Into Thin Air (33 page)

Tim Madsen, descending with Beidleman’s group, happened to glance up from the Balcony around 5:20 and saw Fischer as he began the traverse. “He looked really tired,” Madsen remembers. “He’d take ten steps, then sit and rest, take a couple more steps, rest again. He was moving real slow. But I could see Lopsang above him, coming down the ridge, and I figured, shoot, with Lopsang there to look after him, Scott would be O.K.”

According to Lopsang, the Sherpa caught up with Fischer about 6:00 P.M., just above the Balcony: “Scott is not using oxygen, so I put mask on him. He says, ‘I am very sick, too sick to go down. I am going to jump.’ He is saying many times, acting like crazy man, so I tie him on rope, quickly, otherwise he is jumping down into Tibet.”

Securing Fischer with a 75-foot length of rope, Lopsang persuaded his friend not to jump and then got him moving slowly toward the South Col. “The storm is very bad now,” Lopsang recalls. “BOOM! BOOM! Two times like sound of gun, there is big thunder. Two times lightning hit very close near me and Scott, very loud, very scared.”

A little later, Fischer and Lopsang were resting when they were overtaken by Makalu Gau and his two Sherpas, Mingma Tshering and Ngima Gombu. After a brief, semicoherent discussion, Gau, Mingma, and Ngima continued down. Fischer and Lopsang soon resumed their descent as well, following the faint tracks left by the Taiwanese team as best they could. About 8:00 P.M. they encountered Gau, alone now, about three hundred feet below the Balcony. Too weak to go on, Gau had been left on a snow-covered ledge by his Sherpas.

The gentle snow gully Fischer and Lopsang had been gingerly descending ended here amid outcroppings of loose, steep shale, and Fischer, like Gau, was unable to handle the challenging terrain in his ailing condition. “Scott cannot walk now, I have big problem,” says Lopsang. “I try to carry, but I am also very tired. Scott is big body, I am very small; I cannot carry him. He tell to me, ‘Lopsang, you go down. You go down.’ I tell to him. ‘No, I stay together here with you.’

“I stay with Scott and Makalu one hour, maybe longer,” says Lopsang. “I am very cold, very tired. Scott tell to me, ‘You go down, send up Anatoli.’ So I say, ‘O.K., I go down, I send quick Sherpa up and Anatoli.’ Then I make good place for Scott and go down.”

Lopsang left Fischer and Gau on a ledge 1,200 feet above the South Col and fought his way down through the storm. Unable to see, he got far off route toward the west, ended up below the level of the Col before he realized his error, and was forced to climb back up the northern margin of the Lhotse Face
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to locate Camp Four. Around midnight, nevertheless, he made it to safety. “I go to Anatoli tent,” reported Lopsang. “I tell to Anatoli, ‘Please, you go up, Scott is very sick, he cannot walk.’ Then I go to my tent, just fall asleep, sleep like dead person.”

Guy Cotter, a longtime friend of both Hall’s and Harris’s, happened to be a few miles from Everest Base Camp on the afternoon of May 10, where he was guiding an expedition on Pumori, and had been monitoring Hall’s radio transmissions throughout the day. At 2:15 P.M. he talked to Hall on the summit, and everything sounded fine. At 4:30, however, Hall called down to say that Doug was out of oxygen and unable to move. “I need a bottle of gas!” Hall pleaded in a desperate, breathless voice to anyone on the mountain who might be listening. “Somebody, please! I’m begging you!”

Cotter grew very alarmed. At 4:53 he got on the radio and strongly urged Hall to descend to the South Summit. “The call was mostly to convince him to come down and get some gas,” says Cotter, “because we knew he wasn’t going to be able to do anything for Doug without it. Rob said he could get himself down O.K., but not with Doug.”

But forty minutes later, Hall was still with Hansen atop the Hillary Step, going nowhere. During radio calls from Hall at 5:36, and again at 5:57, Cotter implored his mate to leave Hansen and come down alone. “I know I sound like the bastard for telling Rob to abandon his client,” confessed Cotter, “but by then it was obvious that leaving Doug was his only choice.” Hall, however, wouldn’t consider going down without Hansen.

