Michael Thexton

Pete, of course, being the doctor, he was trying to assess how ill Greg was.

Greg said, well, look, I'll just sit here.

You walk to the top, come back again.

And Pete said, no, no, we've got to go down.

You know, you could be really ill here.

And the only way to treat acute mountain sickness is to go down.

So they turned around and started down.

And as they went down, Greg got better and Pete got worse.

Greg has written an account of it which I have read probably twice in my life and it makes me cry.

In fact, it makes me almost cry even thinking about it.

They ended up in the dark with Greg lifting and lowering Pete rope length by rope length.

I mean, it's just a completely epic descent.

They got back to the top camp at two o'clock in the morning

They found another famous British climber, Don Willems, waiting there with a high-altitude porter.

And he died of pulmonary edema, which is the leaking of fluid into the lungs, a different version of acute mountain sickness.

And they had to bury him there.

They had to put him in a crevasse in his sleeping bag because they obviously couldn't get him down.

It was hard enough getting him down when he was still alive, but they couldn't bring his body down when he was dead.

And that was the last day or just about the last day of June

1983.