Into Thin Air (31 page)

During one of Stuart Hutchison’s forays into the storm to look for the missing members of Rob Hall’s team, he was shocked to stumble upon Boukreev sitting alone out in the blizzard. According to Hutchison, Boukreev “was bent over, retching, about a hundred feet from the South Africans’ tent. When I asked if he needed help, he answered, ‘No! No! No!’ He seemed in bad shape, really fucked out of his tree. So I brought him back to one of Fischer’s tents, and some Sherpas took him inside.”

Boukreev was worried sick about the nineteen climbers who were missing, but because he had no idea where they might be, there was little he could do except warm himself, try to regain some strength, and bide his time. Then, at 12:45 A.M., Beidleman, Groom, Schoening, and Gammelgaard hobbled into camp. “Klev and Neal had lost all power and could barely talk,” Boukreev recalls. “They told me Charlotte, Sandy, and Tim need help, Sandy is close to dying. Then they give me general location where to find them.”

Upon hearing the climbers arrive, Stuart Hutchison went out to assist Groom. “I got Mike into his tent,” Hutchison recalled, “and saw that he was really, really exhausted. He was able to communicate clearly, but it required an agonal effort, like a dying man’s last words. ‘You have to get some Sherpas,’ he told me. ‘Send them out for Beck and Yasuko.’ And then he pointed toward the Kangshung side of the Col.”

Hutchison’s efforts to organize a rescue team proved fruitless, however. Chuldum and Arita—Sherpas on Hall’s team who hadn’t accompanied the summit party and were waiting in reserve at Camp Four specifically for such an emergency—had been incapacitated with carbon monoxide poisoning from cooking in a poorly ventilated tent; Chuldum was actually vomiting blood. And the other four Sherpas on our team were too cold and debilitated from having gone to the summit.

After the expedition, I asked Hutchison why, once he learned the whereabouts of the missing climbers, he didn’t attempt to wake Frank Fischbeck, Lou Kasischke, or John Taske—or make a second attempt to wake me—in order to request our help with the rescue effort. “It was so obvious that all of you were completely exhausted that I didn’t even consider asking. You were so far past the point of ordinary fatigue that I thought if you attempted to help with a rescue you were only going to make the situation worse—that you would get out there and have to be rescued yourself.” The upshot was that Stuart went out into the storm alone, but once again he turned around at the edge of camp when he became worried that he wouldn’t be able to find his way back if he went farther.

At the same time, Boukreev was also trying to organize a rescue effort. Martin Adams, exhausted from his summit climb, “had collapsed into a sleep; he had nothing left,” according to Boukreev, and was clearly unable to help. He located Lopsang, but the Sherpa, like Adams, was too debilitated to go out into the storm. Next, Boukreev went from tent to tent trying to find members of other expeditions who might be in a position to offer assistance—although he didn’t visit the tent I shared with Hutchison, so the efforts of Hutchison and Boukreev remained uncoordinated, and I never learned of either rescue plan.

There happened to be a number of climbers at Camp Four that night—Ian Woodall, Cathy O’Dowd, and Bruce Herrod from the South African team; and Neil Laughton, Brigitte Muir, Michael Jorgensen, Graham Ratcliffe, and Mark Pfetzer from Henry Todd’s team—who hadn’t yet attempted the summit, and were thus relatively well rested. But in the chaos and confusion of the moment, Boukreev apparently located few, if any, of these climbers. And in the end Boukreev discovered, like Hutchison, that everybody he did manage to rouse was too sick, too exhausted, or too frightened to help.

So the Russian guide resolved to bring back the group by himself. Overcoming his own crippling exhaustion, he plunged into the maw of the hurricane and searched the Col for nearly an hour. It was an incredible display of strength and courage, but he was unable to find any of the missing climbers.

Boukreev didn’t give up, however. He returned to camp, obtained a more detailed set of directions from Beidleman and Schoening, then went out into the storm again. This time he saw the faint glow of Madsen’s fading headlamp and was thereby able to locate the missing climbers. “They were lying on the ice, without movement,” says Boukreev. “They could not talk.” Madsen was still conscious and largely able to take care of himself, but Pittman, Fox, and Weathers were utterly helpless, and Namba appeared to be dead.

After Beidleman and the others had set out from the huddle to get help, Madsen had gathered together the climbers who remained and hectored everybody to keep moving in order to stay warm. “I sat Yasuko down in Beck’s lap,” Madsen recalls, “but he was pretty unresponsive by that time, and Yasuko wasn’t moving at all. A little later I saw that she’d laid down flat on her back, with snow blowing into her hood. Somehow she’d lost a glove—her right hand was bare, and her fingers were curled up so tightly you couldn’t straighten them. It looked like they were pretty much frozen to the bone.

“I assumed she was dead,” Madsen continues. “But then a while later she suddenly moved, and it freaked me out: she sort of arched her neck slightly, as if she was trying to sit up, and her right arm came up, then that was it. Yasuko lay back down and never moved again.”

As soon as Boukreev found the group, it became obvious to him that he could bring only one climber in at a time. He was carrying an oxygen bottle, which he and Madsen hooked up to Pittman’s mask. Then Boukreev indicated to Madsen that he’d be back as soon as possible and started helping Fox back toward the tents. “After they left,” says Madsen, “Beck was crumpled in a fetal position, not moving a whole lot, and Sandy was curled up in my lap, not moving much, either. I screamed at her, ‘Hey, keep wiggling your hands! Let me see your hands!’ And when she sits up and pulls her hands out, I see she doesn’t have any mittens on—that they were dangling from her wrists.

