Everest again,” one of his close friends explained. “For one thing, the public would have expected him to get to the top.”
⁴

A joint expedition with Pugh to a different destination like Makalu did have its attractions, however. Sensitive about his perceived lack of gravitas, Hillary was tempted by the idea of associating himself with an expedition which, because it had serious scientific objectives, would not be dismissed as just another self-indulgent sporting adventure, and would confer respectability on all those involved.

At the same time, the other strand in Hillary’s character—the part of him that loved unfussy, inexpensive, Shipton-style expeditions—was pulling him in a different direction. He was tempted to turn his back on the Himalayan giants, and opt instead for a cheaper climbing expedition with the New Zealand Alpine Club, to a lower, unclimbed Himalayan peak. “Would you be interested physiologically in an expedition to a 25,100-foot peak in 1961?” he asked Pugh.

None of this fitted with Pugh’s adventurous concept, however, and he was single-minded in either flatly ignoring Hillary’s demurrals or sweeping them aside as if they were irrelevant. He had his eyes firmly fixed on Everest. But, while his six-page plan gave the impression that the central aim of the expedition was to address one of the biggest challenges in mountaineering, in fact, the scientific side of the expedition was also hugely ambitious. If it came off, it promised to be the crowning achievement of his career.

The only people who had spent significant time at or above 20,000 feet were mountaineers who had shown that it was possible to remain relatively healthy at this height for as long as four to six weeks. On the other hand, most of the climbers who went above 23,000 feet and remained there for more than a few days found they deteriorated rapidly, with the deterioration increasing as they went higher. Whether these limits would remain the same if people spent longer at intermediate heights, adjusting to altitude, was not known. Pugh was determined to find out.

Mountaineers were not the only people who stood to benefit from a better understanding of the physiology of acclimatization. Pugh estimated that there were at least 10 million people working or living permanently at heights of 12,000 feet, mostly in South America and Tibet.
⁵
At sea level, too, there were compelling medical and scientific reasons for studying the impact of high altitude on the human body.

Lowland people suffering from chronic illnesses such as heart disease, bronchitis, and emphysema lived with long-term deprivation of oxygen. Lacking a comprehensive understanding of what happens to the healthy body when deprived of oxygen over a long period of time, it was hard for physicians to distinguish which of their symptoms were caused by their bodies adapting—“acclimatizing”—to the shortage of oxygen, and which were the direct result of their illnesses. Anesthetists handling patients in intensive care units also required a better understanding of the impact of oxygen lack on the healthy body, as did engineers designing pressurization and oxygen equipment for high-flying aircraft and space capsules.

There were crucial gaps in the scientific knowledge, and yet there had only been a handful of major scientific expeditions to high altitude in the first half of the twentieth century. Each of them had made important contributions, but none had lasted for more than a few weeks, and very little research had been carried out above 18,000 feet. Twenty-five years had elapsed since the last landmark expedition, which went to Aucanquilcha in the Chilean Andes in 1935, with Bruce Dill of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory as the scientific director.
⁶
Dill’s team spent several weeks studying their own responses to altitude, at heights up to 20,140 feet. But most of the research at their highest camp had to be carried out by the only two members of the team who felt well enough—Ancel Keys, a physiologist from Harvard, and the youthful Bryan Matthews, then a Cambridge undergraduate, who later became the redoubtable head of the Everest High-Altitude Committee. They stayed at the top camp for only ten days. Pugh had done his own studies at heights up to 21,200 feet on Cho Oyu and Everest, and the pioneering gentleman scientist Alexander Kellas had experimented for short periods at similar heights on the Himalayan mountain of Kamet in the early part of the century.

An intriguing part of the Andes expedition of 1935 was the interest the researchers took in the lives of a group of miners at the village of Quilcha, at 17,500 feet. The village was 1,500 feet below the sulphur mine where the miners worked. It took them one and a half hours to climb up on foot to go to work and 25 minutes to come down, yet they refused to accept accommodation at 18,500 feet, just below the mine. They preferred to expend all the extra time and effort getting to work, rather than living higher up where they suffered loss of weight and appetite and an inability to sleep. Many physiologists concluded from this evidence that a height of around 17,500 feet was the limit at which people could live permanently.

There were wonderful opportunities to do pioneering research, but Pugh’s proposal relied heavily on finding sponsors interested in the prospect of the great Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Everest without oxygen. The largest sum Pugh had ever raised on his own account was £2,300.
⁷
But now he boldly suggested to Hillary that they should attempt to raise £50,000—the equivalent of roughly £900,000 today.
⁸
Hillary knew that would be difficult, and suggested introducing some popular theme, like a search for the Yeti.
⁹
However, as time went on, he appeared to lose interest, brushing Pugh off with the words: “Frankly, Griff, I haven’t been very optimistic about financial backing for the Everest job, and my thoughts have been turning in a rather different direction.”

Then, after a silence of over two months, Pugh received a letter from Hillary in the United States announcing, out of the blue, that he had raised the money from an American source—“£40,000 or more”—enough to “do some excellent physiological research, have a look for the Yeti, and do some damn good climbing.”
¹⁰
And he wanted Pugh to join him. “
The question is
—If I get the finance for this trip will you come in with me on it? . . . YES or NO . . . If I get the money and you aren’t interested, I’d like your advice anyway, but hope you’d be in it hammer and tongs!”

