The Lost Explorer (20 page)

In the end, Thom Pollard and Andy Politz volunteered to make the second search. Andy was willing to forgo the summit because he’d climbed Everest and because he’d gotten caught up in the search. Irvine’s body and the all-important camera still remained to be found. Thom was not, strictly speaking, part of Simo’s team: he’d been hired by
NOVA
to shoot video and take digital pictures, so he felt it was his responsibility to go with the search. He’d actually set out on the first search on May 1, but he had had trouble with his oxygen and had to turn back.

After we’d found Mallory, the obvious goal of a second search was to look for Irvine and the Kodak Vestpocket camera. But by May 15, enough snow had fallen that it seemed unlikely we could find Irvine. Andy and Thom decided instead to go back to Mallory, use a metal detector, and make sure we hadn’t missed anything on May 1.

On May 16, the four of us who were headed for the summit climbed up from Camp V to Camp VI. Andy and Thom came up with us, carrying loads to aid our summit push, helped us pitch camp, and then traversed to the west toward Mallory’s body.

I’d never met Andy before the expedition, but I knew him
by reputation. He’d been to Everest four times before and had summitted from the north with Simo in 1991. He’s a very strong climber, thirty-nine years old, from Columbus, Ohio. For fifteen years he was a mountain guide; now he works as a schoolteacher and as a rigger for films and commercials. He’s also an accomplished sea kayaker, sailor, and boat builder. Most of the guys on the expedition tended to be long and lean, like me, but Andy’s built like a fire plug. He’s not tall, and his forearms are like oak stumps. The guy just exudes power.

Thom’s a year older than I, at thirty-seven, slender and rather gentle-looking. He’s a climber of moderate abilities, and he didn’t have as much big-mountain experience as the rest of us, with one expedition to Gasherbrum II in the Karakoram under his belt. On the trail he was really strong. He has a ribald sense of humor—he’s a very witty guy. He was a pleasure to be with on this trip, because he would speak his mind; he’s honest with other people. Much like Noel Odell in 1924, Thom got stronger as the expedition progressed.

Thom was in an awkward limbo, because he wasn’t officially a member of the climbing team, yet he had the same responsibilities as the rest of us. Whenever Simo called for a “mandatory group meeting,” the question was, Is Thom expected to attend or not? But he served as a valuable bridge between the climbers and the film crew.

Because they’d carried loads for us from Camp V to Camp VI on the sixteenth, Thom and Andy got a relatively late start on the second search. They didn’t branch off to the west until about 2:30 in the afternoon. They were both using oxygen. Later Thom told me about their day at 26,700 feet.

Since only Andy had been to the site before, Thom had to depend on him to relocate Mallory in the makeshift grave of stones we’d piled up. The plan was to head straight for the site, but this turned out to be easier said than done. “Andy just kept walking and walking, not saying anything,” Thom told me later. “After a while I said to myself, ‘I know he’s lost.’ Finally Andy said, ‘I can’t find him.’ ‘You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me,’ I said.”

The pair swept back and forth across the ledges where Andy thought the grave must be; with the new snow, everything looked different. Finally, after two hours of wandering, their labor was rewarded.

At the scene, Thom was struck dumb. “It evoked something deeply spiritual,” he recalled later. “I kept thinking, this is one of the greatest figures in the history of mountaineering. I got down on my knees and asked for guidance. I prayed, in essence, for guidance not to desecrate the site.”

Working silently, the two men removed the stones that covered the body. With the metal detector, Andy found an “artifact” our first team had missed. In his pants pocket, Mallory had stuck a wristwatch. The glass was gone from its face, and the minute and second hands were broken off, but the short hour hand pointed to between one and two, a little closer to two. (Later, the hour hand was accidentally broken off as they carried the watch down to Base Camp.)

The position of that hand might be a clue to what happened to Mallory and Irvine. Did it imply that the accident had occurred around 1:40? If so, 1:40
P.M.
, less than an hour after Odell’s sighting, or 1:40
A.M.
, in the middle of a desperate descent in the night without a flashlight? Or had the watch stopped working before the accident, and Mallory had stuck it into his pocket? Or had it simply wound down after Mallory’s death?

