Into Thin Air (25 page)

Sixty-five feet below, a tall figure in a bright yellow down jacket and pants was hitched to the back of a much smaller Sherpa by a three-foot length of cord; the Sherpa, not wearing an oxygen mask, huffing loudly, was hauling his partner up the slope like a horse pulling a plow. The odd pair was passing other people and making good time, but the arrangement—a technique for assisting a weak or injured climber known as short-roping—appeared to be hazardous and extremely uncomfortable for both parties. By and by, I recognized the Sherpa as Fischer’s flamboyant sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu, and the climber in yellow as Sandy Pittman.

Guide Neal Beidleman, who also observed Lopsang towing Pittman, recalls, “As I came up from below, Lopsang was leaning into the slope, clinging to the rock like a spider, supporting Sandy on a tight tether. It looked awkward and quite dangerous. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”

Around 4:15 A.M., Mike gave us the go-ahead to resume our ascent, and Ang Dorje and I started climbing as fast as we could in order to warm ourselves. As the first hint of daybreak brightened the eastern horizon, the rocky, terraced terrain we’d been ascending gave way to a broad gully of unconsolidated snow. Taking turns breaking trail through the calf-deep powder, Ang Dorje and I reached the crest of the Southeast Ridge at 5:30, just as the sun edged into the sky. Three of the world’s five highest peaks stood out in craggy relief against the pastel dawn. My altimeter read 27,600 feet.

Hall had made it very clear that I was to climb no higher until the whole group had gathered at this balconylike roost, so I sat down on my pack to wait. When Rob and Beck finally arrived at the back of the herd, I’d been sitting for more than ninety minutes. As I waited, both Fischer’s group and the Taiwanese team caught and passed me. I felt frustrated about wasting so much time and peeved at falling behind everybody else. But I understood Hall’s rationale, so I kept a tight lid on my anger.

During my thirty-four-year tenure as a climber, I’d found that the most rewarding aspects of mountaineering derive from the sport’s emphasis on self-reliance, on making critical decisions and dealing with the consequences, on personal responsibility. When you sign on as a client, I discovered, you are forced to give up all of that, and more. For safety’s sake, a responsible guide will always insist on calling the shots—he or she simply can’t afford to let each client make important decisions independently.

Passivity on the part of the clients had thus been encouraged throughout our expedition. Sherpas put in the route, set up the camps, did the cooking, hauled all the loads. This conserved our energy and vastly increased our chances of getting up Everest, but I found it hugely unsatisfying. I felt at times as if I wasn’t really climbing the mountain—that surrogates were doing it for me. Although I had willingly accepted this role in order to climb Everest with Hall, I never got used to it. So I was happy as hell when, at 7:10 A.M., he arrived atop the Balcony and gave me the O.K. to continue climbing.

One of the first people I passed when I started moving again was Lopsang, kneeling in the snow over a pile of vomit. Ordinarily, he was the strongest member of any group he climbed with, even though he never used supplemental oxygen. As he proudly told me after the expedition, “Every mountain I climb, I go first, I fix line. In ninety-five on Everest with Rob Hall I go first from Base Camp to summit, I fix all ropes.” His position near the back of Fischer’s group on the morning of May 10, retching his guts out, seemed to indicate that something was seriously amiss.

The previous afternoon, Lopsang had exhausted himself carrying a satellite phone for Pittman, in addition to the rest of his load, from Camp Three to Camp Four. When Beidleman had seen Lopsang shoulder his crippling eighty-pound burden at Camp Three, he’d told the Sherpa that it wasn’t necessary to carry the phone to the South Col and suggested that he leave it behind. “I don’t want to carry telephone,” Lopsang later admitted, in part because it had worked only marginally at Camp Three and it seemed even less likely to work in the colder, harsher environment of Camp Four.
^*
“But Scott told to me, ‘If you don’t carry, I will carry.’ So I take telephone, tie on outside of my rucksack, carry to Camp Four.… This makes me very tired.”

And now Lopsang had just towed Pittman on a short-rope for five or six hours above the South Col, substantially compounding his fatigue and preventing him from assuming his customary role in the lead, establishing the route. Because his unexpected absence from the head of the line had a bearing on the day’s outcome, his decision to short-rope Pittman provoked criticism and bafflement after the fact. “I have no idea why Lopsang was short-roping Sandy,” says Beidleman. “He lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing up there, what the priorities were.”

For her part, Pittman didn’t ask to be short-roped. As she left Camp Four at the front of Fischer’s group, Lopsang abruptly pulled her aside and girth-hitched a bight of rope to the front of her climbing harness. Then, without consulting her, he clipped the other end to his own harness and began to pull. She maintains that Lopsang hauled her up the slope very much against her wishes. Which begs a question: as a notoriously assertive New Yorker (she was so adamantine that some Kiwis at Base Camp nicknamed her “Sandy Pit Bull”) why didn’t she simply unfasten the three-foot tether connecting her to Lopsang, which would have required nothing more than reaching up and unclipping a single carabiner?

Pittman explains that she didn’t unclip herself from the Sherpa out of respect for his authority—as she put it, “I didn’t want to hurt Lopsang’s feelings.” She also said that although she didn’t consult her watch, her recollection was that he short-roped her for only “one to one and a half hours,”
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not five to six hours, as several other climbers observed, and Lopsang confirmed.

For his part, when asked why he short-roped Pittman, for whom he had openly expressed contempt on multiple occasions, Lopsang gave conflicting accounts. He told Seattle attorney Peter Goldman—who had climbed Broad Peak with both Scott and Lopsang in 1995 and was one of Fischer’s oldest, most trusted friends—that in the darkness he had confused Pittman with the Danish client Lene Gammelgaard and that he stopped towing her as soon as he realized his mistake at daybreak. But in an extended, tape-recorded interview with me, Lopsang insisted rather convincingly that he knew all along he was hauling Pittman and had decided to do it “because Scott wants all members to go to summit, and I am thinking Sandy will be weakest member, I am thinking she will be slow, so I will take her first.”

