Into Thin Air (23 page)

Relying on bottled oxygen as an aid to ascent is a practice that’s sparked acrimonious debate ever since the British first took experimental oxygen rigs to Everest in 1921. (Skeptical Sherpas promptly dubbed the unwieldy canisters “English Air.”) Initially, the foremost critic of bottled gas was George Leigh Mallory, who protested that using it was “unsporting, and therefore un-British.” But it soon became apparent that in the so-called Death Zone above 25,000 feet, without supplemental oxygen the body is vastly more vulnerable to HAPE and HACE, hypothermia, frostbite, and a host of other mortal perils. By 1924, when he returned for his third expedition to the mountain, Mallory had become convinced that the summit would never be reached without gas, and he resigned himself to using it.

Experiments conducted in decompression chambers had by then demonstrated that a human plucked from sea level and dropped on the summit of Everest, where the air holds only a third as much oxygen, would lose consciousness within minutes and die soon thereafter. But a number of idealistic mountaineers continued to insist that a gifted athlete blessed with rare physiological attributes could, after a lengthy period of acclimatization, climb the peak without bottled oxygen. Taking this line of reasoning to its logical extreme, the purists argued that using gas was therefore cheating.

In the 1970s, the famed Tyrolean alpinist Reinhold Messner emerged as the leading proponent of gasless climbing, declaring that he would ascend Everest “by fair means” or not at all. Shortly thereafter he and his longtime partner, the Austrian Peter Habeler, astounded the world climbing community by making good on the boast: at 1:00 P.M. on May 8, 1978, they ascended to the summit via the South Col and Southeast Ridge route without using supplemental oxygen. It was hailed by climbers in some circles as the first true ascent of Everest.

Messner and Habeler’s historic deed was not greeted with hosannas in all quarters, however, especially among the Sherpas. Most of them simply refused to believe that Westerners were capable of such an achievement, which had eluded even the strongest Sherpas. Speculation was rampant that Messner and Habeler had sucked oxygen from miniature cylinders hidden in their clothing. Tenzing Norgay and other eminent Sherpas signed a petition demanding that the government of Nepal conduct an official inquiry of the purported ascent.

But the evidence verifying the oxygenless climb was irrefutable. Two years later Messner silenced all doubters, moreover, by traveling to the Tibetan side of Everest and making another ascent sans gas—this time entirely alone, without the support of Sherpas or anybody else. When he reached the summit at 3:00 P.M. on August 20, 1980, climbing through thick clouds and falling snow, Messner said, “I was in continual agony; I have never in my whole life been so tired.” In
The Crystal Horizon
, his book about the ascent, he describes struggling up the final meters to the top:

When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath.… I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few metres this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again.

Upon Messner’s return to civilization, his ascent was widely lauded as the greatest mountaineering feat of all time.

After Messner and Habeler proved that Everest could be climbed without gas, a cadre of ambitious mountaineers agreed that it
should
be climbed without gas. Henceforth, if one aspired to be considered a member of the Himalayan elite, eschewing bottled oxygen was mandatory. By 1996 some sixty men and women had reached the summit without it—five of whom didn’t make it back down alive.

However grandiose some of our individual ambitions may have been, nobody on Hall’s team ever really considered going for the summit without bottled oxygen. Even Mike Groom, who’d climbed Everest three years earlier without gas, explained to me that he intended to use it this time around because he was working as a guide, and he knew from experience that without bottled oxygen he would be so severely impaired—both mentally and physically—that he would be unable to fulfill his professional duties. Like most veteran Everest guides, Groom believed that although it was acceptable—and, indeed, aesthetically preferable—to do without bottled oxygen when climbing on one’s own, it would be extremely irresponsible to guide the peak without using it.

The state-of-the-art Russian-built oxygen system used by Hall consisted of a stiff plastic oxygen mask of the sort worn by MiG fighter pilots during the Vietnam War, connected via a rubber hose and a crude regulator to an orange steel and Kevlar gas canister. (Smaller and much lighter than a scuba tank, each one weighed 6.6 pounds when full.) Although we hadn’t slept with oxygen during our previous stay at Camp Three, now that we had begun the push to the summit Rob strongly urged us to breathe gas through the night. “Every minute you remain at this altitude and above,” he cautioned, “your minds and bodies are deteriorating.” Brain cells were dying. Our blood was growing dangerously thick and sludgelike. Capillaries in our retinas were spontaneously hemorrhaging. Even at rest, our hearts beat at a furious rate. Rob promised that “bottled oxygen will slow the decline and help you sleep.”

I tried to heed Rob’s advice, but my latent claustrophobia prevailed. When I clamped the mask over my nose and mouth I kept imagining that it was suffocating me, so after a miserable hour I took it off and spent the rest of the night without gas, breathlessly flopping and fidgeting, checking my watch every twenty minutes to see if it was time to get up yet.

Dug into the slope a hundred feet below our camp, in an equally precarious setting, were the tents of most of the other teams—including Scott Fischer’s group, the South Africans, and the Taiwanese. Early the next morning—Thursday, May 9—as I was pulling on my boots for the ascent to Camp Four, Chen Yu-Nan, a thirty-six-year-old steelworker from Taipei, crawled out of his tent to evacuate his bowels shod only in the smooth-soled liners of his mountaineering boots—a serious lapse of judgment.

