Mesca-Dawn: A Remembrance of Bill Denz

I climbed with Bill Denz on Boxing Day 1970. We climbed Glacier Peak and then Mount Douglas. There were four of us, Bill, Chris Fraser, Jim Cowie and myself. Years before this climb we were in the same club, the Otago Tramping and Mountaineering Club, and did other trekking (tramping) trips together. So today, being 46 years since we climbed Douglas, I searched the web to find more about Bill Denz  and found this wonderful article written by David "Zappa Bill Austin.. Thanks " for permission to reproduce this article.

New Zealand alpinist Bill Denz follows David Austin along a rivet ladder during their link-up of Mescalito and the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in 1978. Five years later, Denz would die in an avalanche on the West Pillar of Makalu. [Photo] David Austin

In a collaborative effort to profile the late Bill Denz for our spring issue,  to record his memories of one hard-fought link-up of Mescalito and the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in 1978. A snippet of Austin's story helps shape Denz's tough and tenacious character in "Boldness, Genius Magic: The Life of Bill Denz," Alpinist 42. Here, Austin tells the rest of the unpublished story.—Ed.

"Surely you heard about Bill Denz." The letter trembled in my hand. I hadn't.
Bill Lkilled on Makalu.

Bill, killed on Makalu. My God.

I sat stunned and alone in my apartment in Rio de Janeiro, so far from home, tossed into vivid memory.

"So Bill", I asked him one night high on El Capitan, "What is your life dream?"

"I want to be an old man puttering naked about me garden," he replied emphatically.

That didn't seem like much of an ambition to me then, in 1978. Now, as I stand on the edge of old age, it seems a wise and fine ambition. I putter around my garden, clothes on, and I sometimes think of Bill.

Our climb was a kind of lunatic epic and horror show. The sun baked us for days and days into halfwits. Sometimes we cursed and raged at each other. His epic adventures leaped out of his past, unwelcome, onto our adventure. Yet the truth of the matter is that we connected deeply and did a great climb at the limits of our endurance, emotional and physical. And we forgave each other soon thereafter.

Even now, 30 years later, his death hurts. I never asked him, would his be a vegetable or flower garden?

Bill was already a legend in Yosemite when I met him. Everyone knew about his grudge match with Tis-sa-ack: the flake, the savage gash in his leg, the rescue, long recovery, and then he went back and did it.

He was a real hardman. Everyone on the rescue site gave him a nod of respect that was seldom given.

David Austin in Camp 4, 1978. [Photo] Bill Denz

So I was thrilled to sit at the picnic table with him talking about routes on The Captain. I had done it once, something like the tenth ascent of The Shield. It still had a rep back then, but I think that rep was demolished when John Flemming and I did it a year earlier. John and I joked that ours was the first turkey ascent of The Shield. Still, Bill thought it a good credential.

Bill was friendly and blunt. He took and he gave jibes and wisecracks. His opinions were strong and forcefully argued. His easy aura of hardman confidence needed no swagger. There was a pit-bull kind of toughness about him, like he would just clamp onto a climb and shake it dead. Here was a guy who would not easily back off. And he looked the part, compact and probably dangerous in a fight. I wanted badly to do a wall with him. I liked him immensely.

I had my eye on Mesca-Dawn, starting up on Mescalito and finishing on the Dawn Wall. It seemed to me then to be the true line that Harding and Caldwell should have taken. As far as I knew, we would be the third party up the section of wall bypassed by New Dawn. Bill thought it worth doing.

Bill warmed up as the conversation went on. Finally, he let on that he planned to solo Excalibur, starting in the next day or two. I was impressed. That route was for the chosen few. I knew the rack would be hard to manage because it included a pile of bongs and blocks to aid the wide cracks. No one imagined then freeing them because big cams had not been invented yet. I offered to help him carry his gear and ferry loads with my car. He accepted.

Austin follows Denz up to a belay on Mescalito. [Photo] Bill Denz

The next day or two, we staggered in with huge loads of water and gear, stashing them in a carefully camouflaged location in the forest just below Excalibur. Then we went back to Camp 4. The next day I dropped him off with a more gear and wished him luck.

