Dead Lucky (12 page)

Today the sun was shining strongly, so that despite a persistent wind my Gore-Tex wind-suit kept me more than warm enough. At last I came to the final deep valley, eroded into the glacier by a stream. The climb up out of that valley was the final leg to the 7Summits-Club Intermediate Camp.

The glacial landscape at the halfway point between Base Camp and Advance Base Camp was not the ideal spot for a major encampment. Consequently, the different expeditions were scattered across two separate ice ridges, which at least limited overcrowding. I recognized our long yellow-caterpillar tent immediately; it was identical to our mess tent at Base Camp but less than half the length. My delayed departure from Base Camp put me between the itineraries of both the A-Team and the B-Team, but a few members of the A-Team were still in residence. Dawa and Tendi, cooks in residence, served up plenty of food, which I ate with gusto. I was pleased to have a good appetite because a gain in altitude often suppresses hunger and causes nausea.

In 2002, I had hiked up to this point after leading a trekking group to the Lho La, but the weather had been so bad that I was unable to grasp the lay of the land. And so when I awoke the next morning, I was excited about the next seven miles. The terrain was more straightforward than the previous day, with the upper reaches of the glacier more open and less eroded.

For me it was a great day out in the mountains. Everest had been barely visible in the morning beyond the mass of Changtse. By midafternoon my perspective had changed. As the glacier rounded Changtse's long East Ridge, more of Everest revealed itself, and I could see that there was no need to venture onto the upper glacier, where there would be hidden crevasses. Instead, the moraine valley, with the glacier on one side and Changtse's ridge on the other, led directly to Advance Base Camp. Unfortunately, my heading westward coincided with the sun dropping behind the ridge, putting me in shade and exposing me to a dramatic drop in temperature. I pulled my down jacket on over my wind-suit and struggled onward. I was now at 20,600 feet. The shortage of oxygen forced me to take big gasps of the freezing air, which shocked my lungs and made me cough uncontrollably. This inevitable circumstance was the reason Slate had constructed his Darth Vader mask and why the three Norwegians made sure they were equally well equipped. Without such technology, I was bitterly cold, short of breath, and just wanted to be warm and at rest.

Not yet acclimatized to this height, I was not able to walk quickly toward the tents in the distance. As I crested a rock-covered hump of ice, I almost fell into the open doors of a small expedition's kitchen tent. It was a dramatic way to learn level space on the sloping glacier is utilized even when right by the trail. I plodded on, gradually realizing that Advance Base Camp stretched a half-mile up the moraine gully, gaining almost a thousand feet in the process. Because I was puffing hard and moving slowly, the 7Summits-Club encampment appeared impossibly far away.

At last I arrived at our tents, easily recognizable among the many dozens pitched along the moraine below Changste's Northeast Ridge. I whipped off my down jacket, unzipped my wind-suit, pulled on my cozy fleece bib-and-brace, and then I donned my down jacket again. Now insulated from the sunless afternoon cold at 21,000 feet, I staggered up to the signature yellow caterpillar tent for the refreshments I knew would be waiting for me. Every other time that I had been to this height I had been completely self-sufficient, carrying my own tent, stove, and food, or at least sharing these loads among my few friends. I was not complaining, but it felt decidedly odd to enter a tent where I was welcomed by smiling Sherpas offering a thermos of water, another of milk, six kinds of teabags, and three incarnations of hot chocolate. Despite the strangeness, the “village” setting made me feel less intimidated by the prospect of my first night in several years at 21,000 feet. When I woke at two A.M. with a headache, I was prepared—with a Panadol at the ready and a book to read until I fell asleep again. Years ago I had discovered that this was the best way for me to deal with high-altitude insomnia. The remedy became ineffective only when there was not enough oxygen for me to remember the preceding sentence, but at my present height I was a long way from that.

