A Day to Die For: 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - One Survivor's Personal Journey to Uncover the Truth (33 page)

Fortunately, by this point in my career my line of business took far less of my time than it had previously done. Because of this I was in a position to dedicate myself, almost full-time, to the task ahead. This was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way: by a lot of hard work.

Countless hours were spent contacting publishers and libraries to discover what copies of publications from that period they still held. It would have helped immeasurably if I could have remembered which one the first quote had appeared in. Piles of hundreds of magazines soon began to swamp the floor of our living room. However, my quest was now for much more than just the missing line of print, it was for any reference to weather forecasts being received into Everest Base Camp prior to 10 May in 1996. Every article I found claimed it was a ‘sudden’ or ‘unexpected’ storm, as did the thousands of pieces on the Internet. Many of these latter ones went further and referred to it as a ‘freak’ or ‘rogue’ storm. The more I looked, the further I appeared to be from finding any reference to a weather forecast. My task looked impossible.

I spent many a waking hour in the front room of our apartment. Here, I sat in a large armchair with my face buried in one magazine after another. Every now and again I would look up and stare blankly out of the window at the dramatic coastline of the North Sea, mustering the energy to continue with this thankless task. Month after month slipped by as I carefully went through each article. Periods of despondency began to set in where I’d abandon my reading for a week or two until I could renew my determination.

It was as though I was looking for a needle in a haystack; I only wished I knew which haystack to look in. The seasons changed as I sat each day in the same maroon-coloured chair and read every single line in all the issues I was able to obtain. Flowers came and went, as did the summer sun; late autumn rain lashed hard against the windows. Phone calls and visitors became little more than a distraction, and soon one year would turn into the next. Three magazines a day became a good rate of work.

My concern was that as each day wore on and concentration began to wane I might inadvertently skip the paragraph that contained the elusive quote, or I would miss another that might stand in its stead. As I completed reading each magazine, I convinced myself I was one step nearer in my search. Rows of empty coffee cups filled the kitchen bench as I tried to remain alert.

Logic told me that the two lines of print had not been in error, as one supported the other. Each had had a reason for being published. I would, in time, contact Lindsay Griffin to ask what information he had used to write the article that contained the reference to the prediction of computer models. Alas, he no longer held the relevant records to assist me.

Sitting at my computer in the front room, an area that I now regarded more as an office than a living space, I commenced a parallel line of enquiry as I scoured the Internet for relevant information.

Logic took me first to see if Rob Hall had received his weather from the Meteorological Service of New Zealand. A brief search gave me their contact details. With the press of a single button, this phase of my work began.

Having checked their records for May and June of 1996, the reply came back from Consultant Meteorologist Ross Marsden:
‘I think it is safe to say that no forecasts or forecast data were provided from Meteorological Service of New Zealand Ltd for that expedition.’

The New Zealand enquiry, although not leading anywhere, taught me a valuable lesson. Each enquiry would narrow the search. Any answer I received had to be used in a positive way: either enabling me to cross a particular line of enquiry off my list, or by utilising the information it contained to make further contact with others. In comparison with the colossal amount of fruitless time spent reading the magazines, even a simple ‘no’ appeared as progress, a steppingstone to the next person or organisation to contact.

As Rob’s and Scott’s teams had attempted the summit at the same time, reason dictated that maybe Scott had been getting a weather forecast from the US. I contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the States. The answer I received from Research Meteorologist William Brown from the National Climatic Data Centre brought similar disappointment:
‘Unfortunately the United States does not forecast climatic conditions for Mt Everest.’
He went on to suggest I might try the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), who gathered their information from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF).

I contacted the SMHI and received a response from Gunnar Berglund of their Customer Services:
‘I’ve talked to some people and sorry to say but we have no forecasts from the year 1996.’
He went on to say that they’d first started forecasting for Everest in 1999 and so were unable to help me with my request.

Although buoyed by the relative speed with which I’d received these answers, my initial and obvious lines of enquiry had drawn a blank. Nothing I’d read in my research had given me any indication that I was on the right track. This, I had not expected. I now understood how information could be lost through time. I was beginning to feel that this might be the case or that I was wrong.

Eventually, I managed get hold of most, but not all, of the various UK periodicals of the time. I was greatly assisted by Allcord, a large wholesaler to the outdoor industry based in Newcastle upon Tyne, who kindly gave me unlimited access to their loft, where box upon box of back issues lay, covered by the dusts of time.

I even resorted to eBay in my search. Here, I committed the cardinal sin of placing wanted adverts for the copies I was missing rather than advertising articles for sale, in the desperate hope that someone might have some old editions stashed away. EBay wrote to me and threatened to suspend my account if I repeated this action, so I opened a second eBay account and tried again.

Certain trade publications, where I was missing issues, had names and addresses of manufacturers and suppliers of sports and climbing equipment listed in an appendix. Catherine and I sent out dozens of letters to companies all over Europe, enquiring if per chance they’d kept back copies of these publications. We offered £250 towards their office Christmas party if they were able to help. Many took the time to reply, but none with the answer we were hoping for. The issues we needed were so far out of date that no one had kept them that long. Like my original copy, they too had been thrown out. The publishing companies of these trade magazines also only held copies for a year or two. Time was beginning to work against me. The trail was going cold.

The search had become all-consuming, but I had never stopped to consider why. I splashed out and placed a four-week-long advert on ukclimbing.com, where I offered a £2,000 reward for any information that might lead me to the missing quote. Most replies ironically suggested I look in Jon Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air
. Others hopeful of some money to fund a possible climbing trip actually took the time to have a look through the old copies they held. A blog appeared on the site where discussions began as to why I was looking for the quote. The consensus of opinion appeared to be that I was some lawyer preparing a lawsuit. However, the one that amused me most was when someone emailed me and told me it had all been gone through in great detail in several books already – that I should leave matters alone.

