White Limbo: The Classic Story Of The First Australian Climb Of Everest Read online

  ‘… an irresistible story of adventure …’

  Publishers Weekly, USA

  ‘What Lincoln Hall has done is describe with honesty and perception the personal engines of adventure … It will surely be turned to as an adventure classic in the centuries to come.’

  Ben Sandilands, Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Beautifully written, Lincoln Hall’s personal account of this great undertaking, in which he was a key figure, immediately ensnared me with its honesty, humanity and realism. He deals unselfconsciously with things normally glossed over in climbing books, indeed in life—fear and the whole gamut of emotions and responses of people under extreme stress. The ascent is a spectacular achievement which pushed the climbers to the limit of their resources; in some cases perilously close. White Limbo is a fitting record of this triumph.

  I cannot recall having read a better mountaineering book.’

  Chris Baxter, Wild

  ‘The account reaches new heights in the stark telling of a tale of courage, pain and endurance.’

  The Sunday Observer

  ‘Hall’s book is more satisfying than simply another recounting of a successful climb, mainly because of the strong message one draws from the pages of White Limbo: It is possible to climb an Everest with a small group of friends who have an experience imbued with happiness and mutual respect.’

  James Wickwire, American Alpine Journal

  ‘… sensitively and articulately told by Lincoln Hall.’

  Noel Shaw, The Examiner

  ‘Few climbing books have the power to move the reader emotionally, to transport them into the heart of the struggle to climb a mountain, but this is one of them.

  Filled with plenty of action and drama … White Limbo is … beautifully written …

  While the tone of the book is uplifting, Hall also gives some down-to-earth impressions of the extreme commitment and out-and-out danger of high altitude mountaineering on Everest ’

  Ed Webster, Rock and Ice

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  White Limbo: The classic story of the first Australian climb of Everest

  ePub ISBN 9781742743325

  Kindle ISBN 9781742743332

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders in this book.

  The publishers would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders who have not been acknowledged.

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

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  First published in Australasia in hardback by Weldons Pty Ltd 1985

  Published in Australasia in paperback by Simon & Schuster Australia 1993

  This paperback edition first published in Australia by Random House Australia 2007

  Copyright © Lincoln Hall 1985, 1993 and 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Hall, Lincoln, 1955—.

  White limbo: the classic story of the first Australian climb of Everest.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 864 3.

  1. Mountaineering—Everest, Mount (China and Nepal).

  2. Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)—Description and travel. I. Title.

  915.496

  “White Limbo” lyrics by Simon Binks © Wheatley Music Pty Ltd, published by Alfred Publishing (Australia) Pty Ltd (ABN 15 003 954 247) PO Box 2355 Taren Point NSW 2229. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction is illegal.

  Maps by Michael Dawe

  To Swami Nirmalratna Saraswati

  Avenue of broken dreams

  No-one calls the angel falls

  Alice is in wonderland

  from the song “White Limbo” by Australian Crawl

  Limbo/limbou/, n., pl. -bos 1. (oft.cap.) a supposed region on the border of hell or heaven, the abode after death of unbaptised infants, … 4. in limbo → no-man’s land (defs 4, 5, 6). [ME from ML in limbo on the border (of hell).]

  The Macquarie Dictionary.

  Majesty of silence, casting

  Shadows as long as life,

  The mountain speaks in dimensions

  I cannot hear.

  I try to feel the power

  Behind the wind and snow,

  To know how the emptiness

  Can pervade.

  It is enough to feel that presence

  Amongst these walls of ice,

  In the sunset, catching pink,

  The highest peaks.

  Cover

  Praise for White Limbo

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Peom

  FOREWORD by Bradley Trevor Greive

  Introduction to the Second Edition

  Introduction to the First Edition

  Prologue

  Mount Everest in Perspective

  Map of Routes of Ascent

  Map of the Region

  Map of the Area

  The Australian Expedition

  Annapurna II

  The Mad Months

  To China

  Tibet

  Base Camp Blues

  Whose Idea Was This, Anyway?

  On the Mountain

  The Waiting Game

  Qomolangma

  Return to Earth

  Photo Gallery

  Epilogue

  Biographies of Expedition Members

  Equipment

  Food

  Health and Medical Considerations

  Photography

  Sponsorship

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Index

  POSTSCRIPT TO THE THIRD EDITION

  More fantastic books from Random House Australia

  Dead Lucky

  Around the Buoys

  A Teaspoon of Courage

  The story of how I met Lincoln Hall and eventually became painfully entangled in his untimely death is not the easiest to tell. The obvious place to start is by acknowledging that everything—the joy, the wonder and the horror—began when I read this very book.

