Into Thin Air (32 page)

Very late in the afternoon, when Adams headed down from the Balcony at 27,600 feet, he said that I was still visible, perhaps fifteen minutes ahead of him, but that I was descending faster than he was and soon moved out of sight. “And the next time I saw you,” he said, “it was almost dark and you were crossing the flats of the South Col, about a hundred feet from the tents. I recognized that it was you from your bright red down suit.”

Shortly after that, Adams descended to a flat bench just above the steep ice incline that had given me so much trouble, and fell into a small crevasse. He managed to extricate himself, then fell into another, deeper, crevasse. “Lying in that crevasse, I was thinking, ‘This may be it,’” he mused. “It took a while, but eventually I managed to climb out of that one, too. When I got out, my face was covered with snow, which quickly turned to ice. Then I saw somebody sitting on the ice off to the left, wearing a headlamp, so I walked over in that direction. It wasn’t pitch-black yet, but it was dark enough that I couldn’t see the tents anymore.

“So I got to this fucker and said, ‘Hey, where are the tents?’ and the guy, whoever he was, pointed the way. So I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’ Then the guy said something like, ‘Be careful. The ice here is steeper than it looks. Maybe we should go down and get a rope and some ice screws.’ I thought, ‘Fuck that. I’m out of here.’ So I took two or three steps, tripped, and slid down the ice on my chest, headfirst. As I was sliding, somehow the pick of my ice ax caught something and swung me around, then I came to a stop at the bottom. I got up, stumbled to the tent, and that’s about the size of it.”

As Adams described his encounter with the anonymous climber, and then sliding down the ice, my mouth went dry and the hairs on the back of my neck suddenly bristled. “Martin,” I asked when he’d finished talking, “do you think that could have been me you ran into out there?”

“Fuck, no!” he laughed. “I don’t know who it was, but it definitely wasn’t you.” But then I told him about my encounter with Andy Harris and the chilling series of coincidences: I had bumped into Harris about the same time Adams had encountered the cipher, and in about the same place. Much of the dialogue that transpired between Harris and me was eerily similar to the dialogue between Adams and the cipher. And then Adams had slid headfirst down the ice in much the same manner I remembered seeing Harris slide.

After talking for a few minutes more, Adams was convinced: “So that was you I talked to out there on the ice,” he stated, astounded, acknowledging that he must have been mistaken when he saw me crossing the flats of the South Col just before dark. “And that was me you talked to. Which means it wasn’t Andy Harris at all. Wow. Dude, I’d say you’ve got some explaining to do.”

I was stunned. For two months I’d been telling people that Harris had walked off the edge of the South Col to his death, when he hadn’t done that at all. My error had greatly and unnecessarily compounded the pain of Fiona McPherson; Andy’s parents, Ron and Mary Harris; his brother, David Harris; and his many friends.

Andy was a large man, over six feet tall and 200 pounds, who spoke with a sharp Kiwi lilt; Martin was at least six inches shorter, weighed maybe 130 pounds, and spoke in a thick Texas drawl. How had I made such an egregious mistake? Was I really so debilitated that I had stared into the face of a near stranger and mistaken him for a friend with whom I’d spent the previous six weeks? And if Andy had never arrived at Camp Four after reaching the summit, what in the name of God had happened to him?

3:40 P.M., MAY 10, 1996 • 29,028 FEET

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale
.

Robert Falcon Scott, in “Message to the Public,” penned just prior to his death in Antarctica on March 29, 1912, from
Scott’s Last Expedition

Scott Fischer ascended to the summit around 3:40 on the afternoon of May 10 to find his devoted friend and sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu, waiting for him. The Sherpa pulled his radio from inside his down jacket, made contact with Ingrid Hunt at Base Camp, then handed the walkie-talkie to Fischer. “We all made it,” Fischer told Hunt, 11,400 feet below. “God, I’m tired.” Around this time two Sherpas on the Taiwanese team arrived, followed soon thereafter by Makalu Gau. Rob Hall was there, too, waiting impatiently for Doug Hansen to appear as a rising tide of cloud lapped ominously at the summit ridge.

According to Lopsang, during the fifteen or twenty minutes Fischer spent on the summit, he complained repeatedly that he wasn’t feeling well—something the congenitally stoic guide almost never did. “Scott tell to me, ‘I am too tired. I am sick, also, need medicine for stomach,’ ” the Sherpa recalls. “I gave him tea, but he drank just a little bit, just half cup. So I tell to him, ‘Scott, please, we go fast down.’ So we come down then.”

Fischer started down first, about 3:55. Lopsang reports that although Scott had used supplemental oxygen during the entire ascent and his third canister was more than three-quarters full when he left the summit, for some reason he took his mask off and stopped using it.

Shortly after Fischer left the top, Gau and his Sherpas departed as well, and finally Lopsang headed down—leaving Hall alone on the summit awaiting Hansen. A moment after Lopsang started down, about 4:00, Hansen at last appeared, toughing it out, moving painfully slowly over the last bump on the ridge. As soon as he saw Hansen, Hall hurried down to meet him.

Hall’s obligatory turn-around time had come and gone a full two hours earlier. Given the guide’s conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. Why, they wondered, didn’t he turn Hansen around much lower on the mountain, as soon as it became obvious that the American climber was running late?