I was surprised to see him a couple days later. He was a stubborn bulldog, but not a fool. The racks were just too huge to manage solo he said. Did I still want to do Mesca-Dawn? I helped him retrieve his gear and then we got down to planning.

We did the usual layout of gear. We agreed on food and bought it. Bill was big on carrying lots of water, so we scrounged a pile of water jugs. We thought that we would fix for one or two days, take a rest day, and then hump in our loads early and blast off for a six-day ascent.

It was normal-hot when we started fixing. No big deal. It kept getting hotter. The day we started it got blast-furnace hot. That wall is shining white rock that reflects the sun right back at you. Facing southeast, it catches the first rays of light and holds them until mid-afternoon. We guzzled water to avoid shriveling up in the cruel sun.

Bill was a great partner. His climbing was solid and he was a superb story teller. Our first night on the wall—dangling, he in his hammock, me in my portaledge—stories and conversation were heart to heart. Bivy conversations are a part of wall climbing not much talked about. Sure, there is a lot of dope smoking and listing to tunes, but some of the best conversations of my life have been with partners on a wall. Souls open up in ways that seldom happen when we plod the earth below.

Austin traverses out onto the rivet ladder. [Photo] Bill Denz

I asked him about Tis-sa-ack. He told me the story in detail. I asked why he went back to do it. "I wasn't going to hang me hammer up on that one," he stated as if there were no honorable alternative.

Then he told me the tragic tale of his friend, Phill Herron, killed in Patagonia. There was open joy in his voice as he spoke of the climbs they did in New Zealand, bold and tough. He said that Phill was his inspiration, that he was the one who dreamed up many of the climbs. Bill was clearly proud of him and loved him, like a kid brother who suddenly burst into glorious manhood and turned out to be an inseparable pal.

Then his voice changed to heartbreak—no tears, just tones of raw agony—as he told of Phill plunging into the crevasse. They had been used to unroped glacier travel in New Zealand. Patagonia does not forgive such a thing. Phill's companion had rapped down to him, just able to touch his fingers in the blue, frigid gloom. Phil was hopelessly wedged and frozen in, nothing to be done except wait for death. The two had talked for hours until Phill slipped into the long sleep of hypothermia. Bill got the news when a solitary figure trudged back to camp. I think that Bill would have preferred a bullet to it.

He left the mountains to find his wife, Christine, desperate for solace, for comfort in the wildness of his grief. But she had run off with an Argentine lover. Bill spent two weeks traveling all over Argentina trying to find her. When he did, she told him to "fuck off."

"Goddamn, Bill. What did you do?" I asked.

"What did I do? What did I do?" he said, voice rising to some climax. "Why, I just lay down on the grass and cried and cried. That's what I did, Zappa." The hero revealed that he was human.

Every story I had told him about love lost and friends killed kind of paled next to that one. It wasn't my story, but it broke my heart, too.

Austin continues his rivet traverse. [Photo] Bill Denz

Dawn blazed and the solar furnace brutally roasted us. Our first day had been pretty much getting started with all of our gear. We had to do two hauls at first. It would have been slow going anyway, but the heat hammered our schedule down to about two or three pitches per day. It was late in the season. Days were short and should have been cool, but there we were in the worst summer heat without summer daylight. At the end of the day, we knew we did not have enough water to make it.

We pondered the options. We had seen all the other parties on the east side of The Captain bail off to flee the heat. If either of us had tried to talk the other into bailing, it would have been successful. I am sure of it. But both of us were too stubborn and pig-headed give in first.

At that time, I had spent more time in Yosemite than Bill. My collection of Captain route lore told me that if we sacrificed one pitch, then our three ropes would just make it to the valley floor. We could rap down a pitch and fix our lines the next morning, get more water and be back at it the next day.

