Left for Dead (26 page)

Punta Arenas is remote, and once you get there you still have about two thousand miles to go. Since it would be inordinately expensive for ANI to ship aviation fuel that far, the company must use airplanes capable of making the four thousand-mile round trip on one tank of kerosene.

The craft of choice in January of 1993 was a DC-6, which could make it to Patriot Hills and back in twelve hours, in perfect flying conditions. This is a meteorologically active part of the world, however, and a half day of perfect weather is difficult to guarantee. We got to know Punta Arenas quite well before finally taking off.

Everything connected with this particular adventure would be delayed and protracted, including the warfare between Peach and me that broke out in its aftermath.

After waiting for days to depart, there was the long flight to Patriot Hills, where the DC-6 disgorged us and immediately hightailed back to Chile. The abrupt leave-taking is absolutely necessary. If a storm comes up while the plane is on the ground, it likely never will leave. If anything goes wrong—such as a shift in the wind—on the way home on half a tank of fuel, a header into the Strait of Magellan is a distinct and unwelcome possibility.

Patriot Hills in January 1993 consisted of a couple of large tents and some ice tunnels dug for new arrivals, such as ourselves, who might require immediate shelter. There were no permanent aboveground structures. The tunnels also are used for storage. Because the weather at the time of our arrival was more or less clement, we put up our tents and built ice walls around them, just as I’d done on Denali.

Next morning, or what passed for morning—the antipodal summer sun stays above the horizon twenty-four hours a day—we all climbed into a twin-engine Otter for the two-hour flight to Base Camp at ten thousand feet on Vinson. It was very cold. We landed upslope, passed a sign that said,
WELCOME TO VINSON BEACH
and deplaned.

Once our tents were up, we needed to move a cache up to Camp One. You’ll recall that my packing list didn’t mention either skis or snowshoes, which both Barbara Gurtler and I had been assured we would not require. The snow was hard packed, we were told.

That was not true. Barbara, who is small and light, was not seriously inconvenienced. But I was heavy enough that with every step I created postholes above my knees. This made me seriously unhappy. We made our way up through some crevasses, dumped the stuff and returned. Everyone else shussed down the hill in about two seconds. It took me forever. Thirty hours after taking off, we finally had dinner and went to sleep.

I believe it was the next morning that I clambered out of my tent and was stunned to see three identical suns suspended in the sky above us. I knew nothing until that moment of sun dogs, in which a layer of ice in the atmosphere reflects an image of the sun onto multiple points in the sky.

The additional suns lent the already surreal landscape an even more unworldly cast. I was very much reminded of the opening scenes of
Star Wars
, and the multiple suns over Luke Skywalker’s home planet.

It was in the mess tent where I first encountered Rob Hall—in the form of a poster for the guide service he’d begun with his then-partner and close friend Gary Ball. They called themselves Hall and Ball. It sounded like a rock band.

I was deeply impressed to learn that Hall and Ball had managed to climb all seven summits in just seven months, an incredible logistical feat that culminated where I was standing, the Vinson Massif, on December 12, 1990.

In October of 1993, Gary Ball would succumb to cerebral edema—HACE—high on 26,795-foot Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas, the world’s sixth tallest mountain. Rob Hall was in the tent to hold his friend as he fell into a coma, and then buried Gary Hall the next day in a crevasse.

Our first day of climbing we were out in our T-shirts and made it to High Camp across a small ice field in good shape. Next day, however, the leading edge of a storm system reached us before we could summit, driving the entire group back down to High Camp. We tried, and succeeded, on our second march to the top, which proved anticlimactic. All we found up there was a ski pole stuck in the ground. The view from the top of Vinson reportedly is spectacular. I’ll never know; my glasses were fogged over. We couldn’t see squat anyway. Everything was gray. Then the weather started to deteriorate. My return to Base Camp was done blind, more or less, just as I’d been blind on the way down from Denali. I managed to set a new world’s record for falling into crevasses. I dropped into five of them on that single day.

The Otter came to fetch us on schedule, but by the time it arrived the weather had gone to pieces at Patriot Hills, which meant the pilot and his mechanic were stuck. They tossed out their beds and tents and set up housekeeping with the rest of us—the metal inside the plane would make it feel much colder than in the tents—and waited for the weather to improve. It didn’t for a couple of days.

