Dead Lucky (15 page)

I clambered onto the cornice above the tents so I could peer down over the névé of the East Rongbuk Glacier. From three o'clock the previous afternoon we had continually climbed up through clouds. Now, under clear skies, the view from the cornice was a revelation. Suddenly I remembered how high it is at 23,000 feet and how spectacular the views are from this elevation.

Advance Base Camp no longer looked like the world's highest village. The colorful collection of tents had been swallowed by the moraine trough below Changtse's Northeast Ridge. Looming above me was Changste's East Face, edged by its South Ridge. Its sheer size and mass made it impossible for me to forget that we had not reached even the halfway height of the lowest of Everest's subpeaks.

To the north, Everest's main summit was tucked behind the farthest point of its long Northeast Ridge. The snowy pyramid, which hid the true peak, looked so impossibly far away that I could not begin to conceive what had to be endured to reach the final summit. Suddenly, whirling snow blasted the camp and distracted me—a perversely welcome disruption. Spindrift stung my face and my exposed hands, and the camera I held was too cold for the snowflakes to melt upon its black surface. Cold, tired, and unacclimatized—now was not the time to think about what kind of miracle would be needed for me to climb the inconceivable.

SKY BURIAL

I
N MID-MAY THE CLIMATE on Everest changed. The first month of the 2006 season had delivered weather that was better than it had been for many years. The wind blew as often as usual but rarely as strongly as in other pre-monsoon climbing periods. The afternoon storms were both less regular and less ferocious. In that sense, there were more good days than bad. But the weather had no influence on the ominous change in circumstances. It was the human interface with the mountain that altered in the middle of May. The change of climate was one of atmosphere, and the new atmosphere was death. Even on a good day on Everest there are many ways for people to die.

At the beginning of the 2006 Everest season, there had been four fatalities. The first to die had been Himalayan Experience's Tuk Bahadur in April. Two weeks later, on the opposite side of the mountain, ten Sherpas from several different expeditions were carrying supplies up the Khumbu Icefall. The climb of the standard ascent route on the Nepalese side of Everest begins with the notoriously unstable icefall. Unfortunately, there is no other way to gain access to the high valley of the Western Cwm. As the Sherpas followed the ropes upward, a huge ice tower (or serac) toppled onto a neighboring one, shattering both. Large chunks of ice, some of them the size of cars, tumbled onto the route followed by the Sherpas. There was no time to run—and nowhere to go. Six of the Sherpas were hit by the debris. Three were injured, but Dawa Temba, Lhakpa Tsheri, and Ang Phinjo were buried beneath the ice. Unlike a snow avalanche, where buried climbers can sometimes be dug out, the jumble of broken glacier ice was like being buried under truckloads of boulders. It was fifty-year-old Ang Phinjo's forty-ninth expedition to an 8,000-meter peak, as any mountain over 26,250 feet is known.

The deaths were a sobering start to the season and, for me, a reminder of why I was climbing the north side of the mountain. There was nothing as inherently dangerous on the Northeast Ridge route, but the difficulties concentrated on the long and exposed summit ridge made the final climb more challenging.

APART FROM THE SHADOW of those deaths, there was nothing but good news until the middle of May. The fine weather was holding, and long-range forecasts suggested it would continue to do so. Although the Himalayan Experience Sherpas finished setting the fixed ropes on April 30, the first Western climbers did not reach the world's highest point until May 11.

On May 14, ten members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Expedition reached the summit with four Sherpas. Rumors travel fast at Advance Base Camp, where many different expeditions are clustered close together in limited space. We heard that one of the successful Indian climbers had descended to the Second Step, and then tore the oxygen mask from his face before jumping off the cliff. It was such a crazy story that we dismissed it as a wild rumor, but two days later—after a second team from the Indian Army Expedition summited and the organizers put out a press release—the basic fact was announced that a Constable Srikrishna had died during the descent from the summit.