A perceptive young man, Lopsang was extremely devoted to Fischer; the Sherpa understood how important it was to his friend and employer to get Pittman to the summit. Indeed, one of the last times Fischer communicated with Jane Bromet from Base Camp he mused, “If I can get Sandy to the summit, I’ll bet she’ll be on TV talk shows. Do you think she will include me in her fame and fanfare?”

As Goldman explained, “Lopsang was totally loyal to Scott. To me it’s inconceivable that he would have short-roped anybody unless he believed very strongly that Scott wanted him to do it.”

Whatever motivated him, Lopsang’s decision to tow a client didn’t seem like a particularly serious mistake at the time. But it would end up being one of many little things—a slow accrual, compounding steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.

* The spent oxygen bottles blighting the South Col have been accumulating since the 1950s, but thanks to an ongoing litter-removal program instigated in 1994 by Scott Fischer’s Sagarmatha Environmental Expedition, there are fewer of them up there now than there used to be. Much of the credit belongs to a member of that expedition named Brent Bishop (the son of the late Barry Bishop, the eminent
National Geographic
photographer who summitted Everest in 1963), who initiated a highly successful incentive policy, funded by Nike, Inc., whereby Sherpas are paid a cash bonus for each oxygen bottle they bring down from the Col. Among the companies guiding Everest, Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants, Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness, and Todd Burleson’s Alpine Ascents International have enthusiastically embraced Bishop’s program, resulting in the removal of more than eight hundred oxygen canisters from the upper mountain from 1994 through 1996.

* Missing from Fischer’s summit party were clients Dale Kruse, who had remained at Base Camp in the wake of his most recent bout with HACE, and Pete Schoening, the fabled sixty-eight-year-old veteran, who’d elected to go no higher than Camp Three after a cardiogram administered by Drs. Hutchison, Taske, and Mackenzie had indicated a potentially serious anomaly in his heartbeat.

* Most of the climbing Sherpas on Everest in 1996 wanted an opportunity to reach the top. Their underlying motives were no less varied than the motives of Western climbers, but at least part of the incentive was job security: as Lopsang explained, “After Sherpa climbs Everest, easy to find work. Everybody want to hire this Sherpa.”

* The phone didn’t work at all at Camp Four.

* Pittman and I discussed these and other events during a seventy-minute phone conversation six months after returning from Everest. Except to clarify certain points about the short-roping incident, she requested that I not quote any part of that dialogue in this book, and I have honored that request.

MAY 10, 1996 • 27,600 FEET

George Leigh Mallory,

in a letter to his wife,

June 28, 1921

Above the South Col, up in the Death Zone, survival is to no small degree a race against the clock. Upon setting out from Camp Four on May 10, each client carried two 6.6-pound oxygen bottles and would pick up a third bottle on the South Summit from a cache to be stocked by Sherpas. At a conservative flow rate of two liters per minute, each bottle would last between five and six hours. By 4:00 or 5:00 P.M., everyone’s gas would be gone. Depending on each person’s acclimatization and physiological makeup, we would still be able to function above the South Col—but not well, and not for long. We would instantly become more vulnerable to HAPE, HACE, hypothermia, impaired judgment, and frostbite. The risk of dying would skyrocket.

Hall, who had climbed Everest four times previously, understood as well as anybody the need to get up and down quickly. Recognizing that the basic climbing skills of some of his clients were highly suspect, Hall intended to rely on fixed lines to safeguard and expedite both our group and Fischer’s group over the most difficult ground. The fact that no expedition had been to the top yet this year concerned him, therefore, because it meant that ropes had not been installed over much of this terrain.

Göran Kropp, the Swedish soloist, had ascended to within 350 vertical feet of the top on May 3, but he hadn’t bothered to put in any ropes at all. The Montenegrins, who’d got even higher, had installed some fixed line, but in their inexperience they’d used all they had in the first 1,400 feet above the South Col, wasting it on relatively gentle slopes where it wasn’t really needed. Thus on the morning of our summit bid, the only ropes strung along the precipitous serrations of the upper Southeast Ridge were a few ancient, tattered remnants from past expeditions that emerged sporadically from the ice.

Anticipating this possibility, before leaving Base Camp Hall and Fischer convened a meeting of guides from both teams, during which they agreed that each expedition would dispatch two Sherpas—including the climbing sirdars, Ang Dorje and Lopsang—from Camp Four ninety minutes ahead of the main groups. This would give the Sherpas time to install fixed lines on the most exposed sections of the upper mountain before the clients arrived. “Rob made it very clear how important it was to do this,” recalls Beidleman. “He wanted to avoid a time-consuming bottleneck at all costs.”

For some unknown reason, however, no Sherpas left the South Col ahead of us on the night of May 9. Perhaps the violent gale, which didn’t stop blowing until 7:30 P.M., prevented them from mobilizing as early as they’d hoped. After the expedition Lopsang insisted that at the last minute Hall and Fischer had simply scrapped the plan to fix ropes in advance of their clients, because they’d received erroneous information that the Montenegrins had already completed the job as high as the South Summit.

But if Lopsang’s assertion is correct, neither Beidleman, Groom, nor Boukreev—the three surviving guides—were ever told of the altered scheme. And if the plan to fix lines had been intentionally abandoned, there would have been no reason for Lopsang and Ang Dorje to depart with the 300 feet of rope that each Sherpa carried when they set out from Camp Four at the front of their respective teams.