My first night at Advance Base Camp turned out to be more comfortable than expected, but the best way to acclimatize was to head back to Base Camp, where I would get the recuperative benefits of sleeping 4,000 feet lower. That morning, the sun beating down made the mess tent as hot as a greenhouse. I could not manage much breakfast, but I made sure I had plenty to drink, then I wandered back to my tent and repacked my belongings for the long downhill trek. The path out of the camp was easy to follow, with a good covering of shattered rocks obscuring the ice of the glacier beneath. Not far beyond the last tents, the path was interrupted by a steep-sided gully in the ice. Obstacles like this one were the reason I had brought with me a pair of trekking poles, which are best described as modified ski stocks. Their height is easily adjusted, which is a useful feature on steep terrain. The only time I use them is for balance and extra grip on glaciers where there are loose rocks and exposed ice— which is almost every glacier. With fourteen miles of moraine and glacier to be traversed multiple times, the poles saved me a great deal of effort.

The glacier curved to the north, and by that process the ice was contorted into ridges, like frozen waves. The terrain eased as the glacier straightened out, with shards of rock providing friction underfoot.

I made good time and caught up with a young man also heading down the valley. We chatted, and as we talked, I learned that he was the cinematographer for a two-person Norwegian ski team, although he himself was Swedish. His name was Fredrik Schenholm.

“They will ski the Norton Couloir,” he said.

“I've been there,” I replied immediately. “I can tell you about it.”

He looked at me but said nothing; perhaps he was thinking that the couloir had been climbed only once, and that the chances of meeting someone from that expedition were highly improbable.

“I was part of the Australian team in 1984 that made the first ascent. I climbed to the top of the couloir, to where the snow ended. I could explain the lay of the land to your friends, if they're interested.'

“Okay,” he said, which was about as noncommittal as he could get without being rude.

I wasn't trying to assert myself; I was merely excited to meet anyone interested in our route on the North Face, even if they were going to ski rather than climb it.

“I'm with 7Summits-Club and Alex Abramov. You'll know us from our giant yellow-caterpillar tent.”

Then I was on my way. Maybe the Norwegian skiers would contact me; maybe they wouldn't. Just thinking about the North Face gave me a boost of energy. I continued to be amazed that no one else had climbed the Great Couloir (also known as the Norton Couloir) in the intervening twenty-two years. Very few had tried, despite it being such a major feature of the mountain and one of the most direct routes to the summit. On Mount Everest, tagging the summit sadly meant more than style and adventure.

THE TWO-DAY APPROACH to the heights of Advance Base Camp had been a workout for me and a great metabolic trigger for my body's acclimatization processes. The long one-day return to Base Camp was proving much easier. Once I had cleared the irregular contortions of the rock-covered ice pyramids that marked the end of the East Rongbuk Glacier, I moved with a rhythm and pace that felt just right for where I was and what I was doing. By midafternoon I was traveling at a good speed across a part of the route that consisted of small boulders.

I only stayed on track because the route was marked by cairns at regular intervals. Soon I caught up with three slow-moving figures ahead of me. They turned out to be Harry, Thomas, and Milan, taking it easy on a beautiful sunny afternoon. The sun was losing its warmth but not its power to heighten the warm colors of the orange and brown rocks. As I overtook my teammates, I made a few light remarks about the good weather and wondered to myself whether Thomas's vision was already impaired at these relatively low heights.

I was tired but content and wasted no mental energy on anything superfluous. I was doing what I needed to do at each particular moment, until I reached the point where there were no moments, only the continuum of my passage along the rubble-strewn trail. I made no attempts to put myself in this state; I just found myself there. It felt like the landscape was including me—as if the barrier between the living and the nonliving, between life and death, had dissolved. My enjoyment was no longer of the magnificent day or of the mountains but of an altered sense of reality, a disconnection from the flow of thoughts that normally had me planning, thinking, analyzing. I had stepped into a simpler state of being.

The change in my perceptions was confirmed for me when I became aware of the sounds of birds. Several types of bird live at these heights, but they are neither songbirds nor plentiful. At first I thought nothing of it—because I was not thinking, only moving through the landscape. I approached some boulders with the knowledge that there were Tibetan snow cocks behind them, and although I had seen nothing, I did not question the knowledge or how I came to have it. As I drew parallel with the boulders, four birds broke cover. Only able to fly downhill, they flew across the path in front of me, the loud
wap-wap-wap
of their wings warning other birds higher up the slope to take flight.

