Into Thin Air (15 page)

And now Pete Schoening was being led up Everest by Fischer and his two guides, Neal Beidleman and Anatoli Boukreev. When I asked Beidleman, a powerful climber from Colorado, how it felt to be guiding a client of Schoening’s stature, he quickly corrected me with a self-deprecating laugh: “Somebody like me doesn’t ‘guide’ Pete Schoening anywhere. I just consider it a great honor to be on the same team as him.” Schoening had signed on with Fischer’s Mountain Madness group not because he needed a guide to lead him up the peak but to avoid the mammoth hassle of arranging for a permit, oxygen, tentage, provisions, Sherpa support, and other logistical details.

A few minutes after Pete and Klev Schoening climbed past en route to their own Camp One, their teammate Charlotte Fox appeared. Dynamic and statuesque, thirty-eight years old, Fox was a ski patroller from Aspen, Colorado, who’d previously summitted two 8,000-meter peaks: Gasherbrum II in Pakistan, at 26,361 feet, and Everest’s 26,748-foot neighbor, Cho Oyu. Later still, I encountered a member of Mal Duff’s commercial expedition, a twenty-eight-year-old Finn named Veikka Gustafsson, whose record of previous Himalayan ascents included Everest, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, and Lhotse.

No client on Hall’s team, by comparison, had ever reached the summit of any 8,000-meter peak. If someone like Pete Schoening was the equivalent of a major-league baseball star, my fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of pretty decent small-town softball players who’d bribed their way into the World Series. Yes, at the top of the Icefall Hall had called us “a good strong bunch.” And we actually were strong, perhaps, relative to groups of clients Hall had ushered up the mountain in past years. It was clear to me, nevertheless, that none of us in Hall’s group had a prayer of climbing Everest without considerable assistance from Hall, his guides, and his Sherpas.

On the other hand, our group was far more competent than a number of the other teams on the mountain. There were some climbers of very dubious ability on a commercial expedition led by an Englishman with undistinguished Himalayan credentials. But the least qualified people on Everest were not in fact guided clients at all; rather, they were members of traditionally structured, noncommercial expeditions.

As I was heading back to Base Camp through the lower Icefall, I overtook a pair of slower climbers outfitted with very strange looking clothing and equipment. It was apparent almost immediately that they weren’t very familiar with the standard tools and techniques of glacier travel. The climber in back repeatedly snagged his crampons and stumbled. Waiting for them to cross a yawning crevasse bridged by two rickety ladders spliced end to end, I was shocked to see them go across together, almost in lockstep—a needlessly dangerous act. An awkward attempt at conversation on the far side of the crevasse revealed that they were members of a Taiwanese expedition.

The reputations of the Taiwanese preceded them to Everest. In the spring of 1995, the same team had traveled to Alaska to climb Mount McKinley as a shakedown for the attempt on Everest in 1996. Nine climbers reached the summit, but seven of them were caught by a storm on the descent, became disoriented, and spent a night in the open at 19,400 feet, initiating a costly, hazardous rescue by the National Park Service.

Responding to a request by park rangers, Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker, two of the most skilled alpinists in the United States, interrupted their own ascent and rushed up from 14,400 feet to aid the Taiwanese climbers, who were by then barely alive. With great difficulty and considerable risk to their own lives, Lowe and Anker each dragged a helpless Taiwanese from 19,400 feet down to 17,200 feet, at which point a helicopter was able to evacuate them from the mountain. All told, five members of the Taiwanese team—two with severe frostbite and one already dead—were plucked from McKinley by chopper. “Only one guy died,” says Anker. “But if Alex and I hadn’t arrived right when we did, two others would have died, too. Earlier, we’d noticed the Taiwanese group because they looked so incompetent. It wasn’t any big surprise when they got into trouble.”

The leader of the expedition, Gau Ming-Ho—a jovial freelance photographer who calls himself “Makalu,” after the striking Himalayan peak of that name—was exhausted and frostbitten and had to be assisted down the upper mountain by a pair of Alaskan guides. “As the Alaskans brought him down,” Anker reports, “Makalu was yelling ‘Victory! Victory! We made summit!’ to everyone they passed, as if the disaster hadn’t even happened. Yeah, that Makalu dude struck me as pretty weird.” When the survivors of the McKinley debacle showed up on the south side of Everest in 1996, Makalu Gau was again their leader.

The presence of the Taiwanese on Everest was a matter of grave concern to most of the other expeditions on the mountain. There was a very real fear that the Taiwanese would suffer a calamity that would compel other expeditions to come to their aid, risking further lives, to say nothing of jeopardizing the opportunity for other climbers to reach the summit. But the Taiwanese were by no means the only group that seemed egregiously unqualified. Camped beside us at Base Camp was a twenty-five-year-old Norwegian climber named Petter Neby, who announced his intention to make a solo ascent of the Southwest Face,
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one of the peak’s most dangerous and technically demanding routes—despite the fact that his Himalayan experience was limited to two ascents of neighboring Island Peak, a 20,274-foot bump on a subsidiary ridge of Lhotse involving nothing more technical than vigorous walking.

And then there were the South Africans. Sponsored by a major newspaper, the Johannesburg
Sunday Times
, their team had inspired effusive national pride and had received a personal blessing from President Nelson Mandela prior to their departure. They were the first South African expedition ever to be granted a permit to climb Everest, a mixed-race group that aspired to put the first black person on the summit. Their leader was Ian Woodall, thirty-nine, a loquacious, mouselike man who relished telling anecdotes about his brave exploits as a military commando behind enemy lines during South Africa’s long, brutal conflict with Angola in the 1980s. Woodall had recruited three of South Africa’s strongest climbers to form the nucleus of his team: Andy de Klerk, Andy Hackland, and Edmund February. The biracial makeup of the team was of special significance to February, forty, a soft-spoken black paleoecologist and a climber of international renown. “My parents named me after Sir Edmund Hillary,” he explains. “Climbing Everest had been a personal dream of mine ever since I was very young. But even more significantly, I saw the expedition as a powerful symbol of a young nation trying to unify itself and move toward democracy, trying to recover from its past. I grew up with the yoke of apartheid around my neck in many ways, and I am extremely bitter about that. But we are a new nation now. I firmly believe in the direction my country’s taking. To show that we in South Africa could climb Everest together, black and white on the top—that would be a great thing.”

The entire nation rallied behind the expedition. “Woodall proposed the project at a really fortuitous time,” says de Klerk. “With the end of apartheid, South Africans were finally allowed to travel wherever they wanted, and our sports teams could compete around the world. South Africa had just won the Rugby World Cup. There was this national euphoria, a great upwelling of pride, yeah? So when Woodall came along and proposed a South African Everest expedition, everybody was in favor of it, and he was able to raise a lot of money—the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars in U.S. currency—without anybody asking a lot of questions.”

In addition to himself, the three male climbers, and a British climber and photographer named Bruce Herrod, Woodall wanted to include a woman on the expedition, so prior to leaving South Africa he invited six female candidates on a physically grueling but technically undemanding ascent of 19,340-foot Kilimanjaro. At the conclusion of the two-week trial, Woodall announced that he’d narrowed the field down to two finalists: Cathy O’Dowd, twenty-six, a white journalism instructor with some mountaineering experience in the French Alps, whose father is the director of Anglo American, the largest company in South Africa; and Deshun Deysel, twenty-five, a black physical-education teacher with no previous climbing experience whatsoever who’d grown up in a segregated township. Both women, said Woodall, would accompany the team to Base Camp, and he would choose one of them to continue up Everest after evaluating their performance during the trek.

On April 1, during the second day of my journey to Base Camp, I was surprised to run into February, Hackland, and de Klerk on the trail below Namche Bazaar, walking
out
of the mountains, bound for Kathmandu. De Klerk, a friend of mine, informed me that the three South African climbers and Charlotte Noble, their team’s doctor, had resigned from the expedition before even getting to the base of the mountain. “Woodall, the leader, turned out to be a complete asshole,” explained de Klerk. “A total control freak. And you couldn’t trust him—we never knew if he was talking bullshit or telling the truth. We didn’t want to put our lives in the hands of a guy like that. So we left.”

Woodall had made claims to de Klerk and others that he’d climbed extensively in the Himalaya, including ascents above 26,000 feet. In fact, the whole of Woodall’s Himalayan mountaineering experience consisted of his participation as a paying client on two unsuccessful expeditions led by Mal Duff: In 1989 Woodall failed to reach the summit of modest Island Peak, and in 1990 he was rebuffed at 21,300 feet on Annapurna, still a vertical mile beneath the top.

