When people run out of superlatives, they often turn to Mount Everest for help. If ever any one thing, one word, was recognisable as the pinnacle, the zenith, the ultimate, Everest is it. So, the biggest events in any sport become the ‘Everest’ of that sport. Personal challenges become personal Everests. It is the synonym for suffering followed by immense satisfaction.
The actual mountain’s attrition rate is high: roughly one in 10 climbers will not walk off the mountain, and it often becomes their final resting place.
To conquer Everest is to be above all else in the most literal sense. So to come close but be forced back must be the ultimate matter of unfinished business, which accounts for the number of return journeys.
When Belfast man Gavin Bate returned to Everest this summer, it would be his fifth attempt at the summit. On his four preceding pushes he had come agonisingly close. His first shot at the top was in 2000, when he was forced to turn back just 100m shy of the top.
Two years later, his bid was scuppered when his climbing partner dislocated his knee with the top in sight, resulting in a perilous three-day descent.
On his third attempt, Bate climbed solo and without bottled oxygen to the top and back in 32 hours. But again he missed out on the summit because of queues, and with no oxygen and a hypothermic Sherpa climbing partner by his side, he had to turn back rather than wait for his turn.
Bate mounted another assault on the peak in 2007, again alone (but followed by a Sherpa) and without oxygen. At 8,650m, he suffered fluid in the lungs, an affliction that plagues high-altitude climbers. Hypothermic and asphyxiating, death seemed moments away, until his Sherpa ‘shadow climber’ Pasang Tendi arrived with emergency oxygen, which saved his life and allowed him descend to receive medical attention.
So: four attempts, zero summits. Since his first effort more than 20 people had died on the mountain, and he was nearly among them. Yet climbing remains a huge part of his life, and Bate’s drive to be back on the mountain is added to by the huge exposure and fundraising opportunities it offers the charities he has founded since starting climbing (see sidebar).
On arrival at Camp 1 this April 2009, which put him in sight of the spot where he nearly died, Bate was moved to tears.
“It’s just so emotional being here,” he said in a podcast from the camp.
“So many adventures – this mountain has enabled me to do so much. The times I’ve had up here, it brings me to my knees. I didn’t expect to be so emotionally hit by this.”
Bate’s puritanical less-is-more climbing mentality would be set aside somewhat for this fifth attempt. He would wear an oxygen mask, and in a bid to raise awareness of his charity, would post regular missives, using his blog, Twitter and audio podcasts. His camps were individually sponsored, and he held a charity auction for the right to be the recipient of the world’s highest Tweet from the top of Everest.
May 2009 was an exceedingly busy month on the mountain, with hundreds of people reaching the summit and four climbing deaths recorded. Bate’s team arrived at base camp on 12 April, where they would acclimatise before heading for the peak on 21 May. It wasn’t long before tragedy struck, in a tragic incident when two cooks contracted severe methanol poisoning after a late-night whiskey session.
“One of them died,” said Bate.
“He was found naked, lying on the ice, he was a statue of ice.”
Bate’s own cook, Ngima, went into massive kidney failure and was on the edge of death for 24 hours, while camp doctors did everything in their power to keep him alive.
Ngima made it off the mountain against all the odds.
“Everything went wrong,” said Bate. “Everything.”
Bate and his team had already had a brush with death that week. Having climbed to Camp 3 for acclimatisation, a fast, safe descent saw Bate and Sherpa Pasang Tendi happen upon a scene of devastation.
“A few minutes ahead of us was an absolutely vast avalanche, and the avalanche took out three people, two foreigners and a Sherpa,” he said.
“The two foreigners survived to tell the tale, but the Sherpa was buried under tonnes and tonnes of ice, and by the time I came to the avalanche site the debris was widespread.
Despite undertaking a precarious and exhausting search, the Sherpa was lost.
“It casts a deep pall of gloom over base camp,” said Bate.
“For the Sherpas this is a mark of deep bad luck and anger amongst the gods. Pasang and I came back down to base camp feeling a little, well, it’s hard to put words on the mood. We were certainly feeling something that could very easily have just killed both of us straight away.”
But the push would still go on. At midnight on 20 May, Bate and team suited up and left the highest camp on Everest to head for the summit.
More than 120 people would make the journey that night, making the going tortuously slow.
