Into Thin Air (13 page)

So it came to pass that at 4:45 A.M. on Saturday, April 13, I found myself at the foot of the fabled Icefall, strapping on my crampons in the frigid predawn gloom.

Crusty old alpinists who’ve survived a lifetime of close scrapes like to counsel young protégés that staying alive hinges on listening carefully to one’s “inner voice.” Tales abound of one or another climber who decided to remain in his or her sleeping bag after detecting some inauspicious vibe in the ether and thereby survived a catastrophe that wiped out others who failed to heed the portents.

I didn’t doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues. As I waited for Rob to lead the way, the ice underfoot emitted a series of loud cracking noises, like small trees being snapped in two, and I felt myself wince with each pop and rumble from the glacier’s shifting depths. Problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots. I therefore did my damnedest to ignore my histrionic imagination and grimly followed Rob into the eerie blue labyrinth.

Although I’d never been in an icefall as frightening as the Khumbu, I’d climbed many other icefalls. They typically have vertical or even overhanging passages that demand considerable expertise with ice ax and crampons. There was certainly no lack of steep ice in the Khumbu Icefall, but all of it had been rigged with ladders or ropes or both, rendering the conventional tools and techniques of ice climbing largely superfluous.

I soon learned that on Everest not even the rope—the quintessential climber’s accoutrement—was to be utilized in the time-honored manner. Ordinarily, one climber is tied to one or two partners with a 150-foot length of rope, making each person directly responsible for the life of the others; roping up in this fashion is a serious and very intimate act. In the Icefall, though, expediency dictated that each of us climb independently, without being physically connected to one another in any way.

Mal Duff’s Sherpas had anchored a static line of rope that extended from the bottom of the Icefall to its top. Attached to my waist was a three-foot-long safety tether with a carabiner, or snap-link, at the distal end. Security was achieved not by roping myself to a teammate but rather by clipping my safety tether to the fixed line and sliding it up the rope as I ascended. Climbing in this fashion, we would be able to move as quickly as possible through the most dangerous parts of the Icefall, and we wouldn’t have to entrust our lives to teammates whose skill and experience were unknown. As it turned out, not once during the entire expedition would I ever have reason to rope myself to another climber.

If the Icefall required few orthodox climbing techniques, it demanded a whole new repertoire of skills in their stead—for instance, the ability to tiptoe in mountaineering boots and crampons across three wobbly ladders lashed end to end, bridging a sphincter-clenching chasm. There were many such crossings, and I never got used to them.

At one point I was balanced on an unsteady ladder in the predawn gloaming, stepping tenuously from one bent rung to the next, when the ice supporting the ladder on either end began to quiver as if an earthquake had struck. A moment later came an explosive roar as a large serac somewhere close above came crashing down. I froze, my heart in my throat, but the avalanching ice passed fifty yards to the left, out of sight, without doing any damage. After waiting a few minutes to regain my composure I resumed my herky-jerky passage to the far side of the ladder.

The glacier’s continual and often violent state of flux added an element of uncertainty to every ladder crossing. As the glacier moved, crevasses would sometimes compress, buckling ladders like toothpicks; other times a crevasse might expand, leaving a ladder dangling in the air, only tenuously supported, with neither end mounted on solid ice. Anchors
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securing the ladders and lines routinely melted out when the afternoon sun warmed the surrounding ice and snow. Despite daily maintenance, there was a very real danger that any given rope might pull loose under body weight.

But if the Icefall was strenuous and terrifying, it had a surprising allure as well. As dawn washed the darkness from the sky, the shattered glacier was revealed to be a three-dimensional landscape of phantasmal beauty. The temperature was six degrees Fahrenheit. My crampons crunched reassuringly into the glacier’s rind. Following the fixed line, I meandered through a vertical maze of crystalline blue stalagmites. Sheer rock buttresses seamed with ice pressed in from both edges of the glacier, rising like the shoulders of a malevolent god. Absorbed by my surroundings and the gravity of the labor, I lost myself in the unfettered pleasures of ascent, and for an hour or two actually forgot to be afraid.

Three-quarters of the way to Camp One, Hall remarked at a rest stop that the Icefall was in better shape than he’d ever seen it: “The route’s a bloody freeway this season.” But only slightly higher, at 19,000 feet, the ropes brought us to the base of a gargantuan, perilously balanced serac. As massive as a twelve-story building, it loomed over our heads, leaning 30 degrees past vertical. The route followed a natural catwalk that angled sharply up the overhanging face: we would have to climb up and over the entire off-kilter tower to escape its threatening tonnage.

Safety, I understood, hinged on speed. I huffed toward the relative security of the serac’s crest with all the haste I could muster, but since I wasn’t acclimatized my fastest pace was no better than a crawl. Every four or five steps I’d have to stop, lean against the rope, and suck desperately at the thin, bitter air, searing my lungs in the process.

I reached the top of the serac without it collapsing and flopped breathless onto its flat summit, my heart pounding like a jackhammer. A little later, around 8:30 A.M., I arrived at the top of the Icefall itself, just beyond the last of the seracs. The safety of Camp One didn’t supply much peace of mind, however: I couldn’t stop thinking about the ominously tilted slab a short distance below, and the fact that I would have to pass beneath its faltering bulk at least seven more times if I was going to make it to the summit of Everest. Climbers who snidely denigrate this as the Yak Route, I decided, had obviously never been through the Khumbu Icefall.

Before leaving the tents Rob had explained that we would turn around at 10:00 A.M. sharp, even if some of us hadn’t reached Camp One, in order to return to Base Camp before the midday sun made the Icefall even more unstable. At the appointed hour only Rob, Frank Fischbeck, John Taske, Doug Hansen, and I had arrived at Camp One; Yasuko Namba, Stuart Hutchison, Beck Weathers, and Lou Kasischke, escorted by guides Mike Groom and Andy Harris, were within 200 vertical feet of the camp when Rob got on the radio and turned everybody around.