That night we talked about why we climb. Bill thought that climbing was like war. He had trained hard as a commando and was heartbroken when New Zealand pulled out of Vietnam before he could go. He had very much wanted to go. He spoke of his dentist, a World War II vet, who told him that young men must go into the mountains because they long for war.

I don't think that I quite agreed with him. I felt that climbing was more of a spiritual journey. Still, the force of his argument, like pretty much everything else about him, was hard to resist. Looking back, I think that much of what he said was right. Certain young men with no family to care for, no daily demands of compassion, are called by a fierce life. I was one of them and pretty much as ruthless as the next. To me, spirituality may have been a justification to paper over something more elemental. Bill rejected any kind of the climbing mysticism that I espoused at the time because it turned one away from reality. "You've got to be completely plugged into reality to climb," he told me with flat finality.

We executed our plan the next day. By the time we got to the bottom, the rope hung a short walk away from the wall. At no spot did it touch the wall.

That night Bill and I had split for a bit. I walked into Camp 4. As usual, I read the bulletin board. I saw a note, "BILL DENZ. EMERGENCY. CALL PARK DISPATCH," with a number. I grabbed it and headed back toward the lounge to find Bill. I handed it to him and off he went.

A while later he found me. "Bill, what's the deal? Is our climb still on?"

"It was Christine. She is in San Francisco. She was headed to London from Auckland, had a layover in San Francisco and stepped off the plane without her luggage. She had heard about Tis-sa-ack and felt bad about all that had happened between us. She stepped off the plane because she had to see me."

"So what are you going to do?"

"I told her if she meets me at the top then things will work out. I am not hanging up my hammer on this one."

Relieved, I slept well. And off we went the next day.

Austin negotiates the upper end of the rivet ladder. He was surprised and disappointed to find that Warren Harding and Dean Caldwell had continued their rivet ladder through the dihedral instead of protecting it with A3+ nailing. [Photo] Bill Denz

We hit the Harding-Caldwell rivet ladders the day we got back on the wall. There was Mescalito going off to the right, and the rivets going off to the left. There was a moment of decision. We went left. That was a mistake.

Up to that point we were nailing away. Sure it was bloody hot, but we had water. Nothing was really hard, just tradesman piton-craft and plenty of decent nut placements.

Mescalito had been a dream. On a couple of pitches, swarms of tree frogs jumped, surprised, out of the crack. They would launch into the air and then expertly maneuver with spread legs onto a perch. None went the distance. I remember having several on me while Bill was leading.

But the rivets, my God, those goddamn, fucking rivets—dumb-ass little aluminum plugs hardly punched into the rock. We quickly discovered that only #1 wedges, wee things with the cutest little wires, would strangle the rivets. We thought our pile of wires would do the job. We both thought that we had got the word on these things. Had we been smoking dope at the time? I dunno. We blew it. Anyway, all we had were six wires that fit on the rivets. Harding had popped some on the first ascent. My confidence in them was low.

When we made the discovery, we could have just said "fuck it" and gone right. We would have had a short-pitch day, but so what? I have no recollection of why we continued. I can only speculate that two super stubborn guys wanted a third ascent of the lower blank dihedrals more than we wanted to actually have a good climb. On we went, leapfrogging three wires, leaving the other three as imaginary protection to indulge delusions of safety. If any rivet had popped the leader would have gone the distance. A5 for sure.

The next day, Bill was leading over a long, smooth bulge in the morning before thermals started roaring and violently fluttering our bits of loose gear. If I leaned out from my hanging belay, I could see him alright. Otherwise, he was out of sight. The slow, methodical pace of the aiding gave me plenty of time to take in the sights.

At the toe of the Nose, I saw a yellow dot making its slow, tentative way toward the bottom of the Dawn Wall. Finally, it stopped at the base below us
.

The pyjama-clad hero robbed of Everest glory:

Now that I have time to read I have been catching up on a lot of mountaineering and Antarctic history. I have always been fascinated by the Welsh physiologist , skier and mountaineer Griff Pugh who In the spring of 1951, a visitor to the Hampstead offices of the Medical Research Council was confronted with the most extraordinary sight – a semi-naked man lying in a large Victorian enamel bath full to the brim with water and ice cubes. 