Any further speculation about Srikrishna's demise was suddenly replaced by talk of a climber who had spent a night out on the Northeast Ridge. It seemed that no one knew who he was or which expedition he was with, but his passage up the mountain—and partway down—was noted by others high on the ridge at the time. Then the dreadful news surfaced that climbers from two expeditions had passed by the terminally weakened climber during the night. In total darkness it is difficult to judge the state of an unmoving body. Most of those climbers had thought he was either dead or resting—the two usual states of anyone slumped beside the fixed rope above 27,800 feet. A few of the climbers who passed him that night thought he was alive but assessed him as being impossibly close to death.

However, by the time the two expeditions, Himalayan Experience and the Turkish Everest Expedition, were wearily plodding down the ridge in groups of two or three after their summit attempts, it was broad daylight. It was then that more climbers from both expeditions realized that the man was alive, thirty-six hours after he had set out for the summit.

At Advance Base Camp, Russell Brice had taken it upon himself to identify the unknown man, and one possibility seemed more likely than any other. The head Sherpa of the Himalayan Experience team, Phurba Tashi, was able to identify David Sharp from his passport photo, which they found in the man's luggage.

This basic information about the tragedy was instantly broadcast on websites. It was exactly the kind of dramatic, controversial story that the mainstream media picks up in a flash. Dispatches full of assumptions and misinformation, padded with a few facts, were broadcast around the world.

When I heard what was going on, I did not know what to think. I certainly did not jump to any conclusions. Base Camp seemed close to the dreadful events that had unfolded, but in fact I knew too few of the details to invest emotional energy in an opinion. It was not that I did not care about David Sharp, just that I did not yet know the truth of his circumstances. In the past, newspapers in Australia had written that I was missing, assumed dead, when the fact was that our small expedition had no radio communications on the mountain, only a mail-runner at Base Camp. After my first Himalayan climb, a journalist had written that my minor frostbite was so bad that I would never walk again, but I was to have more than thirty years of climbing and trekking ahead of me. I was keen to hear the facts about David Sharp, but I would not be seduced by the rumors or the outraged opinions of people who knew less than I did.

The topic was not foremost in our minds when Mike and I hiked across the glacial flats to the Himalayan Experience Base Camp. We needed the exercise, and I wanted to congratulate both Ken Sauls and Bob Killip on having reached the summit.

When we arrived at the Himex Camp, we were pointed to their large rectangular mess tent, set up to cope with the wind. As soon as Bob saw us, he leaped to his feet to share his triumph but grimaced as he put weight on his frostbitten toes.

“Congratulations, Bob!” I said, before I thought to ask about his injuries. “Well done!”

“Thanks, mate. It was hard, man. So cold.”

“I'll bet. And you remember Mike from ABC?”

“Sure. Welcome.” Then he said to us both, “I'm the oldest Australian to summit. Fifty-three. Should get a photo of me and young Christopher. Youngest and oldest Australians.”

For the moment at least, Bob's exuberance at reaching the summit overshadowed the issue of his frostbite.

“That would be a great outcome for the season,” I said, “Christopher topping out as well.”

“It would be,” agreed Mike. “Christopher's watching a DVD at the moment.”

We sat and listened to Bob's account of his climb. He had arrived at Base Camp less than an hour earlier, so his story was fresh, and it began with the fact that he and his rope-mate, Mark Inglis, who also summited, had been unlucky enough to pick the coldest night of the season for their summit push.

“A lot of guys got frostbite up there. Much worse than this.” He gestured at his toe. “Much worse.”

His words reminded me of the latest tragedy.

“What's the story with David Sharp?”

Bob paused and grimaced. “He was history from the first time we saw him. It just felt like I was walking past a dead body—that's how far gone he was.”

It was a very unfortunate affair, and the media kept feeding on it, but eventually the full story of David Sharp would come out. I could imagine he would have wanted the truth to be known.

WE DID NOT SEE Bob Killip again, as he would be preparing to leave for Kathmandu while the four of us spent the next day readying ourselves for our own summit push. Late in the day news came through that one of the Norwegians had died skiing the Great Couloir. There was no more information until the morning, when we learned that it was Tomas Olsson. The name meant nothing to me. I knew only of Fredrik Schenholm, the photographer whose details I had jotted down when we had crossed paths. Tomas had been attempting to rappel into the very top of the couloir, where the snow was ski-able and the real descent could begin for both him and his partner, Tormod Granheim. The anchor he'd used for his rope had held long enough for him to rappel one hundred feet—then it gave way and he fell the last forty feet to the top of the couloir and beyond. I remembered the spot well—it was my high point in 1984—and I knew it was too steep for him to be able to stop.