Andy pulled loose a section of the rope to carry down—the rope was so weathered, it broke with a strong tug. And he removed the hobnailed boot from Mallory’s broken right leg. They brought those objects down, to add to the collection of artifacts.

Thom decided he wanted to look at Mallory’s face, which was still frozen into the scree. He cut away the ice and dirt as carefully as he could; as he later put it, “It was like digging into your driveway.” At last he got the face freed up enough so that, lying on the ground, he could look straight at George Mallory.

“The face was in perfect condition,” Thom said. “It was ever so slightly distorted—pancaked, in effect—by the years of bearing the weight of snow. His eyes were closed. I could still see whiskers on his chin.”

As he made his investigation, Thom found the wound that may have caused Mallory’s death. “Over his left eye, there was a hole. There was dried blood, and two pieces of skull sticking out. It was as though someone had taken a ball peen hammer and smashed in his forehead.”

Finally Andy and Thom reburied the body under the stones. Just as he had the first time, Andy read Psalm 103.

They got back to Camp V late, rappelling the fixed ropes in the dark. As they passed near us at Camp VI, they talked to us on the radio. We wanted to know whether they’d found anything, but once again we were leery of our broadcasts being monitored by other expeditions. Dave Hahn, who knows Morse code, wanted to set up a signal of radio clicks: three clicks followed by two clicks would mean they’d found something. But I thought that could be too hard to remember, especially at altitude, so I came up with another idea.

The code was for me to ask Andy over the radio, “Do you still think I’m an asshole?” The kind of banter climbers trade on the mountain all the time.

Now Andy radioed back, “Yeah, you’re still an asshole.” That’s how we knew they’d found something—but we didn’t know what until a couple of days later.

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON ON
M
AY
16, we had our tents pitched at Camp VI, just under 27,000 feet. Jake Norton and I shared one tent, Dave Hahn and Tap Richards another, and our two strongest Sherpas, who’d come all the way up from the North Col that day, a third. They were Ang Pasang and Da Nuru, or Dawa for short; among all the Sherpas on our team, they were the two who hoped to go to the top. In addition, Dawa was the sirdar or headman for the expedition. Ang Pasang and Dawa were older and more experienced than most of the other Sherpas, and I thought they had a good chance of summitting. For Sherpas, getting to the top of Everest is important; those who have summitted from both sides are guaranteed steady work. The record for most ascents of Everest—ten—is held by a Sherpa, Ang Rita.

Jake’s and my tent faced west. That evening, we watched a magnificent sunset through the door, and fifteen minutes after sunset, in the alpenglow, all the clouds dissipated. We could see Cho Oyu, Pumori, Gyachung Kang, and the Khumbu valley. As the sun set on these lofty sentinels, a warm evening glow enhanced the windless calm. I felt that it was going to be a good day in the morning.

It’s difficult to sleep that high. You have all this anticipation
and excitement, and you’re planning to get up at midnight so you can be off by 2:00
A.M.
I’d get about fifteen minutes of random sleep out of each hour. The last hour I lapsed into a deep sleep, and then all of a sudden I had to wake up.

Ang Pasang and Dawa were a little slow getting out of their sleeping bags. We kept hollering over to them to get started. Then my headlamp bulb snapped in the cold, and Dave had to shine his light on my light while I fiddled with the spare bulb in the dark. The headlamp is crucial to moving in the dark and staying warm. As soon as you stop in the predawn cold, you turn into a Popsicle.

With one thing and another, we didn’t get off until 2:30 on May 17. In half an hour we reached the foot of the Yellow Band, where the rock changes from gray schistose shale to a tawny limestone. In the dark, it was hard to find the bottom of the fixed ropes that mark the route through the Yellow Band. Only Dave had been there before, and he was able to point out where the fixed lines started.

There were old ropes from previous years on these pitches, but I wasn’t about to trust them. I’m very suspicious of fixed lines. Who set the rope and how long ago? What is it anchored to?

We strung out our own fixed rope here, and I was in charge of anchoring it. I felt that it was my responsibility to ensure the safety not only of my teammates, but of the Sherpas. They’re paid to be here, and they’re putting one hundred percent trust in those lines. If the lines are not secure, you’re endangering their lives.

