Into Thin Air

  “At times you couldn’t even see your own feet, it was blowing so hard,” he continues. “I was worried somebody would sit down or get separated from the group and we’d never see them again. But once we got to the flats of the Col we started following the Sherpas, and I figured they knew where camp was. Then they suddenly stopped and doubled back, and it quickly became obvious they didn’t have any idea where we were. At that point I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. That’s when I first knew we were in trouble.”

  For the next two hours, Beidleman, Groom, the two Sherpas, and the seven clients staggered blindly around in the storm, growing ever more exhausted and hypothermic, hoping to blunder across the camp. Once they came across a couple of discarded oxygen bottles, suggesting that the tents were near, but the climbers couldn’t locate them. “It was total chaos,” says Beidleman. “People are wandering all over the place; I’m yelling at everyone, trying to get them to follow a single leader. Finally, probably around ten o’clock, I walked over this little rise, and it felt like I was standing on the edge of the earth. I could sense a huge void just beyond.”

  The group had unwittingly strayed to the easternmost edge of the Col, at the lip of a 7, 000-foot drop down the Kangshung Face. They were at the same elevation as Camp Four, just 1,000 horizontal feet from safety,* but, says Beidleman, “I knew that if we kept wandering in the storm, pretty soon we were going to lose somebody. I was exhausted from dragging Yasuko. Charlotte and Sandy were barely able to stand. So I screamed at everyone to huddle up right there and wait for a break in the storm.”

  Beidleman and Schoening searched for a protected place to escape the wind, but there was nowhere to hide. Everyone’s oxygen had long since run out, making the group more vulnerable to the windchill, which exceeded a hundred below zero. In the lee of a boulder no larger than a dishwasher, the climbers hunkered in a pathetic row on a patch of gale-scoured ice. “By then the cold had about finished me off,” says Charlotte Fox. “My eyes were frozen. I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive. The cold was so painful, I didn’t think I could endure it anymore. I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.”

  “We tried to keep warm by pummeling each other,” Weathers remembers. “Someone yelled at us to keep moving our arms and legs. Sandy was hysterical; she kept yelling over and over, ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’ But nobody else was saying a whole lot.”

  Three hundred yards to the west I was shivering uncontrollably in my tent—even though I was zipped into my sleeping bag, and wearing my down suit and every other stitch of clothing I had. The gale threatened to blow the tent apart. Every time the door was opened, the shelter would fill with blowing spindrift, so everything inside was covered with an inch-thick layer of snow. Oblivious to the tragedy unfolding outside in the storm, I drifted in and out of consciousness, delirious from exhaustion, dehydration, and the cumulative effects of oxygen depletion.

  At some point early in the evening, Stuart Hutchison, my tent-mate, came in, shook me hard, and asked if I would go outside with him to bang on pots and shine lights into the sky in the hope of guiding the lost climbers in, but I was too weak and incoherent to respond. Hutchison—who had gotten back to camp at 2:00 P.M. and was thus considerably less debilitated than me—then tried to rouse clients and Sherpas from the other tents. Everybody was too cold or too exhausted. So Hutchison went out into the storm alone.

  He left our tent six times that night to look for the missing climbers, but the blizzard was so fierce that he never dared to venture more than a few yards beyond the margin of camp. “The winds were ballistically strong,” he emphasizes, “The blowing spindrift felt like a sandblaster or something. I could only go out for fifteen minutes at a time before I became too cold and had to return to the tent.”

  Out among the climbers hunkered on the eastern edge of the Col, Beidelman willed himself to stay alert for a sign that the storm might be blowing itself out. Just before midnight, his vigilance was rewarded when he suddenly noticed a few stars overhead and shouted to the others to look. The wind was still whipping up a furious ground-blizzard at the surface, but far above, the sky had begun to clear, revealing the hulking silhouettes of Everest and Lhotse. From these reference points, Klev Schoening thought he’d figured out where the group was in relation to Camp Four. After a shouting match with Beidleman, he convinced the guide that he knew the way to the tents.

  Beidleman tried to coax everyone to their feet and get them moving in the direction indicated by Schoening, but Pittman, Fox, Weathers, and Namba were too feeble to walk. By then it was obvious to the guide that if somebody from the group didn’t make it to the tents and summon a rescue party, they were all going to die. So Beidleman assembled those who were ambulatory, and then he, Schoening, Gammelgaard, Groom, and the two Sherpas stumbled off into the storm to get help, leaving behind the four incapacitated clients with Tim Madsen. Reluctant to abandon his girlfriend, Fox, Madsen selflessly volunteered to stay and look after everybody until help arrived.

  Twenty minutes later, Beidleman’s contingent limped into camp, where they had an emotional reunion with a very worried Anatoli Boukreev. Schoening and Beidleman, barely able to speak, told the Russian where to find the five clients who’d remained behind out in the elements and then collapsed in their respective tents, utterly spent.

  Boukreev had come down to the South Col hours in front of anyone else in Fischer’s team. Indeed, by 5:00 P.M., while his teammates were still struggling down through the clouds at 28,000 feet, Boukreev was already in his tent resting and drinking tea. Experienced guides would later question his decision to descend so far ahead of his clients—extremely unorthodox behavior for a guide. One of the clients from that group has nothing but contempt for Boukreev, insisting that when it mattered most, the guide “cut and ran.”

  Anatoli had left the summit around 2:00 P.M. and quickly became entangled in the traffic jam at the Hillary Step. As soon as the mob dispersed he moved very rapidly down the Southeast Ridge without waiting for any clients—despite telling Fischer atop the Step that he would be going down with Martin Adams. Boukreev thereby arrived at Camp Four well before the brunt of the storm.

  After the expedition, when I asked Anatoli why he had hurried down ahead of his group, he handed me the transcript of an interview he’d given a few days previously to Men’s Journal through a Russian interpreter. Boukreev told me that he’d read the transcript and confirmed its accuracy. Reading it on the spot, I quickly came to a series of questions about the descent, to which he had replied:

  I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour.… It is very cold, naturally, it takes your strength.… My position was that I would not be good if I stood around freezing, waiting. I would be more useful if I returned to Camp Four in order to be able to take oxygen up to the returning climbers or to go up to help them if some became weak during the descent.… If you are immobile at that altitude you lose strength in the cold, and then you are unable to do anything.

  Boukreev’s susceptibility to the cold was doubtless greatly exacerbated by the fact that he wasn’t using supplemental oxygen; in the absence of gas he simply couldn’t stop to wait for slow clients on the summit ridge without courting frostbite and hypothermia. For whatever reason, he raced down ahead of the group—which in fact had been his pattern throughout the entire expedition, as Fischer’s final letters and phone calls from Base Camp to Seattle made clear.

  When I questioned him about the wisdom of leaving his clients on the summit ridge, Anatoli insisted that it was for the good of the team: “It is much better for me to warm myself at South Col, be ready to carry up oxygen if clients run out.” Indeed, shortly after dark, after Beidleman’s group failed to return and the storm had risen to hurricane intensity, Boukreev realized they must be in trouble and made a courageous attempt to bring oxygen to them. But his stratagem had a serious flaw: because neither he nor Beidleman had a radio, Anatoli had no way of knowing the true nature
of the missing climbers’ predicament, or even where on the huge expanse of the upper mountain they might be.

  Around 7:30 P.M., Boukreev left Camp Four to search for the group, regardless. By then, he recalled,

  Visibility was maybe a meter. It disappeared altogether. I had a lamp, and I began to use oxygen to speed up my ascent. I was carrying three bottles. I tried to go faster, but visibility was gone.… It is like being without eyes, without being able to see, it was impossible to see. That is very dangerous, because one can fall into a crevasse, one can fall toward the southern side of Lhotse, 3,000 meters straight down. I tried to go up, it was dark, I could not find the fixed line.

  Some six hundred feet above the Col, Boukreev recognized the futility of his effort and returned to the tents, but, he admits, he very nearly became lost himself. In any case, it was just as well that he abandoned this rescue effort, because at that point his teammates were no longer on the peak above, where Boukreev had been headed—by the time he gave up his search, Beidleman’s group was actually wandering around on the Col six hundred feet below the Russian.

  Boukreev arrived back at Camp Four around 9:00 P.M. Exhausted and extremely concerned about his missing teammates, he sat down on his pack at the edge of camp, cradled his head in his hands, and tried to figure out how he might rescue them. “The wind is driving snow into my back but I am powerless to move,” he later recalled. “How long I was there, I don’t remember. It is here that I start to lose track of time because I am so tired, so exhausted.”

  During one of Stuart Hutchison’s forays into the storm to look for the missing members of Rob Hall’s team, he was shocked to stumble upon Boukreev sitting alone out in the blizzard. According to Hutchison, Boukreev “was bent over, retching, about a hundred feet from the South Africans’ tent. When I asked if he needed help, he answered, ‘No! No! No!’ He seemed in bad shape, really fucked out of his tree. So I brought him back to one of Fischer’s tents, and some Sherpas took him inside.”

  Boukreev was worried sick about the nineteen climbers who were missing, but because he had no idea where they might be, there was little he could do except warm himself, try to regain some strength, and bide his time. Then, at 12:45 A.M., Beidleman, Groom, Schoening, and Gammelgaard hobbled into camp. “Klev and Neal had lost all power and could barely talk,” Boukreev recalls. “They told me Charlotte, Sandy, and Tim need help, Sandy is close to dying. Then they give me general location where to find them.”

  Upon hearing the climbers arrive, Stuart Hutchison went out to assist Groom. “I got Mike into his tent,” Hutchison recalled, “and saw that he was really, really exhausted. He was able to communicate clearly, but it required an agonal effort, like a dying man’s last words. ‘You have to get some Sherpas,’ he told me. ‘Send them out for Beck and Yasuko.’ And then he pointed toward the Kangshung side of the Col.”

  Hutchison’s efforts to organize a rescue team proved fruitless, however. Chuldum and Arita—Sherpas on Hall’s team who hadn’t accompanied the summit party and were waiting in reserve at Camp Four specifically for such an emergency—had been incapacitated with carbon monoxide poisoning from cooking in a poorly ventilated tent; Chuldum was actually vomiting blood. And the other four Sherpas on our team were too cold and debilitated from having gone to the summit.

  After the expedition, I asked Hutchison why, once he learned the whereabouts of the missing climbers, he didn’t attempt to wake Frank Fischbeck, Lou Kasischke, or John Taske—or make a second attempt to wake me—in order to request our help with the rescue effort. “It was so obvious that all of you were completely exhausted that I didn’t even consider asking. You were so far past the point of ordinary fatigue that I thought if you attempted to help with a rescue you were only going to make the situation worse—that you would get out there and have to be rescued yourself.” The upshot was that Stuart went out into the storm alone, but once again he turned around at the edge of camp when he became worried that he wouldn’t be able to find his way back if he went farther.

  At the same time, Boukreev was also trying to organize a rescue effort. Martin Adams, exhausted from his summit climb, “had collapsed into a sleep; he had nothing left,” according to Boukreev, and was clearly unable to help. He located Lopsang, but the Sherpa, like Adams, was too debilitated to go out into the storm. Next, Boukreev went from tent to tent trying to find members of other expeditions who might be in a position to offer assistance—although he didn’t visit the tent I shared with Hutchison, so the efforts of Hutchison and Boukreev remained uncoordinated, and I never learned of either rescue plan.

  There happened to be a number of climbers at Camp Four that night—Ian Woodall, Cathy O’Dowd, and Bruce Herrod from the South African team; and Neil Laughton, Brigitte Muir, Michael Jorgensen, Graham Ratcliffe, and Mark Pfetzer from Henry Todd’s team—who hadn’t yet attempted the summit, and were thus relatively well rested. But in the chaos and confusion of the moment, Boukreev apparently located few, if any, of these climbers. And in the end Boukreev discovered, like Hutchison, that everybody he did manage to rouse was too sick, too exhausted, or too frightened to help.