There was no further word from Hall until the middle of the night. At 2:46 A.M., Cotter woke up in his tent below Pumori to hear a long, broken transmission, probably unintended: Hall had been wearing a remote microphone clipped to the shoulder strap of his backpack, which was occasionally keyed on by mistake. In this instance, says Cotter, “I suspect Rob didn’t even know he was transmitting. I could hear someone yelling—it might have been Rob, but I couldn’t be sure because the wind was so loud in the background. But he was saying something like, ‘Keep moving! Keep going!’ presumably to Doug, urging him on.”

If this was indeed the case, it meant that in the wee hours of the morning Hall and Hansen—perhaps accompanied by Harris—were still struggling from the Hillary Step toward the South Summit through the gale. And if so, it also meant that it had taken them more than ten hours to move down a stretch of ridge that was typically covered by descending climbers in less than half an hour.

Of course, this is highly speculative. All that is certain is that Hall called down at 5:57 P.M. At that point, he and Hansen were still on the Step; and at 4:43 on the morning of May 11, when he next spoke to Base Camp, he had descended to the South Summit. And at that point neither Hansen nor Harris was with him.

In a series of transmissions over the next two hours, Rob sounded disturbingly confused and irrational. During the call at 4:43 A.M., he told Caroline Mackenzie, our Base Camp doctor, that his legs no longer worked, and that he was “too clumsy to move.” In a ragged, barely audible voice, Rob croaked, “Harold was with me last night, but he doesn’t seem to be with me now. He was very weak.” Then, obviously befuddled, he asked, “Was Harold with me? Can you tell me that?”
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By this point Hall had possession of two full oxygen canisters, but the valves on his mask were so choked with ice that he couldn’t get the gas to flow. He indicated, however, that he was attempting to de-ice the oxygen rig, “which,” says Cotter, “made us all feel a little better. It was the first positive thing we’d heard.”

At 5:00 A.M., Base Camp patched through a call on the satellite telephone to Jan Arnold, Hall’s wife, in Christchurch, New Zealand. She had climbed to the summit of Everest with Hall in 1993, and she entertained no illusions about the gravity of her husband’s predicament. “My heart really sank when I heard his voice,” she recalls. “He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I’d been up there; I knew what it could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, ‘You might as well be on the moon.’”

At 5:31, Hall took four milligrams of oral dexamethasone and indicated he was still trying to clear his oxygen mask of ice. Talking to Base Camp, he asked repeatedly about the condition of Makalu Gau, Fischer, Beck Weathers, Yasuko Namba, and his other clients. He seemed most concerned about Andy Harris and kept inquiring about his whereabouts. Cotter says they tried to steer the discussion away from Harris, who in all likelihood was dead, “because we didn’t want Rob to have another reason for staying up there. At one point Ed Viesturs jumped on the radio from Camp Two and fibbed, ‘Don’t worry about Andy; he’s down here with us.’”

A little later, Mackenzie asked Rob how Hansen was doing. “Doug,” Hall replied, “is gone.” That was all he said, and it was the last mention he ever made of Hansen.

On May 23, when David Breashears and Ed Viesturs reached the summit, they would find no sign of Hansen’s body; they did, however, find an ice ax planted about fifty vertical feet above the South Summit, along a very exposed section of ridge where the fixed ropes came to an end. It’s quite possible that Hall and/or Harris managed to get Hansen down the ropes to this point, only to have him lose his footing and fall 7,000 feet down the sheer Southwest Face, leaving his ice ax jammed into the ridge where he slipped. But this, too, is merely conjecture.

What might have happened to Harris remains even harder to discern. Between Lopsang’s testimony, Hall’s radio calls, and the fact that another ice ax found on the South Summit was positively identified as Andy’s, we can be reasonably sure he was at the South Summit with Hall on the night of May 10. Beyond that, however, virtually nothing is known about how the young guide met his end.

