Into Thin Air (37 page)

Stuart Hutchison, at the back of the pack, was still atop the Spur when I reached him, preparing to rappel down the fixed lines. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing his goggles. Even though it was a cloudy day, the vicious ultraviolet radiation at this altitude would render him snow-blind very quickly. “Stuart!” I yelled over the wind, pointing at my eyes. “Your goggles!”

“Oh yeah,” he replied in a weary voice. “Thanks for reminding me. Hey, as long as you’re here, would you mind checking my harness? I’m so tired that I’m not thinking clearly anymore. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye on me.” Examining his harness, I saw immediately that the buckle was only half-fastened. Had he clipped into the rope with his safety tether it would have opened under his body weight and sent him tumbling down the Lhotse Face. When I pointed this out, he said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought, but my hands were too cold to do it right.” Yanking off my gloves in the bitter wind, I hurriedly cinched the harness tightly around his waist and sent him down the Spur after the others.

As he clipped his safety tether onto the fixed rope he tossed his ice ax down, then left it lying on the rocks as he embarked on the first rappel. “Stuart!” I shouted. “Your ax!”

“I’m too tired to carry it,” he shouted back. “Just leave it there.” I was so knackered myself that I didn’t argue with him. I left the ax where it lay, clipped the rope, and followed Stuart down the steep flank of the Geneva Spur.

An hour later we arrived atop the Yellow Band, and a bottleneck ensued as each climber cautiously descended the vertical limestone cliff. As I waited at the back of the queue, several of Scott Fischer’s Sherpas caught up to us. Lopsang Jangbu, half-crazed with grief and exhaustion, was among them. Placing a hand on his shoulder, I told him that I was sorry about Scott. Lopsang pounded his chest and tearfully blurted, “I am very bad luck, very bad luck. Scott is dead; it is my fault. I am very bad luck. It is my fault. I am very bad luck.”

I dragged my haggard ass into Camp Two around 1:30 P.M. Although by any rational standard I was still at high altitude—21,300 feet—this place felt manifestly different from the South Col. The murderous wind had completely abated. Instead of shivering and worrying about frostbite, I was now sweating heavily beneath a scorching sun. No longer did it seem as though I were clinging to survival by a fraying thread.

Our mess tent, I saw, had been transformed into a makeshift field hospital, staffed by Henrik Jessen Hansen, a Danish physician on Mal Duff’s team, and Ken Kamler, an American client and physician on Todd Burleson’s expedition. At 3:00 P.M., as I was drinking a cup of tea, six Sherpas hustled a dazed-looking Makalu Gau into the tent and the doctors sprang into action.

They immediately laid him down, removed his clothing, and stuck an IV tube into his arm. Examining his frozen hands and feet, which had a dull whitish sheen like a dirty bathroom sink, Kamler observed grimly, “This is the worst frostbite I’ve ever seen.” When he asked Gau if he could photograph his limbs for the medical record, the Taiwanese climber consented with a broad smile; like a soldier displaying battle wounds, he seemed almost proud of the gruesome injuries he’d sustained.

Ninety minutes later, the doctors were still working on Makalu when David Breashears’s voice barked over the radio: “We’re on our way down with Beck. We’ll have him to Camp Two by dark.”

A long beat passed before I realized that Breashears wasn’t talking about hauling a body off the mountain; he and his companions were bringing Beck down alive. I couldn’t believe it. When I’d left him on the South Col seven hours earlier, I was terrified that he wasn’t going to survive through the morning.

Given up for dead yet again, Beck had simply refused to succumb. Later I learned from Pete Athans that shortly after he had injected Beck with dexamethasone, the Texan experienced an astonishing recovery. “Around ten-thirty we got him dressed, put his harness on, and discovered that he was actually able to stand up and walk. We were all pretty amazed.”

They started descending from the Col with Athans directly in front of Beck, telling him where to place his feet. With Beck draping an arm over Athans’s shoulders and Burleson grasping the Texan’s climbing harness tightly from behind, they shuffled carefully down the mountain. “At times we had to help him pretty substantially,” says Athans, “but really, he moved surprisingly well.”

At 25,000 feet, arriving above the limestone cliffs of the Yellow Band, they were met by Ed Viesturs and Robert Schauer, who efficiently lowered Beck down the steep rock. At Camp Three they were assisted by Breashears, Jim Williams, Veikka Gustafsson, and Araceli Segarra; the eight healthy climbers actually brought the severely crippled Beck down the Lhotse Face in considerably less time than my teammates and I had managed to descend earlier that morning.

When I heard that Beck was on his way down, I made my way to my tent, wearily pulled on my mountaineering boots, and started plodding up to meet the rescue party, expecting to encounter them on the lower reaches of the Lhotse Face. Just twenty minutes above Camp Two, however, I was amazed to run into the entire crew. Although he was being assisted with a short-rope, Beck was moving under his own power. Breashears and company hustled him down the glacier at such a fast pace that in my own woeful state, I could barely keep up with them.

Beck was placed beside Gau in the hospital tent, and the physicians began stripping off his clothing. “My God!” Dr. Kamler exclaimed when he saw Beck’s right hand. “His frostbite is even worse than Makalu’s.” Three hours later, when I crawled into my sleeping bag, the doctors were still gingerly thawing Beck’s frozen limbs in a pot of lukewarm water, working by the glow of their headlamps.

