Dead Lucky (9 page)

The higher we drove, the colder it became outside and the more the windows of the minibus fogged up. We were almost at Base Camp, yet no one would let me open a window. I laughed to myself at this attempt to postpone the realities of high-altitude mountaineering. In a month or two we would not be worrying about fresh air rushing in through a small window but about the possibility of the tents we huddled in high on the mountain being shredded by hurricane-force winds.

TENT CITY

WITH THE SUMMIT of Mount Everest the most inhospitable place on earth, and with the base camps on both sides higher than any permanently inhabited place, people are understandably surprised when they learn that a road leads all the way to the Tibetan Base Camp.

When China invaded Tibet and added it to the Motherland, they also assumed ownership of the entire Everest massif. Chinese maps of the time portrayed Chinese territory extending as far south as Namche Bazaar. In the Everest region the true border between Nepal and Tibet runs from the summit of Makalu westward over the crests and summits of Lhotse, Everest, Pumori, Gyachung Kang, and Cho Oyu—very much the skyline as viewed from the Pang La. Of course, the optimistic Chinese border was not recognized by Nepal, India, or any other country. Nowhere else in the world could a border be less traversable than across the top of Mount Everest.

The Chinese came to their senses and corrected their maps. They salvaged some of their limitless national pride by mounting an expedition to Chomolungma (the Tibetan name for Everest). Their first task was the gargantuan one of constructing the Rongbuk Base Camp road that is in use today. With that achieved, they trucked in mountains of supplies and a climbing team of 214 Chinese and Tibetan men and women. Nothing could be further from the lonely experience of 1924—when a small British team including George Mallory and Andrew Irvine climbed close to the summit—than the Chinese siege ascent in 1960 under the leadership of Shih Chanchun. Completing the route pioneered by the British thirty-six years before, the Chinese planted the Red Flag on the summit on May 25, 1960.

THE ROAD TO BASE CAMP had improved since my visit in 2003. Well-engineered embankments and wider hairpin bends made it easier for longer vehicles to manage the steepness of the final moraine wall. Our minibuses chugged up with no difficulty. Ahead, the terrain opened out into a broad valley with a floor of gray glacial silt. I recognized a short ridge that rose twenty feet above the flats. On its crest was a two-room building that marked the outskirts of Base Camp. The concrete hut provided office space for the Tibetan Mountaineering Association (known as the TMA) and accommodation for its officials; it was inhabited only during the spring and autumn climbing seasons. Below it was a small grassy area that existed only because a spring-fed creek brought life to the dry ground. This beautiful spot was where we had set up our base camp in 1984, and we had had the place to ourselves. A large American team was the only other expedition on the Tibetan side of the mountain that year, but it did not arrive until after we had moved up the valley to our higher but more sheltered Advance Base Camp, much closer to the North Face.

The grassy area had survived the explosion of Everest expeditions over the preceding decade, but the spring water was no longer potable. The most obvious change was the growth of the shantytown of temporary tents where meals, alcohol, and the other services of a frontier land were sold. By 2006 the temporary settlement along the last stretch of road had doubled in size. Between two of the tents was Base Camp's newest permanent building, the small concrete cube that was the Rongbuk Post Office. The northern approach to Mount Everest had definitely become a tourist attraction.

The shantytown was politely known as the Chinese Base Camp. Beyond it was a vast alluvial flat. Most expeditions had set themselves up here. Our driver showed no mercy as he bounced and swayed the minibus across what was essentially a field of glacial silt, boulders, and dry watercourses filling with snow. With the visibility ahead limited to a few hundred feet, we drove past several encampments. Finally, rows and rows of yellow tents appeared to our left. The minibus jolted to a halt, and we clambered out into the storm. We had arrived.

