The Climb

  Guam. The beach. Sea level. It sounded good to Perry.

  Loud crashing from below made him jump. “What was that?”

  Sammi laughed with delight. “We’re on a glacier. It’s a frozen river — always shifting and breaking apart.” She did a dance to the beat of a series of aftershocks. “It’s like Rice Krispies — snap, crackle, pop — ”

  “More like snap, crackle, heart attack,” Perry said feelingly.

  “It is pretty extreme,” she chortled. “I can’t believe Dominic’s missing this.”

  Dominic. As soon as the news had come in that Dominic’s life was no longer in danger, Perry’s jealousy had begun. The boy now had a built-in excuse not to climb.

  “Look.” Sammi pointed. “Ethan Zaph’s team.”

  The famous Ethan was climbing with an expedition called This Way Up, which boasted the boldest plan on the mountain that year. After a punishing ascent of the 27,920-foot Lhotse, they would traverse to Everest via the South Col. Even more impressive, Ethan would be summiting both peaks without oxygen. All but the most elite mountaineers breathed bottled gas in the infamous Death Zone above twenty-five thousand feet. Yet Ethan, who was not yet seventeen, would be climbing without it — up not just one mountain, but two.

  This Way Up’s camp was even larger and more elaborate than SummitQuest’s, sporting a library and even a makeshift shower. There was no sign of Ethan, but a tall, thin, olive-skinned young man with thick glasses was outside one of the smaller tents. He was painting a wooden sign that hung just above the flap:

  NESTER ALI

  FIRST-EVER NEARSIGHTED

  PUERTO RICAN/PAKISTANI

  DOUBLE ASCENT & YETI RECONNAISSANCE

  Perry frowned. “What’s a ‘yeti’?”

  “Haven’t you heard of the abominable snowman?” Nestor asked pleasantly. “It’s a local legend — kind of the Bigfoot of the Himalayas. He’s got to be up there somewhere.”

  Sammi gave him a skeptical once-over. “Who else do you expect to find? The Tooth Fairy?”

  It turned out that Nestor was a journalist who had been hired by an Internet magazine to write humorous articles about Everest. His job, essentially, was to make fun of everything. He had already dubbed the sea of corporate logos “McBase Camp.” The expedition leaders were “Everest cruise directors.”

  “Where does the abominable snowman fit in?” asked Perry.

  “Look around you,” said Nestor. “Everybody has a gimmick. There’s a guy on the Australian team who plans to be the first garbage collector to stand on the summit. The Peruvians are taking a lab rat up there — the first rodent on top of the world. On the other side of camp, there’s a lady who wants to be the first great-grandmother to make it through the Khumbu Icefall. Why can’t I be the yeti guy?”

  “Watch it, Nestor,” came a voice behind him. “I think you’re talking to one of those gimmicks right now.”

  Ethan Zaph stepped through the tent flap, unfolding his six-foot-two-inch frame. He faced Sammi. “SummitQuest, right? And you want to be the youngest girl?”

  “I don’t care about records,” Sammi told him. “I climb for the rush.” She held out her hand. “Sammi Moon. I’m a fan — but that doesn’t mean I won’t smoke your butt on the mountain. Carrot-top here is Perry Noonan.”

  There were handshakes all around.

  “So you’re after my record,” Ethan said to Perry. “No, wait — what happened to Chris Alexis’s brother?”

  “He had to turn back,” Sammi informed him solemnly. “HAPE at sixteen thousand.”

  “Is he all right?” Ethan asked in concern.

  She shrugged. “He coughed a lot.”

  Ethan shook his head. “It makes you question Cap’s judgment.”

  “Hey,” Sammi said sharply. “You’re talking about Cap Cicero. He stood on this summit and twenty others before we were even born.”

  “I met this kid,” Ethan persisted. “Back in Kathmandu. He looks like he’s in grade school.”

  “You’ve never climbed with him,” she countered with more bravado than facts. “He’s tough. He’ll be back.”

  “That’s what worries me,” Ethan told her.

  “You worry about your climb,” Sammi suggested, “and we’ll worry about ours. Right, Perry?”