  So the Russian guide resolved to bring back the group by himself. Overcoming his own crippling exhaustion, he plunged into the maw of the hurricane and searched the Col for nearly an hour. It was an incredible display of strength and courage, but he was unable to find any of the missing climbers.

  Boukreev didn’t give up, however. He returned to camp, obtained a more detailed set of directions from Beidleman and Schoening, then went out into the storm again. This time he saw the faint glow of Madsen’s fading headlamp and was thereby able to locate the missing climbers. “They were lying on the ice, without movement,” says Boukreev. “They could not talk.” Madsen was still conscious and largely able to take care of himself, but Pittman, Fox, and Weathers were utterly helpless, and Namba appeared to be dead.

  After Beidleman and the others had set out from the huddle to get help, Madsen had gathered together the climbers who remained and hectored everybody to keep moving in order to stay warm. “I sat Yasuko down in Beck’s lap,” Madsen recalls, “but he was pretty unresponsive by that time, and Yasuko wasn’t moving at all. A little later I saw that she’d laid down flat on her back, with snow blowing into her hood. Somehow she’d lost a glove—her right hand was bare, and her fingers were curled up so tightly you couldn’t straighten them. It looked like they were pretty much frozen to the bone.

  “I assumed she was dead,” Madsen continues. “But then a while later she suddenly moved, and it freaked me out: she sort of arched her neck slightly, as if she was trying to sit up, and her right arm came up, then that was it. Yasuko lay back down and never moved again.”

  As soon as Boukreev found the group, it became obvious to him that he could bring only one climber in at a time. He was carrying an oxygen bottle, which he and Madsen hooked up to Pittman’s mask. Then Boukreev indicated to Madsen that he’d be back as soon as possible and started helping Fox back toward the tents. “After they left,” says Madsen, “Beck was crumpled in a fetal position, not moving a whole lot, and Sandy was curled up in my lap, not moving much, either. I screamed at her, ‘Hey, keep wiggling your hands! Let me see your hands!’ And when she sits up and pulls her hands out, I see she doesn’t have any mittens on—that they were dangling from her wrists.

  “So I’m trying to shove her hands back into her mittens when all of a sudden Beck mumbles, ‘Hey, I’ve got this all figured out.’ Then he kind of rolls a little distance away, crouches on a big rock, and stands up facing the wind with his arms stretched out to either side. A second later a gust comes up and just blows him over backward into the night, beyond the beam of my headlamp. And that was the last I saw of him.

  “Toli came back a little bit after that and grabbed Sandy, so I just packed up my stuff and started waddling after them, trying to follow Toli’s and Sandy’s headlamps. By then I assumed Yasuko was dead and Beck was a lost cause.” When they finally re
ached camp it was 4:30 A.M., and the sky was starting to brighten above the eastern horizon. Upon hearing from Madsen that Yasuko hadn’t made it, Beidleman broke down in his tent and wept for forty-five minutes.

  * Although a strong climber might require three hours to ascend 1,000 vertical feet, in this case the distance was over more or less flat terrain, which the group would have been able to cover in perhaps fifteen minutes had they known where the tents were.

  SIXTEEN

  SOUTH COL

  6:00 A.M., MAY 11, 1996 • 26,000 FEET

  I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven.… I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.

  Harold Brodkey

  “Manipulations”

  Stuart Hutchison finally managed to shake me awake at 6:00 A.M. on May 11. “Andy’s not in his tent,” he told me somberly, “and he doesn’t seem to be in any of the other tents, either. I don’t think he ever made it in.”

  “Harold’s missing?” I asked. “No way. I saw him walk to the edge of camp with my own eyes.” Shocked and confused, I pulled on my boots and rushed out to look for Harris. The wind was still fierce—strong enough to knock me down several times—but it was a bright, clear dawn, and the visibility was perfect. I searched the entire western half of the Col for more than an hour, peering behind boulders and poking under shredded, long-abandoned tents, but found no trace of Harris. Adrenaline surged through my veins. Tears welled in my eyes, instantly freezing my eyelids shut. How could Andy be gone? It couldn’t be so.