Into Thin Air (29 page)

Beidleman, sensitive by nature, was quite conscious of his place in the expedition pecking order. “I was definitely considered the third guide,” he acknowledged after the expedition, “so I tried not to be too pushy. As a consequence, I didn’t always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it.”

Beidleman said that according to Fischer’s loosely formulated plan for the summit day, Lopsang Jangbu was supposed to be at the front of the line, carrying a radio and two coils of rope to install ahead of the clients; Boukreev and Beidleman—neither of whom was given a radio—were to be “in the middle or near the front, depending on how the clients were moving; and Scott, carrying a second radio, was going to be ‘sweep.’ At Rob’s suggestion, we’d decided to enforce a two o’clock turn-around time: anybody who wasn’t within spitting distance of the summit by two P.M. had to turn around and go down.

“It was supposed to be Scott’s job to turn clients around,” Beidleman explained. “We’d talked about it. I’d told him that as the third guide, I didn’t feel comfortable telling clients who’d paid sixty-five thousand dollars that they had to go down. So Scott agreed that would be his responsibility. But for whatever reason, it didn’t happen.” In fact, the only people to reach the summit before 2:00 P.M. were Boukreev, Harris, Beidleman, Adams, Schoening, and me; if Fischer and Hall had been true to their pre-arranged rules, everyone else would have turned back before the top.

Despite Beidleman’s growing anxiety about the advancing clock, he didn’t have a radio, so there was no way to discuss the situation with Fischer. Lopsang—who did have a radio—was still somewhere out of sight below. Early that morning, when Beidleman had encountered Lopsang on the Balcony, vomiting between his knees into the snow, he’d taken the Sherpa’s two coils of rope to fix on the steep rock steps above. As he now laments, however, “It didn’t even occur to me to grab his radio, too.”

The upshot, Beidleman recalled, is that “I ended up sitting on the summit for a very long time, looking at my watch and waiting for Scott to show, thinking about heading down—but every time I stood up to leave, another one of our clients would roll over the crest of the ridge, and I’d sit back down to wait for them.”

Sandy Pittman appeared over the final rise about 2:10, slightly ahead of Charlotte Fox, Lopsang Jangbu, Tim Madsen, and Lene Gammelgaard. But Pittman was moving very slowly, and shortly below the summit she abruptly dropped to her knees in the snow. When Lopsang came to her assistance he discovered that her third oxygen canister had run out. Early in the morning, when he’d started short-roping Pittman, he’d also cranked her oxygen flow as high as it would go—four liters per minute—and consequently she’d used up all her gas relatively quickly. Fortunately, Lopsang—who wasn’t using oxygen himself—was carrying a spare oxygen canister in his pack. He attached Pittman’s mask and regulator to the fresh bottle, and then they ascended the last few meters to the top and joined the celebration in progress.

Rob Hall, Mike Groom, and Yasuko Namba reached the summit around this time, too, and Hall radioed Helen Wilton at Base Camp to give her the good news. “Rob said it was cold and windy up there,” Wilton recalled, “but he sounded good. He said, ‘Doug is just coming up over the horizon; right after that I’ll be heading down.… If you don’t hear from me again, it means everything’s fine.’ ” Wilton notified the Adventure Consultants office in New Zealand, and a flurry of faxes went out to friends and families around the world, announcing the expedition’s triumphant culmination.

But Doug Hansen wasn’t just below the summit at that point, as Hall believed, nor was Fischer. It would in fact be 3:40 before Fischer reached the top, and Hansen wouldn’t get there until after 4:00 P.M.

The previous afternoon—Thursday, May 9—when all of us had climbed from Camp Three to Camp Four, Fischer hadn’t reached the tents on the South Col until after 5:00 P.M., and he was visibly tired when he’d finally gotten there, although he did his best to disguise his fatigue from his clients. “That evening,” recalled his tent-mate Charlotte Fox, “I couldn’t tell that Scott might have been sick. He was acting like Mr. Gung Ho, getting everyone psyched up like a football coach before the big game.”

In truth Fischer was exhausted from the physical and mental strain of the preceding weeks. Although he possessed extraordinary reserves of energy, he’d been profligate with those reserves, and by the time he got to Camp Four they were nearly depleted. “Scott strong person,” Boukreev acknowledged after the expedition, “but before summit attempt is tired, has many problems, spend lots of power. Worry, worry, worry, worry. Scott nervous, but he keep inside.”

Fischer hid the fact from everyone, as well, that he may have been clinically ill during the summit attempt. In 1984, during an expedition to Nepal’s Annapurna massif, he’d picked up a gastrointestinal parasite,
Entamoeba histolytica
, which he was unable to entirely purge from his body over the years that followed. The bug emerged from dormancy on an irregular basis, producing bouts of acute physical distress and leaving a cyst on his liver. Insisting it was nothing to worry about, Fischer mentioned the ailment to few people at Base Camp.

According to Jane Bromet, when the disease was in its active phase (as was apparently the case in the spring of 1996) Fischer would “break into these intense sweating spells and get the shakes. The spells would lay him low, but they would only last for ten or fifteen minutes and then pass. In Seattle he’d get the attacks maybe once a week or so, but when he was stressed they’d occur more frequently. At Base Camp he was getting them more often—every other day, sometimes every day.”

If Fischer suffered such attacks at Camp Four or above, he never mentioned it. Fox reported that soon after he crawled into their tent Thursday evening, “Scott conked out and slept really hard for about two hours.” When he woke up at 10:00 P.M. he was slow getting ready and he remained in camp long after the last of his clients, guides, and Sherpas departed for the summit.