  “Right.” Deep down, Perry knew he was worried enough for every expedition in Base Camp.

  http://www.summathletic.com/everest/icefall

  A mountain the size of Everest must be tackled in pieces and ascended slowly, traveling up to and then down from a series of camps. The first challenge is the perilous Khumbu Icefall, which stretches from Base Camp to Camp One at 19,500 feet.

  If the glacier can be thought of as a frozen river moving at four feet per day, the Icefall is its Niagara. Here, it drops precipitously. But instead of a rush of cascading water, in the Icefall this means collapsing seracs — massive blocks of ice, some of them one hundred feet tall.

  If the Icefall has become the most feared part of the route up Everest, it is also the most strikingly beautiful. CLICK HERE to see the SummitQuest climbers taking on the vertical minefield of the Khumbu Icefall.

  The crevasse was thirty feet wide and so deep that no bottom was visible, only a steely blue-gray darkening to black. Sammi Moon balanced precariously on an aluminum ladder — one of four lashed together to span the gap.

  She turned back to her teammates, her face wreathed in smiles. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done — and I’ve done a lot of cool things!”

  Cicero rolled his eyes. “Sometime this year, please.”

  She scampered to the other side, and then it was Perry’s turn. His crampons scraped against the first aluminum rung, and he froze.

  “Hurry up,” grumbled Tilt.

  “Come on, Perry,” Sammi encouraged, so close, yet so far away. “Don’t look down.”

  But down was the only place to look. Tiptoeing across the metal rungs in cramponed boots was as tricky as it was terrifying. His first glimpse of the chasm’s yawning maw nearly caused him to lose his breakfast.

  No, he thought. No, Uncle Joe, I can’t do this. I’ve gone on your rock scrambles and climbed your crags, but I won’t walk a tightrope over a bottomless pit!

  There was a low rumble, and the ladder began to vibrate. Suddenly, a quarter mile away, a huge section of the Icefall disintegrated with an earsplitting roar, sending seracs the size of houses tumbling like tenpins.

  Perry was glued to the spot, waiting out the earthquake. Trembling along with the tremors.

  Cicero himself had said it best three hours before as the team was strapping on crampons and harnesses in the predawn chill: “You’re walking into the last great democracy in the world. The Icefall doesn’t care if you’re the best climber in the world or the worst. If you’re unlucky up there, you’re dead, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. So I guess the rule is: Don’t be unlucky.”

  Not exactly reassuring words.

  Perry lifted his left foot and placed it ahead of the right. It was a tiny step, but it brought him twelve inches closer to being done with this. Then came the right and another twelve inches. The others were cheering like this was a triumph, but Perry knew it was really a form of surrender — surrender to Uncle Joe, nine thousand miles away. As his crampons crunched the ice beside Sammi, it occurred to him that, on the other side of the world, Uncle Joe was probably asleep right now, unaware of his victory.

  In a remarkable show of skill and courage, Sneezy lowered himself on a rope several feet down into the crevasse so he could film Tilt’s crossing from below. As he passed over the camera, Tilt looked down and mouthed the words, “Hi, Mom.”

  “Watch,” he whispered to Sammi on the other side. “Twenty bucks says Baboon bends the ladder.”

  “Climbing with your mouth again, huh?” Sammi observed. “How do you keep your teeth from getting stuck in the glacier?”

  “It has to bug you, too,” Tilt persisted. “We break our necks getting in shap
e, and then Cap hires a waterbed to be our Sirdar.” The Sirdar was the leader of the Sherpas.

  At last, the six were reunited beyond the crevasse. Dr. Oberman and Dominic were not there. They remained in the valley, awaiting the boy’s recovery from HAPE.

  Passage through the Icefall was nerve-wracking and difficult, but at least the trail was set. Each year, two Sherpas were hired as “Icefall doctors.” So the SummitQuest team was following an established route with fixed ropes and ladders.

