A Day to Die For: 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - One Survivor's Personal Journey to Uncover the Truth (39 page)

Before going our separate ways, I turned to Iswari and said, ‘That was very hard for you today, thank you.’ He knew that I meant each and every word.

‘People don’t understand how difficult it can be. Those army checkpoints, I had to telephone very high up to get us through, very high up.’ He felt the need to repeat the last few words. ‘I do this so I can send money back to my family in the east of Nepal. People don’t understand,’ he continued.

I had never seen him so openly distressed. These were difficult times for him. The events of the day had more than taken their toll.

That afternoon, shortly after Iswari and I had got back to Thamel, nearly half a million unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets of Kathmandu, chanting for the King to relinquish power back to the people. Alongside other tourists, I watched, for the best part of an hour, as a seemingly endless stream of men made their way through the outskirts of Thamel. Some protestors held banners aloft, all were chanting loudly, but still they came, marching four or five deep. There were so many coming from all directions there was nothing either the police or army could do except stand and watch. Later that evening, 21 April 2006, King Gyanendra announced that he would return political power to the people and called for elections to be held as soon as possible. He was hanging on to his privileged position by a thread.

I spent the first few days back home rueing the early end to my Lhotse climb, which in actual terms had never got off the ground. Also preying on my mind were the events that had taken place immediately after we had met Iswari at the airport. I wrestled with whether or not I should write to Henry.

In more youthful days, a long list of escapades I had undertaken with little or no regard to the consequences they might have on others had been left in my wake. I had been a teenager once and treated those much older than me with a degree of disdain. What could they tell me about life that I didn’t already know? Now I knew.

Eventually, I decided that the consequences could have been so serious that I couldn’t let it go. I knew Henry could receive emails at Base Camp, so I wrote to him.

This was a mistake on my behalf. Not that it shouldn’t have been said, rather I should have discussed this privately with Henry at a later date. Such messages received by email are, more often than not, seen by the recipient as confrontational.

I could see how Henry might have taken it that way. He had been more than generous to me over the last ten years; the manner of my approach had been poorly thought out. He was in Base Camp with teams of climbers on both Lhotse and Everest. With all the attention and mental drain this entailed, my email was the last thing he needed.

I received no reply. I sent two further innocuous emails a week or so later to wish his climbers whom I’d met briefly at Base Camp all the best for the climbs ahead. I heard nothing back.

I didn’t regret what I had said to Henry, rather the method by which I had conveyed it. The door of friendship appeared to have been slammed firmly shut: a door that I would need to be open if my enquiries into the tragic events of 1996 proved fruitful.

Amongst the books written in the wake of the 1996 disaster was National Geographic’s
Everest: Mountain Without Mercy
by Broughton Coburn, with an afterword by David Breashears. This publication was the nearest I could find to an official/authorised account describing the making of the IMAX film
Everest
. It was a book in which I hoped to find significant references to weather forecasts being received by the Imax expedition.

With a copy duly ordered, it was only a matter of days before the doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of my parcel and the next phase in my research. It turned out to be a large-format glossy book, adorned with excellent photographs and easy-to-read, well-spaced print: the sort of publication that could be referred to as a coffee table book, that many might flick through, admiring the photography or dallying over a page or two out of curiosity.

However, mine was no passing interest. I wanted to look carefully at the information this contained. It wasn’t long before I came across the first reference to meteorology.

On page 28, I read:

These were noble aspirations with a highly commendable purpose. Yet, as I read on, I was puzzled as to why, with a budget of $7 million and ten scientific advisers, I could find no reference to the Imax expedition receiving accurate weather forecasts on a regular basis, in particular for their high-risk summit day, originally planned for 9 May.

Eventually, on page 204, came an unambiguous reference to weather information being received, but from the chronological order of the book, with regards to the 1996 Imax expedition, I took this to be after the tragedy. I could find no specific reference in Broughton’s book to weather forecasts being received before 10 May, which surprised me and left me a little confused as to when these forecasts were first received:

As meteorologist Martin Harris was actually named, then sensibly he had to be my next line of enquiry. Especially as when Martin is mentioned for the second time on page 209 it states: ‘On the night of May 20, the team finally received confirmation from meteorologist Martin Harris in England that the jet stream had moved to the north.’ Was he the source of the weather forecasts prior to the disaster of 10 May? And why the need for additional input from Bob Rice’s Weather Window (a company that provided weather reports for yacht races, record attempts, etc.) and Roger Bilham if Martin Harris’s forecasts had been remarkably accurate so far? And if these had been accurate, why was there no mention of their significance in the reports and accounts that followed the disaster?

After a brief search on the Internet, it transpired that Martin Harris was currently working as a director of Oxford Scientific Services Ltd. I telephoned Martin, speaking to him at some length about meteorology and in particular the Everest region, with specific reference to the spring of 1996.

From the information Martin gave me, it soon became apparent he was regarded as a meteorologist with significant experience in mountainous areas. As a specialist in the interpretation of weather satellite imagery, he had some 40 years’ experience in the field. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he carried out meteorological research in the vicinity of Mount Everest. In 1991, he looked at the airflow above Mount Everest using radiosonde balloons, satellite systems and other equipment, as part of an exercise called the Mount Everest Meteorological Experiment (MEMEX1991). This work was supported in part by the UK Met Office, and since then they have consulted him from time to time about weather patterns and processes in this part of the Himalaya.

I advised Martin of the references to him in
Everest: Mountain Without Mercy
. He was quite surprised at what these contained. He kindly agreed to answer my questions via email to give him an opportunity to consider them carefully before responding.

In essence, Martin explained he’d received a totally unexpected phone call from a woman called Liesl Clark a day or so after the disaster. She wanted to ask him about the weather in the Everest region, as members of the Imax team were still on the mountain. Following this up, he then telephoned one of his colleagues at the UK Met Office to find out the weather situation.

Martin then received a second phone call from Liesl Clark, on the same day as the first, during which he advised her that the climbers should descend and wait for more settled conditions. According to Martin, this was the only contact he had with the Imax team: that the generalities he discussed with Liesl Clark during those two conversations were the only meteorological information with which he supplied them.

I think this episode is best summed up in Martin’s own words:

Martin’s response and confirmation of his involvement with the Imax team was clearly at odds with how his role was portrayed in the book. This surprised me.

That week I went to my usual Friday night meeting with Geoff Scarth, the faith in my research restored and Martin’s printed answers in hand. Sitting on the opposite side of a small wooden table supping my pint of real ale, I watched Geoff as he carefully read through the replies. Undisturbed by the conversations of those round about, his head nodded as he absorbed the point each question and its answer made. With a broad nose and distinguished face, his courtroom years had taught him the skill of turning a stern look into a disarming smile in the blink of an eye. The lawyer in him also meant he wanted to see the information for himself rather than hear it second hand. Only a printed-out copy of the exact emails I had received would suffice.

Reaching the end of the document, he paused for a moment, smiled and then said, ‘But this doesn’t prove anything.’

A long discussion ensued, at the end of which all we could agree was that something here didn’t add up. I’d found a difference between what had been written and the facts with regard to the Imax expedition, but deep down I knew Geoff was right.

It could quite easily be said that because Broughton Coburn wrote
Everest: Mountain Without Mercy
David Breashears had no control or say over its content. However, when you consider that David wrote the afterword to this book and that his photography was included, you would assume that he would have read it, but maybe he didn’t. Nevertheless, I felt there were gaps in the picture portrayed.

My findings with regard to Martin Harris made it evident I needed to look carefully through the other significant accounts that had followed 10 May. Having previously read
Into Thin Air
, the next obvious book was
The Climb
by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt. However, by doing this I would be following a well-trodden path, one that I felt might have accidentally steered everyone away from a more deadly truth. I wanted to look at some of the others beforehand. I would consider
The Climb
, but not quite yet.

First I looked at
The Death Zone
by Matt Dickinson, published in 1997. I wanted to understand how the period leading up to the afternoon of 10 May had been seen on the other side of the mountain.

Matt had been attempting the north side of Everest from Tibet. He had been commissioned to film a documentary for British television’s Channel 4 about actor and would-be Everest summiteer Brian Blessed making his third attempt on the mountain. Along with a small film crew, they had employed high-altitude expert Alan Hinkes to operate the camera on Everest’s upper reaches. This compact unit had joined a commercial expedition run by a UK company called Himalayan Kingdoms. Amongst their staff was qualified mountain guide Martin Barnicott.

Matt describes the weather conditions at north side Advanced Base Camp on 9 May 1996:

At approximately the same time as this team were discussing the weather conditions they could see on the north side of the mountain, I had been on the radio to Henry. Matt and his team were at 21,000 feet, a similar height to myself at the upper end of the Western Cwm; the only difference was that they were on the other side of the mountain.

On the north side, Matt relates what they saw on 10 May, the morning they had planned to move to the upper camps in readiness for their summit attempt.

At 4 p.m., a ferocious wind and blizzard conditions struck them at Advanced Base Camp. It was only a few hours after Alan Hinkes and Martin Barnicott had given their experienced opinions.