  For me, White Limbo became a graduate thesis, completing a lifelong education, however curious and misguided, that would enable and encourage me to pursue an adventurous life. Lincoln and his friends, numbering among the very best mountaineers Australia has ever produced, set out to make history in a most wonderful manner that embraced new cultures and new challenges, and eschewed the conventional sense of competition. In this way, and in their extraordinary abilities and qualities, they remain a breed apart.

  Lincoln Hall was never, or at least very rarely, what one might de
scribe as conventional. Perhaps it was this counter-culture persona that really struck a chord with me as a young man. Initially, both in the opening passages of White Limbo and when we first met, Lincoln presented himself as a carefree, hippy-esque pilgrim with giant hands and a seemingly limitless supply of groan-inducing jokes. It is hard at times to reconcile that image with the ‘other’ Lincoln; an Alpine legend, a man with limitless endurance and granite-faced stoicism who has left footprints and a number of toes upon the most celebrated peaks on the planet. Nevertheless, after reading White Limbo, Lincoln and his fellow climbers established a base-camp in the back of my brain and have lodged there ever since.

  This will not come as a great surprise to those who know me. Even as a child I spurned matinee idols and mere sporting figures, vastly preferring gritty and romantic epics of adventure, endurance and discovery. My heroes were the great explorers, zoologists and archaeologists who sought the ends of the world by whatever means necessary and, in doing so, dragged my youthful imagination along behind them in their wake.

  This devotion to distant, dark and wondrous horizons was further fuelled by the literature of such noted writers as Ernest Hemingway and the some-time Australian Alan Moorehead. And who could not be inspired to strike out for every exotic shore and drink one’s fill of life after reading François René de Chateaubriand’s famous words, “Every man carries inside himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved …” (Voyage en Italie, 1827).

  The influence of adventurers and storytellers upon my life has been profound, enduring and painfully obvious to my trusted physicians. Though my heart yearns for more, my aching bones, metal joints and weary sinews have grown tired. I now accept that growing heroic facial hair is a more reasonable objective for me these days and so I choose to continue my lifelong commitment to adventure and exploration via my favourite bookstores.

  Having allowed myself a more contemplative relationship with adventure than my idols, I admit to indulging in excessive—perhaps even perverse—ruminations regarding the nature of quest in the human sprit. I have never been one for gathering baubles and keepsakes about me, but I confess there are two possessions that give me enormous joy and which I would not part with for any sum. The first is an original set of Gerald Durrell’s groundbreaking natural history memoirs. The second is a simple framed ink sketch on paper by none other than Sir Edmund Hillary, depicting a lone figure standing, triumphant, at the summit of a towering mountain. It never ceases to inspire me to know that a humble New Zealand beekeeper became the first human being to stand on the roof of the world. I would love to think that, had I been in Hillary’s large frozen boots, I would have had the extra something he found for those last virgin steps and then handled such exhilaration and achievement with his grace, generosity and humility. Somehow I doubt it.

  Lincoln Hall is not like me at all. Where I am loud, he is quiet. Where I would look for explosive strength and speed to get me through, he is gentle and patient. And yet he and I have enough in common for us to be drawn together via White Limbo—a book that captured my imagination when it was first released in 1985, one year after the first Australian climb of Everest.

  The expedition itself was so much more than a nationalistic “me too”, with a country’s flag waved above the summit for the sake of being a token “first”. No, this was something very different. The team chose to climb “alpine style”, refusing to soften the experience with a huge entourage, extra safety equipment or even oxygen tanks. Furthermore, they decided that to truly connect with Qomolangma—the “Mother Goddess of the Earth”, as Everest is known in Tibetan—in a meaningful and spiritual way, and to contribute to the body of climbing knowledge, they should forge an entirely new route to justify their labours. I would be spoiling the story to offer too many details of the expedition, suffice to say that many, if not most, of Australia’s greatest mountaineers made their reputation in the pages of this book. White Limbo captures the drama, the majesty and the heartbreak of an incredible journey through exotic cultures and extraordinary lands. This is a true and timeless account of exquisite victory and bitter despair, told by a man who is equal parts adventurer and poet. After I first finished this book all those years ago, I knew I would long remember the name Lincoln Hall.