In many ways, it had become a very lonely journey. I was sustained by little more than my own determination and Catherine’s support. Although I met friends regularly on a Monday and Thursday evening, they were understandably wrapped up in their own careers and hobbies. The events on Everest in 1996 held little relevance or interest for them. It would have been pointless for me to begin a topic of conversation about a quote I’d read several years earlier, one that I could now not re-find.

There turned out to be only two people who I think truly understood the tortuous task I’d given myself. The first was Catherine, who stayed amazingly positive throughout. I’m sure there will have been many topics she would have rather listened to than this particular one on a daily basis for such a long a period of time. The other was Geoff Scarth, a very good friend, some 20 years my senior, whom I met each Friday evening for a quiet drink in a nearby pub called The Briar Dene. Situated next to the golf course on the seafront at Whitley Bay, it had a reputation as a family-friendly establishment. With comfortable seats and a thick-carpeted floor, it was an ideal venue for uninterrupted discussion and one that served an excellent selection of hand-pulled real ale to add flavour to our deliberations.

Geoff was a lawyer who’d acted on Catherine’s and my behalf with regard to our businesses. He’d taken semi-retirement, as he called it, around 1997 when he’d telephoned half a dozen selected clients he wished to maintain on his books, with their agreement, because, as he put it, he ‘found them interesting’. We’d been included in the select few – something we took as a great compliment at the time, although I joked with him afterwards that it was really because he made so much money out of us, which he needed for his annual vacation with his wife Enid to Zermatt and Grindelwald in Switzerland each autumn. This comment had made him roar with laughter. A year or two later, he fully retired and had subsequently become a very close friend, whose opinion, not surprisingly, I valued very highly.

Fortunately for me, Geoff, although not a climber, had a passion for the mountains. He’d followed my progress on Everest from the very beginning and had noted well my initial reluctance to talk about the disaster on Everest. He was one of the first to see me after my return from Nepal that year and had left the topic alone. Now, several years on, each Friday, more often than not, we would discuss my fruitless search and the events of 1996. I openly told Geoff that had I not read the quote myself I would have sworn that it did not exist. He played a superb devil’s advocate by asking me, in all seriousness, if I might have dreamt reading the quote, in which case it actually might not exist. Fortunately for me, when I’d seen it all that time ago I’d been so taken aback that I’d shown it to Catherine. She too had read the elusive two lines of print and as such gave me the witness that Geoff had to accept.

I would, in time, come to realise that throwing out the magazine when we moved house was probably the best thing that could have happened. If I’d discovered the quote early on in my quest, I might have got some answers on a more superficial level, but I am convinced I would not have dug so hard or so relentlessly. I’d read the quote. I knew it was there somewhere. Had I found it and tracked down the source would they have admitted saying it or would I have been met with a denial? This had only been said once in all that I’d read – from which I concluded there had been a momentary lapse. The real value was that it had become my motivation. The way to the truth was no brighter than a pinprick of light.

One sentence.

Much of the difficulty I’d encountered up to this point had been due to the lack of any official investigation, in the form of an inquiry, into the events leading up to the disaster. In Nepal, for mountaineering fatalities at least, there is no post-mortem requirement, nor does the cause of death need to be shown on the death certificate.

As two Americans had died, Doug Hansen and Scott Fischer, I looked into the US requirements for any of their citizens being killed abroad, in the hope these might be the most stringent.

Since 30 September 2002, the Department of State in the US has been required to record, and make publicly available, detailed statistics of US citizens who die overseas from non-natural causes, including where, when and what category of death. Climbing comes under the heading of ‘other accidents of misadventure’. However, in the case of accidental deaths, the host country is responsible for the investigation. Since Nepal has no post-mortem or cause-of-death requirement for the death certificate in such cases, an inquest into the events and circumstances leading up to a person’s demise cannot reasonably be held.

I contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in New Zealand to ask what their requirements might be if a New Zealander was killed abroad. In this case, there had been two: Rob Hall and Andy Harris.

In their response, they wrote:
‘If a New Zealander is killed overseas, any investigation into that death is normally conducted by the local authorities and a local death certificate issued. We are bound by the local laws/investigation process of that country.’

The reply from Japan, with regard to the death of Yasuko Namba, was in a similar vein. With an accidental death, the investigation is carried out by, and according to the laws of, the host country.

The short winter days and long dark nights had done little to raise my spirits, nor did the lack of any evidence corroborating the existence of a weather forecast in 1996. Rather than getting overly dejected about the position I found myself in, Catherine and I decided to head off to Nepal that coming spring for a complete break in the hope that when we returned home refreshed my luck might change, although I must admit I was beginning to doubt that very much. The countless hours we’d both spent painstakingly reading and re-reading page after page of the many magazines I’d gathered had produced virtually nothing but a few minor references: ones that might possibly be useful in the future, but nothing of any substance.

We were going to Nepal this time not for climbing or trekking but to indulge our greatest passion: wildlife and the natural world. We’d been to the lowlands of Nepal, the Terai, several times before to visit the world-famous Chitwan National Park. On one occasion, we’d been extraordinarily lucky enough to see a Royal Bengal tiger in the wild. I was hoping we would again, but even if we didn’t have a sighting, we wouldn’t be disappointed. The change in our surroundings, the very friendly people of the Terai and being in the park itself would be reward enough.