Tomas fell over 6,000 feet to his death. In a state of shock, Tormod had to climb down the rock-face to the top of the couloir. He must be a very skillful mountaineer, I thought, to have been able to complete the short descent without a rope. From that point, the obvious escape route was to do what he had come to do—ski the wide gully of the couloir. He managed it safely, but on that day there would have been no satisfaction in becoming the first person to achieve the feat. High-altitude extreme skiing is exceptionally dangerous—both men would have known the risks, but that did not make Tomas's accident any more palatable.

Richard, Christopher, and Mike set off after breakfast the next day, but I was in no particular hurry. Richard was not in good shape, so he would be traveling slowly with Christopher. Base Camp was deserted because the A-Team had moved up to Intermediate Camp the day before. When I was finally ready to go, I was treated to the arrival of the garbage truck. The piles of bagged-up rubbish were in a dry watercourse less than thirty yards from my tent, so I witnessed the full show. The truck pulled up, a team of cheerful Tibetans leaped off the load, and then heaved the bags of rubbish up into the truck in a competitive manner, as if there was a prize for speed and accuracy. I snapped a few photos of the scene. This was the first expedition I had been on where there was a garbage-removal service. On other climbs we had carried rubbish down to below the snowline and burned our combustibles there because the Sherpas did not want to offend the mountain gods with unclean smoke. Noncombustibles we buried. I suspected that the Tibetans were excited about the work because it was one of the rare ways to earn money in this part of the world. Expeditions arrived with their own staff, not leaving much room for local employment. When the truck was loaded, the Tibetans hauled themselves up onto the top of the rubbish and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

It was time for me to disappear as well. Casting my eyes around the empty camp, I thought briefly about the members of the A-Team, who would be arriving at Advance Base Camp today. The chances were that we would not see them until they returned from the summit, with or without success. Several climbers had already gone home without setting foot on the mountain. Bill Tyler had hurt his back and headed home with his wife, Barbie. Vince Bousselaire, who the previous year had attempted Everest from the Nepalese side, was now forced to retreat from Tibet as well. It was altitude problems that sent him packing from ABC—his goal of placing a Bible on each of the Seven Summits put on hold. Torbjørn Orkelbog learned that his wife was pregnant and took the first Jeep out of Base Camp, choosing new life over possible death.

Three hours later I was well into the walk. I plodded slowly up a steep part of the trail where the ice was thinly covered by rocks. A figure was coming toward me, but I thought nothing of it. He approached quickly, and I expected he would slow down so that we could pass each other easily. Instead, he maintained his speed and overtook me on the uphill side, leaving me no room to step off the track. As he brushed past me, the lilt of his body caused a ski to swing and whack me on the shoulder. The unexpected blow almost knocked me off balance.

“Hey!” I shouted after him. “Watch what you're doing!” He turned and looked at me as I rubbed my shoulder, as if he did not understand.

“You hit me with your ski and almost bumped me off the path.”

“I am sorry,” he said, his hand raised in a conciliatory gesture. “I was not aware.”

“It's okay,” I said, raising my hand as well.

He nodded and continued down the path.

A few steps up the path, I realized that the man must have been Tormod Granheim, the surviving skier, still stunned by the death of his friend. I looked back, but he was already gone.

AFTER I RECOVERED from my thoughtless confrontation, I increased my speed until I caught up with Mike and the others not far from Intermediate Camp. When we had arrived here during our first hike to Advance Base Camp three weeks ago, snow had covered the rocks and ice of the glacier. Now the ground was bare rocks and patches of hard ice, and the intensity of the high-altitude sun hitting soggy yak dung released an aroma that made the place smell like a stable. By late afternoon the temperature had dropped dramatically, and with the warmth went the stench of the yak dung.