Into Thin Air (21 page)

It was late morning by the time I finally humped into Camp Three: a trio of small yellow tents, halfway up the vertiginous sprawl of the Lhotse Face, jammed side by side onto a platform that had been hewn from the icy slope by our Sherpas. When I arrived, Lhakpa Chhiri and Arita were still hard at work on a platform for a fourth tent, so I took off my pack and helped them chop. At 24,000 feet, I could manage only seven or eight blows of my ice ax before having to pause for more than a minute to catch my breath. My contribution to the effort was negligible, needless to say, and it took nearly an hour to complete the job.

Our tiny camp, a hundred feet above the tents of the other expeditions, was a spectacularly exposed perch. For weeks we’d been toiling in what amounted to a canyon; now, for the first time on the expedition the vista was primarily sky rather than earth. Herds of puffy cumulus raced beneath the sun, imprinting the landscape with a shifting matrix of shadow and blinding light. Waiting for my teammates to arrive, I sat with my feet hanging over the abyss, staring across the clouds, looking down on the tops of 22,000-foot peaks that a month earlier had towered overhead. At long last, it seemed as though I was really nearing the roof of the world.

The summit, however, was still a vertical mile above, wreathed in a nimbus of gale-borne condensation. But even as the upper mountain was raked by winds in excess of a hundred miles per hour, the air at Camp Three barely stirred, and as the afternoon wore on I began to feel increasingly woozy from the fierce solar radiation—at least I hoped it was the heat that was making me stupid, and not the onset of cerebral edema.

High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) is less common than High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE), but it tends to be even more deadly. A baffling ailment, HACE occurs when fluid leaks from oxygen-starved cerebral blood vessels, causing severe swelling of the brain, and it can strike with little or no warning. As pressure builds inside the skull, motor and mental skills deteriorate with alarming speed—typically within a few hours or less—and often without the victim even noticing the change. The next step is coma, and then, unless the afflicted party is quickly evacuated to lower altitude, death.

HACE happened to be on my mind that afternoon because just two days earlier a client of Fischer’s named Dale Kruse, a forty-four-year-old dentist from Colorado, had come down with a serious case of it right here at Camp Three. A longtime friend of Fischer’s, Kruse was a strong, very experienced climber. On April 26 he’d climbed from Camp Two to Camp Three, brewed some tea for himself and his teammates, and then lay down in his tent to take a nap. “I fell right asleep,” Kruse recalls, “and ended up sleeping almost twenty-four hours, until about two P.M. the following day. When somebody finally woke me up it immediately became apparent to the others that my mind wasn’t working, although it wasn’t apparent to me. Scott told me, ‘We gotta get you down right away.’ ”

Kruse was having an incredibly difficult time simply trying to dress himself. He put his climbing harness on inside out, threaded it through the fly of his wind suit, and failed to fasten the buckle; fortunately, Fischer and Neal Beidleman noticed the screwup before Kruse started to descend. “If he’d tried to rappel down the ropes like that,” says Beidleman, “he would have immediately popped out of his harness and fallen to the bottom of the Lhotse Face.”

“It was like I was very drunk,” Kruse recollects. “I couldn’t walk without stumbling, and completely lost the ability to think or speak. It was a really strange feeling. I’d have some word in my mind, but I couldn’t figure out how to bring it to my lips. So Scott and Neal had to get me dressed and make sure my harness was on correctly, then Scott lowered me down the fixed ropes.” By the time Kruse arrived in Base Camp, he says, “It was still another three or four days before I could walk from my tent to the mess tent without stumbling all over the place.”

When the evening sun slid behind Pumori, the temperature at Camp Three plummeted more than fifty degrees, and as the air chilled my head cleared: my anxiety about coming down with HACE proved to be unfounded, at least for the time being. The next morning, after a miserable, sleepless night at 24,000 feet, we descended to Camp Two, and a day later, on May 1, continued down to Base Camp to recoup our strength for the summit push.

Our acclimatization was now officially complete—and to my pleasant surprise Hall’s strategy appeared to be working: After three weeks on the mountain, I found that the air at Base Camp seemed thick and rich and voluptuously saturated with oxygen compared to the brutally thin atmosphere of the camps above.

All was not well with my body, however. I’d lost nearly twenty pounds of muscle mass, largely from my shoulders, back, and legs. I’d also burned up virtually all my subcutaneous fat, making me vastly more sensitive to the cold. My worst problem, though, was my chest: the dry hack I’d picked up weeks earlier in Lobuje had gotten so bad that I’d torn some thoracic cartilage during an especially robust bout of coughing at Camp Three. The coughing had continued unabated, and each hack felt like a stiff kick between the ribs.

