Page 36 - 2020 AMA Winter

MISCARTICLE
Camp 3
After acclimatising at Dingboche we quickly established ourselves on the mountain, crossing the Nuptse Glacier and setting up Camp 1. The route onto the higher reaches of the face then used a sharp arête of tottering rock and ice that rose steeply for 1500 metres before broadening into a huge white whaleback that gave access to the final difficulties. Camps 2, 3, 3A and 3Dump were pitched along this narrow ridge. We were forced to have several Camp 3s because the arête was so narrow that there was simply not enough room for more than one tent at each site.
We pitched Camp 4 at the bottom of the whaleback and Camp 5 at its top, from where we could tackle the next big obstacle: the steep and difficult Rock Band. A 400 metre horizontal section then led to Camp 6 at the start of a vast ice and snow field. This half mile of steep ground, mostly hard frozen névé snow, had to be traversed ’facing in’ to put us directly below the broad couloir that led to the summit, 300 metres above. Camp 6 and Camp 7 at either end of this big traverse were pitched on shelves cut into the ice slope.
I worked with my climbing partner Nigel Gifford on various parts of the route up to Camp 4. It was while we were above Camp 4 fixing the route to Camp 5 that I was hit by a rock fall. My knee took a big blow from a boulder and began to swell rapidly. I doubled up in pain, lost my ice axe down the South Face and almost
blacked out. I am told that I became completely incoherent with shock and unable to support myself. Somehow the others managed to lower me all the way down the whaleback to Camp 4, where I was put into my sleeping bag and given two morphine tablets by Gerry Owens. They made me sick but the pain subsided.
I thought I would be at Camp 4 forever. The ground below it was so technically difficult that it would have been impossible to lower me from there: I knew I had to rescue myself or accept a permanent stay. Eventually the swelling started to go down and I decided that it was then or never. I made it down to Base Camp in two days of concentrated effort.
I was then stuck at Base for several days feeling very sorry for myself. The mountain was being climbed and I was missing it all. My mood was not improved by our doctor Noel Dilly, who said that the injury was ‘probably psychosomatic’. The implication was clear and I resented it. Nigel, who was also in base camp with frostbitten hands, advised me to ignore Noel’s remark and get straight back up the mountain.
By the 9th of May I was passing through Camp 3 where John Muston was based. I knew that Gerry Owens and Richard Summerton would be making our first summit attempt that day but John said that he thought something might have happened to them. He and others had been following their progress but there was now no sign of them and various ‘objects’ had been seen falling down the face. I moved on up, to work at Camp 4. Two days later John came up with supplies and confirmed that Richard and Gerry had been killed. They had fallen all the way down the South Face before disappearing into the bergschrund at its base.
Bad weather now hit the whole of the climb, making any movement extremely difficult. I was snowbound in my tent on 12th May when Charles Walshaw unex- pectedly appeared. He had fought his way down from Camp 5 in search of rations because they had almost run out. We scoured Camp 4, loaded our sacs with all we could find and set off early the next morning. Climbing conditions were so bad that it took us nearly 8 hours to
reach Camp 5 by which time it was almost dark. Luckily we had taken our sleeping bags and were squeezed into one of the two tents there.
Almost immediately a big slide came over the lip of the hanging crevasse where the camp was pitched and buried the tents. At the time all five of us at the camp – me, Charlie, Noel Dilly, our leader Jon Fleming and Crispin Agnew - were sitting in our tent celebrating Crispin’s birthday and were able to brace against the roof to stop it collapsing on us. The other tent was completely flattened with all Jon and Crispin’s kit still inside it. We spent the rest of the night sitting round the tent walls, awake just in case another slide came. The next day the weather was still bad so Jon decided to call a general retreat but he hoped that after a good rest we could use the existing camps and stores to mount a rapid second attempt on the summit.
At this point there were four men still at Camp 7: Bronco Lane, Brummie Stokes, David Brister and Pasang Tamang and five of us at Camp 5. Jon ordered everyone off the mountain except Charles Walshaw and me. Charlie was in good shape and I was fresh so we were to stay at Camp 5, see the four still above us through it and then come down after them. We dug out and re-erected the collapsed tent and tried to melt as much snow as we could before the others arrived, anticipating the dehydration they would feel after the long
36 / ARMY MOUNTAINEER
Camp 3 Dump on the Arete