There was no mistaking the conditions outside, but it was still a slap in the face to step out of the warm fug inside the vehicle into heavy snowfall and a strong wind. This was the reality we would be living for the next two months, so I took it on board immediately. None of us was fully dressed for a snowstorm, so there was some urgency about getting our gear into tents. I could see that our driver had dropped us at the base of a huge wall of moraine that was like a rock dam across the valley. I had never seen as many tents in the one spot—and that was without counting the base camps of other expeditions, now hidden in the storm. The tent city was laid out in rows, and as somebody who had decided not to live in a city back home, I wanted to avoid living in one here. My best option was to choose a tent at the end of a row, with only one row between my tent and the eastern edge of the encampment. Mike was in front of me and Slate to one side. A good set of neighbors, I thought to myself. Mike's neighbors were Christopher and then Richard, which was convenient for our small Australian team. I slung my daypack and cameras into the roomy yellow dome that would serve as my home for the next two months. I looked forward to making it into a comfortable refuge.

Soon there was a call for hot drinks and snacks in the mess tent. The tent itself was extraordinary. Bright yellow and semicircular in cross section, it was nine feet high, twelve feet across, and eighty feet long. From a distance it looked like a giant yellow caterpillar. The tent was divided into five compartments. Midlength was an entrance into the vestibule, which was about twelve feet square. The sides of the vestibule had door-flaps leading to dining areas about twenty feet long. There were small storage areas at the far ends. When I stepped in, Alex directed me to the right, as this was the zone for the B-Team. The climbers in the A-Team were directed to the left. Although climbers from one team could visit climbers of the other team, they were not allowed to dine with them. I felt like I was in school again.

Alex and his Russian crew certainly had their own way of doing things, and I was not sure that I was going to like it. If we were to be treated like schoolkids at Base Camp, how tightly would we be reined in when on the dangerous slopes of the mountain? Time would tell. For the moment I would just watch and learn.

Five collapsible metal card tables ran the length of the B-Team's section of the mess tent. Each table was set for four people. A mirror image of the layout had been set up across the vestibule for the A-Team. The Russian staff ate with us in the B-Team's mess tent, their tables at the end of the row. Their conversation, not surprisingly, was in Russian and they kept to themselves, with one exception. A man in his thirties with a young face but a hairline that was starting to recede took a spare seat at a table next to us and introduced himself.

“I am Andrey Selivanov,” he said as he joined Noel, Lorenzo, and Giuseppe. “I am from Siberia. I am doctor, but now I am mountaineer. Welcome to Base Camp.”

I assumed he was making himself approachable because he was the doctor and wanted everyone to feel comfortable in his presence. He was certainly friendly, but his English came to him slowly.

The Russians were squeezed between our table and that of four Norwegians. Petter Kragset, Johnny Brevik, Torbjørn Orkelbog, and Frode Høgset all spoke excellent English and shared a sense of humor that translated well. Climbing this mountain would demand a lot of fuel, so we set about sampling the hot drink options and the agreeably large range of biscuits. That first afternoon I concluded that we had landed on our feet. My years as a trekking guide had heightened my sensibility to what I called “the shithead factor.” I judged that, this time around, we had escaped without someone whose unbearable ego might have prevented us from working properly as a team. I had experienced this too many times, not only when in the mountains but also when I took corporate groups into the wilds for a week of team building. On this expedition all of us shared a purpose that would allow us to take strength from one another, and yet no one could guess what events might push us together or pull us apart when we were high on the mountain.

Certainly the mess tent was a good place to get to know everyone, and there were plenty of good stories to share around. Three of the B-Team climbers had been on Everest the previous season. Petter Kragset had been a member of a Norwegian expedition, and while some of the team had summited, poor health had turned him around at the North Col. At an altitude of 23,200 feet, the col is high by every other standard but is just the real beginning of a climb of Everest.

Noel Hanna had also been forced to turn back at the North Col when his eyesight was compromised by a retinal hemorrhage. These are not uncommon at altitude, but usually vision is not affected. Noel had become aware of a large dark spot, which he knew was a danger sign. Doctors at Advance Base Camp had agreed that it would be unwise for him to go back up the mountain. Back in Ireland, Noel sought specialist opinions, and some key advice was to take Diamox, a drug used by glaucoma sufferers to reduce fluid buildup around the eye and so lower its internal pressure. Noel immediately realized this was a serendipitous recommendation. He knew that climbers had long been using Diamox to manage or inhibit the onset of altitude sickness, with some taking it preventatively for the duration of their expeditions. Although I had never used the drug myself, I had given it to trekkers in my care and had seen its positive effects. Noel arrived at Base Camp with a plentiful supply.