“So I’m trying to shove her hands back into her mittens when all of a sudden Beck mumbles, ‘Hey, I’ve got this all figured out.’ Then he kind of rolls a little distance away, crouches on a big rock, and stands up facing the wind with his arms stretched out to either side. A second later a gust comes up and just blows him over backward into the night, beyond the beam of my headlamp. And that was the last I saw of him.

“Toli came back a little bit after that and grabbed Sandy, so I just packed up my stuff and started waddling after them, trying to follow Toli’s and Sandy’s headlamps. By then I assumed Yasuko was dead and Beck was a lost cause.” When they finally reached camp it was 4:30 A.M., and the sky was starting to brighten above the eastern horizon. Upon hearing from Madsen that Yasuko hadn’t made it, Beidleman broke down in his tent and wept for forty-five minutes.

* Although a strong climber might require three hours to ascend 1,000
vertical
feet, in this case the distance was over more or less flat terrain, which the group would have been able to cover in perhaps fifteen minutes had they known where the tents were.

6:00 A.M., MAY 11, 1996 • 26,000 FEET

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven.… I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event
.

Harold Brodkey

“Manipulations”

Stuart Hutchison finally managed to shake me awake at 6:00 A.M. on May 11. “Andy’s not in his tent,” he told me somberly, “and he doesn’t seem to be in any of the other tents, either. I don’t think he ever made it in.”

“Harold’s missing?” I asked. “No way. I saw him walk to the edge of camp with my own eyes.” Shocked and confused, I pulled on my boots and rushed out to look for Harris. The wind was still fierce—strong enough to knock me down several times—but it was a bright, clear dawn, and the visibility was perfect. I searched the entire western half of the Col for more than an hour, peering behind boulders and poking under shredded, long-abandoned tents, but found no trace of Harris. Adrenaline surged through my veins. Tears welled in my eyes, instantly freezing my eyelids shut. How could Andy be gone? It couldn’t be so.

I went to the place where Harris had slid down the ice just above the Col, and then methodically retraced the route he’d followed toward camp, which followed a broad, almost flat ice gully. At the point where I last saw him when the clouds descended, a sharp left turn would have taken Harris forty or fifty feet up a rocky rise to the tents.

I realized, however, that if he hadn’t turned left but instead continued straight down the gully—which would have been easy to do in the whiteout even if one wasn’t exhausted and stupid with altitude sickness—he would have quickly come to the westernmost edge of the Col. Below, the steep gray ice of the Lhotse Face dropped 4,000 vertical feet to the floor of the Western Cwm. Standing there, afraid to move any closer to the edge, I noticed a single set of faint crampon tracks leading past me toward the abyss. Those tracks, I feared, were Andy Harris’s.

After getting into camp the previous evening, I’d told Hutchison that I’d seen Harris arrive safely at the tents. Hutchison had radioed this news to Base Camp, and from there it was passed along via satellite phone to the woman with whom Harris shared his life in New Zealand, Fiona McPherson. She’d been overcome with relief when she learned that Harris was safe at Camp Four. Now, however, Hall’s wife back in Christchurch, Jan Arnold, would have to do the unthinkable: call McPherson back to inform her there had been a horrible mistake—that Andy was in fact missing and presumed dead. Imagining this phone conversation, and my role in the events leading up to it, I fell to my knees with dry heaves, retching over and over as the icy wind blasted against my back.

After spending sixty minutes searching in vain for Andy, I returned to my tent just in time to overhear a radio call between Base Camp and Rob Hall; he was up on the summit ridge, I learned, calling down for help. Hutchison then told me that Beck and Yasuko were dead and that Scott Fischer was missing somewhere on the peak above. Shortly after that, the batteries to our radio died, cutting us off from the rest of the mountain. Alarmed that they had lost contact with us, members of the IMAX team at Camp Two called the South African team, whose tents on the Col were only a few yards away from ours. David Breashears—the IMAX leader, and a climber I had known for twenty years—reports, “We knew the South Africans had a powerful radio and that it was working, so we got one of their team members at Camp Two to call up to Woodall on the South Col and say, ‘Look, this is an emergency. People are dying up there. We need to be able to communicate with the survivors in Hall’s team to coordinate a rescue. Please lend your radio to Jon Krakauer.’ And Woodall said no. It was very clear what was at stake, but they wouldn’t give up their radio.”

Immediately after the expedition, when I was researching my article for
Outside
magazine, I interviewed as many of the people on Hall’s and Fischer’s summit teams as possible—I spoke with most of them several times. But Martin Adams, distrustful of reporters, kept a low profile in the aftermath of the tragedy and eluded my repeated attempts to interview him until after the
Outside
piece went to press.

When I eventually reached Adams by phone in mid-July and he consented to talk, I began by asking him to recount everything he remembered about the summit push. One of the stronger clients that day, he’d remained near the front of the pack and was either just ahead of me or just behind me for much of the climb. Because he possessed what seemed to be an unusually reliable memory, I was particularly interested to hear how his version of the events jibed with my own.