It’s unclear when Fischer actually left Camp Four; perhaps as late as 1:00 A.M. on Friday, May 10. He dragged far behind everyone else through most of the summit day, and he didn’t arrive at the South Summit until around 1:00 P.M. I first saw him at about 2:45, on my way down from the top, while I waited on the Hillary Step with Andy Harris for the crowd to clear out. Fischer was the last climber up the rope, and he looked extremely wasted.

After we exchanged pleasantries, he spoke briefly with Martin Adams and Anatoli Boukreev, who were standing just above Harris and me, waiting to descend the Step. “Hey, Martin,” Fischer bantered through his oxygen mask, trying to affect a jocular tone. “Do you think you can summit Mount Everest?”

“Hey, Scott,” Adams replied, sounding annoyed that Fischer hadn’t offered any congratulations, “I just did.”

Next Fischer had a few words with Boukreev. As Adams remembered the conversation, Boukreev told Fischer, “I am going down with Martin.” Then Fischer plodded slowly on toward the summit, while Harris, Boukreev, Adams, and I turned to rappel down the Step. Nobody discussed Fischer’s exhausted appearance. It didn’t occur to any of us that he might be in trouble.

At 3:10 Friday afternoon Fischer still hadn’t arrived on top, says Beidleman, adding, “I decided it was time to get the hell out of there, even though Scott hadn’t showed up yet.” He gathered up Pittman, Gammelgaard, Fox, and Madsen and started leading them down the summit ridge. Twenty minutes later, just above the Hillary Step, they ran into Fischer. “I didn’t really say anything to him,” Beidleman recalls. “He just sort of raised his hand. He looked like he was having a hard time, but he was Scott, so I wasn’t particularly worried. I figured he’d tag the summit and catch up to us pretty quick to help bring the clients down.”

Beidleman’s primary concern at the time was Pittman: “Everybody was pretty messed up by that point, but Sandy looked especially shaky. I thought that if I didn’t keep real close tabs on her, there was a good chance she’d peel right off the ridge. So I made sure she was clipped into the fixed line, and in the places where there was no rope I grabbed her harness from behind and kept a tight hold on her until she could clip into the next section of rope. She was so out of it that I’m not sure she even knew I was there.”

A short distance below the South Summit, as the climbers descended into thick clouds and falling snow, Pittman collapsed again and asked Fox to give her an injection of a powerful steroid called dexamethasone. “Dex,” as it is known, can temporarily negate the deleterious effects of altitude; following the instructions of Dr. Ingrid Hunt, each member of Fischer’s team carried a preprepared syringe of the drug in a plastic toothbrush case inside his or her down suit, where it wouldn’t freeze, for emergencies. “I pulled aside Sandy’s pants a little,” Fox recalls, “and jammed the needle into her hip, right through her long underwear and everything.”

Beidleman, who had lingered at the South Summit to inventory oxygen, arrived on the scene to see Fox plunging the syringe into Pittman, stretched out face down on the snow. “When I came over the rise and saw Sandy lying there, with Charlotte standing over her waving a hypodermic needle, I thought, ‘Oh fuck, this looks bad.’ So I asked Sandy what was going on, and when she tried to answer all that came out of her mouth was a bunch of garbled babble.” Extremely concerned, Beidleman ordered Gammelgaard to exchange her full oxygen canister with Pittman’s nearly empty one, made sure her regulator was turned to full flow, then grabbed the semi-comatose Pittman by her harness and started dragging her down the steep snow of the Southeast Ridge. “Once I got her sliding,” he explains, “I’d let go and glissade down in front of her. Every fifty meters I’d stop, wrap my hands around the fixed rope, and brace myself to arrest her slide with a body block. The first time Sandy came barreling into me, the points of her crampons sliced through my down suit. Feathers went flying everywhere.” To everyone’s relief, after about twenty minutes the injection and extra oxygen revived Pittman and she was able to resume the descent under her own power.

Around 5:00 P.M., as Beidleman accompanied his clients down the ridge, Mike Groom and Yasuko Namba were arriving at the Balcony some 500 feet below them. From this promontory at 27,600 feet, the route veers sharply off the ridge to the south toward Camp Four. When Groom looked in the other direction, however—down the north side of the ridge—through the billowing snow and faltering light he noticed a lone climber badly off route: it was Martin Adams, who’d become disoriented in the storm and mistakenly started to descend the Kangshung Face into Tibet.

As soon as Adams saw Groom and Namba above him, he realized his mistake and climbed slowly back toward the Balcony. “Martin was out of it by the time he got back up to Yasuko and me,” Groom recalls. “His oxygen mask was off and his face was encrusted in snow. He asked, ‘Which way to the tents?’” Groom pointed, and Adams immediately started down the correct side of the ridge, following the trail I’d blazed perhaps ten minutes earlier.

While Groom was waiting for Adams to climb back up to the ridge, he sent Namba down ahead and busied himself trying to find a camera case he’d left on the way up. As he was looking around, for the first time he noticed another person on the Balcony with him. “Because he was sort of camouflaged in the snow, I took him to be one of Fischer’s group, and I ignored him. Then this person was standing in front of me saying, ‘Hi, Mike,’ and I realized it was Beck.”

Groom, just as surprised to see Beck as I had been, got out his rope and began short-roping the Texan down toward the South Col. “Beck was so hopelessly blind,” Groom reports, “that every ten meters he’d take a step into thin air and I’d have to catch him with the rope. I was worried he was going to pull me off many times. It was bloody nerve-racking. I had to make sure I had a good ice-ax belay and that all my points were clean and sticking into something solid at all times.”

One by one, following the tracks I’d made fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, Beidleman and the remainder of Fischer’s clients filed down through the worsening blizzard. Adams was behind me, ahead of the others; then came Namba, Groom and Weathers, Schoening and Gammelgaard, Beidleman, and finally Pittman, Fox, and Madsen.