Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (8 page)

Aaron Junk could never have gotten that kind of backing from Ovaltine or any other establishment because, although he was now seen as a legitimate climber, his seedy history and unpredictable behaviour were seen as too much of a liability. Granted, even Hoyt now had two arrests to his name, but most people saw those indiscretions as provoked. Junk’s reputation was, in contrast, toxic. A company like Woolworth would not put their brand in the hands of a man who might break all records of mountaineering one day, and then be arrested for climbing their own corporate headquarters the next. Junk had no choice but to sponsor his own team if he wished to dog Hoyt at every turn. Both Hoyt and Junk set out for India by way of London on the same day, March 13 of 1939, with the goal of dominating Nanda Devi. British climbers Bill Tilman and Eric Shipton had already reached the top, but no American had yet to even enter the sanctuary.

Nanda Devi stands 25,642 feet tall. That certainly does not make it the tallest mountain in the world. It is not even the tallest in India. But Nanda Devi is brutal. Even the most experienced climber on Earth must first get to a mountain before climbing it, and that’s where Nanda Devi has you. She is almost impossible to reach. Ringed by a series of other mountains, including her smaller sister, Nanda Devi East, the lowest passes into her sanctuary require an ascent to 18,000 feet. Once over the top of those passes, there is a good likelihood the way will be impassible due to serac-laced glaciers standing between you and the mountain. The only entry point not requiring a grueling climb is through the Rishi Gorge, a raging river flanked by sheer walls on both sides. In a sense, Nanda Devi is a smaller version of Fumu – an imposing giant guarded by multiple lines of defense.

Hoyt and Junk were both ready to take on this amazing challenge, and take on each other. But sadly, neither one even made it to India. Everyone to the man on Hoyt’s steamer got food poisoning. Turning around in the Red Sea, the team vomited its way back to Toulon. It had nothing to do with Ovaltine, but the unlucky sponsors had to spend months proving as much. Only two days after Hoyt’s ship headed home, Junk’s ship was stopped by Burmese pirates who were nice enough not to kill the passengers, but only to loot them of everything on their ship save some tins of pemmican. “They were the most civilized men I had met since leaving London,” recalled Junk. “It turned out the lead pirate and I shared a favorite watering hole in Bermuda. They even shared a glass of brandy with the captain and me before demanding the removal of our clothing and shoving off.” The party returned home in their underwear, the taste of lost adventure bitter on their tongues.

Chapter Four: Fumu and the Dividing Engine

The mountains of the Himalayan chain tend to have origin stories, often based in Sanskrit literature, Indian dynasties, or colourful tales of Hindu gods. Nanda Devi got its name from a princess of the Chanda dynasty who narrowly escaped a murder attempt. The mountains that tightly ring Nanda Devi are guards protecting her from further attack. Annapurna is the Hindu goddess of food. Chomolungma, the local name for Mount Everest and its surrounding area, is a Bon god who can suffuse kindness and empathy at one moment and then turn angry due to the smallest slight. The peak of Harmukh is believed by Kashmiris to be the home of Shiva. If the peak can be seen from a nearby village, then it is believed the snakes of that village will be rendered harmless.

But no single mythology like these exists for Mount Fumu. Or more precisely, there are as many Fumu mythologies as there are people in Asia. One Sherpa will tell you the name Fumu did not come from his people but was the name of a Hindu god who slaughtered his own children to show allegiance to Vishnu. Another Sherpa will tell you Fumu was the name of Chomolungma’s daughter but who is also the mother of Lhotse. Ask a citizen of Darjeeling and they may tell you Fumu was the name of a European explorer who snuck into Nepal one hundred years earlier and crawled out of the woods one year later, bloody, screaming tales of a mountain haunted by spirits of strange women looking for their children in the night.

One gets the feeling after asking several hundred people for the story of Fumu that there is something intentional in the discrepancies, and that the variation in stories comes not from miscommunication, but from obfuscation. It is as if there is a true story to be told about the mountain and its moniker, and that everyone in India, Nepal, and Tibet know the story, but we who come from far away are not meant to know anything about it. It is not for us.