As he squatted, he lost his footing on the ice and went hurtling down the Lhotse Face. Incredibly, after falling only 70 feet he plunged headfirst in a crevasse, which arrested his tumble. Chen’s fall was witnessed by a lone Sherpa named Jangbu from the IMAX team, who happened to be passing through Camp Three while carrying a load to South Col. He immediately roused Makalu Gau, the leader of the Taiwanese team, and the two of them lowered a rope to Chen, pulled him out of the slot, and assisted him back to his tent. Although he was battered and badly frightened, he didn’t seem seriously injured. At the time, nobody on Hall’s team, including me, was even aware that the mishap had occurred.

Shortly thereafter, Gau and the rest of the Taiwanese left Chen in a tent to recover, with two Sherpas, and departed for the South Col. Even though Hall had been led to understand that Gau wouldn’t attempt the summit on May 10, the Taiwanese leader apparently changed his mind and now intended to go for the top the same day we did.

As the day wore on, Chen’s condition took a significant turn for the worse. He became disoriented and reported being in great pain. Concerned, a Sherpa from the Taiwanese team began escorting Chen slowly down the Lhotse Face toward Camp Two. Jangbu, upon learning over the radio that Chen was in a bad way, hurried down from the South Col to assist with his evacuation down the fixed ropes. Three hundred feet from the bottom of the ice slope, Chen abruptly keeled over and lost consciousness. A moment later, down at Camp Two, David Breashears’s radio crackled to life: it was Jangbu, reporting in a panicked voice that Chen had stopped breathing.

Breashears and his IMAX teammate Ed Viesturs rushed up to see if they could revive him, but when they reached Chen some forty minutes later they found no vital signs. That evening, after Gau arrived at the South Col, Breashears called him on the radio. “Makalu,” Breashears told the Taiwanese leader, “Chen has died.”

“O.K.,” Gau replied. “Thank you for the information.” Then he assured his team that Chen’s death would in no way affect their plans to leave for the summit at midnight. Breashears was flabbergasted. “I had just closed his friend’s eyes for him,” he says with more than a touch of anger. “I had just dragged Chen’s body down. And all Makalu could say was, ‘O.K.’ I don’t know, I guess maybe it was a cultural thing. Maybe he thought the best way to honor Chen’s death was to continue to the summit.”

Over the preceding six weeks there had been several serious accidents: Tenzing’s fall into the crevasse before we even arrived at Base Camp; Ngawang Topche’s case of HAPE and subsequent deterioration; a young, apparently fit English climber on Mal Duff’s team named Ginge Fullen who’d had a serious heart attack near the top of the Icefall; a Dane on Duff’s team named Kim Sejberg who was struck by a falling serac in the Icefall and broke several ribs. Until that moment, however, nobody had died.

Chen’s death cast a pall over the mountain as rumors of the accident spread from tent to tent, but thirty-three climbers would be departing for the summit in a few short hours, and the gloom was quickly banished by nervous anticipation of what lay ahead. Most of us were simply wrapped too tightly in the grip of summit fever to engage in thoughtful reflection about the death of someone in our midst. There would be plenty of time for reflection later, we assumed, after we all had summitted and got back down.

* Bromet had left Base Camp in mid-April and returned to Seattle, whence she continued to file Internet dispatches about Fischer’s expedition for Outside Online; she relied on regular phone updates from Fischer as the primary source for her reports.

MAY 9, 1996 • 24,000 FEET

Thomas F. Hornbein

A rising lethargic and groggy after my sleepless night at Camp Three, I was slow to dress, melt water, and get out of the tent on Thursday morning, May 9. By the time I loaded my backpack and strapped on my crampons, most of the rest of Hall’s group was already ascending the ropes toward Camp Four. Surprisingly, Lou Kasischke and Frank Fischbeck were among them. Because of their ravaged state when they arrived in camp the previous evening, I’d assumed that both men would decide to throw in the towel. “Good on ya, mates,” I exclaimed, borrowing a phrase from the antipodal contingent, impressed that my cohorts had sucked it up and resolved to push on.

As I rushed to join my teammates, I looked down to see a queue of approximately fifty climbers from other expeditions moving up the ropes, too; the first of them were now immediately below me. Not wanting to become entangled in what was sure to be a massive traffic jam (which would prolong my exposure to the intermittent fusillade of stones whizzing down the face from above, among other hazards), I picked up my pace and resolved to move toward the head of the line. Because only a single rope snaked up the Lhotse Face, however, it wasn’t easy to pass slower climbers.

Andy’s encounter with the falling rock was very much on my mind every time I unclipped from the line to move around somebody—even a small projectile would be enough to send me to the bottom of the face if it struck while I was disengaged from the rope. Leapfrogging past others, moreover, was not only nerve-racking but exhausting. Like an underpowered Yugo trying to pass a line of other vehicles on a steep hill, I had to keep the accelerator jammed to the floor for a distressingly long time to get around anybody, leaving me gasping so hard that I worried I was going to puke into my oxygen mask.

Climbing with oxygen for the first time in my life, I took a while to get used to it. Although the benefits of using gas at this altitude—24,000 feet—were genuine, they were hard to discern immediately. As I fought to catch my breath after moving past three climbers, the mask actually gave the illusion of asphyxiating me, so I tore it from my face—only to discover breathing was even harder without it.

By the time I surmounted the cliff of brittle, ocher-hued limestone known as the Yellow Band, I had worked my way to the front of the queue and was able to settle into a more comfortable pace. Moving slowly but steadily, I made a rising leftward traverse across the top of the Lhotse Face, then ascended a prow of shattered black schist called the Geneva Spur. I’d finally gotten the hang of breathing through my oxygen rig and had moved more than an hour ahead of my nearest companion. Solitude was a rare commodity on Everest, and I was grateful to be granted a bit of it on this day, in such a remarkable setting.