Oddly, the third returnee to the North Ridge of Everest had also retreated because of an eye problem, but on the highest reaches of the mountain. At 28,000 feet, in the deep cold of the night, Lorenzo Gariano had realized that the surface of one of his eyeballs was frozen. With several hours of climbing to the summit, he might have made it to the top, but he had not known how near his other eye was to freezing and so his only option was to descend.

Three climbers were facing a bigger challenge. Along with Petter, Henrik Olsen and Kirk Wheatley were close to completing the Seven Summits of all seven continents, their goal being the highest point on each. Everest was the last on their list, and I judged all of them as likely to succeed. Petter had already devoted months to climbing Everest, knew how to manage cold, and oozed determination. Henrik was a solid man in body and spirit, obviously fit, accustomed to the extreme cold of winters in Denmark, and a competent no-nonsense outdoorsman.

Of these three, I found Kirk the most intriguing. My first proper conversation with Kirk, who came from the UK, had taken place in the big dining hall of the grand hotel in Shegar. I learned that he was a professionaldiver, but not the kind who introduces bikini babes to the warm tropical waters of the Bahamas or the Great Barrier Reef. He operated at the other end of the spectrum, the murky depths of industrial diving, working on the maintenance and repair of marine and underwater structures. Kirk might spend three weeks in a pressurized capsule with two or three workmates without coming up to see the sky, let alone his wife and young family. At other times he repaired port facilities in darkness that came not from night but from the swirling silt at the bottom of the sea. Often he wore a mask with air pumped down from above because the work took much longer than any scuba system could accommodate. That kind of work required a particular type of person, someone who could work twelve hours straight while under several atmospheres of pressure and stay focused on the job. Kirk obviously had those abilities.

Because Kirk was someone who worked where the visibility was often less than the length of his arm, I wondered whether he compensated for the claustrophobic darkness of the depths by searching for the most majestic and all-encompassing views in the world. But in fact Kirk wanted to climb mountains because as a nonclimber he was excited by the challenge of climbing the Seven Summits.

“I'm not a mountaineer,” he told me. “I'm a tourist in the mountains.”

Kirk certainly had no pretensions, but I knew already that he had two of the attributes necessary for success at extreme altitudes—the ability to stay calm when there was very little environmental oxygen and the doggedness to persevere in dangerous situations. As for climbing skills and the intimidating cold, he would have worked out his strategies during his climbs of the other six peaks.

Kirk was talkative and cheerful in a sour, British kind of way and had initially attempted a unique sponsorship path. He had smoked a cigarette on the top of the six peaks he had summited and decided to approach tobacco companies about sponsoring his Everest ascent, which he would complete with a cigarette on the summit. He was knocked back, perhaps because companies such as Philip Morris, the Gallaher Group, and Austrian Tabac realized that tobacco was dangerous enough without linking it to the deadly risks of climbing the world's highest peak.

Also in the Seven Summits stakes was Christopher Harris. Before I left Australia, a number of people had questioned me about the wisdom of a fifteen-year-old climbing Mount Everest. I replied that it had already been climbed by someone only three months older than Christopher, so it was definitely possible. It was refreshing to find that among our expedition nobody questioned Christopher's goal of becoming the youngest fifteen-year-old to climb the mountain.

Everyone accepted that all of us were here for our own Everest experiences, which would surely vary enormously. Rather than Christopher's climb, the point of controversy was whether Irian Jaya's Carstensz Pyramid should replace Australia's highest peak, Mount Kosciuszko, as the Australasian summit. Alex voted for Carstensz because he said it was a climbers' mountain, unlike Kosciuszko, which was for walkers. Whether the quest should include Kosciuszko or Carstensz (which sits on the Australian tectonic plate) was never settled. Alex argued that Christopher should play it safe and climb both, but then his company, 7Summits-Club, had the vested interest of running expeditions to the chosen seven—and an ascent of Kosciuszko was not an expedition, it was a day-walk.