The only theme that seems to run through all of the stories, as barebones as it may be, is that of a strained relationship between a parent and a child. Anyone who has attempted to climb atop Fumu’s haunches and witnessed the horrors of her retaliations can understand from where this recurring idea may have come.

Once, the surface of the Earth was only comprised of ocean and a single, monolithic landmass called Pangea. As with all things, Pangea began to fall apart. Slabs of earth broke from one another and wandered in random directions. Then in an act that could be seen as tectonic separation anxiety, the slab that would later become modern-day India returned to Pangea about 150 million years ago. The reunion was not peaceful. To this day, the Indian plate and the Asian plate are in the process of colliding violently. Rock meets rock with nowhere to go but up. As this conflict plays out at an excruciatingly slow clip, the mountains we call the Himalaya continue to grow. The process has slowed down somewhat as time has passed, and what used to be a chain of active volcanoes have cooled and become snow-capped peaks. However, one peak remains volcanically active.

Fumu is a strange volcano. What is left of the enormous main vent has been dormant for eons and has become a dead, icy caldera. A caldera is formed when the magma chamber under the volcano has spent most of its contents and the ground above collapses downward. An unusually large crater, often more than a mile across, is formed. There is a small hole in the deep ice at the bottom of the Fumu’s dormant caldera, in the winter it is about the size of an obese man’s waist, and in the summer it becomes the size of an American football gridiron. The hole has been deemed “The Oculus” by explorers. A blasting sub-zero wind seems to rise out of the Oculus itself and blow up the walls of the caldera’s bowl on all sides. The wind has been known to throw equipment and unsuspecting humans off of their perch along the caldera’s lip. It is because of this ever-blowing arctic menace that the dead caldera – the four-mile-in-diameter bowl around the Oculus - has been given the nickname “The Icy Bellows.”

An Earth scientist from the University of Bedlam named Randy Felcher believes that Fumu was once three times her current size. According to Felcher’s theory, two-thirds of her width was blown off sideways about 50 million years ago by a pyroclastic event that plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter likely lasting for decades. That is why the lip of the Icy Bellows is not consistent in altitude all the way around; the eruption did not do a clean job of severing off the top of the mountain. The current summit of Fumu is actually the southernmost point on the lip. But then the lip erratically drops from its greatest height of approximately 30, 121 feet down to its lowest point of 18,330 feet in the north. When one looks at Fumu from Everest in the north, one sees a peak in the distance with two ridges fanning out from it to the east and to the west. Then like a pair of curved staircases, the ridges come back around, descending toward you and downward, curving back toward each other, and ultimately they meet each other at the bottom to create the lowest point on the lip of the Icy Bellows. Many Nepalese Sherpa who have traveled in the high elevations north of Fumu call the mountain “The Childless Mother,” with the summit as her head and the two descending ridges as cradling arms holding nothing at all.

Although the main vent between the ridges has long been dead, that does not mean Fumu is dormant. Small eruptions like the one that killed Zach Hoover continue to occur from smaller vents along the ridgelines and especially at the summit. If the mountain were momentarily transparent, you would be able to see vents wending their way to and fro but always upward, some reaching the surface and others coming to dead ends of high pressure. Some of the veins reaching for the surface look bloody, swollen with lava, almost living, like leaves of red chard. Others carry only steam, water, and gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid. Others hold nothing at all but darkness.

