Into Thin Air (30 page)

Five hundred feet above the South Col, where the steep shale gave way to a gentler slope of snow, Namba’s oxygen ran out, and the diminutive Japanese woman sat down, refusing to move. “When I tried to take her oxygen mask off so she could breathe more easily,” says Groom, “she’d insist on putting it right back on. No amount of persuasion could convince her that she was out of oxygen, that the mask was actually suffocating her. By now, Beck had weakened to the point where he wasn’t able to walk on his own, and I had to support him on my shoulder. Fortunately, right about then Neal caught up to us.” Beidleman, seeing that Groom had his hands full with Weathers, started dragging Namba down toward Camp Four, even though she wasn’t on Fischer’s team.

It was now about 6:45 P.M. and almost completely dark. Beidleman, Groom, their clients, and two Sherpas from Fischer’s team who had belatedly materialized out of the mist—Tashi Tshering and Ngawang Dorje—had coalesced into a single group. Although they were moving slowly, they had descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four. At that moment I was just arriving at the tents—probably no more than fifteen minutes in front of the first members of Beidleman’s group. But in that brief span the storm abruptly metastasized into a full-blown hurricane, and the visibility dropped to less than twenty feet.

Wanting to avoid the dangerous ice pitch, Beidleman led his group on an indirect route that looped far to the east, where the slope was much less steep, and around 7:30 they safely reached the broad, gently rolling expanse of the South Col. By then, however, only three or four people had headlamps with batteries that hadn’t run down, and everyone was on the brink of physical collapse. Fox was increasingly relying on Madsen for assistance. Weathers and Namba were unable to walk without being supported by Groom and Beidleman, respectively.

Beidleman knew they were on the eastern, Tibetan side of the Col and that the tents lay somewhere to the west. But to move in that direction it was necessary to walk directly upwind into the teeth of the storm. Wind-whipped granules of ice and snow struck the climbers’ faces with violent force, lacerating their eyes and making it impossible to see where they were going. “It was so difficult and painful,” Schoening explains, “that there was an inevitable tendency to bear off the wind, to keep angling away from it to the left, and that’s how we went wrong.

“At times you couldn’t even see your own feet, it was blowing so hard,” he continues. “I was worried somebody would sit down or get separated from the group and we’d never see them again. But once we got to the flats of the Col we started following the Sherpas, and I figured they knew where camp was. Then they suddenly stopped and doubled back, and it quickly became obvious they didn’t have any idea where we were. At that point I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. That’s when I first knew we were in trouble.”

For the next two hours, Beidleman, Groom, the two Sherpas, and the seven clients staggered blindly around in the storm, growing ever more exhausted and hypothermic, hoping to blunder across the camp. Once they came across a couple of discarded oxygen bottles, suggesting that the tents were near, but the climbers couldn’t locate them. “It was total chaos,” says Beidleman. “People are wandering all over the place; I’m yelling at everyone, trying to get them to follow a single leader. Finally, probably around ten o’clock, I walked over this little rise, and it felt like I was standing on the edge of the earth. I could sense a huge void just beyond.”

The group had unwittingly strayed to the easternmost edge of the Col, at the lip of a 7, 000-foot drop down the Kangshung Face. They were at the same elevation as Camp Four, just 1,000 horizontal feet from safety,
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but, says Beidleman, “I knew that if we kept wandering in the storm, pretty soon we were going to lose somebody. I was exhausted from dragging Yasuko. Charlotte and Sandy were barely able to stand. So I screamed at everyone to huddle up right there and wait for a break in the storm.”

Beidleman and Schoening searched for a protected place to escape the wind, but there was nowhere to hide. Everyone’s oxygen had long since run out, making the group more vulnerable to the windchill, which exceeded a hundred below zero. In the lee of a boulder no larger than a dishwasher, the climbers hunkered in a pathetic row on a patch of gale-scoured ice. “By then the cold had about finished me off,” says Charlotte Fox. “My eyes were frozen. I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive. The cold was so painful, I didn’t think I could endure it anymore. I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.”

“We tried to keep warm by pummeling each other,” Weathers remembers. “Someone yelled at us to keep moving our arms and legs. Sandy was hysterical; she kept yelling over and over, ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’ But nobody else was saying a whole lot.”

Three hundred yards to the west I was shivering uncontrollably in my tent—even though I was zipped into my sleeping bag, and wearing my down suit and every other stitch of clothing I had. The gale threatened to blow the tent apart. Every time the door was opened, the shelter would fill with blowing spindrift, so everything inside was covered with an inch-thick layer of snow. Oblivious to the tragedy unfolding outside in the storm, I drifted in and out of consciousness, delirious from exhaustion, dehydration, and the cumulative effects of oxygen depletion.

At some point early in the evening, Stuart Hutchison, my tent-mate, came in, shook me hard, and asked if I would go outside with him to bang on pots and shine lights into the sky in the hope of guiding the lost climbers in, but I was too weak and incoherent to respond. Hutchison—who had gotten back to camp at 2:00 P.M. and was thus considerably less debilitated than me—then tried to rouse clients and Sherpas from the other tents. Everybody was too cold or too exhausted. So Hutchison went out into the storm alone.

He left our tent six times that night to look for the missing climbers, but the blizzard was so fierce that he never dared to venture more than a few yards beyond the margin of camp. “The winds were ballistically strong,” he emphasizes, “The blowing spindrift felt like a sandblaster or something. I could only go out for fifteen minutes at a time before I became too cold and had to return to the tent.”