  Perry never got used to it. His one strength as a climber was his ropework. It was a product of his nervousness, really. He was always so afraid of falling that he had become an expert at securing himself with safety lines bolted or screwed into the mountain. But here on Everest, the ropes were all fixed, rendering his talent useless. In the Icefall, an alpinist relied not on technical skill, but on a mixture of courage, blind faith, and pure stubbornness that bordered on insanity. Every time he set foot on a ladder, the terror was so immediate that his abdomen ached from clenching his stomach. In his school chess club back home, he was renowned as the guy who wasn’t afraid to take risks. Risks! he thought bitterly. No chess player ever knew the meaning of the word. In chess, the worst that can happen is getting checkmated. Here, a bad risk can send you plummeting to an icy grave!

  Fatigue was also a major factor. They were climbing two thousand feet higher than Base Camp, and the air was thinning as they rose. Every few steps, Perry had to stop and gasp for breath. Although the temperature was barely above zero, he was bathed in perspiration. His one consolation was that Tilt, with the physique of a rhino and twice the strength, was also puffing and sweating. The grin was gone from Sammi’s face, replaced by a grimace of effort. Even Himalayan legend Cap Cicero slowed a little. Only Babu, born and raised at altitude, waddled along with no loss of speed.

  “You’re right,” Sammi panted sarcastically to Tilt. “He’s going to collapse any minute.”

  “Shut up.”

  The percussive drumrolls caused by splintering ice never stopped for a second. It was a chilling reminder that anything — even the ground beneath your feet — could crumble at any moment.

  They had been in the Icefall nearly six hours when the fixed ropes angled sharply upward. It was by no means the steepest part of the route, but this time they were climbing a single colossal serac. Shaped like a shark’s tooth the size of the Statue of Liberty, it towered over them, lord of the Icefall, leaning ominously forward.

  Cicero sucked air between his teeth. “I don’t like the look of that.”

  For Perry, who hadn’t liked the look of anything since Base Camp, the pronouncement was a 9-1-1 call to every nerve ending in his body. “We’re turning around, right?” he babbled. “We’ll head down and find the Icefall doctors, and they’ll rework the route — ”

  “I’ll go first,” Sammi interrupted.

  One by one, they ascended the shark’s tooth. With every heart-stopping footfall, Perry tried to beam his terror and misery across continents and oceans to Joe Sullivan’s safe, warm bed in Boulder, Colorado. I hope you’re having a nightmare, Uncle Joe! he thought bitterly. I’m having one in broad daylight.

  Forty-five minutes later, the six stood at Camp One — a ragtag assortment of tents that stood at the entrance to the Western Cwm, the highest canyon on the planet.

  Cicero was pleased. “Nice work. A little slow, but that’ll improve as we get used to the thin air.” Then he dropped the bombshell. “Ten minutes break, and we go back down.”

  “Down?!” protested Tilt. “You mean we’re not staying at Camp One?”

  “We’re not ready for this altitude. Climb high, sleep low — that’s the rule.” He chuckled. “Don’t worry, the descent is the fun part. It isn’t any easier, but it takes half the time.”

  And double the stomach lining, reflected Perry, who felt his guts churning again.

  So they turned around and headed back into the Icefall.

  It happened just as Sammi was clipping her harness onto the fixed line to descend the massive shark’s tooth. All at once, there was a crack as loud as a gunshot, followed by a mournful groaning sound, and the 150-foot serac began to topple forward.

  “Jump!” bellowed Cicero.

  Sammi leaped, swinging her legs up and clear, as the mountain of ice rolled over on its face, bringing with it the destructive power of a small nuclear bomb. The climbers below ran for cover as shattering ice flew every which way. The screw at the bottom anchoring the fixed rope snapped like a toothpick, and the line popped loose and hung there. With a cry of terror, Sammi plummeted 150 feet straight down, still harnessed to the useless rope.

  In a spectacular display of speed for someone his size, Babu Pemba sprang into action. It was technically impossible to run in crampons, but he came close, hurling himself forward like an NFL linebacker making a highlight-film tackle.

  He hit the ice a split second before Sammi hit him. He couldn’t catch her — from that height, the impact would have crushed him. Instead, he redirected the free-falling climber to strike the glacier at an angle, and they rolled, somersaulting one over the other. They would have kept on going, tumbling and sliding until a crevasse swallowed them, if they hadn’t smacked into a glacial chunk the size of a small truck — a fragment of the former shark’s tooth.

  “Sammi!” With the route gone, Cicero was front-pointing down a 150-foot drop with a single ax. “Babu!”