It is hard to think of a better metaphor for strength and immobility than a mountain. But in the case of Fumu, the metaphor breaks. Fumu is in motion from bottom to top. Running down between the spurs near her base are glaciers that can be heard by the human ear as they plod downward. Creaks and loud snapping sounds echo through crevasses, often accompanied by the sound of ponderous ice chunks dropping into subterranean water. Between the glaciers and at approximately the same elevation (10,000-12,000 feet) is the scree. Needless to say, the scree is no monument to stability. New chunks of fresh lava rock and pulverized granite tumble down the mountain to feed its size every day. And every day, older rocks tumble off of it into the glaciers to be slowly pulverized into oblivion. Above the scree one comes to the two main ridges on the north rising up to the summit on the south. The Icy Bellows between the ridges includes ever-moving snowdrifts, sloshing slowly from east to west like cold broth in a bowl on a boat in rough seas. The winds of the Bellows may be unpredictable, emanating up from the Earth via the Oculus and down from the heavens, but one can always depend on the snow drifts moving from one side of the bowl to the other in perfect, yearly cycles. On the other side of the summit, the South Face, opposite the Bellows, the mountain above the scree is comprised of snowfields. Climbing these is not difficult, except where the fields are interrupted by steep rock cliff. And then there is Rauff’s Maw, cleaving in half the route the Rauff expedition took. That route started at the bottom in the southeast and zigzagged up to meet the Eastern Ridge just before the summit. The fate of the Rauff expedition makes it clear that part of the mountain is also not at rest. Finally, there is the summit. So busy is this part of Fumu that it cannot be seen through plumes of grey smoke. Maps of the mountain assumed a perfectly pointed top for centuries. No one truly knew what the top looked like until the Hoyt and Junk expeditions.

Getting close enough to study the mountain has always been a source of difficulty. Forgetting the brutal challenges one must face in order to climb her, simply getting to Base Camp is nearly impossible. Like Nanda Devi, Fumu is ringed by four smaller but by no means small mountains. Most Europeans and Americans still call these mountains by the labels bestowed upon them by the Great Trigonometric Survey – H57, H58, H62, and H63 – but the locals call them Mitya, Abel, Lata, and Asha. Their names are as mysterious as that of Fumu. No in-depth investigation has been pursued. Each of the four peaks soars to heights ranging from 26,000 to 28,000 feet. They are connected by wall-like passes reaching more than two thirds of the peaks’ heights. Seen from nearby mountains like Ama Dablam, the effect on the human eye is that of looking at a castle or fort built for gods. This may be why the entire area is locally referred to as
Qila
, the Urdu word for ‘fort.’ The four peaks are the towers and the passes the outer curtain walls. The problem with this castle is there is no portcullis. The only way a human can even consider reasonably entering Qila is over a sixteen-thousand foot pass on the southern perimeter, aptly called the Qila Pass (also known as the Fumuri La to locals). The pass is shaped like a giant shoehorn, wide at the bottom, narrow at the top, and concave toward its center line the entirety of its length. It starts off gradually at roughly a forty-five degree angle; then it steepens, and by the top it takes the form of a chute rising consistently at a sixty degree angle. That pitch would be very possible for most technical climbers except the fifty-foot wide chute is made entirely of amethyst. The rare version of amethyst called ametrine is beautiful to behold. It is purple like most amethyst, but because of heating from volcanic activity, it is streaked with glittering yellow. In addition to being beautiful, the bumpy face is very hard and devoid of cracks. There is no purchase for climbing equipment. Countless men have tumbled to their deaths, tenderized while they fall on rough, rare stone, their twisted bodies reflecting in bright, brilliant colours from the gemstone wall. Climbers who have gotten over the pass have usually done so by moving at a sloth-like pace and by being lucky. Needless to say, Qila Pass is usually the first filter of climbers making their way to top of Fumu.

Measuring Fumu has been a source of much tension ever since the first summit attempt was made in 1881. At that time, it was given short shrift for a variety of reasons and assumed to be almost one thousand feet shorter than Everest. It was not until Hoover’s fateful summit attempt of 1939 that people started learning what many had already felt might be true – that Fumu was the tallest mountain in the world. But before the Hoover expedition, people did what they often do: Rely on the word of experts who may or may not know what they are talking about in order to understand their world.

The experts in this case were geodesists, people who study the size and shape of the Earth. Fumu was first measured by geodesists who cared little about its height. They were in the middle of much larger projects at the time and the measurement of the Himalaya was of secondary importance.

William Lambton of Yorkshire had been in India since the turn of the 19
^th
Century, trying to figure out nothing less than the shape of the Earth. Other geodesists had recently completed measurements in the Arctic Circle and at one point on the equator. They had surmised the Earth was an “oblate spheroid.” In other words, the world is not round as many had assumed, but rather shaped like a grapefruit; flattened at the poles and sticking out further at the equator. Lambton wished to supplement these findings by continuing the measurements in a small region of India called Mysore.