Into Thin Air (22 page)

Kropp reached his high camp at 26,000 feet on the South Col on Thursday afternoon and left for the top the following morning just after midnight. Everybody at Base Camp stayed close by their radios throughout the day, anxiously awaiting word of his progress. Helen Wilton hung a sign in our mess tent that read, “Go, Göran, Go!”

For the first time in months almost no wind blasted the summit, but the snow on the upper mountain was thigh deep, making for slow, exhausting progress. Kropp bulled his way relentlessly upward through the drifts, however, and by two o’clock Thursday afternoon he’d reached 28,700 feet, just below the South Summit. But even though the top was no more than sixty minutes above, he decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend safely if he climbed any higher.

“To turn around that close to the summit ….” Hall mused with a shake of his head on May 6 as Kropp plodded past Camp Two on his way down the mountain. “
That
showed incredibly good judgment on young Göran’s part. I’m impressed—considerably more impressed, actually, than if he’d continued climbing and made the top.” Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turn-around time on our summit day—in our case it would probably be 1:00 P.M., or 2:00 at the very latest—and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get
up
this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.”

Hall’s easygoing facade masked an intense desire to succeed—which he defined in the fairly simple terms of getting as many clients as possible to the summit. To ensure success, he paid meticulous attention to detail: the health of the Sherpas, the efficiency of the solar-powered electrical system, the sharpness of his clients’ crampons. Hall loved being a guide, and it pained him that some celebrated climbers—including but not limited to Sir Edmund Hillary—didn’t appreciate how difficult guiding was, or give the profession the respect he felt it deserved.

Rob decreed that Tuesday, May 7, would be a rest day, so we got up late and sat around Camp Two, buzzing with nervous anticipation over the imminent summit assault. I fiddled with my crampons and some other gear, then tried to read a Carl Hiaasen paperback but was so focused on the climb that I kept scanning the same sentences over and over without the words registering.

Eventually I put the book down, snapped a few photos of Doug posing with a flag the Kent schoolkids had asked him to carry up the peak, and pumped him for detailed information about the difficulties of the summit pyramid, which he remembered well from the year before. “By the time we get to the top,” he frowned, “I guarantee that you’re gonna be one hurtin’ hombre.” Doug was hell-bent on joining the summit push, even though his throat was still bothering him and his strength seemed to be at a low ebb. As he put it, “I’ve put too much of myself into this mountain to quit now, without giving it everything I’ve got.”

Late that afternoon Fischer walked through our camp with a clenched jaw, moving uncharacteristically slowly toward his own tents. He usually managed to maintain a relentlessly upbeat attitude; one of his favorite utterances was, “If you’re bumming out, you’re not gonna get to the top, so as long as we’re up here we might as well make a point of grooving.” At the moment, however, Scott did not appear to be grooving in the slightest; instead he looked anxious and extremely tired.

Because he’d encouraged his clients to move up and down the mountain independently during the acclimatization period, he ended up having to make a number of hurried, unplanned excursions between Base Camp and the upper camps when several clients experienced problems and needed to be escorted down. He’d already made special trips to assist Tim Madsen, Pete Schoening, and Dale Kruse. And now, on what should have been a badly needed day and a half of rest, Fischer had just been forced to make a hasty round-trip from Camp Two to Base Camp and back to help his good friend Kruse after he came down with what appeared to be a relapse of HACE.

Fischer had arrived at Camp Two around noon the previous day, just after Andy and me, having climbed from Base Camp well ahead of his clients; he’d directed guide Anatoli Boukreev to bring up the rear, stay close to the group, and keep an eye on everybody. But Boukreev ignored Fischer’s instructions: instead of climbing with the team, he slept late, took a shower, and departed Base Camp some five hours behind the last of the clients. Thus, when Kruse collapsed at 20,000 feet with a splitting headache, Boukreev was nowhere in the vicinity, compelling Fischer and Beidleman to rush down from Camp Two to handle the emergency as soon as word of Kruse’s condition arrived via climbers coming up the Western Cwm.

Not long after Fischer reached Kruse and began the troublesome descent to Base Camp, they encountered Boukreev at the top of the Icefall, ascending alone, and Fischer harshly reprimanded the guide for shirking his responsibilities. “Yeah,” Kruse remembers, “Scott laid into Toli pretty good. He wanted to know why he was so far behind everybody—why he wasn’t climbing with the team.”

According to Kruse and other clients of Fischer’s, tension between Fischer and Boukreev had been building throughout the expedition. Fischer paid Boukreev $25,000—an unusually generous fee for guiding Everest (most other guides on the mountain were paid $10,000 to $15,000; skilled climbing Sherpas received only $1,400 to $2,500), and Boukreev’s performance hadn’t been meeting his expectations. “Toli was very strong and a very good technical climber,” Kruse explains, “but he had poor social skills. He didn’t watch out for other people. He just wasn’t a team player. Earlier, I’d told Scott that I didn’t want to have to climb with Toli high on the mountain, because I doubted that I’d be able to count on him when it really mattered.”