Out among the climbers hunkered on the eastern edge of the Col, Beidelman willed himself to stay alert for a sign that the storm might be blowing itself out. Just before midnight, his vigilance was rewarded when he suddenly noticed a few stars overhead and shouted to the others to look. The wind was still whipping up a furious ground-blizzard at the surface, but far above, the sky had begun to clear, revealing the hulking silhouettes of Everest and Lhotse. From these reference points, Klev Schoening thought he’d figured out where the group was in relation to Camp Four. After a shouting match with Beidleman, he convinced the guide that he knew the way to the tents.

Beidleman tried to coax everyone to their feet and get them moving in the direction indicated by Schoening, but Pittman, Fox, Weathers, and Namba were too feeble to walk. By then it was obvious to the guide that if somebody from the group didn’t make it to the tents and summon a rescue party, they were all going to die. So Beidleman assembled those who were ambulatory, and then he, Schoening, Gammelgaard, Groom, and the two Sherpas stumbled off into the storm to get help, leaving behind the four incapacitated clients with Tim Madsen. Reluctant to abandon his girlfriend, Fox, Madsen selflessly volunteered to stay and look after everybody until help arrived.

Twenty minutes later, Beidleman’s contingent limped into camp, where they had an emotional reunion with a very worried Anatoli Boukreev. Schoening and Beidleman, barely able to speak, told the Russian where to find the five clients who’d remained behind out in the elements and then collapsed in their respective tents, utterly spent.

Boukreev had come down to the South Col hours in front of anyone else in Fischer’s team. Indeed, by 5:00 P.M., while his teammates were still struggling down through the clouds at 28,000 feet, Boukreev was already in his tent resting and drinking tea. Experienced guides would later question his decision to descend so far ahead of his clients—extremely unorthodox behavior for a guide. One of the clients from that group has nothing but contempt for Boukreev, insisting that when it mattered most, the guide “cut and ran.”

Anatoli had left the summit around 2:00 P.M. and quickly became entangled in the traffic jam at the Hillary Step. As soon as the mob dispersed he moved very rapidly down the Southeast Ridge without waiting for any clients—despite telling Fischer atop the Step that he would be going down with Martin Adams. Boukreev thereby arrived at Camp Four well before the brunt of the storm.

After the expedition, when I asked Anatoli why he had hurried down ahead of his group, he handed me the transcript of an interview he’d given a few days previously to
Men’s Journal
through a Russian interpreter. Boukreev told me that he’d read the transcript and confirmed its accuracy. Reading it on the spot, I quickly came to a series of questions about the descent, to which he had replied:

I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour.… It is very cold, naturally, it takes your strength.… My position was that I would not be good if I stood around freezing, waiting. I would be more useful if I returned to Camp Four in order to be able to take oxygen up to the returning climbers or to go up to help them if some became weak during the descent.… If you are immobile at that altitude you lose strength in the cold, and then you are unable to do anything.

Boukreev’s susceptibility to the cold was doubtless greatly exacerbated by the fact that he wasn’t using supplemental oxygen; in the absence of gas he simply couldn’t stop to wait for slow clients on the summit ridge without courting frostbite and hypothermia. For whatever reason, he raced down ahead of the group—which in fact had been his pattern throughout the entire expedition, as Fischer’s final letters and phone calls from Base Camp to Seattle made clear.

When I questioned him about the wisdom of leaving his clients on the summit ridge, Anatoli insisted that it was for the good of the team: “It is much better for me to warm myself at South Col, be ready to carry up oxygen if clients run out.” Indeed, shortly after dark, after Beidleman’s group failed to return and the storm had risen to hurricane intensity, Boukreev realized they must be in trouble and made a courageous attempt to bring oxygen to them. But his stratagem had a serious flaw: because neither he nor Beidleman had a radio, Anatoli had no way of knowing the true nature of the missing climbers’ predicament, or even where on the huge expanse of the upper mountain they might be.

Around 7:30 P.M., Boukreev left Camp Four to search for the group, regardless. By then, he recalled,

Visibility was maybe a meter. It disappeared altogether. I had a lamp, and I began to use oxygen to speed up my ascent. I was carrying three bottles. I tried to go faster, but visibility was gone.… It is like being without eyes, without being able to see, it was impossible to see. That is very dangerous, because one can fall into a crevasse, one can fall toward the southern side of Lhotse, 3,000 meters straight down. I tried to go up, it was dark, I could not find the fixed line.

Some six hundred feet above the Col, Boukreev recognized the futility of his effort and returned to the tents, but, he admits, he very nearly became lost himself. In any case, it was just as well that he abandoned this rescue effort, because at that point his teammates were no longer on the peak above, where Boukreev had been headed—by the time he gave up his search, Beidleman’s group was actually wandering around on the Col six hundred feet
below
the Russian.

Boukreev arrived back at Camp Four around 9:00 P.M. Exhausted and extremely concerned about his missing teammates, he sat down on his pack at the edge of camp, cradled his head in his hands, and tried to figure out how he might rescue them. “The wind is driving snow into my back but I am powerless to move,” he later recalled. “How long I was there, I don’t remember. It is here that I start to lose track of time because I am so tired, so exhausted.”