I`d felt physically sick for a month before with a strange mixture of excitement and fear. We had an emotional farewell at my parents` house when I left on August 15th. I shall never forget the anguished look on my mother`s face. I thought, perhaps it is time to stop inflicting these feelings on those close to me. My little nephew Ben was in tears too, but he had just trapped a finger in my car aerial.
Ours was a team of 20 climbers from 9 countries, but mostly the UK, attempting the north ridge from the Tibetan side of the mountain. Of the roughly 600 ascents to that date, only 40 had been from this side. The first British ascent of our route had only been made a few months earlier. When Nepal was still closed to foreigners, all the British expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s had failed on this route, and the disappearanace of Mallory and Irvine is now part of mountaineering folklore.

Base Camp is at 17,500 feet and so a period of acclimitisation is required beforehand. As ours was a post-monsoon expedition, it meant that the acclimitisation trek had to be done in the monsoon. All the guidebooks advise against trekking at this time, and I was soon to find out why. Not even an obscene amount of Munro-bagging in the wet Scottish spring of 1993 could break me in for the 12-14 hours torrential rain every day. Night-time dessert was served in the form of horrible black critters called leeches, feasting themselves on my haemoglobin. I`d been told that garlic salt killed them, and proceeded to stink out my sleeping bag and tent in the process. Nobody had told me that plain salt did the trick just as well.
Well, it`s all suffering so far, but does it get any better? Of course not. What did you expect - a picnic? You`re on an Everest trip, mate!
Next up was the trip to the Nepal/Tibet border, a mini-epic in itself. Massive landslides had rendered the road impassable in places, so that several tonnes of equipment had to be unloaded from 3 trucks at one end of the slide and carried piggy-back to the trucks at the other. At one point the choice involved either a mad dash across the top of the debris playing Russian Roulette with the stonefall, or a long detour further up the hillside. The porters took the second option as it meant two hours more pay.
The Tibetan plateau on the rain-shadow side of the Himalaya was almost surreal by contrast. The barren landscape of endless brown hills bears a stark similarity, I imagine, to the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon. Our first lunch-stop was at Nyalam (Tibetan for "road to hell") where my intestines revolted for the first time on the trip. I suppose it helped that several others were in the same boat, but we did so much wingeing about it that eventually the subject of bowels was banned as a topic of conversation at the meal table.
At our lunar base camp we had our first close-up view of the north side of the mountain. According to Mallory, Everest "rises not so much a peak as a prodigous mountain mass". For the first few days it was difficult to take our eyes off it, so that people kept stumbling over the guy lines of the 20 or so tents in our camp. Our youngest team member, Ian (27) announced that he thought he had chosen the wrong mountain. Earlier, during a very explicit pep talk by our doctor about what could go wrong medically with the human body up on the mountain, Ian stood up, walked out and collapsed in a faint on the hotel reception floor.
Advance Base Camp (ABC) is 12 miles up the East Rongbuk Glacier from Base Camp so that 60 yaks were hired to carry our gear up this easy-angled glacier, known as "The Magic Highway". Fantastically sculptured ice pinnacles known as "Penitentes" make this perhaps one of the most beautiful treks in the world, but certainly the highest, leading as it does without technical difficulty to 21,000 feet, .
ABC was already occupied by Korean, Spanish and Indian expeditions. The Spanish team had learnt that a Greek expedition (which had spent an amazing 5 days at ABC and then gone home) had just just stolen their entire base camp. So much for the common bond that binds mountaineers.
The Koreans had already fixed ropes on the steep 2,000 feet leading to the north col. We were allowed to use these which saved time and enabled us to start ferrying tents, food, fuel and oxygen for our own attempt. Progress was slow early on as it snowed every day and the mountain was still plastered with monsoon snow. However by late September, we had established three camps on the hill - at the north col, and at 25,000 feet and 26,000 feet. The climbing was tiring because of the snow conditions underfoot but technically easy. There was little wind and it was comparatively warm. At this stage most of us returned to base camp for a rest and to greet four newcomers, one of whom, Harry Taylor, had climbed Everest without bottled oxygen the previous May. His friend Nish Bruce planned to do the world`s highest parachute jump the following year (from 130,000 feet) for which he had enlisted NASA`s help in designing the space-suit. As a return favour they bought along a 66 year old American former astronaut. Karl Henize had been on the Space Lab mission in 1985 and had taken to visiting the remote parts of the Earth in his retirement. He had no summit ambitions in coming here but planned to carry out research on the effects of solar radiation on the human body, ideally at the north col.
By early October typical post-monsoon conditions were setting in.The weather was becoming bitterly cold and very windy. So windy in fact that three of our tents, one at each of the high camps, were destroyed by high winds. Three Indian climbers developed frostbite at their top camp, and it was a sad sight to see them being carried down by the sherpas. They were warm-hearted folk, we`d laughed and joked with them at base camp, and they`d expended every calorie in their attempt.
