Into Thin Air (24 page)

At 25,900 feet, I paused on the crest of the Spur to drink some water and take in the view. The thin air had a shimmering, crystalline quality that made even distant peaks seem close enough to touch. Extravagantly illuminated by the midday sun, Everest’s summit pyramid loomed through an intermittent gauze of clouds. Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens at the upper Southeast Ridge, I was surprised to see four antlike figures moving almost imperceptibly toward the South Summit. I deduced that they must be climbers from the Montenegrin expedition; if they succeeded they would be the first team to reach the top this year. It would also mean that the rumors we’d been hearing of impossibly deep snow were unfounded—if they made the summit, maybe we had a chance of making it, too. But the plume of snow now blowing from the summit ridge was a bad sign: the Montenegrins were struggling upward through ferocious wind.

I arrived on the South Col, our launching pad for the summit assault, at 1:00 P.M. A forlorn plateau of bulletproof ice and windswept boulders 26,000 feet above sea level, it occupies a broad notch between the upper ramparts of Lhotse and Everest. Roughly rectangular in shape, about four football fields long by two across, the Col’s eastern margin drops 7,000 feet down the Kangshung Face into Tibet; the other side plunges 4,000 feet to the Western Cwm. Just back from the lip of this chasm, at the Col’s westernmost edge, the tents of Camp Four squatted on a patch of barren ground surrounded by more than a thousand discarded oxygen canisters.
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If there is a more desolate, inhospitable habitation anywhere on the planet, I hope never to see it.

As the jet stream encounters the Everest massif and is squeezed through the V-shaped contours of the South Col, the wind accelerates to unimaginable velocities; it’s not unusual for the winds at the Col actually to be stronger than the winds that rip the summit. The nearly constant hurricane blowing through the Col in early spring explains why it remains as naked rock and ice even when deep snow blankets adjacent slopes: everything not frozen in place here has been blasted into Tibet.

When I walked into Camp Four, six Sherpas were struggling to erect Hall’s tents in a 50-knot tempest. Helping them put up my shelter, I anchored it to some discarded oxygen canisters wedged beneath the largest rocks I could lift, then dove inside to wait for my teammates and warm my icy hands.

The weather deteriorated as the afternoon wore on. Lopsang Jangbu, Fischer’s sirdar, showed up bearing a back-wrenching eighty-pound load, some thirty pounds of which consisted of a satellite telephone and its peripheral hardware: Sandy Pittman was intending to file Internet dispatches from 26,000 feet. The last of my teammates didn’t arrive until 4:30 P.M., and the final stragglers in Fischer’s group came in even later, by which time a serious storm was in full flower. At dark, the Montenegrins returned to the Col to report that the summit had remained out of reach: they’d turned around below the Hillary Step.

Between the weather and the Montenegrins’ defeat, it didn’t augur well for our own summit assault, scheduled to get under way in less than six hours. Everyone retreated to their nylon shelters the moment they reached the Col and did their best to nap, but the machine-gun rattle of the flapping tents and anxiety over what was to come made sleep out of the question for most of us.

Stuart Hutchison—the young Canadian cardiologist—and I were assigned to one tent; Rob, Frank, Mike Groom, John Taske, and Yasuko Namba were in another; Lou, Beck Weathers, Andy Harris, and Doug Hansen occupied a third. Lou and his tent-mates were dozing in their shelter when an unfamiliar voice called from out of the gale, “Let him in quickly or he’s going to die out here!” Lou unzipped the door, and a moment later a bearded man fell supine into his lap. It was Bruce Herrod, the amiable thirty-seven-year-old deputy leader of the South African team, and the sole remaining member of that expedition with real mountaineering credentials.

“Bruce was in real trouble,” Lou remembers, “shivering uncontrollably, acting very spacey and irrational, basically unable to do anything for himself. He was so hypothermic he could barely talk. The rest of his group was apparently somewhere on the Col, or on their way to the Col. But he didn’t know where, and he had no idea how to find his own tent, so we gave him something to drink and tried to warm him up.”

Doug was also not doing well. “Doug didn’t look good,” Beck recalls. “He was complaining that he hadn’t slept in a couple of days, hadn’t eaten. But he was determined to strap his gear on and climb when the time came. I was concerned, because I’d gotten to know Doug well enough at that point to realize that he’d spent the entire previous year agonizing over the fact that he’d gotten to within three hundred feet of the summit and had to turn around. And I mean it had gnawed at him every single day. It was pretty clear that he was not going to be denied a second time. Doug was going to keep climbing toward the top as long as he was still able to breathe.”

There were more than fifty people camped on the Col that night, huddled in shelters pitched side by side, yet an odd feeling of isolation hung in the air. The roar of the wind made it impossible to communicate from one tent to the next. In this godforsaken place, I felt disconnected from the climbers around me—emotionally, spiritually, physically—to a degree I hadn’t experienced on any previous expedition. We were a team in name only, I’d sadly come to realize. Although in a few hours we would leave camp as a group, we would ascend as individuals, linked to one another by neither rope nor any deep sense of loyalty. Each client was in it for himself or herself, pretty much. And I was no different: I sincerely hoped Doug got to the top, for instance, yet I would do everything in my power to keep pushing on if he turned around.

In another context this insight would have been depressing, but I was too preoccupied with the weather to dwell on it. If the wind didn’t abate—and soon—the summit would be out of the question for all of us. Over the preceding week, Hall’s Sherpas had stocked the Col with 363 pounds of bottled oxygen—55 cylinders. Although that sounds like a lot, it was only enough to permit a single attempt for three guides, eight clients, and four Sherpas. And the meter was running: even as we reclined in our tents, we were using up precious gas. If need be we could turn off our oxygen and safely remain up here for perhaps twenty-four hours; after that, however, we would need to either go up or go down.

But
mirabile visu
, at 7:30 P.M. the gale abruptly ceased. Herrod crawled out of Lou’s tent and stumbled off to locate his teammates. The temperature was well below zero, but there was almost no wind: excellent conditions for a summit climb. Hall’s instincts were uncanny: it appeared that he had timed our attempt perfectly. “Jonno! Stuart!” he yelled from the tent next door. “Looks like we’re on, lads. Be ready to rock and roll at eleven-thirty!”

As we sipped tea and readied our gear for the climb, nobody said much. All of us had suffered greatly to get to this moment. Like Doug, I had eaten little and slept not at all since leaving Camp Two, two days earlier. Every time I coughed, the pain from my torn thoracic cartilage felt like someone was jabbing a knife beneath my ribs, and brought tears to my eyes. But if I wanted a crack at the summit, I knew that I had no choice but to ignore my infirmities and climb.

Twenty-five minutes before midnight, I strapped on my oxygen mask, switched on my headlamp, and ascended into the darkness. There were fifteen of us in Hall’s group: three guides, a full complement of eight clients, and Sherpas Ang Dorje, Lhakpa Chhiri, Ngawang Norbu, and Kami. Hall directed two other Sherpas—Arita and Chuldum—to remain at the tents in support, ready to mobilize in the event of trouble.

The Mountain Madness team—composed of guides Fischer, Beidleman, and Boukreev; six Sherpas; and clients Charlotte Fox, Tim Madsen, Klev Schoening, Sandy Pittman, Lene Gammelgaard, and Martin Adams—left the South Col half an hour after us.
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Lopsang had intended that only five Mountain Madness Sherpas accompany the summit team, leaving two at the Col in support, but, he says, “Scott opens his heart, tells to my Sherpas, ‘All can go to summit.’”
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In the end, Lopsang went behind Fischer’s back and ordered one Sherpa, his cousin “Big” Pemba, to remain behind. “Pemba angry to me,” Lopsang acknowledged, “but I tell to him, ‘You must stay, or I will not give you job again.’ So he stays at Camp Four.”

Leaving camp just after Fischer’s team, Makalu Gau started up with three Sherpas—contrary to Hall’s understanding that no Taiwanese would make a summit attempt the same day we did. The South Africans had intended to go for the top, too, but the grueling climb from Camp Three to the Col had taken so much out of them that they didn’t even emerge from their tents.

All told, thirty-four climbers departed for the summit in the middle of that night. Although we left the Col as members of three distinct expeditions, our fates were already starting to intertwine—and they would become more and more tightly bound with every meter we ascended.

The night had a cold, phantasmal beauty that intensified as we climbed. More stars than I had ever seen smeared the frozen sky. A gibbous moon rose above the shoulder of 27,824-foot Makalu, washing the slope beneath my boots in ghostly light, obviating the need for a headlamp. Far to the southeast, along the India-Nepal frontier, colossal thunderheads drifted over the malarial swamps of the Terai, illuminating the heavens with surreal bursts of orange and blue lightning.

Within three hours of leaving the Col, Frank decided that something about the day just didn’t feel right. Stepping out of the queue, he turned around and descended to the tents. His fourth attempt to climb Everest was over.

Not long after that, Doug stepped aside as well, “He was a little ahead of me at the time,” recalls Lou. “All of a sudden he stepped out of line and just stood there. When I moved up beside him, he told me he was cold and feeling bad and was heading down.” Then Rob, who was bringing up the rear, caught up to Doug, and a brief conversation ensued. Nobody overheard the dialogue, so there is no way of knowing what was said, but the upshot was that Doug got back in line and continued his ascent.

The day before departing Base Camp, Rob had sat the team down in the mess tent and given us a lecture about the importance of obeying his orders on summit day. “I will tolerate no dissension up there,” he admonished, staring pointedly at me. “My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal. If you don’t like a particular decision I make, I’d be happy to discuss it with you afterward, but not while we’re on the hill.”

The most obvious source of potential conflict was the likelihood that Rob might decide to turn us around before the summit. But there was another matter he was particularly concerned about. During the latter stages of the acclimatization period, he’d given us slightly freer rein to climb at our own pace—for instance, Hall sometimes allowed me to travel two hours or more out in front of the main group. He now stressed, however, that for the first half of the summit day he wanted everybody to climb in close proximity. “Until we all reach the crest of the Southeast Ridge,” he pronounced, referring to a distinctive promontory at 27,600 feet known as the Balcony, “everyone needs to stay within a hundred meters of each other. This is very important. We will be climbing in the dark, and I want the guides to be able to keep close track of you.”

Ascending through the predawn hours of May 10, those of us at the head of the pack were thus compelled to repeatedly stop and wait in the bone-cracking cold for our slowest members to catch up. On one occasion Mike Groom, sirdar Ang Dorje, and I sat on a snow-covered ledge for more than forty-five minutes, shivering and pounding our hands and feet to ward off frostbite, waiting for the others to arrive. But the squandered time was even more excruciating to bear than the cold.

At 3:45 A.M., Mike announced that we’d gotten too far ahead and needed to stop and wait yet again. Pressing my body against a shale outcrop, trying to escape the subzero breeze now blowing from the west, I stared down the precipitous slope and attempted to identify the climbers inching toward us in the moonlight. As they advanced, I could see that some members of Fischer’s group had caught up with our group: Hall’s team, the Mountain Madness team, and the Taiwanese were now jumbled into one long, intermittent queue. And then something peculiar caught my eye.