Our acclimatization was now officially complete—and to my pleasant surprise Hall’s strategy appeared to be working: After three weeks on the mountain, I found that the air at Base Camp seemed thick and rich and voluptuously saturated with oxygen compared to the brutally thin atmosphere of the camps above.
All was not well with my body, however. I’d lost nearly twenty pounds of muscle mass, largely from my shoulders, back, and legs. I’d also burned up virtually all my subcutaneous fat, making me vastly more sensitive to the cold. My worst problem, though, was my chest: the dry hack I’d picked up weeks earlier in Lobuje had gotten so bad that I’d torn some thoracic cartilage during an especially robust bout of coughing at Camp Three. The coughing had continued unabated, and each hack felt like a stiff kick between the ribs.
Most of the other climbers in Base Camp were in similarly battered shape—it was simply a fact of life on Everest. In five days those of us on Hall’s and Fischer’s teams would be leaving Base Camp for the top. Hoping to stanch my decline, I resolved to rest, gobble ibuprofen, and force down as many calories as possible in that time.
From the beginning, Hall had planned that May 10 would be our summit day. “Of the four times I’ve summitted,” he explained, “twice it was on the tenth of May. As the Sherpas would put it, the tenth is an ‘auspicious’ date for me.” But there was also a more down-to-earth reason for selecting this date: the annual ebb and flow of the monsoon made it likely that the most favorable weather of the year would fall on or near May 10.
For all of April, the jet stream had been trained on Everest like a fire hose, blasting the summit pyramid with hurricane-force winds. Even on days when Base Camp was perfectly calm and flooded with sunshine, an immense banner of wind-driven snow flew from the summit. But in early May, we hoped, the approach of the monsoon from the Bay of Bengal would force the jet stream north into Tibet. If this year was like past years, between the departure of the wind and the arrival of the monsoon storms we would be presented with a brief window of clear, calm weather, during which a summit assault would be possible.
Unfortunately, the annual weather pattern was no secret, and every expedition had set their sights on the same window of fair weather. Hoping to avoid dangerous gridlock on the summit ridge, Hall held a big powwow with leaders of the other expeditions in Base Camp. It was determined that Göran Kropp, a young Swede who had ridden a bicycle from Stockholm to Nepal, would make the first attempt, alone, on May 3. Next would be a team from Montenegro. Then, on May 8 or 9, it would be the turn of the IMAX expedition.
Hall’s team, it was decided, would share a summit date of May 10 with Fischer’s expedition. After nearly getting killed by a falling rock low on the Southwest Face, Petter Neby, the solo Norwegian climber, was already gone: he’d quietly left Base Camp one morning and returned to Scandinavia. A guided group led by Americans Todd Burleson and Pete Athans, as well as Mal Duff’s commercial team and another British commercial team, all promised to steer clear of May 10, as did the Taiwanese.* Ian Woodall, however, declared that the South Africans would go to the top whenever they damn well pleased, probably on May 10, and anyone who didn’t like it could bugger off.
Hall, ordinarily extremely slow to rile, flew into a rage when he learned of Woodall’s refusal to cooperate. “I don’t want to be anywhere near the upper mountain when those punters are up there,” he seethed.
* Although Hall and other expedition leaders clearly believed that the Taiwanese had promised not to attempt the summit on this date, Makalu Gau insisted after the tragedy that he was not aware of any such promise. It is possible that the Taiwanese sirdar, Chhiring Sherpa, made the promise on Gau’s behalf without informing Gau that he had done so.
ELEVEN
BASE CAMP
MAY 6, 1996 • 17,600 FEET
How much of the appeal of mountaineering lies in its simplification of interpersonal relationships, its reduction of friendship to smooth interaction (like war), its substitution of an Other (the mountain, the challenge) for the relationship itself? Behind a mystique of adventure, toughness, footloose vagabondage—all much needed antidotes to our culture’s built-in comfort and convenience—may lie a kind of adolescent refusal to take seriously aging, the frailty of others, interpersonal responsibility, weakness of all kinds, the slow and unspectacular course of life itself.…
[T]op climbers … can be deeply moved, in fact maudlin; but only for worthy martyred ex-comrades. A certain coldness, strikingly similar in tone, emerges from the writings of Buhl, John Harlin, Bonatti, Bonington, and Haston: the coldness of competence. Perhaps this is what extreme climbing is about: to get to a point where, in Haston’s words, “If anything goes wrong it will be a fight to the end. If your training is good enough, survival is there; if not nature claims its forfeit.”
David Roberts
“Patey Agonistes”
Moments of Doubt
We left Base Camp at 4:30 A.M. on May 6 to commence our summit bid. The top of Everest, two vertical miles above, seemed so impossibly distant that I tried to limit my thoughts to Camp Two, our destination for the day. By the time the first sunlight struck the glacier I was at 20,000 feet, in the maw of the Western Cwm, grateful that the Icefall was below me and that I would have to go through it only one more time, on the final trip down.
I had been plagued by heat in the Cwm every time I’d traveled through it, and this trip was no exception. Climbing with Andy Harris at the front of the group, I continually stuffed snow under my hat and moved as fast as my legs and lungs would propel me, hoping to reach the shade of the tents before succumbing to the solar radiation. As the morning dragged on and the sun beat down, my head began to pound. My tongue swelled so much that it was difficult to breathe through my mouth, and I noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to think clearly.
Andy and I dragged into Camp Two at 10:30 A.M. After I guzzled two liters of Gatorade my equilibrium returned. “It feels good to at last be on our way to the summit, yeah?” Andy inquired. He’d been laid low with various intestinal ailments for most of the expedition and was finally getting his strength back. A gifted tutor blessed with astonishing patience, he’d usually been assigned to watch over the slower clients at the back of the herd and was thrilled when Rob had turned him loose this morning to go out on point. As the junior guide on Hall’s team, and the only one who’d never been on Everest, Andy was eager to prove himself to his seasoned colleagues. “I think we’re actually gonna knock this big bastard off,” he confided in me with a huge smile, staring up at the summit.
Later that day, Göran Kropp, the twenty-nine-year-old Swedish soloist, passed Camp Two on his way down to Base Camp, looking utterly worked. On October 16, 1995, he had left Stockholm on a custom-built bicycle loaded with 240 pounds of gear, intending to travel round-trip from sea level in Sweden to the top of Everest entirely under his own power, without Sherpa support or bottled oxygen. It was an exceedingly ambitious goal, but Kropp had the credentials to pull it off: he’d been on six previous Himalayan expeditions and had made solo ascents of Broad Peak, Cho Oyu, and K2.
During the 8,000-mile bike ride to Kathmandu, he was robbed by Romanian schoolchildren and assaulted by a crowd in Pakistan. In Iran, an irate motorcyclist broke a baseball bat over Kropp’s (fortunately) helmeted head. He’d nevertheless arrived intact at the foot of Everest in early April with a film crew in tow, and immediately began making acclimatization trips up the lower mountain. Then, on Wednesday, May 1, he’d departed Base Camp for the top.
Kropp reached his high camp at 26,000 feet on the South Col on Thursday afternoon and left for the top the following morning just after midnight. Everybody at Base Camp stayed close by their radios throughout the day, anxiously awaiting word of his progress. Helen Wilton hung a sign in our mess tent that read, “Go, Göran, Go!”
For the first time in months almost no wind blasted the summit, but the snow on the upper mountain was thigh deep, making for slow, exhausting progress. Kropp bulled
his way relentlessly upward through the drifts, however, and by two o’clock Thursday afternoon he’d reached 28,700 feet, just below the South Summit. But even though the top was no more than sixty minutes above, he decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend safely if he climbed any higher.
“To turn around that close to the summit ….” Hall mused with a shake of his head on May 6 as Kropp plodded past Camp Two on his way down the mountain. “That showed incredibly good judgment on young Göran’s part. I’m impressed—considerably more impressed, actually, than if he’d continued climbing and made the top.” Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turn-around time on our summit day—in our case it would probably be 1:00 P.M., or 2:00 at the very latest—and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.”
