Into Thin Air (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine September 1996

Page:

True Everest
Into Thin Air (Cont.)

For our third and final acclimatization excursion, we spent four nights at 21,300-foot Camp Two and a night at 24,000-foot Camp Three. Then on May 1 our whole team descended to Base Camp to recoup our strength for the summit push. Much to my surprise, Hall's acclimatization plan seemed to be working: After three weeks, I felt like I was finally adapting to the altitude. The air at Base Camp now seemed deliciously thick.

From the beginning, Hall had planned that May 10 would be our summit day. "Of the four times I've summited," he explained, "twice it was on the tenth of May. As the Sherps 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 nonstop hurricane-force winds. Even on days when Base Camp was perfectly calm and flooded with sunshine, an immense plume of wind-driven snow was visible over the summit. But if all went well, in early May the monsoon approaching 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 patterns were no secret, and every expedition had its sights set on the same window. Hoping to avoid dangerous gridlock on the summit ridge, Hall held a powwow in the mess tent with leaders of the expeditions in Base Camp. The council, as it were, determined that Gòran Kropp, a young Swede who had ridden a bicycle all the way to Nepal from Stockholm, 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, headed by David Breashears, which hoped to wrap up a large-format film about Everest with footage from the top.

Our team, it was decided, would share a summit date of May 10 with Fischer's group. An American commercial team and two British-led commercial groups promised to steer clear of the top of the mountain on the tenth, as did the Taiwanese. Woodall, however, declared that the South Africans would go to the top whenever they pleased, probably on the tenth, and anyone who didn't like it could "bugger off."

Hall, ordinarily extremely slow to rile, flew into a rage over Woodall's refusal to cooperate. "I don't want to be anywhere near the upper mountain when those punters are up there," he seethed.

"It feels good to be on our way to the summit, yeah?" Harris inquired as we pulled into Camp Two. The midday sun was reflecting off the walls of Nuptse, Lhotse, and Everest, and the entire ice-coated valley seemed to have been transformed into a huge solar oven. We were finally ascending for real, headed straight toward the top, Harris and me and everybody else.

Harris—Harold to his friends—was the junior guide on the expedition and the only one who'd never been to Everest (indeed, he'd never been above 23,000 feet). Built like an NFL quarterback and preternaturally good-natured, he was usually assigned to the slower clients at the back of the pack. For much of the expedition, he had been laid low with intestinal ailments, but he was finally getting his strength back, and he was eager to prove himself to his seasoned colleagues. "I think we're actually gonna knock this big bastard off," he confided to me with a huge smile, staring up at the summit.

Harris worked as a much-in-demand heli-skiing guide in the antipodal winter. Summers he guided climbers in New Zealand's Southern Alps and had just launched a promising heli-hiking business. Sipping tea in the mess tent back at Base Camp, he'd shown me a photograph of Fiona McPherson, the pretty, athletic doctor with whom he lived, and described the house they were building together in the hills outside Queenstown. "Yeah," he'd marveled, "it's kind of amazing, really. My life seems to be working out pretty well."

Later that day, Kropp, the Swedish soloist, passed Camp Two on his way down the mountain, looking utterly worked. Three days earlier, under clear skies, he'd made it to just below the South Summit and was no more than an hour from the top when he decided to turn around. He had been climbing without supplemental oxygen, the hour had been late—2 P.M., to be exact—and he'd believed that if he'd kept going, he'd have been too tired to descend safely.

"To turn around that close to the summit," Hall mused, shaking his head. "That showed incredibly good judgment on young Gòran's part. I'm impressed." Sticking to your predetermined turn-around time—that was the most important rule on the mountain. Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly on this point. Our turn-around time, he said, would probably be 1 P.M., and no matter how close we were to the top, we were to abide by it. "With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill," Hall said. "The trick is to get back down alive."

Cheerful and unflappable, Hall's easygoing facade masked an intense desire to succeed—which to him was defined in the fairly simple terms of getting as many clients as possible to the summit. But he also paid careful attention to the details: the health of the Sherpas, the efficiency of the solar-powered electrical system, the sharpness of his clients' crampons. He loved being a guide, and it pained him that some celebrated climbers didn't give his profession the respect he felt it deserved.

On May 8 our team and Fischer's team left Camp Two and started climbing the Lhotse Face, a vast sweep of steel-hard ice rising from the head of the Western Cwm. Hall's Camp Three, two-thirds of the way up this wall, was set on a narrow ledge that had been chopped into the face by our Sherpas. It was a spectacularly perilous perch. A hundred feet below, no less exposed, were the tents of most of the other teams, including Fischer's, the South Africans, and the Taiwanese.

It was here that we had our first encounter with death on the mountain. At 7:30 A.M. on May 9, as we were pulling on our boots to ascend to Camp Four, a 36-year-old steelworker from Taipei named Chen Yu-Nan crawled out of his tent to relieve himself, with only the smooth-soled liners of his mountaineering boots on his feet—a rather serious lapse of judgment. As he squatted, he lost his footing on the slick ice and went hurtling down the Lhotse Face, coming to rest, head-first, in a crevasse. Sherpas who had seen the incident lowered a rope, pulled him out of the slot, and carried him back to his tent. He was bruised and badly rattled, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. Chen's teammates left him in a tent to recover and departed for Camp Four. That afternoon, as Chen tried to descend to Camp Two with the help of Sherpas, he keeled over and died.

Over the preceding six weeks there had been several serious accidents: Tenzing Sherpa, from our team, fell 150 feet into a crevasse and injured a leg seriously enough to require helicopter evacuation from Base Camp. One of Fischer's Sherpas nearly died of a mysterious illness at Camp Two. A young, apparently fit British climber had a serious heart attack near the top of the Icefall. A Dane was struck by a falling serac and broke several ribs. Until now, however, none of the mishaps had been fatal.

Chen's death cast a momentary pall over the mountain. But 33 climbers at the South Col would be departing for the summit in a few short hours, and the gloom was quickly shoved aside by nervous anticipation of the challenge to come. Most of us were simply wrapped too tightly in the grip of summit fever to engage in thoughtful reflection about the death of someone in our midst. There would be plenty of time for reflection later, we assumed, after we all had summited—and got back down.

Page: