The Silver-Lined Ridge by Matthew J. Richardson

Fluttering canvas frames a view that has tugged at Ralph Nilsen’s dreams. The mountain is dark against the star-smeared sky, curved like a sickle, beckoning. Ralph permits himself a few moments to glance upwards, to watch the spindrift pluming across the Milky Way. Moments are all Ralph has. He will not be back, not for another season, not when he is within three hundred vertical metres…

It will be another half-hour before any other climber stirs from their tent. Ralph can hear the first cossetted clients bleating for high altitude suits and fresh oxygen bottles. As if they’d make it beyond Advanced Base Camp without their sherpas.

Ashley Duncan is one of many who should not be on the mountain. She is young, ambitious, and unaware that her body has already started dying at altitude. The sherpas have had to sweat to get her to Camp Three, pulling her bodily over the steeper crags and prompting crackles of derision across the radio frequencies. Ashley does not help herself, parading around in a powder-pink climbing suit with matching oxygen mask, and documenting every brew and (probably) defecation on Instagram.

Ralph switches his headlamp on and watches its beam swallowed by the darkness, overwhelmed by the black. Oxygen mask clamped over his mouth, he walks through the tents, the coloured globes clustered at first and then ragged, yielding to rubbled slopes.

Four steps and rest. Four steps and rest. For someone with the gait and pace of a drunk making his way home from the pub, he makes good time. Soon, Camp Three is lost beneath. There is only rock, wind, and snow between Ralph and his goal.

There are no sherpas shadowing Ralph. Asking the Nepalese to cater to his climbing inadequacies whilst paying them a pittance has never sat comfortably. If cerebral oedema, pulmonary oedema, hypothermia, exposure, heart attack, or any of the other thousand altitude-induced misfortunes strike, no sherpa will be obliged to sit with a dwindling oxygen supply as dry, rattling breaths issue from Ralph’s frostbitten lips.

Clank of crampon upon rock. The Yellow Band – Everest’s final warning to the unprepared. Before long, a jangling line of climbers will traverse the phyllite, the muscovite, the biotite, and the marble that makes up the band. Their minds will be on oxygen flow rates and turnaround times. The Ashley Duncan’s of this world won’t consider that their feet drag over millions of tiny marine fossils. To think, the indignity of having spent millions of years rising, nano-millimetre by nano-millimetre atop burgeoning earth crust, only to be trumped by some halfwit wearing North Face nylon. 

The exit cracks are the cramped, sharpened route to the summit ridge. Ralph stops frequently, always with some reason. Adjusting his pack. Checking his bottled oxygen. The wind whips smart and the drop yawns as Ralph gains the ridge. The blackness seems to breathe depth up at him, shuffling and hissing like a beast. Ralph does some shuffling himself. Two steps and rest. Two steps and rest. Keep going, old son.

A glance behind reveals a thin, tremulous line of headlamps sweeping up from Camp Three. Ahead of him, grey against the black, stands Mushroom Rock. The bottles at its base are the litter of dozens of dreams fulfilled, of once-gleaming ambitions rusted and pockmarked. Ralph glances at the rock’s bulbous head. He wonders, idly, how much force he would have to exert for that head to splinter off and go rolling down the mountain. Perhaps only the weight of a finger applied to the right spot…

Ralph does not stash an oxygen bottle for the return journey.

On, along the ridge. The mountain is not coy, brazenly showing its would-be conquerors a moon-silvered path into the unknown. First, second, and third steps all rise above – three challenges that have tempted mountaineers, whispering, whispering to them as they climb. The whispered-to are becoming more common now, and Everest’s landmarks are becoming more macabre.

Greenboots’ Cave is named after its longest serving resident, an Indian climber who stopped to rest during a storm in 1996. Just a rest. Only for a minute. Tsewang Paljor’s lime green footwear should provide climbers with a grim reminder of the price of misjudgement up here. They did not remind David Sharp, who sat down next to Paljor’s green boots for a minute on the coldest night of the climbing season. One minute turned into five, turned into more, and still David Sharp sat, his arms crossed and his breathing shallow. A lot is made of the bravery of climbers, not least by themselves. Pioneers. The death zone. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Strange then that dozens walked past David Sharp, huddled and life-leached, on that clear, shear morning.

Easy to be morbid up here. Nevertheless, he must focus – the first step approaches. Disciplines such as recovery from alcoholism and marathon running cling to the adage that the first step is the hardest. Not the case on Everest, old chum. For a start, just getting to 8,564m has left Ralph’s lungs feeling like two empty crisp bags. Not name-brand, either – value packaging. The first step is also much easier than the famous second. ‘Easier’ is relative up here, though.

By the time Ralph slides his safety to the top, it feels as though those crisp bags have been inflated and then popped – a trick Ralph’s daughter delighted in when she was young. What a view, though. The summit looks no further away than thirty long paces. For the first time he understands, really understands, why people act as they do on this mountain. In the same season that Paljor and Sharp took up permanent residence, expedition leader Rob Hall met his client Doug Hansen whilst descending. Hall ordered Hansen to abandon his climb, telling him that it was too late in the day to continue. Hansen’s reply has long since been snatched away by the wind off the Hilary Step, but both men started to climb once more. How close the summit must have seemed!