Pugh cabled an immediate response:
ACCEPT ENTHUSIASTICALLY AND COUNT ON MRC SUPPORT
.
¹¹

Hillary’s sponsor was Field Enterprises Educational Corporation, wealthy American publishers of
World Book Encyclopedia.
Hillary had been in New York to receive an award when Field Enterprises had invited him to their headquarters in Chicago to take part in an educational television program. Dining one evening with the public relations director, John Dienhart, Hillary mentioned his “dream” of combining a serious study of acclimatization with a Yeti-hunting expedition in the Himalayas. Dienhart leapt at the idea.
¹²

Hillary did not involve Pugh in the negotiations, which won him a grant of £42,000. Telling Pugh not to “worry too much about the details,” he wrote his own expedition plan that was similar to Pugh’s but with two key differences. Where Pugh had tried to sell the expedition as a climbing venture, Hillary hardly mentioned the climbing. His key objectives were the Yeti hunt, and the research into extended acclimatization, which he claimed to have been working on with “Dr. Griffith Pugh, the eminent research physiologist of the British Medical Research Council.”
¹³

The first mention of climbing appeared only at the bottom of the second page, in Hillary’s description of the “Physiological Program,” where he explained that the team would attempt an oxygen-free ascent of Makalu to test how well they had adapted to high altitude. He justified opting for Makalu, rather than Everest, by saying he thought it better to try out the theory that Everest could be climbed without oxygen “on a lesser giant before putting it to the ultimate test.” But he did not adopt Pugh’s plan to have climbers with oxygen prepare a route to the summit in advance of the attempt without oxygen. This was to be a completely oxygen-free attempt.

The subject that took real pride of place in Hillary’s proposal, however, was the hunt for the Yeti, or “Abominable Snowman.” Belief in the existence of this mythical, giant, hairy, man-like creature of the Himalayas was widespread among the Sherpas. There were numerous stories of Sherpa sightings of Yetis, but none of European sightings, although both Europeans and Sherpas had seen strange humanoid footprints in the snow, thought to be Yeti tracks, in remote mountainous areas. After the Everest reconnaissance in 1951, Michael Ward and Eric Shipton had taken some exceptionally clear photographs of “Yeti footprints” near the Rolwaling Valley, which had generated huge fascination in Europe and America.

There had already been several Yeti hunts, including one in 1954 by the Everest cameraman Tom Stobart and the
Daily Mail
journalist Ralph Izzard.
¹⁴
But Hillary promised that his Yeti hunt would be superior to all previous efforts, requiring “a far greater degree of mountaineering skill and ruggedness than the ordinary Yeti party, and probably a great deal more patience.” Yeti hunting was just the kind of “publicity stunt” that Alpine Club members frowned upon. Michael Ward—the first person Pugh invited onto the expedition—was concerned about being associated with it.
¹⁵
Pugh, on the contrary, thought it was an inspired way of “inducing the climbers to spend a long time at altitude.”

Pugh was worried, however, that Hillary might not fully appreciate the scale of his scientific ambition. He wanted his side of the expedition to be a world-class scientific venture. His worst fear was that it might degenerate into a repetition of Cho Oyu or Everest—“just another climbing expedition with a physiologist attached.”
¹⁶
When Hillary came to England in October, Pugh made him promise that physiology would be a “primary objective,” and that the climbers would be required to “collaborate in the physiological work throughout the expedition.”
¹⁷

Having raised the money, Hillary assumed the role of overall leader of the expedition, and Field Enterprises gave him carte blanche to choose the team, except for two experts—Marlin Perkins, the director of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, and Dr. Larry Swann, a biologist from San Francisco State College—who were included to give the Yeti hunt some gravitas. As leader of the scientific side, Pugh was acutely aware of the need to recruit “a strong enough physiological team to do a first-class job.” Hillary let him select his own three scientists, plus Michael Ward.

Pugh went for younger men, who would find it easier to tolerate a grueling winter at high altitude. Perhaps he also wanted to avoid facing any personal challenges from contemporaries with better paper qualifications. He did not advertise, and the process was very informal. Two of the three recruits simply heard about the expedition on the grapevine and volunteered themselves.

This was true of John West, a gifted twenty-nine-year-old Australian respiratory physiologist from Hammersmith Hospital Postgraduate Medical School. Pugh took him on after one interview despite his lack of either climbing or high-altitude experience. Dr. Jim Milledge, a registrar in respiratory medicine at Southampton Hospital, and a climber with Himalayan experience, also volunteered. The third scientist, Dr. Sukhamay Lahiri, was studying for a doctor of philosophy degree at the famous “Oxford School” of physiology, which had been doing research into the way the body controls breathing at high altitude ever since the heyday of Professor J. S. Haldane. The two leading lights of the department, Dan Cunningham and Bryan Lloyd (under whom Lahiri was studying), had developed sophisticated tools of analysis and had collaborated with Pugh before, lending him equipment, advising him on techniques, and analyzing samples he had brought home in sealed ampoules from the Himalayas.

Leading a group of young scientists on a complex project under testing conditions was a daunting prospect for a man who was not regarded as a team player. But Pugh’s recruits turned out to be as ambitious and perfectionist as he was.