Exactly one year earlier, Hall had turned Hansen around on the South Summit at 2:30 P.M., and to be denied so close to the top was a crushing disappointment to Hansen. He told me several times that he’d returned to Everest in 1996 largely as a result of Hall’s advocacy—he said Rob had called him from New Zealand “a dozen times” urging him to give it another shot—and this time Doug was absolutely determined to bag the top. “I want to get this thing done and out of my life,” he’d told me three days earlier at Camp Two. “I don’t want to have to come back here. I’m getting too old for this shit.”

It doesn’t seem far-fetched to speculate that because Hall had talked Hansen into coming back to Everest, it would have been especially hard for him to deny Hansen the summit a second time. “It’s very difficult to turn someone around high on the mountain,” cautions Guy Cotter, a New Zealand guide who summitted Everest with Hall in 1992 and was guiding the peak for him in 1995 when Hansen made his first attempt. “If a client sees that the summit is close and they’re dead-set on getting there, they’re going to laugh in your face and keep going up.” As the veteran American guide Peter Lev told
Climbing
magazine after the disastrous events on Everest, “We think that people pay us to make good decisions, but what people really pay for is to get to the top.”

In any case, Hall did not turn Hansen around at 2:00 P.M.—or, for that matter, at 4:00, when he met his client just below the top. Instead, according to Lopsang, Hall placed Hansen’s arm around his neck and assisted the weary client up the final forty feet to the summit. They stayed only a minute or two, then turned to begin the long descent.

When Lopsang saw that Hansen was faltering, he held up his own descent long enough to make sure Doug and Rob made it safely across a dangerously corniced area just below the top. Then, eager to catch Fischer, who was by now more than thirty minutes ahead of him, the Sherpa continued down the ridge, leaving Hansen and Hall at the top of the Hillary Step.

Just after Lopsang disappeared down the Step, Hansen apparently ran out of oxygen and foundered. He’d expended every last bit of his strength to reach the summit—and now there was nothing left in reserve for the descent. “Pretty much the same thing happened to Doug in ’95,” says Ed Viesturs, who, like Cotter, was guiding the peak for Hall that year. “He was fine during the ascent, but as soon as he started down he lost it mentally and physically; he turned into a zombie, like he’d used everything up.”

At 4:30 P.M., and again at 4:41, Hall got on the radio to say that he and Hansen were in trouble high on the summit ridge and urgently needed oxygen. Two full bottles were waiting for them at the South Summit; if Hall had known this he could have retrieved the gas fairly quickly and then climbed back up to give Hansen a fresh tank. But Andy Harris, still at the oxygen cache, in the throes of his hypoxic dementia, overheard these radio calls and broke in to tell Hall—incorrectly, just as he’d told Mike Groom and me—that all the bottles at the South Summit were empty.

Groom heard the conversation between Harris and Hall on his radio as he was descending the Southeast Ridge with Yasuko Namba, just above the Balcony. He tried to call Hall to correct the misinformation and let him know that there were in fact full oxygen canisters waiting for him at the South Summit, but, Groom explains, “my radio was malfunctioning. I was able to receive most calls, but my outgoing calls could rarely be heard by anyone. On the couple of occasions that my calls were being picked up by Rob, and I tried to tell him where the full cylinders were, I was immediately interrupted by Andy, transmitting to say there was no gas at the South Summit.”

Unsure whether there was oxygen waiting for him, Hall decided that the best course of action was to remain with Hansen and try to bring the nearly helpless client down without gas. But when they got to the top of the Hillary Step, Hall couldn’t get Hansen down the 40-foot vertical drop, and their progress ground to a halt. “I can get myself down,” Hall reported over the radio, gasping audibly for breath. “I just don’t know how the fuck I can get this man down the Hillary Step without any oxygen.”

Shortly before 5:00, Groom finally managed to get through to Hall and communicate that there actually was oxygen at the South Summit. Fifteen minutes later, Lopsang arrived at the South Summit on his way down from the top and encountered Harris.
^*
At this point, according to Lopsang, Harris must have finally understood that at least two of the oxygen canisters stashed there were full, because he pleaded with the Sherpa to help him carry the life-sustaining gas up to Hall and Hansen on the Hillary Step. “Andy says he will pay me five hundred dollars to bring oxygen to Rob and Doug,” Lopsang recalls. “But I am supposed to take care of just my group. I have to take care of Scott. So I say to Andy, no, I go fast down.”

At 5:30, as Lopsang left the South Summit to resume his descent, he turned to see Harris—who must have been severely debilitated, if his condition when I’d seen him on the South Summit two hours earlier was any indication—plodding slowly up the summit ridge to assist Hall and Hansen. It was an act of heroism that would cost Harris his life.

A few hundred feet below, Scott Fischer was struggling down the Southeast Ridge, growing weaker and weaker. Upon reaching the top of the rock steps at 28,400 feet, he was confronted with a series of short but troublesome rappels that angled along the ridge. Too exhausted to cope with the complexities of the rope work, Fischer slid directly down an adjacent snow slope on his butt. This was easier than following the fixed lines, but once he was below the level of the rock steps it meant that he had to make a laborious 330-foot rising traverse through knee-deep snow to regain the route.