Bate had plenty of personal markers along the way from his previous attempts, all cut short. Debatably, two of those may have been successful had he carried oxygen, but in a horrific turn of irony, Bate’s oxygen supply this time around would prevent him from even reaching the first of his altitude markers.
“Literally 300m from the top, I was at 8,500m and my mask froze. The valve in the mask froze and I was unable to breathe, to inhale anything in fact, and had to turn back with acute hypoxia,” said a dejected Bate.
Gasping for breath in the thin, freezing air, Bate was again in mortal danger, and the immediate priority became losing altitude.
“It was quite frightening. My breathing rate increased to something like 140 and I avoided blackout by borrowing Danu’s mask on occasion.
“The three of us – me, Danu and Pasang – juggled masks in the dark on the steep slope to the Balcony.
“It was so cold that when we eventually reached the south col each of us had the front of our down jackets coated with thick slabs of ice, which we had to knock off with my ice axe before getting in the tent.
“Pasang struggled to get one of the masks working since I was still panting like a locomotive and clearly suffering the effects of severe lack of oxygen.”
After a brief respite, Bate thought he was having a recurrence of the high-altitude pulmonary oedema (HAPE) that nearly killed him in 2007. It was time to leave for base camp. Fast.
“My coughing was so bad I was convinced that my lungs were once again brimful of liquid and I was counting my hours left.
“Poor Pasang spent the day in a permanent fug of fear as I slowly negotiated my way down the mountain, coughing and panting. At one point on the steep blue ice above Camp 3 I nearly took a fall and later he told me he started crying at that point.”
His lungs had been badly burnt by the -40°C air above 8,000m and Bate was given emergency treatment at base camp, and recovered gradually.
For Bate, the success of this attempt was escaping with his life, and he vows to return.
“I’m naturally annoyed, but also fully understanding that to come back from an oxygen failure at 8,500m is something to be thankful for. People die for a lot less on Everest. It is always important to maintain the perspective which doesn’t let summit fever get in the way.”
First Irish couple on top
A day later, two more climbers from Northern Ireland would make a successful assault on the mountain, becoming the first husband-and-wife team from the six counties to do so.
Noel Hanna and his wife Lynne had made one attempt to climb Everest together before, in 2005, but were forced back when Noel suffered retinal haemorrhages and temporary blindness at 7,000m.
Lynne decided to stay with Noel and descend, a decision which may have saved her life.
“The guide that was supposed to be with us, he near enough died on the mountain,” said Noel, “so I’m sort of way glad that she didn’t go on without me.”
The pair had held off their push for a week at base camp, waiting for good weather.
They weren’t alone, and the good weather brought out crowds trying to get up the mountain, among them serial adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
Their journey was blissfully straightforward in comparison to Bate’s.
“The [weather] window was good, and we left high camp at about five past eight at night,” said Noel, “and at that stage there was perhaps a dozen climbers in front of us who left 10 minutes before us.
“Before we got to the balcony we had passed them all, so it meant there were going to be no queues in front of us.
“We just kept at a steady pace and I got there first and Lynn was just two minutes behind us.”
Most teams leave it later to head for the summit, arriving at or after dawn, but their early departure and steady pace meant that Noel and Lynne arrived in darkness.
“The downside of that was that it was still pitch black when we were on the summit, so we waited for about 20 minutes and it started to become daybreak.
“It’s as if there had been a cup brought over you, a normal cup. And you’re in under the cup and somebody keeps lifting that cup every now and then and you get that white light around the rim. And that was what it was like.
“It was nice to have that and be up there for that and then to see the oranges and pinks and reds coming up with the sun.”
Although their climb was relatively trouble-free, the traffic on Everest was heavy, and Noel had misgivings about the ability of some of the climbers.
“There’s certain things that can’t be helped, he said.
“The like of avalanche or ice slide or things like that. But there’s a lot of people on the mountain that really shouldn’t be on the mountain.
“It surprised me this … the amount of the people that were in the way on the ropes that didn’t really know how to free themselves. They were getting instructions from their guides or their Sherpa or whatnot, but I feel it’s not a place to learn how to do ropework.”
Photo Credits:
Courtesy of Gavin Bate and Noel and Lynne Hanna