Additionally, before leaving for Everest Woodall had boasted on the expedition’s Internet website of a distinguished military career in which he’d risen through the ranks of the British army “to command the elite Long Range Mountain Reconnaissance Unit that did much of its training in the Himalayas.” He’d told the
Sunday Times
that he had been an instructor at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England, as well. As it happens, there is no such thing as a Long Range Mountain Reconnaissance Unit in the British army, and Woodall never served as an instructor at Sandhurst. Nor did he ever fight behind enemy lines in Angola. According to a spokesman for the British army, Woodall served as a pay clerk.

Woodall also lied about whom he’d listed on the Everest climbing permit
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issued by the Nepalese Ministry of Tourism. From the beginning he’d said that both Cathy O’Dowd and Deshun Deysel were on the permit and that the final decision about which woman would be invited to join the climbing team would be made at Base Camp. After leaving the expedition de Klerk discovered that O’Dowd was listed on the permit, as well as Woodall’s sixty-nine-year-old father and a Frenchman named Tierry Renard (who’d paid Woodall $35,000 to join the South African team), but Deshun Deysel—the only black member after the resignation of Ed February—was not. This suggested to de Klerk that Woodall had never had any intention of letting Deysel climb the mountain.

Adding insult to injury, before leaving South Africa Woodall had cautioned de Klerk—who is married to an American woman and has dual citizenship—that he would not be allowed on the expedition unless he agreed to use his South African passport to enter Nepal. “He made a big fuss about it,” recalls de Klerk, “because we were the first South African Everest expedition and all that. But it turns out that Woodall doesn’t hold a South African passport himself. He’s not even a South African citizen—the guy’s a Brit, and he entered Nepal on his British passport.”

Woodall’s numerous deceits became an international scandal, reported on the front pages of newspapers throughout the British Commonwealth. As the negative press filtered back to him, the megalomaniacal leader turned a cold shoulder to the criticism and insulated his team as much as possible from the other expeditions. He also banished
Sunday Times
reporter Ken Vernon and photographer Richard Shorey from the expedition, even though Woodall had signed a contract stipulating that in return for receiving financial backing from the newspaper, the two journalists would be “allowed to accompany the expedition at all times,” and that failure to honor this stipulation “would be cause for breach of contract.”

The editor of the
Sunday Times
, Ken Owen, was en route to Base Camp with his wife at the time, midway through a trekking vacation that had been arranged to coincide with the South African Everest expedition, and was being led by Woodall’s girlfriend, a young Frenchwoman named Alexandrine Gaudin. In Pheriche, Owen learned that Woodall had given the boot to his reporter and photographer. Flabbergasted, he sent a note to the expedition leader explaining that the newspaper had no intention of pulling Vernon and Shorey from the story and that the journalists had been ordered to rejoin the expedition. When Woodall received this message, he flew into a rage and rushed down to Pheriche from Base Camp to have it out with Owen.

According to Owen, during the ensuing confrontation he asked Woodall point-blank if Deysel’s name was on the permit. Woodall replied, “That’s none of your business.”

When Owen suggested that Deysel had been reduced to “serving as a token black woman to give the team a spurious South Africanism,” Woodall threatened to kill both Owen and his wife. At one point the overwrought expedition leader declared, “I’m going to rip your fucking head off and ram it up your arse.”

Shortly thereafter, journalist Ken Vernon arrived at the South African Base Camp—an incident he first reported from Rob Hall’s satellite fax machine—only to be informed “by a grimfaced Ms. O’Dowd that I was ‘not welcome’ at the camp.” As Vernon later wrote in the
Sunday Times:

I told her she had no right to bar me from a camp my newspaper had paid for. When pressed further she said she was acting on “instructions” from Mr. Woodall. She said Shorey had already been thrown out of the camp and I should follow as I would not be given food or shelter there. My legs were still shaky from the walk and, before deciding whether to fight the edict or leave, I asked for a cup of tea. “No way,” came the reply. Ms. O’Dowd walked to the team’s Sherpa leader, Ang Dorje, and said audibly: “This is Ken Vernon, one of the ones we told you about. He is to be given no assistance whatsoever.” Ang Dorje is a tough, nuggety rock of a man and we had already shared several glasses of Chang, the fiery local brew. I looked at him and said, “Not even a cup of tea?” To his credit, and in the best tradition of Sherpa hospitality, he looked at Ms. O’Dowd and said: “Bullshit.” He grabbed me by the arm, dragged me into the mess tent and served up a mug of steaming tea and a plate of biscuits.