The man’s body was chalk-white with cold and covered in wires attached to various instruments. His blazing red hair contrasted sharply with the ghostly pallor of his face.

The man was Dr Griffith Pugh and the visitor had stumbled across him conducting a typically eccentric experiment into the effects of hypothermia. Pugh was so paralysed by cold that he had to be rescued by his technician.

 As a six year old I got to know Pugh through my Mother reading me the outstanding scientific work he had done for the 1953 British Everest Expedition, from the National Geographic and later, Hunt's and Hillary's books.

After Everest, Pugh turned his attention to problems of cold, the 1955-57 International Geophysical Year when Vivien Fuchs and Hillary crossed Antarctica. Pugh was with the New Zealand team working on cold and the hazards and carbon monoxide poisoning inAntarctic Huts and tents. At this time the two of them dreamed up an idea of a scientific and mountaineering expedition lasting nine months to study the long-term effect of altitude. This dream was realised as the 1960-61 expedition usually known as the Silver Hut led by Hillary with Pugh as scientific leader. The winter was at 5,800 metres in the prefabricated hut but  before an attempt was made on Makalu (8,400m). A tremendous amount of phsysiological work was done on mny aspects of heart and lung responses to this prolonged period of low oxygen both in the Silver Hut and higher on Makalu. But this article focusses on Pugh's huge scientific role on the 1953 Everest Expedition written this year by his daughter Harriet.

Pugh at Camp 3, testing the air in the bottom of John Hunt's lungs with his new methods

Today, the name of this pioneering physiologist is barely known. Yet without his tireless devotion and extraordinary eye for detail, the conquest of Mount Everest in May 1953 could never have taken place.

It was Dr Pugh – himself a  member of the expedition – who designed the oxygen and fluid-intake regimes, the acclimatisation programme, the diet, the high-altitude boots, the tents, the down clothing, the mountain stoves and even the airbeds.

Without Pugh, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay would never have reached the summit. So it is all the more regrettable that his role was largely ignored in the official history written by expedition leader Colonel John Hunt. 

Even Pugh’s children knew little of the scale of his achievement as  I – his daughter – can testify.

As, this month, we toast the 60th anniversary of that first successful expedition, it is time to put that right. For not only was my father the true genius behind the achievement, but his work would shape the future of human exploration.

British climbing was still in the hands of gentlemen amateurs when, seven years after the end of the Second World War, the Nepalese government granted permission for a British expedition to climb  Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest  mountain, and to make an assault on Everest the following year. 

The omens weren’t good. Between 1921 and the Second World War, the Joint Himalaya Committee had sent seven expeditions to the world’s highest mountain, all of which had failed. Six British climbers had reached 28,000ft – 1,000ft below the summit – but none had climbed higher. 

It was as if there was a glass ceiling barring further advance. Yet no one was trying to find out why.
Griffith Pugh, who had recently been appointed by the Medical Research Council’s human physiology division to study the problems faced by soldiers and sailors in extreme conditions, was uniquely qualified to help.

Dr Griffith Pugh with his wife and children Harriet and Simon after the Everest triumph in 1953

Born in 1909, the son of a Welsh colonial barrister in Calcutta, he had trained as a doctor in Oxford.
Then, in the summer of 1941, he was given the post of his dreams – training the newly formed Mountain  Warfare Ski Unit at the resort of Cedars in the Lebanese mountains. He was himself an Olympic skier.

The British military authorities wanted research into all aspects of ‘fighting in the snow’, including  ‘equipment and the maintenance of the human body in fighting trim in such conditions’. 

Nothing escaped Pugh’s eye. He designed experimental clothes of a lightweight double-layered fabric  and a flexible boot for ski-mountaineering. He studied load-carrying  and worked out how much weight mountain troops could carry without becoming exhausted or compromising their speed.

He modified the rucksacks to distribute the weight more efficiently.