The underlying problem was that Boukreev’s notion of his responsibilities differed substantially from Fischer’s. As a Russian, Boukreev came from a tough, proud, hardscrabble climbing culture that did not believe in coddling the weak. In Eastern Europe guides were trained to act more like Sherpas—hauling loads, fixing ropes, establishing the route—and less like caretakers. Tall and blond, with handsome Slavic features, Boukreev was one of the most accomplished high-altitude climbers in the world, with twenty years of experience in the Himalaya, including two ascents of Everest without supplemental oxygen. And in the course of his distinguished career he’d formulated a number of unorthodox, very strongly held opinions about how the mountain should be ascended. He was quite outspoken in his belief that it was a mistake for guides to pamper their clients. “If client cannot climb Everest without big help from guide,” Boukreev told me, “this client should not be on Everest. Otherwise there can be big problems up high.”

But Boukreev’s refusal or inability to play the role of a conventional guide in the Western tradition exasperated Fischer. It also forced him and Beidleman to shoulder a disproportionate share of the caretaker duties for their group, and by the first week in May the effort had taken an unmistakable toll on Fischer’s health. After arriving in Base Camp with the ailing Kruse on the evening of May 6, Fischer made two satellite phone calls to Seattle in which he complained bitterly to his business partner, Karen Dickinson, and to his publicist, Jane Bromet,
^*
about Boukreev’s intransigence. Neither woman imagined that these would be the last conversations they would ever have with Fischer.

On May 8 both Hall’s team and Fischer’s team departed Camp Two and commenced the grinding ascent of the ropes up the Lhotse Face. Two thousand feet above the floor of the Western Cwm, just below Camp Three, a boulder the size of a small television came rocketing down from the cliffs above and smashed into Andy Harris’s chest. It knocked him off his feet, slammed the wind out of him, and left him dangling from the fixed line in a state of shock for several minutes. Had he not been clipped in with a jumar he would have certainly fallen to his death.

When he arrived at the tents, Andy looked badly rattled but claimed that he wasn’t injured. “I might be a bit stiff in the morning,” he insisted, “but I think the bloody thing didn’t do much more than bruise me.” Just before the rock nailed him he’d been hunched forward with his head down; he happened to look up a moment before it struck, so that it merely grazed his chin before hitting him in the sternum, but it had come sickeningly close to smashing into his cranium. “If that rock had hit me in the head ….” Andy speculated with a grimace as he shed his pack, leaving the rest of the sentence unsaid.

Because Camp Three was the only camp on the entire mountain that we didn’t share with the Sherpas (the ledge was too small to accommodate tents for all of us), it meant that here we had to do our own cooking—which mostly amounted to melting prodigious quantities of ice for drinking water. Due to the pronounced dehydration that was an inevitable byproduct of heavy breathing in such desiccated air, each of us consumed more than a gallon of liquid every day. We therefore needed to produce approximately a dozen gallons of water to meet the needs of eight clients and three guides.

As the first person to reach the tents on May 8, I inherited the job of ice chopper. For three hours, as my companions trickled into camp and settled into their sleeping bags, I remained outside hacking at the slope with the adze of my ice ax, filling plastic garbage bags with frozen shards and distributing the ice to the tents for melting. At 24,000 feet it was fatiguing work. Every time one of my teammates yelled, “Hey, Jon! You still out there? We could use some more ice over here!” it gave me a fresh perspective on how much the Sherpas ordinarily did for us, and how little we truly appreciated it.

By late afternoon, as the sun eased toward the corrugated horizon and the temperature began to plunge, everyone had pulled into camp except Lou Kasischke, Frank Fischbeck, and Rob, who had volunteered to do the “sweep” and come up last. Around 4:30 P.M., guide Mike Groom received a call from Rob on his walkie-talkie: Lou and Frank were still a couple of hundred feet below the tents and moving extremely slowly; would Mike please come down to assist them? Mike hurriedly put his crampons back on and disappeared down the fixed ropes without complaint.

Nearly an hour passed before he reappeared, just ahead of the others. Lou, who was so tired he’d let Rob carry his pack, staggered into camp looking pale and distraught, muttering, “I’m finished. I’m finished. Completely out of gas.” Frank showed up a few minutes later appearing even more exhausted, although he’d refused to give his pack to Mike. It was a shock to see these guys—both of whom had been climbing well lately—in such a state. Frank’s apparent deterioration came as a particular blow: I’d assumed from the beginning that if any members of our team reached the top, Frank—who’d been high on the mountain three times previously and seemed so savvy and strong—would be among them.

As darkness enveloped the camp, our guides handed out oxygen canisters, regulators, and masks to everyone: for the remainder of the climb we would be breathing compressed gas.