For the first time we had seen one another actually climbing and could better assess the strengths and weaknesses of the people on whom we would each depend over the coming weeks. Doug and John—at fifty-six, the oldest person on the team—had both looked solid. But Frank, the gentlemanly, soft-spoken publisher from Hong Kong, was the most impressive: demonstrating the savvy he’d acquired over three previous Everest expeditions, he’d started out slowly but kept moving at the same steady pace; by the top of the Icefall he’d quietly passed almost everyone, and he never even seemed to be breathing hard.

In marked contrast, Stuart—the youngest and seemingly strongest client on the whole team—had dashed out of camp at the front of the group, soon exhausted himself, and by the top of the Icefall was in visible agony at the back of the line. Lou, hampered by a leg muscle he’d injured on the first morning of the trek to Base Camp, was slow but competent. Beck, and especially Yasuko, on the other hand, had looked sketchy.

Several times both Beck and Yasuko had appeared to be in danger of falling off a ladder and plummeting into a crevasse, and Yasuko seemed to know next to nothing about how to use crampons.
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Andy, who revealed himself to be a gifted, extremely patient teacher—and who, as the junior guide, had been assigned to climb with the slowest clients, at the rear—spent the whole morning coaching her on basic ice-climbing techniques.

Whatever our group’s various shortcomings, at the top of the Icefall, Rob announced that he was quite pleased with everyone’s performance. “For your first time above Base Camp you’ve all done remarkably well,” he proclaimed like a proud father. “I think we’ve got a good strong bunch this year.”

It took little more than an hour to descend back to Base Camp. By the time I removed my crampons to walk the last hundred yards to the tents, the sun felt like it was boring a hole through the crown of my skull. The full force of the headache struck a few minutes later, as I was chatting with Helen and Chhongba in the mess tent. I’d never experienced anything like it: crushing pain between my temples—pain so severe that it was accompanied by shuddering waves of nausea and made it impossible for me to speak in coherent sentences. Fearing that I’d suffered some sort of stroke, I staggered away in mid-conversation, retreated to my sleeping bag, and pulled my hat over my eyes.

The headache had the blinding intensity of a migraine, and I had no idea what had caused it. I doubted that it was due to the altitude, because it didn’t strike until I’d returned to Base Camp. More likely it was a reaction to the fierce ultraviolet radiation that had burned my retinas and baked my brain. Whatever had brought it on, the agony was intense and unrelenting. For the next five hours I lay in my tent trying to avoid sensory stimuli of any kind. If I opened my eyes, or even just moved them from side to side behind closed eyelids, I received a withering jolt of pain. At sunset, unable to bear it any longer, I stumbled over to the medical tent to seek advice from Caroline, the expedition doctor.

She gave me a strong analgesic and told me to drink some water, but after a few swallows I regurgitated the pills, the liquid, and the remnants of lunch. “Hmmm,” mused Caro, observing the vomitus splashed across my boots. “I guess we’ll have to try something else.” I was instructed to dissolve a tiny pill under my tongue, which would keep me from vomiting, and then swallow two codeine pills. An hour later the pain began to fade; nearly weeping with gratitude I drifted into unconsciousness.

I was dozing in my sleeping bag, watching the morning sun cast shadows across the walls of my tent, when Helen yelled, “Jon! Telephone! It’s Linda!” I yanked on a pair of sandals, sprinted the fifty yards to the communications tent, and grabbed the handset as I fought to catch my breath.

The entire satellite phone-and-fax apparatus wasn’t much larger than a laptop computer. Calls were expensive—about five dollars a minute—and they didn’t always go through, but the fact that my wife could dial a thirteen-digit number in Seattle and speak to me on Mount Everest astounded me. Although the call was a great comfort, the resignation in Linda’s voice was unmistakable even from the far side of the globe. “I’m doing fine,” she assured me, “but I wish you were here.”

Eighteen days earlier she’d broken into tears when she’d taken me to the plane to Nepal. “Driving home from the airport,” she confessed, “I couldn’t stop crying. Saying good-bye to you was one of the saddest things I’ve ever done. I guess I knew on some level that you might not be coming back, and it seemed like such a waste. It seemed so fucking stupid and pointless.”

We’d been married for fifteen and a half years. Within a week of first talking about taking the plunge, we’d visited a justice of the peace and done the deed. I was twenty-six at the time and had recently decided to quit climbing and get serious about life.

When I first met Linda she had been a climber herself—and an exceptionally gifted one—but she’d given it up after breaking an arm, injuring her back, and subsequently making a cold appraisal of the inherent risks. Linda would never have considered asking me to abandon the sport, but the announcement that I intended to quit had reinforced her decision to marry me. I’d failed to appreciate the grip climbing had on my soul, however, or the purpose it lent to my otherwise rudderless life. I didn’t anticipate the void that would loom in its absence. Within a year I sneaked my rope out of storage and was back on the rock. By 1984, when I went to Switzerland to climb a notoriously dangerous alpine wall called the Eiger Nordwand, Linda and I had advanced to within millimeters of splitting up, and my climbing lay at the core of our troubles.

Our relationship remained rocky for two or three years after my failed attempt on the Eiger, but the marriage somehow survived that rough patch. Linda came to accept my climbing: she saw that it was a crucial (if perplexing) part of who I was. Mountaineering, she understood, was an essential expression of some odd, immutable aspect of my personality that I could no sooner alter than change the color of my eyes. Then, in the midst of this delicate rapprochement,
Outside
magazine confirmed it was sending me to Everest.