Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [94]
Neil stared through his goggles at the summit: so close, yet so very far. All he felt was emptiness.
He turned, and never looked back.
At 10.50 a.m., the radio flared into life. It was Mick’s voice. He sounded weak and distant.
‘Bear. This is Mick. Do you copy?’
The message then crackled with intermittent static. All I could make out was something about oxygen.
I knew it was bad news.
‘Mick, say that again. What about your oxygen, over?’
There was a short pause.
‘I’ve run out. I haven’t got any.’
The words hung in the quiet of the tent at camp two.
Through eyes squeezed shut, all I could think was that my best friend would soon be dying some six thousand feet above me – and I was powerless to help.
‘Keep talking to me, Mick. Don’t stop,’ I said firmly. ‘Who is with you?’
I knew if Mick stopped talking and didn’t find help, he would never survive. First he would lose the strength to stand, and with it the ability to stave off the cold.
Immobile, hypothermic and oxygen starved, he would soon lose consciousness. Death would inevitably follow.
‘Alan’s here.’ He paused. ‘He’s got no oxygen either. It’s … it’s not good, Bear.’
I knew that we had to contact Neil, and fast. Their survival depended on there being someone else above them.
Mick came back on the net: ‘Bear, I reckon Alan only has ten minutes to live. I don’t know what to do.’
I tried to get him back on the radio but no reply came.
CHAPTER 86
Eventually, two Swedish climbers and a Sherpa called Babu Chiri found Mick. By chance – by God’s grace – Babu was carrying a spare canister of oxygen.
Neil and Pasang had also now descended, and met up with Mick and the others. Neil then located an emergency cache of oxygen half-buried in the snow nearby. He gave one to Alan, and forced both him and Mick to their feet.
Slow and tired, his mind wandering in and out of consciousness, Mick remembers little about the next few hours. It was just a haze of delirium, fatigue, and cold.
Descending blue sheet ice can be lethal. Much more so than ascending it. Mick staggered on down, the debilitating effects of thin air threatening to overwhelm him.
Somewhere beneath the balcony Mick suddenly felt the ground surge beneath him. There was a rush of acceleration as the loose topping of snow – covering the blue ice – slid away under him.
He began to hurtle down the sheer face on his back, and then made the all too easy error of trying to dig in his crampons to slow the fall. The force catapulted him into a somersault, hurtling him ever faster down the steep ice and snow face.
He resigned himself to the fact that he would die.
He bounced and twisted, over and over, and then slid to a halt on a small ledge. Then he heard voices. They were muffled and strange.
Mick tried to shout to them but nothing came out. The climbers who were now at the col then surrounded him, clipped him in and held him. He was shaking uncontrollably.
When Mick and Neil reached us at camp two, forty-eight hours later, they were utterly shattered. Different men. Mick just sat and held his head in his hands.
That said it all.
That evening, as we prepared to sleep, he prodded me. I sat up and saw a smile spread across his face.
‘Bear, next time, let me choose where we go on holiday – all right?’
I began to laugh and cry at the same time. I needed to. So much had been kept inside.
The next morning, Mick, Neil and Geoffrey left for base camp. Their attempt was over. Mick just wanted to be off this forsaken mountain – to be safe.
I watched them head out into the glacier and hoped I had made the right decision to stay up at camp two without them all.
The longer you stay at altitude, the weaker your body becomes. It is a fine balance between acclimatization and deterioration. I chose to risk the deterioration, and to wait – just in case. In case we got another shot at the summit.
Some called it brave. More called it foolish.
The typhoon was slowing and wouldn’t be here for two days. But it was still coming. Two days wasn’t long enough to reach the summit and return.