Each of us had a single ascender attached to his harness, which he would slide up the fixed rope as he climbed, sometimes using it to pull on. We were climbing in crampons, even on the rock. It was pretty much pitch dark still; there was a sliver of old moon, but it didn’t give much light. Just as dawn started to break, we topped out of the Yellow Band. This is another tricky place, because coming down, when you might be exhausted, you need to find the top of the fixed ropes. Jake and Tap were really heads-up here: anticipating the route-finding problem, they stuck long pickets into the snow, then tied flagging to the heads of the pickets, to make a very visible marker.

At the top of the Yellow Band, we were finally on the
northeast ridge. By now we had turned off our headlamps. The wind was a little brisk, but it wasn’t hammering us. A lenticular cloud was forming on the summit, which is usually not a good sign. We tucked ourselves into the shelter of a boulder and had our first discussion.

Tap and Jake are both twenty-five, more than a decade younger than Dave and I. I often shared a tent with Jake; we really hit it off, I think because our paces and cycles were very similar. I’d first met him in Kathmandu in 1996, when we happened to stay in the same hotel. It was good to see him again on this expedition.

Jake has done some guiding, but he makes a living refurbishing old houses and renting out units in Colorado Springs, where he lives. He’d spent considerable time in Kathmandu, studying Buddhism, and had learned to speak Nepali. So our views and values were remarkably compatible.

Jake’s a genuinely nice and honest person. He never got upset about anything. On our expedition, I thought of Jake as the strongest member. Whenever we had to build camp sites, he’d carry a huge number of rocks. On the long trek to ABC, Jake would keep pace with the Sherpas, chatting away in Nepali. He’s about six feet one or two, 170 pounds, a big, lanky guy, about the same size and height as me.

Tap’s an inch or two shorter, and even leaner than I—also a lanky fellow. He too was very strong. He’d been on several Himalayan expeditions and was sensitive to the nuances of getting along with teammates in an inhospitable place. Tap lives in Taos, New Mexico, but cut his teeth on Rainier and now guides for IMG, Simo’s company. Among the mountains he guides are Denali and Aconcagua. Also a very likable guy. At Base Camp, during rest days, Tap and I came together around a certain ritual of what we called “carbo loading” and washing our socks. It’s important to have clean socks on a big Himalayan mountain, because your feet stay dryer. Tap and I would build a little wash basin behind the storage tent, sneak a few beers out there, and drink them with the Sherpas on the sly while we did our laundry.

The interesting thing, in view of subsequent events, was that shortly after dawn, as we huddled behind the Conference Rock (as I called it) on the northeast ridge, at about 27,700 feet,
it was Dave Hahn who felt the least confident. He was the first to express his doubts about going on. “Hey, man, I’m really cold,” he said. “This doesn’t look like a good day. That lenticular isn’t good. I think the weather’s going to turn bad on us. We need to make a decision right here.”

Jake and Tap seemed caught up in a certain lassitude and indecisiveness. They weren’t totally jazzed to go on. They may have been a bit intimidated. For that matter, we were all intimidated, way up there on the northeast ridge. We knew that the obstacles ahead, the First and Second Steps and the traverse between them, were very serious ground. Ang Pasang and Dawa hardly said a word. I felt that we ought to keep going and see how the day turned out. I knew we could at least get to the base of the First Step, some 250 yards away. I wanted to keep going—I was getting cold just sitting there, swinging my feet and arms to try to stay warm—and then the Sherpas said, “Yes, let’s go.”

We must have spent forty-five minutes at Conference Rock in this discussion. We talked on the radio to Simo down at ABC, to get his input on the weather. We were all breathing oxygen, at a flow of two and a half to three and a half liters per minute. I’d originally hoped to climb Everest without oxygen, but after seeing what had happened to the Ukrainians, I opted for gas as giving us an added safety margin.

It was very near here that Percy Wyn Harris found the ice axe that belonged to either Mallory or Irvine, in 1933. And slightly to the west of this spot, on their way down later that day, Tap and Jake found an old oxygen bottle and carried it down the mountain. Back at Base Camp, Jochen Hemmleb was able to determine that it was definitely a 1924 bottle. Simo had actually seen the bottle in 1991; now he was kicking himself for not having retrieved it then. The bottle is another vital piece of evidence, for it further proves that Mallory and Irvine at least reached a point just short of the First Step, and that they were on the skyline ridge, not traversing the face below.