  “I’m okay!” called Sammi. Babu sat up beside her, and she clamped her arms around his hefty frame, mumbling, “At least I think I’m okay … I can’t believe I’m okay.”

  Sneezy rushed up, Tilt and Perry hot on his heels. The guide set down the camera and examined Sammi and Babu inch by inch. Only then did he flash Cicero a thumbs-up.

  “Thank God!” But the team leader didn’t relax until he himself had made it down to stand with his Sirdar and his teenage charge.

  “Take some time,” he told Sammi. “As much as you need. I don’t want you climbing again until you’re one-hundred-percent comfortable.”

  “Are you kidding?” she scoffed. “You know me, Cap. I like it like that. Gets the blood pumping.”

  “That was almost prom night, your wedding — the rest of your life,” he said seriously. “Be a strong, silent type if you like. But we’re not moving until you admit what almost happened.”

  “Silly,” she chided sweetly. “Sophomores don’t go to prom.”

  But Cicero knew her bravado was just an act. Three hours later, when the exhausted team staggered back into Base Camp, Sammi Moon was still shaking.

  * * *

  The monotonous chanting seemed to float on the thin air as easily as the low overcast.

  It was Dominic’s second visit to the famous monastery at Thyangboche. Ten days before he had come eagerly to this rambling collection of temples, almost as much of a landmark on the mountaineering map as Everest itself.

  Now the place merely reminded him of where he was not.

  Patience, he told himself.

  After five days at lower altitude, he had made a complete recovery from HAPE. It was astounding, Dr. Oberman assured him. Normally it took close to two weeks for the effects of altitude sickness to disappear.

  He believed her. He could see it in her eyes as she poked and prodded him with her stethoscope. Yes, his chest was clear, although the dry Khumbu cough still plagued him. She kept raving about his healing power, but when he asked when they would start back up the valley, the answer was always the same.

  “It’s not time yet.”

  Will it ever be time?

  “What does Cap say?” he would ask every night. “Did you talk to him?”

  “Cap hired a doctor for his expedition. If he had medical training, he wouldn’t need me.”

  He sat in the temple, with a kata — a white silk prayer scarf — draped around his neck. He was glumly sipping sweet tea when he spied an emaciated elderly lama. The man was so weak that he had to be carried in by several of his colle
agues. All at once, the monk pointed at Dominic and began speaking in such agitation that he had to be restrained by his bearers.

  Dominic and Dr. Oberman left soon after — they didn’t want to be the cause of any disturbance. But as they made their way to the door, one of the younger lamas rushed up and addressed them in broken English. He apologized for the elderly monk frightening them. The man was coming off a three-week fast.

  “But what was he saying about me?” asked Dominic

  “He say, look this boy, he have shiny coils all around,” the young lama informed him.

  “Shiny coils?” repeated Dominic. “You mean like climbing ropes? They can look kind of shiny in bright sun.”

  The doctor shook her head. “It was just a hallucination.”

  The young monk was offended. “No hallucinate! Vision! Very important. Always remember.”

  “I — I will,” Dominic managed as Dr. Oberman led him outside.

  When they had reached their lodge in the nearby village, she turned to him. “Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll start back up toward Base Camp. No guarantees, okay? We’ll take it one day at a time.”

  Her cautious tone did nothing to dampen his celebration.

  That night, he lay on his lumpy mattress, looking up at a small glass vial on a leather string. It held sand from the Dead Sea — the lowest point on Earth. The keepsake belonged to his brother, Chris, a gift from their grandmother before Dominic was even born. Chris had been planning to leave it on the summit of Everest. “From the bottom of the world to the top.” That was his motto. And when Chris had been cut from the team, he had passed it on to Dominic.

  Hang on, Chris. We’re still in this thing.

  Despite his exhilaration, he was strangely troubled. The incident at the monastery was still very much on his mind.

  Shiny coils. Did it mean ropes? Could the holy man actually have seen a vision of Dominic ascending the mountain?

  More likely it’s a scam, he thought. They say it to every climber who goes in there.

  But there was another possible explanation for the shiny coils: Medical tubes and wires, snaking in and around his body.