Most of the other climbers in Base Camp were in similarly battered shape—it was simply a fact of life on Everest. In five days those of us on Hall’s and Fischer’s teams would be leaving Base Camp for the top. Hoping to stanch my decline, I resolved to rest, gobble ibuprofen, and force down as many calories as possible in that time.

From the beginning, Hall had planned that May 10 would be our summit day. “Of the four times I’ve summitted,” he explained, “twice it was on the tenth of May. As the Sherpas 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 hurricane-force winds. Even on days when Base Camp was perfectly calm and flooded with sunshine, an immense banner of wind-driven snow flew from the summit. But in early May, we hoped, the approach of the monsoon 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 pattern was no secret, and every expedition had set their sights on the same window of fair weather. Hoping to avoid dangerous gridlock on the summit ridge, Hall held a big powwow with leaders of the other expeditions in Base Camp. It was determined that Göran Kropp, a young Swede who had ridden a bicycle from Stockholm to Nepal, 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.

Hall’s team, it was decided, would share a summit date of May 10 with Fischer’s expedition. After nearly getting killed by a falling rock low on the Southwest Face, Petter Neby, the solo Norwegian climber, was already gone: he’d quietly left Base Camp one morning and returned to Scandinavia. A guided group led by Americans Todd Burleson and Pete Athans, as well as Mal Duff’s commercial team and another British commercial team, all promised to steer clear of May 10, as did the Taiwanese.
^*
Ian Woodall, however, declared that the South Africans would go to the top whenever they damn well pleased, probably on May 10, and anyone who didn’t like it could bugger off.

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

* Although Hall and other expedition leaders clearly believed that the Taiwanese had promised not to attempt the summit on this date, Makalu Gau insisted after the tragedy that he was not aware of any such promise. It is possible that the Taiwanese sirdar, Chhiring Sherpa, made the promise on Gau’s behalf without informing Gau that he had done so.

MAY 6, 1996 • 17,600 FEET

David Roberts

“Patey Agonistes”

We left Base Camp at 4:30 A.M. on May 6 to commence our summit bid. The top of Everest, two vertical miles above, seemed so impossibly distant that I tried to limit my thoughts to Camp Two, our destination for the day. By the time the first sunlight struck the glacier I was at 20,000 feet, in the maw of the Western Cwm, grateful that the Icefall was below me and that I would have to go through it only one more time, on the final trip down.

I had been plagued by heat in the Cwm every time I’d traveled through it, and this trip was no exception. Climbing with Andy Harris at the front of the group, I continually stuffed snow under my hat and moved as fast as my legs and lungs would propel me, hoping to reach the shade of the tents before succumbing to the solar radiation. As the morning dragged on and the sun beat down, my head began to pound. My tongue swelled so much that it was difficult to breathe through my mouth, and I noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to think clearly.

Andy and I dragged into Camp Two at 10:30 A.M. After I guzzled two liters of Gatorade my equilibrium returned. “It feels good to at last be on our way to the summit, yeah?” Andy inquired. He’d been laid low with various intestinal ailments for most of the expedition and was finally getting his strength back. A gifted tutor blessed with astonishing patience, he’d usually been assigned to watch over the slower clients at the back of the herd and was thrilled when Rob had turned him loose this morning to go out on point. As the junior guide on Hall’s team, and the only one who’d never been on Everest, Andy was eager to prove himself to his seasoned colleagues. “I think we’re actually gonna knock this big bastard off,” he confided in me with a huge smile, staring up at the summit.

Later that day, Göran Kropp, the twenty-nine-year-old Swedish soloist, passed Camp Two on his way down to Base Camp, looking utterly worked. On October 16, 1995, he had left Stockholm on a custom-built bicycle loaded with 240 pounds of gear, intending to travel round-trip from sea level in Sweden to the top of Everest entirely under his own power, without Sherpa support or bottled oxygen. It was an exceedingly ambitious goal, but Kropp had the credentials to pull it off: he’d been on six previous Himalayan expeditions and had made solo ascents of Broad Peak, Cho Oyu, and K2.

During the 8,000-mile bike ride to Kathmandu, he was robbed by Romanian schoolchildren and assaulted by a crowd in Pakistan. In Iran, an irate motorcyclist broke a baseball bat over Kropp’s (fortunately) helmeted head. He’d nevertheless arrived intact at the foot of Everest in early April with a film crew in tow, and immediately began making acclimatization trips up the lower mountain. Then, on Wednesday, May 1, he’d departed Base Camp for the top.