On. Just as Hall and Hansen went on. Ralph is approaching the realm of Everest myth. At 1250 on 8^th June 1924, Noel Odell was searching for fossils high on the mountain. Looking up towards the Northeast Ridge, he espied two, tiny black figures climbing an outcrop of rock. The weather closed in, and the two figures were never seen alive again. Were Mallory and Irvine the first people to summit Everest? Did they share an exhausted, hypoxic embrace at the top before disappearing into mountaineering legend? 

That outcrop of rock is getting closer now, its full size apparent. Forty metres of heartbreak loom above the rest of the planet, globular and nausea-inducing, the last true obstacle before the summit slopes. The top five metres are vertical and were considered so treacherous that an aluminium ladder was fixed to the rock to assist those ascending. Ralph clips in. God, it’s hard. Harder even than he thought it would be.

There is so much commentary, so much conjecture focussing on whether Mallory and Irvine conquered this obstacle. Was it within their capabilities? Would their antiquated breathing apparatus have proven too heavy to manipulate up the sheer rock? Would they have had time to summit before nightfall? Always the wrong questions.

Legend has it that when asked why he was attempting to climb Everest, Mallory responded ‘Because it’s there’.

What a pompous prick.

Everest draws them, those faux self-effacing types, the humblebraggers who even now are heaving their way towards book deals and Netflix documentaries. Sure, climbers admit the selfishness of their endeavours, but always with an air of self-congratulation. Married to climbing, she says! The last word always belongs to the mountain… Christ, if Ralph didn’t have a facemask over his mouth he’d bring up breakfast.

They fawn over Mallory’s boyish looks, these LinkedIn profile builders. People who never saw him rave over his serpentine grace. Dullards engage in rehearsed climbing bar soliloquies about a man who disappeared into the clouds, instantly anaesthetising fellow drinkers. No-one talks about the wife Mallory left to chase glory, of the three children whose memories of their father are themselves yellowed and waxen, scoured by the winds of Everest ambition. People croon softly by campfires about the two days and a night Rob Hall spent near the South Summit. They remember Hall enquiring about his wife’s welfare whilst freezing to death. Less comfortable are discussions as to why Hall had left his pregnant wife for a payday and another tally on his summit record. These fucking people and their fucking mountains.

Hall, Mallory, Irvine, Paljor, Fischer, Rutkiewicz, Rouse, Tullis, Boukreev…The list unfurls down the scree slopes and along the moraine ridges. Ralph knows that these names are revered, treasured, and that is the problem. One moronic act breeds another. What purpose were they serving apart from self-aggrandisement?

The mountain is whispering to Ralph again, as it must have whispered to his daughter. The difference, Ralph thinks as he rests precipitously on the cold aluminium of the ladder, is that unlike Emilie he knows he is being whispered to.

The gloves come off first, flung into the nothingness. The backpack and oxygen cylinders are next, stacked neatly at the bottom of the ladder in case someone is running short. Ralph’s fingers shiver and jolt as they tug at the zip of his suit. Off comes the fleece. Down come the thermal one-piece, the goggles, the balaclava.  It is like being immersed in an ice bath from the head down. And the air. So, so thin. Ralph has gasped for oxygen like this only once before.

For parents, satellite calls from base camp mean one of two things. The call that Ralph took five years ago was of the second kind, the kind where a crackling voice shouts words like ‘unfeasible body recovery’and ‘personal possessions’ over a howling storm. As he listened, Ralph imagined Emilie’s hands, her face, white against the snow. The mountain’s riposte to would-be conquerors is an almost perfect preservation of folly. Flesh bleaches rather than rots, covered and uncovered by snow as the mountain wills.

Those cheeks were the same cheeks that Ralph had kissed tears from, watched dimples form in, felt with the back of his hand for temperatures. His daughter would have died alone on this bleak ridge, her cries muffled by an ice-choked facemask and her skin slowly cooling to join the phyllite, the muscovite, the biotite, and the marble. Awful images for any parent to contemplate, and yet the punishment fits Ralph’s crime. From when Emilie could walk she had been encouraged to run, to climb, to relish risk. Ralph could have prompted his daughter to become a surgeon, a scientist, but perhaps his current course of action recognises that some people are not wired for such mundanity.

With numbed fingers and flesh shrieking from the cold, Ralph climbs the first few rungs of the aluminium ladder, turns away from Everest’s summit, and handcuffs himself to the icy metal.

Debate has raged over whether Mallory had the ability to climb the last few vertical metres of the second step. No new opinions will be formed on that debate today, nor for many days if Ralph Nilsen’s display has the desired effect. There will be a snow-silvered lining to the mountainous clouds that have hung heavy since Emilie’s death, no yawning temptation of unknown heights and unclimbed couloirs. Here a father will hang on the world’s highest gibbet, a grimacing reminder to would-be summiteers to return home to those they love, and that love them.

*

Ralph is letting go of the last fluttering strands of consciousness when he perceives shapes below him. Hurried conversations are held at the foot of the step. Radios are pulled from within down suits.

Colour perception is almost gone, but Ralph can still make out a powder-pink oxygen mask being removed from a mouth. Over the wind, he can hear a sherpa being consulted about the possibility of getting a hacksaw, high on the Northeast Ridge.

Matthew J Richardson

Image by Simon from Pixabay – Everest with a light covering of snow and a clear blue sky.