  Some twenty years elapsed before Lincoln entered my life for the second time. Whilst still in tremendous physical shape, Lincoln was fifty years of age and no longer led expeditions up the world’s most legendary peaks on a regular basis. Indeed for all intents and purposes he had retired from world-class climbing, and deservedly so. His place in mountaineering lore was already assured.

  But fate has a curious way of twisting in upon itself. Out of the blue, I was approached by Australia’s leading alpine cinematographer, Mike Dillon, to assist an Everest expedition for Christopher Harris, the fifteen-year-old climbing wunderkind from Emu Plains. If successful, Christopher would make history and Mike naturally wanted be there to capture the moment. I should point out that the help sought from me was purely financial in nature—the expedition desperately needed funding if it was to make the treacherously short annual window during which it is possible to scale Everest in relative safety. There was never any talk of me coming along—nor would I have entertained such a ludicrous thought. If Hannibal failed to get his elephants over the Alps, I couldn’t see how anyone could get this particular mammoth up the Himalayas.

  I didn’t exactly jump at the chance to put my shoulder behind this expedition. I have long held the view that everyone should do their utmost to encourage young Australian talent, which is why I have been a proud supporter of The Taronga Foundation Poetry Prize and the Australian Youth Orchestra. However, Everest expeditions are extremely dangerous and, call me a capitalist whore for saying so, very expensive. Thus, before I agreed to lend my full support, I needed to be reassured that this team would be aided to the summit by the best possible guide—Lincoln Hall.

  By now Lincoln was also known to me as a close friend of Richard Morecroft, my own dear friend, neighbour and fellow Taronga Foundation Governor. Richard let me know that Lincoln was certainly prepared to come out of retirement for one final Everest climb because of the special circumstances surrounding this attempt. With Lincoln’s commitment assured, I had no further hesitation in signing on as the principle expedition sponsor and, a few weeks later, the team was on a plane to Kathmandu.

  This expedition was, to put it bluntly, a complete disaster. Although he had climbed almost a thousand metres higher during his acclimatisation training, Christopher had to retreat after experiencing serious health problems high above Advance Base Camp—heartbreakingly close to victory. This was the penultimate setback of a miserable season wherein many a team member was injured or ill and Everest claimed almost as many lives as it had in the disastrous 1996 season. Qomolangma was, once again, hungry for souls.

  In my opinion, what happened next was a direct result of, or perhaps reaction against, the painful decisions that Lincoln was forced to make as he approached the same summit over twenty years earlier, as described here in White Limbo. After Christopher’s retreat, and therefore with the expedition notionally over, Lincoln decided to make a dash for the summit with three trusted Sherpa guides. I was a tad confused by this most un-Lincoln-like action, but utterly delighted when I received an elated report by phone of Lincoln reaching his goal. A few hours later, after a night of celebration, I received a very different phone call; a breathless voice told me Lincoln was dead, his body abandoned to the ice only three hundred metres along his descent from the summit.

  Words can’t describe how sickening and strangely exhausting it was to receive this terrible news, all the more so for having to share this tragedy with Richard Morecroft and other close friends. But stranger events lay in store. A day later, Lincoln became one of those incredibly rare individuals who die and live to talk about it. However, that is another story and in his next book, Dead Lucky, Lincoln describes how he miraculously escaped from the shadow of
the mountain that has towered over him for so long.

  I selfishly note that on the cover of Dead Lucky you can see Lincoln during his return from this fateful expedition, wearing my favourite watch (which, I’m glad to say, has also been returned safely). He did this as a favour to me, so that I could have an intimate token of this experience; something that had touched the face of Qomolangma. I joked afterwards that my lucky Rolex actually saved him. You’d think I would let him keep the damn watch after all he went through but, even though being part of this climb changed me for the better, it still hasn’t changed me enough to consider such unfettered benevolence and generosity of spirit. Typically, Lincoln returned from the dead bearing wonderful gifts. I now have a third irreplaceable item in my possession, a sacred prayer wheel from the Buddhist monks who are the benevolent stewards for Qomolangma and all who would approach her.

  Curiously, for a man who has faced the afterlife and continues to experience so much physical pain, Lincoln seems remarkably unchanged and, at least superficially, is surprisingly at peace. I envy both his incredible accomplishments and the ease with which he faces adversity. Most of all, I am in awe of the way he embraces life and death, and sees the beauty in both—I’m sure this very quality has helped him to live the extraordinary life he has. Lincoln is someone I deeply admire, whose friendship and energy I treasure. I will never forget the name Lincoln Hall and I am quite certain that, after you have finished White Limbo, neither will you.