We were forced to excavate old food caches at Base Camp, some frozen eggs and vegetables that had been there for ages. Sandy Pittman, I recall, had this enormous bag of gourmet food:
seaweed salad, smoked duck and the damnedest other delicacies, as well as a video camera with which she could play movies in her tent. She did share
some
of her luxuries with the group. But Sandy, who was generally a good sport and able expedition member, also had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which she would
not
share with me no matter how long I stood outside her tent with my little tin cup.

Otherwise very little transpired out there in the middle of nowhere, except that Barbara Gurtler contrived to set our mess tent on fire. She incorrectly started up the stove, which flamed up the side of the tent, sending us all either diving into the snow outside, or putting the fire out.

The miniconflagration aside, Barbara was generally appalled at our cooking conditions. Martyn, for example, prepared what he called a lying dinner; he cooked up anything he found lying around.

At this point, I made a connection with one of the great mountaineers of this century, Reinhold Messner. As we excavated the old food caches, we came across a pack of chocolate pudding inscribed with Messner’s name. He’d been there years before. The way I see it, at least at some level Reinhold and I have dined together.

Deep into the second day of our frozen exile, thick clouds descended all around us, a worrisome development. We discovered at the same time that the Otter was frozen to the ice. We tried rocking the plane, and prying it loose with shovels. Just as local visibility was about to hit zero we broke the plane free, jumped in and headed back to Patriot Hills, where the DC-6 would retrieve us for the return flight to Punta Arenas.

At least that was the plan.

On its way from Chile, the big plane blew an engine and turned back. Working D-6 replacement engines never are as plentiful as you’d like them to be—the nearest available one was found in Florida—so we had no choice but to chill our heels the week or eight days it took to get the big bird safely airborne again.

They had a solar-powered radio set up at Patriot Hills. It could reach Punta Arenas. When we discovered we were going to be stuck for a while, we all gave names of family and friends who needed to be told why we were delayed. These were supposed to be relayed on from Punta Arenas. Some people don’t understand that you can’t just pick up a telephone when you are out in the middle of nowhere.

I don’t know how many calls got through, but mine didn’t. My aunt in New York was just frantic to find out what had happened to me, just absolutely frantic. Nobody contacted her.

When Beck went off on these trips, he’d never call home to check on us. He would go for weeks without communicating.

I was used to that. What I wasn’t prepared for was to go to the airport to pick him up and find he wasn’t on the plane. I was totally undone by this.

I called the tour operator. They told me that he must be all right, because if he were dead I already would have been contacted! Then I called a travel agent friend, who informed me
that someone had canceled Beck’s reservation home. It was days before I knew about the blown engine on the DC-6, and that Beck was all right.

This incident was a turning point.

I remember how terrified Peach was. For several days she didn’t know where the hell he was, how he was or whether he was dead or alive. It was a terrible foretaste of what she’d go through when she was told he’d died on Everest. I waited with her until she heard something. We all just had knives in our stomachs. Peach swore she wouldn’t go through that again. I saw her anger and determination.

We weren’t in any danger at Patriot Hills, but there also wasn’t much to do while we were waiting for the DC-6 to be fixed. So some of us helped out on a project. ANI owned a single-engine Cessna, which the company kept year-round at Patriot Hills. In the past, their practice had been to excavate a hole in the ice and snow and then to ease the plane down into it, nose first. Then they’d fill up the hole, leaving a bit of the Cessna’s tail showing so they could locate the plane the following summer.

This year, we created sort of a subsurface ice grotto into which we carefully lowered the airplane backward, and then fitted the cavity with a plywood ceiling and ramp so that the Cessna was both protected and could be easily wheeled out for use the next year.

We had just finished—Patriot Hills was beginning to feel like a penal colony—when the DC-6 hove into view, ready to whisk yours truly back to Peach’s side. When I did finally land in Dallas, an unseasonable chill had descended; the drive back home from the airport was not cordial. Peach informed me we were going to see a marriage counselor.

Meg, Beck, Peach and Beck II, fall 1999.

Beck and Peach, 1998.

Howard Olson.

I don’t think Beck had a clue of the distress this episode caused me. My hair started falling out, and I lost about forty pounds over a three-month period.