Hall’s easygoing facade masked an intense desire to succeed—which he defined in the fairly simple terms of getting as many clients as possible to the summit. To ensure success, he paid meticulous attention to detail: the health of the Sherpas, the efficiency of the solar-powered electrical system, the sharpness of his clients’ crampons. Hall loved being a guide, and it pained him that some celebrated climbers—including but not limited to Sir Edmund Hillary—didn’t appreciate how difficult guiding was, or give the profession the respect he felt it deserved.
Rob decreed that Tuesday, May 7, would be a rest day, so we got up late and sat around Camp Two, buzzing with nervous anticipation over the imminent summit assault. I fiddled with my crampons and some other gear, then tried to read a Carl Hiaasen paperback but was so focused on the climb that I kept scanning the same sentences over and over without the words registering.
Eventually I put the book down, snapped a few photos of Doug posing with a flag the Kent schoolkids had asked him to carry up the peak, and pumped him for detailed information about the difficulties of the summit pyramid, which he remembered well from the year before. “By the time we get to the top,” he frowned, “I guarantee that you’re gonna be one hurtin’ hombre.” Doug was hell-bent on joining the summit push, even though his throat was still bothering him and his strength seemed to be at a low ebb. As he put it, “I’ve put too much of myself into this mountain to quit now, without giving it everything I’ve got.”
Late that afternoon Fischer walked through our camp with a clenched jaw, moving uncharacteristically slowly toward his own tents. He usually managed to maintain a relentlessly upbeat attitude; one of his favorite utterances was, “If you’re bumming out, you’re not gonna get to the top, so as long as we’re up here we might as well make a point of grooving.” At the moment, however, Scott did not appear to be grooving in the slightest; instead he looked anxious and extremely tired.
Because he’d encouraged his clients to move up and down the mountain independently during the acclimatization period, he ended up having to make a number of hurried, unplanned excursions between Base Camp and the upper camps when several clients experienced problems and needed to be escorted down. He’d already made special trips to assist Tim Madsen, Pete Schoening, and Dale Kruse. And now, on what should have been a badly needed day and a half of rest, Fischer had just been forced to make a hasty round-trip from Camp Two to Base Camp and back to help his good friend Kruse after he came down with what appeared to be a relapse of HACE.
Fischer had arrived at Camp Two around noon the previous day, just after Andy and me, having climbed from Base Camp well ahead of his clients; he’d directed guide Anatoli Boukreev to bring up the rear, stay close to the group, and keep an eye on everybody. But Boukreev ignored Fischer’s instructions: instead of climbing with the team, he slept late, took a shower, and departed Base Camp some five hours behind the last of the clients. Thus, when Kruse collapsed at 20,000 feet with a splitting headache, Boukreev was nowhere in the vicinity, compelling Fischer and Beidleman to rush down from Camp Two to handle the emergency as soon as word of Kruse’s condition arrived via climbers coming up the Western Cwm.
Not long after Fischer reached Kruse and began the troublesome descent to Base Camp, they encountered Boukreev at the top of the Icefall, ascending alone, and Fischer harshly reprimanded the guide for shirking his responsibilities. “Yeah,” Kruse remembers, “Scott laid into Toli pretty good. He wanted to know why he was so far behind everybody—why he wasn’t climbing with the team.”
According to Kruse and other clients of Fischer’s, tension between Fischer and Boukreev had been building throughout the expedition. Fischer paid Boukreev $25,000—an unusually generous fee for guiding Everest (most other guides on the mountain were paid $10,000 to $15,000; skilled climbing Sherpas received only $1,400 to $2,500), and Boukreev’s performance hadn’t been meeting his expectations. “Toli was very strong and a very good technical climber,” Kruse explains, “but he had poor social skills. He didn’t watch out for other people. He just wasn’t a team player. Earlier, I’d told Scott that I didn’t want to have to climb with Toli high on the mountain, because I doubted that I’d be able to count on him when it really mattered.”