He examined fluid intakes and  concluded that, on patrol, his commandos needed to drink approximately eight pints of water a day. Army Primus stoves were slow and inefficient, so he designed a better one which the Army adopted. 

He modified the ski-bindings to make them safer. He designed a l ightweight, double-skinned tent for long-range patrols. He also made  recommendations about safety, hygiene, navigation, snow-craft and survival in extreme conditions.

Tempted to have another whisky, he would roar: ‘Where’s my supper? Your mother’s turning me into an alcoholic!’ 

Griffith Pugh was an archetypal ‘boffin’ – driven, obsessive about  his work, plain-spoken and habitually scruffy. 

He could also be absent-minded. Once when his wife – my mother Josephine – was in labour, he asked a taxi driver to stop at the Cafe Royal en route to the hospital so he could pass on his apologies for not attending a function. Thirty minutes later, he had to be reminded about Josephine.

As a teenager, I regarded him  as selfish, egocentric, completely preoccupied with his own interests,  a man with no time for everyday life, no interest in other people’s needs, and no time for his children.

He was a remote and irascible father. I didn’t get on with him, had never asked him about his work and knew little about it.

He treated my mother badly, too. When he came home from work, he invariably went straight to his study, pausing just long enough to collect a large tumbler of whisky and a cigar. 

There, in a fug of tobacco smoke, he would soon be surrounded by screwed-up pieces of paper, angrily cast off  as he struggled with the draft of the article he was attempting to write. Being dyslexic, he wrote very slowly and with difficulty. Tempted to have another whisky, he would roar: ‘Where’s my supper? Your mother’s turning me into an alcoholic!’

Pugh's first test came with the 1952 expedition to Cho Oyu and an invitation from the Joint Himalaya Committee to help develop new methods of using oxygen at high altitude – all in preparation for the assault on Everest.

He spent months planning experiments and choosing equipment, but a fractured and unhappy expedition failed to reach the summit. The climbers mistrusted Pugh, were sceptical about science and effectively sidelined him. 

But he was able to scientifically test the benefits of oxygen at altitude. He got the men to climb as fast as they could on a steep snow slope. The tests confirmed what climbers had been saying for years – the weight of standard oxygen equipment cancelled out the benefits of using it.

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay pause at about 27,350 feet (8,336 metres), where previously supplies had been left for the camp by John Hunt and Sherpa Da Namgyal

Crucially, he increased the amount of oxygen the climbers breathed  to four litres a minute from the  standard two. 

He discovered that while speed was increased only slightly, the climbers were able to breathe more easily, their limbs seemed less heavy and they recovered more quickly. 

For the following year’s assault  on Everest no stone was to be left unturned. Expedition leader Col Hunt produced a draft plan that showed Pugh’s influence on almost every page. As Pugh had advised, Hunt stipulated that oxygen, delivered at a rate of four litres a minute, should be provided.

Pugh’s recommendations on a four-week acclimatisation programme were adopted, as was his policy on fluid intake. Nobody had  fully understood that dehydration makes the blood less efficient at transporting oxygen around the body. The lightweight stove he designed in wartime was used to melt snow for drinking on Everest.

Pugh modified the equipment and planned the expedition’s diet. Different pre-packed menus were provided for each day of the week.

He helped develop a lightweight boot of microcellular rubber for use above 20,000ft. The finished soles had half the density and three times the insulation of conventional mountain boots. He designed tents and windproof clothing – selecting  a new cotton-nylon fabric he found in tests was windproof, ‘breathable’, lightweight and resistant to tearing. 

He specified innovative features such as the slippery taffeta linings that made outer garments easier to pull on. He added extra pockets and loops and ensured the clothes were fitted with zips rather than buttons. 

Athlete Bruce Tulloh running using a breathing hose which enabled Dr Griffith Pugh to monitor physical stress and endurance

Pugh proposed several improvements to the expedition tents, including strong sewn-in groundsheets, and sleeve entrances to keep out snow and draughts. He studied the thermal properties of sleeping bags and specified the amount of down needed to give protection. 