The next morning—Monday, May 13—I left the tents at first light and walked two and a half miles through the deep cleft of the Western Cwm to the lip of the Icefall. There, acting on instructions radioed up from Guy Cotter at Base Camp, I scouted for a level area that could serve as a helicopter landing pad.

Over the preceding days, Cotter had been doggedly working the satellite phone to arrange a helicopter evacuation from the lower end of the Cwm so that Beck wouldn’t have to descend the treacherous ropes and ladders of the Icefall, which would have been difficult and very hazardous with such severely injured hands. Helicopters had landed in the Cwm previously, in 1973, when an Italian expedition used a pair of them to ferry loads from Base Camp. It was nevertheless extremely dangerous flying, at the limit of the aircraft’s range, and one of the Italian machines had crashed on the glacier. In the twenty-three years since, nobody had attempted to land above the Icefall again.

Cotter was persistent, however, and thanks to his efforts the American Embassy persuaded the Nepalese army to attempt a helicopter rescue in the Cwm. Around 8:00 Monday morning, as I searched in vain for an acceptable helipad among the jumbled seracs at the lip of the Icefall, Cotter’s voice crackled over my radio: “The helicopter’s on the way, Jon. He should be there any minute. You better find a place for him to land pretty quickly.” Hoping to find level terrain higher on the glacier, I promptly ran into Beck being short-roped down the Cwm by Athans, Burleson, Gustafsson, Breashears, Viesturs, and the rest of the IMAX crew.

Breashears, who had worked around many helicopters during the course of a long and distinguished film career, immediately found a landing pad bordered by two gaping crevasses at 19,860 feet. I tied a silk kata to a bamboo wand to serve as a wind indicator, while Breashears—using a bottle of red Kool-Aid as dye—marked a giant X in the snow at the center of the landing zone. A few minutes later Makalu Gau appeared having been dragged down the glacier on a piece of plastic by a half-dozen Sherpas. A moment after that we heard the THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCK of a helicopter’s rotors thrashing furiously at the thin air.

Piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri of the Nepalese army, the olive-drab B2 Squirrel helicopter—stripped of all unnecessary fuel and equipment—made two passes, but on each occasion aborted at the last moment. On Madan’s third attempt, however, he settled the Squirrel shakily onto the glacier with its tail hanging over a bottomless crevasse. Keeping the rotors revving at full power, never taking his eyes off the control panel, Madan raised a single finger, indicating that he could take only one passenger; at this altitude, any additional weight might cause him to crash while taking off.

Because Gau’s frostbitten feet had been thawed at Camp Two, he could no longer walk or even stand, so Breashears, Athans, and I agreed that the Taiwanese climber should be the one to go. “Sorry,” I yelled to Beck above the scream of the chopper’s turbines. “Maybe he’ll be able to make a second flight.” Beck nodded philosophically.

We hoisted Gau into the rear of the helicopter, and the machine labored tentatively into the air. As soon as Madan’s skids lifted from the glacier, he nosed the aircraft forward, dropped like a stone over the lip of the Icefall, and disappeared into the shadows. A dense silence now filled the Cwm.

Thirty minutes later we were standing around the landing zone, discussing how to get Beck down, when a faint THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCK sounded from the valley below. Slowly the noise grew louder and louder, and finally the small green helicopter popped into view. Madan flew a short distance up the Cwm before bringing the aircraft around, so that its snout pointed downhill. Then, without hesitation, he set the Squirrel down once more on the Kool-Aid crosshatch, and Breashears and Athans hustled Beck aboard. A few seconds later the helicopter was airborne, flitting past the West Shoulder of Everest like a freakish metal dragonfly. An hour later Beck and Makalu Gau were receiving treatment in a Kathmandu hospital.

After the rescue team dispersed, I sat in the snow for a long while by myself, staring at my boots, endeavoring to get a grip on what had happened over the preceding seventy-two hours. How could things have gone so haywire? How could Andy and Rob and Scott and Doug and Yasuko really be dead? But try as I might, no answers were forthcoming. The magnitude of this calamity was so far beyond anything I’d ever imagined that my brain simply shorted out and went dark. Abandoning my hope of comprehending what had transpired, I shouldered my backpack and headed down into the frozen witchery of the Icefall, nervous as a cat, for one last trip through the maze of decaying seracs.

MAY 13, 1996 • 17,600 FEET

I shall inevitably be asked for a word of mature judgement on the expedition of a kind that was impossible when we were all up close to it.… On the one hand, Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day’s work of polar exploration. On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice. To ignore such a contrast would be ridiculous: to write a book without accounting for it a waste of time
.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

World
, an account of

Robert Falcon Scott’s

doomed 1912

expedition to the

South Pole

Arriving at the bottom of the Khumbu Icefall on Monday morning, May 13, I came down the final slope to find Ang Tshering, Guy Cotter, and Caroline Mackenzie waiting for me at the edge of the glacier. Guy handed me a beer, Caroline gave me a hug, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the ice with my face in my hands and tears streaking my cheeks, weeping like I hadn’t wept since I was a small boy. Safe now, the crushing strain of the preceding days lifted from my shoulders, I cried for my lost companions, I cried because I was grateful to be alive, I cried because I felt terrible for having survived while others had died.