The underlying problem was that Boukreev’s notion of his responsibilities differed substantially from Fischer’s. As a Russian, Boukreev came from a tough, proud, hardscrabble climbing culture that did not believe in coddling the weak. In Eastern Europe guides were trained to act more like Sherpas—hauling loads, fixing ropes, establishing the route—and less like caretakers. Tall and blond, with handsome Slavic features, Boukreev was one of the most accomplished high-altitude climbers in the world, with twenty years of experience in the Himalaya, including two ascents of Everest without supplemental oxygen. And in the course of his distinguished career he’d formulated a number of unorthodox, very strongly held opinions about how the mountain should be ascended. He was quite outspoken in his belief that it was a mistake for guides to pamper their clients. “If client cannot climb Everest without big help from guide,” Boukreev told me, “this client should not be on Everest. Otherwise there can be big problems up high.”
But Boukreev’s refusal or inability to play the role of a conventional guide in the Western tradition exasperated Fischer. It also forced him and Beidleman to shoulder a disproportionate share of the caretaker duties for their group, and by the first week in May the effort had taken an unmistakable toll on Fischer’s health. After arriving in Base Camp with the ailing Kruse on the evening of May 6, Fischer made two satellite phone calls to Seattle in which he complained bitterly to his business partner, Karen Dickinson, and to his publicist, Jane Bromet,* about Boukreev’s intransigence. Neither woman imagined that these would be the last conversations they would ever have with Fischer.
On May 8 both Hall’s team and Fischer’s team departed Camp Two and commenced the grinding ascent of the ropes up the Lhotse Face. Two thousand feet above the floor of the Western Cwm, just below Camp Three, a boulder the size of a small television came rocketing down from the cliffs above and smashed into Andy Harris’s chest. It knocked him off his feet, slammed the wind out of him, and left him dangling from the fixed line in a state of shock for several minutes. Had he not been clipped in with a jumar he would have certainly fallen to his death.
When he arrived at the tents, Andy looked badly rattled but claimed that he wasn’t injured. “I might be a bit stiff in the morning,” he insisted, “but I think the bloody thing didn’t do much more than bruise me.” Just before the rock nailed him he’d been hunched forward with his head down; he happened to look up a moment before it struck, so that it merely grazed his chin before hitting him in the sternum, but it had come sickeningly close to smashing into his cranium. “If that rock had hit me in the head ….” Andy speculated with a grimace as he shed his pack, leaving the rest of the sentence unsaid.
Because Camp Three was the only camp on the entire mountain that we didn’t share with the Sherpas (the ledge was too small
to accommodate tents for all of us), it meant that here we had to do our own cooking—which mostly amounted to melting prodigious quantities of ice for drinking water. Due to the pronounced dehydration that was an inevitable byproduct of heavy breathing in such desiccated air, each of us consumed more than a gallon of liquid every day. We therefore needed to produce approximately a dozen gallons of water to meet the needs of eight clients and three guides.
As the first person to reach the tents on May 8, I inherited the job of ice chopper. For three hours, as my companions trickled into camp and settled into their sleeping bags, I remained outside hacking at the slope with the adze of my ice ax, filling plastic garbage bags with frozen shards and distributing the ice to the tents for melting. At 24,000 feet it was fatiguing work. Every time one of my teammates yelled, “Hey, Jon! You still out there? We could use some more ice over here!” it gave me a fresh perspective on how much the Sherpas ordinarily did for us, and how little we truly appreciated it.
By late afternoon, as the sun eased toward the corrugated horizon and the temperature began to plunge, everyone had pulled into camp except Lou Kasischke, Frank Fischbeck, and Rob, who had volunteered to do the “sweep” and come up last. Around 4:30 P.M., guide Mike Groom received a call from Rob on his walkie-talkie: Lou and Frank were still a couple of hundred feet below the tents and moving extremely slowly; would Mike please come down to assist them? Mike hurriedly put his crampons back on and disappeared down the fixed ropes without complaint.
Nearly an hour passed before he reappeared, just ahead of the others. Lou, who was so tired he’d let Rob carry his pack, staggered into camp looking pale and distraught, muttering, “I’m finished. I’m finished. Completely out of gas.” Frank showed up a few minutes later appearing even more exhausted, although he’d refused to give his pack to Mike. It was a shock to see these guys—both of whom had been climbing well lately—in such a state. Frank’s apparent deterioration came as a particular blow: I’d assumed from the beginning that if any members of our team reached the top, Frank—who’d been high on the mountain three times previously and seemed so savvy and strong—would be among them.