Into Thin Air (26 page)

In any case, above 27,400 feet, no ropes had been fixed ahead of time. When Ang Dorje and I first arrived on the Balcony at 5:30 A.M., we were more than an hour in front of the rest of Hall’s group. At that point we could easily have gone ahead to install the ropes. But Rob had explicitly forbidden me to go ahead, and Lopsang was still far below, short-roping Pittman, so there was nobody to accompany Ang Dorje.

Quiet and moody by nature, Ang Dorje seemed especially somber as we sat together watching the sun come up. My attempts to engage him in conversation went nowhere. His ill humor, I figured, was perhaps due to the abscessed tooth that had been causing him pain for the previous two weeks. Or maybe he was brooding over the disturbing vision he’d had four days earlier: on their last evening at Base Camp, he and some other Sherpas had celebrated the coming summit attempt by drinking a large quantity of
chhang
—a thick, sweet beer brewed from rice and millet. The next morning, severely hungover, he was extremely agitated; before ascending the Icefall he confided to a friend that he’d seen ghosts in the night. An intensely spiritual young man, Ang Dorje was not one to take such portents lightly.

It was possible, though, that he was simply angry at Lopsang, whom he regarded as a showboat. In 1995, Hall had employed both Lopsang and Ang Dorje on his Everest expedition, and the two Sherpas had not worked well together.

On summit day that year, Hall’s team had reached the South Summit late, around 1:30 P.M., to find deep, unstable snow blanketing the final stretch of the summit ridge. Hall sent a Kiwi guide named Guy Cotter ahead with Lopsang, rather than Ang Dorje, to determine the feasibility of climbing higher—and Ang Dorje, who was the sirdar on that climb, took it as an insult. A little later, when Lopsang had climbed to the base of the Hillary Step, Hall decided to abort the summit attempt and signaled Cotter and Lopsang to turn around. But Lopsang ignored the command, untied from Cotter, and continued ascending to the summit alone. Hall had been angry about Lopsang’s insubordination, and Ang Dorje had shared his employer’s displeasure.

This year, even though they were on different teams, Ang Dorje had again been asked to work with Lopsang on summit day—and again Lopsang appeared to be acting squirrelly. Ang Dorje had been working well beyond the call of duty for six long weeks. Now, apparently, he was tired of doing more than his share. Looking sullen, he sat beside me in the snow, awaiting the arrival of Lopsang, and the ropes were left unfixed.

As a consequence, I ran smack into the first bottleneck ninety minutes after moving beyond the Balcony, at 28,000 feet, where the intermingled teams encountered a series of massive rock steps that required ropes for safe passage. Clients huddled restlessly at the base of the rock for nearly an hour while Beidleman—taking over the duties of an absent Lopsang—laboriously ran the rope out.

Here, the impatience and technical inexperience of Hall’s client Yasuko Namba nearly caused a disaster. An accomplished businesswoman employed by Federal Express in Tokyo, Yasuko didn’t fit the meek, deferential stereotype of a middle-aged Japanese woman. At home, she’d told me with a laugh, her husband did all the cooking and cleaning. Her quest for Everest had turned into a minor cause célèbre in Japan. Previously on the expedition she’d been a slow, uncertain climber, but today, with the summit in her crosshairs, she was energized as never before. “From the time we arrived at the South Col,” says John Taske, who’d shared a tent with her at Camp Four, “Yasuko was totally focused on the top—it was almost like she was in a trance.” Ever since leaving the Col she’d been pushing extremely hard, jostling her way toward the front of the line.

Now, as Beidleman clung precariously to the rock 100 feet above the clients, the overly eager Yasuko clamped her jumar to the dangling rope before the guide had anchored his end of it. As she was about to put her full body weight on the rope—which would have pulled Beidleman off—Mike Groom intervened in the nick of time and gently scolded her for being so impatient.

The traffic jam at the ropes grew with each arriving climber, so those at the rear of the scrum fell farther and farther behind. By late morning, three of Hall’s clients—Stuart Hutchison, John Taske, and Lou Kasischke, climbing near the back with Hall—were becoming quite worried about the lagging pace. Immediately in front of them was the Taiwanese team, moving especially sluggishly. “They were climbing in a peculiar style, really close together,” says Hutchison, “almost like slices in a loaf of bread, one behind the other, which meant it was nearly impossible to pass them. We spent a lot of time waiting for them to move up the ropes.”

At Base Camp before our summit bid, Hall had contemplated two possible turn-around times—either 1:00 P.M. or 2:00 P.M. He never declared which of these times we were to abide by, however—which was curious, considering how much he’d talked about the importance of designating a hard deadline and sticking to it no matter what. We were simply left with a vaguely articulated understanding that Hall would withhold making a final decision until summit day, after assessing the weather and other factors, and would then personally take responsibility for turning everyone around at the proper hour.

By midmorning on May 10, Hall still hadn’t announced what our turn-around time would actually be. Hutchison, conservative by nature, was operating on the assumption that it would be 1:00 P.M. Around 11:00, Hall told Hutchison and Taske that the top was still three hours away, and then he sprinted to try and get past the Taiwanese. “It seemed increasingly unlikely that we would have any chance of summitting before the one P.M. turn-around time,” says Hutchison. A brief discussion ensued. Kasischke was initially reluctant to concede defeat, but Taske and Hutchison were persuasive. At 11:30, the three men turned their backs on the summit and headed down, and Hall sent Sherpas Kami and Lhakpa Chhiri down with them.

Electing to descend must have been supremely difficult for these three clients, as well as for Frank Fischbeck, who’d turned around hours earlier. Mountaineering tends to draw men and women not easily deflected from their goals. By this late stage in the expedition we had all been subjected to levels of misery and peril that would have sent more balanced individuals packing for home long ago. To get this far one had to have an uncommonly obdurate personality.

Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

Taske, Hutchison, Kasischke, and Fischbeck had each spent as much as $70,000 and endured weeks of agony to be granted this one shot at the summit. All were ambitious men, unaccustomed to losing and even less to quitting. And yet, faced with a tough decision, they were among the few who made the right choice that day.

Above the rock step where John, Stuart, and Lou turned around, the fixed ropes ended. From this point the route angled steeply upward along a graceful arête of wind-compacted snow that culminated in the South Summit—where I arrived at 11:00 to find a second, even worse bottleneck. A little higher, seemingly no more than a stone’s throw away, was the vertical gash of the Hillary Step, and slightly beyond that the summit itself. Rendered dumb with awe and fatigue, I took some photos, then sat down with guides Andy Harris, Neal Beidleman, and Anatoli Boukreev to wait for the Sherpas to fix ropes along the spectacularly corniced summit ridge.

I noticed that Boukreev, like Lopsang, wasn’t using supplemental oxygen. Although the Russian had summitted Everest twice before without gas, and Lopsang thrice, I was surprised Fischer had given them permission to guide the peak without it, which didn’t seem to be in their clients’ best interest. I was also surprised to see that Boukreev didn’t have a backpack—customarily a guide would carry a pack containing rope, first-aid supplies, crevasse-rescue gear, extra clothing, and other items necessary to assist clients in the event of an emergency. Boukreev was the first guide I’d ever seen, on any mountain, ignore this convention.

It turned out that he had departed Camp Four carrying both a backpack and an oxygen bottle; he later told me that although he didn’t intend to use the gas, he wanted to have a bottle handy in the event that “his power was low” and he needed it higher on the peak. Upon reaching the Balcony, however, he jettisoned the pack and gave his oxygen canister, mask, and regulator to Beidleman to carry for him. Because Boukreev wasn’t breathing supplemental oxygen, he had apparently decided to strip his load down to the bare minimum to gain every possible advantage in the appallingly thin air.

A 20-knot breeze raked the ridge, blowing a plume of spindrift far over the Kangshung Face, but overhead the sky was an achingly brilliant blue. Lounging in the sun at 28,700 feet inside my thick down suit, gazing across the roof of the world in a hypoxic stupor, I completely lost track of time. None of us paid much attention to the fact that Ang Dorje and Ngawang Norbu, another Sherpa on Hall’s team, were sitting beside us sharing a thermos of tea and seemed to be in no hurry to go higher. Around 11:40, Beidleman eventually asked, “Hey, Ang Dorje, are you going to fix the ropes, or what?” Ang Dorje’s reply was a quick, unequivocal “No”—perhaps because none of Fischer’s Sherpas were there to share the work.

Growing alarmed at the crowd stacking up at the South Summit, Beidleman roused Harris and Boukreev and strongly suggested that the three guides install the ropes themselves; hearing this, I quickly volunteered to help. Beidleman pulled a 150-foot coil of rope from his pack, I grabbed another coil from Ang Dorje, and with Boukreev and Harris we got under way at noon to fix lines up the summit ridge. But by then another hour had already trickled away.

Bottled oxygen does not make the top of Everest feel like sea level. Climbing above the South Summit with my regulator delivering just under two liters of oxygen per minute, I had to stop and draw three or four lungfuls of air after each ponderous step. Then I’d take one more step and have to pause for another four heaving breaths—and this was the fastest pace I could manage. Because the oxygen systems we were using delivered a lean mix of compressed gas and ambient air, 29,000 feet with gas felt like approximately 26,000 feet without gas. But the bottled oxygen conferred other benefits that weren’t so easily quantified.

Climbing along the blade of the summit ridge, sucking gas into my ragged lungs, I enjoyed a strange, unwarranted sense of calm. The world beyond the rubber mask was stupendously vivid but seemed not quite real, as if a movie were being projected in slow motion across the front of my goggles. I felt drugged, disengaged, thoroughly insulated from external stimuli. I had to remind myself over and over that there was 7,000 feet of sky on either side, that everything was at stake here, that I would pay for a single bungled step with my life.

Half an hour above the South Summit I arrived at the foot of the Hillary Step. One of the most famous pitches in all of mountaineering, its forty feet of near-vertical rock and ice looked daunting, but—as any serious climber would—I’d wanted very badly to take the “sharp end” of the rope and lead the Step. It was clear, however, that Boukreev, Beidleman, and Harris all felt the same way, and it was hypoxic delusion on my part to think that any of them was going to let a client hog such a coveted lead.

In the end, Boukreev—as senior guide and the only one of us who had climbed Everest previously—claimed the honor; with Beidleman paying out the rope, he did a masterful job of leading the pitch. But it was a slow process, and as he painstakingly ascended toward the crest of the Step, I nervously studied my watch and wondered whether I might run out of oxygen. My first canister had expired at 7:00 A.M. on the Balcony, after lasting about seven hours. Using this as a benchmark, at the South Summit I’d calculated that my second canister would expire around 2:00 P.M., which I’d stupidly assumed would allow plenty of time to reach the summit and return to the South Summit to retrieve my third oxygen bottle. But now it was already after 1:00, and I was beginning to have serious doubts.

At the top of the Step I shared my concern with Beidleman and asked whether he minded if I hurried ahead to the summit instead of pausing to help him string the last coil of rope along the ridge. “Go for it,” he graciously offered. “I’ll take care of the rope.”

Plodding slowly up the last few steps to the summit, I had the sensation of being underwater, of life moving at quarter speed. And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.