He stipulated the sleeping bags must be long enough to pull over the head and wide enough to allow a man to turn over inside. 

He also helped to design an insulating double-layered airbed and insisted items such as suncream and dark-tinted goggles be provided.

However, he was regarded as an object of scepticism and suspicion, and even, in some quarters, scorn and derision.

When Pugh flew alone from  London and arrived in Kathmandu on March 5, 1953, he faced the prospect of living and working with men who were instinctively hostile to the presence of a scientist. 

Expedition member Wilfred Noyce wrote: ‘To  some of us, the idea of taking a physiologist was repugnant. I myself fully imagined a kind of vampire, lurking at Camp III in readiness to absorb our blood and deflate our lungs as we weaved wearily over the icefall.’

Noyce was later generous enough to acknowledge that he owed a debt of gratitude to Pugh. ‘On the South Col, I was breathing and appreciating and even feeling a certain inspiration – because I was wearing an oxygen mask and my feet were encased in special boots. Without the mask, away goes the enjoyment .  .  . I was feeling well partly because I had been told [by Pugh] to drink six pints of liquid a day.’

The outfit Pugh wore for the trek – sky-blue pyjamas, a hat and an umbrella to shade his fair skin from the sun – was regarded as comical by the very climbers who suffered painful sunburn as a result of  wearing shorts.

In an effort to keep cool, climber Charles Wylie had his hair cropped short. Pugh recorded the painful consequences: ‘Wiley [sic] had the back of his neck shaved half way up to the crown of his head at Banepa; as a result he has second degree sunburn and the back of his head is all swollen and blistered.’

Years later, Col Hunt would admit in his autobiography that he had failed to give due credit to Pugh for his ‘great contribution’.

The conquest of Everest on May 29, 1953, was a triumph for every member of the Everest team. And for Pugh, it was a validation of his ideas and his indefatigable work before the expedition.

Yet his Everest diary contains only the deadpan words: ‘2pm, Hillary and Tenzing arrive back.’ 

Hillary and Tenzing proved to be in ‘surprisingly good condition’, with no trace of frostbite.

Indeed, the success of the expedition was in one respect a disappointment for Pugh: ‘The scope of the physiological work accomplished was limited by the fact the expedition met with no setbacks,’ he wrote.

The team arrived back in England on July 6. They were feted and summoned to Buckingham Palace  to be presented with special medals. But Pugh was irritated when Col Hunt’s official book portrayed  the expedition as a rousing tale of  heroism and derring-do – a theme  of romantic heroism that Hunt feared would be damaged if too much attention were given to the role played by science.

So it was that the official book about the Everest expedition written by him chose not to reveal the true extent of Pugh’s role. 

Details of Pugh’s practical and scientific work had been shunted to the back of the book in the  appendices – indeed, behind six earlier appendices. 

Years later, Col Hunt would admit in his autobiography, Life Is Meeting, that he had failed to give due credit to Pugh for his ‘great contribution’. 

But Pugh had the last laugh. Those appendices – including his theories on oxygen, diet, hydration and dealing with the cold – were read avidly by mountaineers around the world. 

And within three years of his  Everest expedition, the world’s six  highest mountains had all been conquered. Pugh’s scientific methods had become the template for high-altitude climbing everywhere.

© 2013 Harriet Tuckey
Everest: The First Ascent, by Harriet Tuckey, published by Rider, priced £20. To order your copy for £15, including p&p, call 0844 472 4157 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk.

Review: 

The bizarre story of the genius who helped Edmund Hillary to the summit 60 years ago... wearing his night clothes

By HARRIET TUCKEY

PUBLISHED: 21:03 GMT, 18 May 2013 | UPDATED: 17:32 GMT, 19 May 2013

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2326727/The-pyjama-clad-hero-robbed-Everest-glory-The-bizarre-story-genius-helped-Hillary-summit-60-years-ago--wearing-night-clothes.html#ixzz2dqyPiqRK
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