Our problem now was one that besets all north ridge expeditions in the post-monsoon. The winds howl across the lower part of the north face and hit the north ridge with incredible ferocity. Oddly enough, the top 2,000 feet is less windy as a huge rock buttress on the north face offers some protection. We knew that if we could establish the top camp at 27,000 feet, we would be in with a shout. Despite taking a sensible three days to go from base camp to ABC, Karl still arrived ashen and exhausted. His group of three had become separated on the walk up the glacier and Karl had made an open bivouac on his own at 20,000 feet. The following morning he was breathless and dizzy and stumbled badly to the mess tent for breakfast. Unfortunately our doctor had received bad news by letter and had had to return to Australia. The collective medical knowledge of the rest of those present was not too impressive, but he was put in a gammow bag which, when pumped up, increases the air pressure inside and simulates a return to lower, safer altitudes. Had he been a normally healthy man, this might have saved Karl`s life but, as we discovered later, he had had open heart surgery. He died later that day.
The atmosphere in the group now deteriorated. Nobody had been above the north col for at least a fortnight, and so we didn`t know what damage had been done to the higher camps. We had only heard from the Koreans that the tents had been swept off the mountain. There was also a big argument about what our objectives were. This was a commercial expedition whereby "clients" paid a large sum of money, with a profit element, to a British-based company to organise the expedition. Was our prime aim to get somebody on the summit regardless of whether he was a fee-paying client or not? Or was it to get all clients as high as each were capable on the mountain? The clients agreed to the idea that we should try to make the trip a success as a whole, and Maciej (an experienced professional climber from Poland) and Lakpa Sherpa were chosen as our first summit team. Lakpa had already summitted three times from the south side and Maciej had made a string of first ascents of difficult routes on the 8000ers. These two were probably the only ones capable of going from the north col at 23,000 feet to the 25,000 foot camp, picking up the oxygen and useable tent and carrying on to 27,000 feet, all in one day, and without using the oxygen. It`s one thing to carry oxygen and use it whilst climbing. It is quite another to carry it to 27,000 feet without using it. On top of this Maciej`s big toe was supperating due to a previous frostbite injury. That climb to 27,000 feet must have been brutal for them. Each time Maciej radioed ABC, he could manage little more than to say "no power, no power".
On the morning of their summit day, Maciej took an hour to get his boots warmed up over a stove and to put them on. The normal route from the top camp is to go straight up to the north-east ridge and across two rock steps, one of which now has a ladder fixed, followed by a final interminable snow slope to the summit. Instead of doing this, Maciej and Lakpa cut out two sides of a triangle and made a very steep beeline for the second rock step, quite near the summit. The ladder here was tied on one side only, so Maciej swung on it "like a boy on a gate". It was a brilliant piece of mountaineering on new and technically difficult ground. Everyone was delighted for Maciej when he summitted. And for Lakpa? Well, it was just another day`s work for him.
The first of the objectives had now been achieved. Would the fee-paying clients be given a chance to get as high as they could on Everest? This had been the expressed intention of our leader, Jon Tinker, who despite two previous unsuccessful attempts on Everest had often said, "I am only here to help you climb the mountain". So why did Jon take second slot with Ang Babu, the best sherpa, who had already climbed the route the previous year? Summit fever, in plain English. This is not to decry Jon`s strength as a climber, and so next day, he became the first Englishman to reach the summit via the north ridge.
The third slot on the mountain was allocated by Jon to his two mates, Jon Muir and his wife Brigitte. Jon had climbed Everest ten years previously and Brigitte was hoping to become the first woman to reach the highest point on each of the seven continents. Jon and Brigitte were stuck at the 25,000 foot camp for three days unable to move up because the camps above were occupied by the summitters.
Meanwhile an increasingly frustrated and embittered group of clients waited on the north col for their turn, with time running out and no sherpa back-up. Of the four climbing sherpas, Lakpa and Ang Babu were exhausted having already climbed the mountain. Nema had been ill for some time, and Jangbu, who had done a heroic amount of load-carrying for the first pair, had become snowblind after taking his sunglasses off. The situation had arisen where the clients were doing the supporting - this role-reversal may have been unprecedented in the short history of commercial expeditions till then. The efforts of the fee-paying clients dwindled correspondingly. On a carry to the 25,000 foot camp, I turned back at 24,500 feet. On the north col, I had not taken the precaution of warming my boots up over a stove as Maciej had learnt to do. My feet were numb and I was not prepared to risk frostbite for the simple act of carrying a load between camps. Turning back I felt an odd mixture of shame and relief. I had not performed nearly as well as I`d hoped, nor as I had shown I was capable of on previous expeditions to high altitude. Whether I would have had the guts to risk almost certain frostbite, given the chance for the summit, I don`t know. I did know that Pat, the Irish life and soul of the party, and the two Finns, Harry and Pavo, were still gunning for it. Jon`s sense of guilt was demonstrated when he returned to the north col after his successful climb: "I`m sorry, Pat".

To the layman, the end and not the means, is all that`s important on Everest. To a hardcore climber, the style of ascent is what counts. Wingeing aside, carrying all our own gear including oxygen to the top camp proved too difficult a task for most of us mere white mortals. Still, it was an unforgettable experience, and when I look at my toes, I can still count to ten.