I had experienced this kind of connection to a world beyond oneself on the hardest of mountains, when danger had put all my senses on red alert. Afterward, as I descended from the last of the snow and steep rock, my senses remained tuned to the present moment. The sounds were more insistent, the colors were brighter, and my eyes seemed to take in everything around me without my mind asking them to look. It was an extraordinary feeling—it is one of the reasons that I climb. I had trudged up and down many tedious glaciers in magnificent settings, but never before had I experienced such rapture without the elixir of danger.

This state of heightened awareness stayed with me as I continued down the trail. The steep descent from the lip of the East Rongbuk Valley into the main Rongbuk Valley seemed much shorter than it had during the ascent, which was a measure of the extra effort I had needed to put in when plodding uphill, unacclimatized, at 17,000 feet two days earlier. The path through the boulders scattered along the moraine trough was obvious, thanks to the glacial silt underfoot which left a well-trodden trail.

There are dangers between Base Camp and Advance Base Camp, especially for heavily loaded yaks, and so the
yakpas
(yak drivers) had the habit of blessing the trail with prayer flags. With no trees or bridges from which to hang the lines of flags, they were placed individually on boulders at waist height or above and kept in place by a pebble in the center. The pebble or fragment of rock had to be heavy enough to hold down the prayer flag but not so large that it prevented the edges of the flag from fluttering in the wind.

I was no longer hearing birds, but I could hear distant wind-borne music. Ahead of me a dark blue prayer flag caught my eye, and I sensed that I needed to keep it in my sight. The flag was on a jagged boulder of gray granite at the level of my shoulder and was held down by a chunky rock the size of a bar of soap. Within a few feet of it, as I watched intently, the chunk of rock wobbled, the event confirmed by the soft
clack
as it moved. I was surprised less by the movement than by my attention being drawn to it before it happened.

During the last miles to Base Camp, my mind was open to everything. I saw a man leaning against a tall rock, wearing an Akubra hat and moleskin trousers and holding what looked like some kind of box. There are times when you see an object from a new perspective only to discover that it is something completely different. As I approached the man, the perspective changed, but he remained a man. A few steps farther his image had transformed into a stack of boulders. You can make mistakes when your mind is cluttered with thoughts but also when it is free of them.

Beyond the disappearing man, I saw the hindquarters of a small deer, similar to one that Mike had spotted silhouetted on the crest of a ridge. As I approached, I slowed down and trod softly, only to discover that the deer, too, was no more than a shape among the rocks. These were obviously hallucinations caused by tiredness and hypoxia, but I believed I would not have seen the shapes at all had I not been in a heightened state of awareness.

If nothing else, the experience gave me an insight into the origins of Tibetan animism, where spirits are believed to exist among the rocks and mountains are courted by
pujas
at Base Camp and ceremonies in monasteries. I was not seeing any spirits, but I managed to maintain the feeling of belonging to the landscape until I stepped into the mess tent at Base Camp. Back at our mountain home, instantly there were practical matters which required my attention.

ON A SUNNY but windy afternoon a week later, when hiking up the glacier with Christopher, Richard, and Mike, I pulled into Intermediate Camp and was amazed to find the mess tent full. This only happened because the B-Team caught up with a few members of the A-Team, who had decided they needed an extra night there before pushing on to Advance Base Camp. This was perfectly acceptable because there is often personal variation in the rate of acclimatization, and there were enough tents, plenty of food, and two eager cooks. What I didn't realize immediately was that there were two extra people, Vitor Negrete and Rodrigo Raineri.

The two Brazilian mountaineers had attempted Everest by this same route the year before. Vitor had summited, but Rodrigo had been forced to retreat 150 feet below. The fact that he turned back at that point indicates both the enormous physical effort required for that final section and the debilitating effects of extreme altitude, even for those using oxygen. As chance would have it, Harry and Vitor had stood on the summit of Everest at the same hour on the same day in 2005 but until now had not had the opportunity to compare their triumphs.