At 6:00 A.M., Cotter asked Hall if the sun had reached him yet. “Almost,” Rob replied—which was good, because he’d mentioned a moment earlier that he was shaking uncontrollably in the awful cold. In conjunction with his earlier revelation that he was no longer able to walk, this had been very upsetting news to the people listening down below. Nevertheless, it was remarkable that Hall was even alive after spending a night without shelter or oxygen at 28,700 feet in hurricane-force winds and windchill of one hundred degrees below zero.

During this same radio call, Hall asked after Harris yet again: “Did anyone see Harold last night except meself?” Some three hours later Rob was still obsessing over Andy’s whereabouts. At 8:43 A.M. he mused over the radio, “Some of Andy’s gear is still here. I thought he must have gone ahead in the nighttime. Listen, can you account for him or not?” Wilton attempted to dodge the question, but Rob persisted in his line of inquiry: “O.K. I mean his ice ax is here and his jacket and things.”

“Rob,” Viesturs replied from Camp Two, “if you can put the jacket on, just use it. Keep going down and worry only about yourself. Everybody else is taking care of other people. Just get yourself down.”

After struggling for four hours to de-ice his mask, Hall finally got it to work, and by 9:00 A.M. he was breathing supplemental oxygen for the first time; by then he’d spent more than sixteen hours above 28,700 feet without gas. Thousands of feet below, his friends stepped up their efforts to cajole him to start down. “Rob, this is Helen at Base Camp,” Wilton importuned, sounding as if she was on the brink of tears. “You think about that little baby of yours. You’re going to see its face in a couple of months, so keep on going.”

Several times Hall announced he was preparing to descend, and at one point we were sure he’d finally left the South Summit. At Camp Four, Lhakpa Chhiri and I shivered in the wind outside the tents, peering up at a tiny speck moving slowly down the upper Southeast Ridge. Convinced that it was Rob, coming down at last, Lhakpa and I slapped each other on the back and cheered him on. But an hour later my optimism was rudely extinguished when I noticed that the speck was still in the same place: it was actually nothing but a rock—just another altitude-induced hallucination. In truth, Rob had never even left the South Summit.

Around 9:30 A.M., Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri left Camp Four and started climbing toward the South Summit with a thermos of hot tea and two extra canisters of oxygen, intending to rescue Hall. They faced an exceedingly formidable task. As astounding and courageous as Boukreev’s rescue of Sandy Pittman and Charlotte Fox had been the night before, it paled in comparison to what the two Sherpas were proposing to do now: Pittman and Fox had been a twenty-minute walk from the tents over relatively flat ground; Hall was 3,000 vertical feet above Camp Four—an exhausting eight- or nine-hour climb in the best of circumstances.

And these were surely not the best of circumstances. The wind was blowing in excess of 40 knots. Both Ang Dorje and Lhakpa were cold and wasted from climbing to the summit and back just the day before. If they did somehow manage to reach Hall, moreover, it would be late afternoon before they got there, leaving only one or two hours of daylight in which to begin the even more difficult ordeal of bringing him down. Yet their loyalty to Hall was such that the two men ignored the overwhelming odds and set out toward the South Summit as fast as they could climb.

Shortly thereafter, two Sherpas from the Mountain Madness team—Tashi Tshering and Ngawang Sya Kya (a small, trim man, graying at the temples, who is Lopsang’s father)—and one Sherpa from the Taiwanese team, Tenzing Nuri, headed up to bring down Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau. Twelve hundred feet above the South Col the trio of Sherpas found the incapacitated climbers on the ledge where Lopsang had left them. Although they tried to give Fischer oxygen, he was unresponsive. Scott was still breathing, barely, but his eyes were fixed in their sockets, and his teeth were tightly clenched. Concluding that he was beyond hope, they left him on the ledge and started descending with Gau, who, after receiving hot tea and oxygen, and with considerable assistance from Tenzing Nuri, was able to move down to the tents on a short-rope under his own power.