Into Thin Air (35 page)

The ceremony of innocence is drowned
.

William Butler Yeats

“The Second Coming”

When I wobbled back to Camp Four around 7:30 Saturday morning, May 11, the actuality of what had happened—of what was still happening—began to sink in with paralyzing force. I was physically and emotionally wrecked after having just spent an hour scouring the South Col for Andy Harris; the search had left me convinced that he was dead. Radio calls my teammate Stuart Hutchison had been monitoring from Rob Hall on the South Summit made clear that our leader was in desperate straits and that Doug Hansen was dead. Members of Scott Fischer’s team who’d spent most of the night lost on the Col reported that Yasuko Namba and Beck Weathers were dead. And Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau were believed to be dead or very near death, 1,200 feet above the tents.

Confronted with this tally, my mind balked and retreated into a weird, almost robotic state of detachment. I felt emotionally anesthetized yet hyperaware, as if I had fled into a bunker deep inside my skull and was peering out at the wreckage around me through a narrow, armored slit. As I gazed numbly at the sky, it seemed to have turned a preternaturally pale shade of blue, bleached of all but the faintest remnant of color. The jagged horizon was limned with a coronalike glow that flickered and pulsed before my eyes. I wondered if I had begun the downward spiral into the nightmarish territory of the mad.

After a night at 26,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, I was even weaker and more exhausted than I had been the previous evening after coming down from the summit. Unless we somehow acquired some more gas or descended to a lower camp, I knew that my teammates and I would continue to deteriorate rapidly.

The fast-track acclimatization schedule followed by Hall and most other modern Everesters is remarkably efficient: it allows climbers to embark for the summit after spending a relatively brief four-week period above 17,000 feet—including just a single overnight acclimatization excursion to 24,000 feet.
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Yet this strategy is predicated on the assumption that everyone will have a continuous supply of bottled oxygen above 24,000 feet. When that ceases to be the case, all bets are off.

Searching out the rest of our crew, I found Frank Fischbeck and Lou Kasischke lying in a nearby tent. Lou was delirious and snow-blind, completely without sight, unable to do anything for himself, muttering incoherently. Frank looked as if he were in a severe state of shock, but he was doing his best to take care of Lou. John Taske was in another tent with Mike Groom; both men appeared to be asleep or unconscious. As rickety and feeble as I felt, it was obvious that everyone else except Stuart Hutchison was faring even worse.

As I went from tent to tent I tried to locate some oxygen, but all the canisters I found were empty. The ongoing hypoxia, coupled with my profound fatigue, exacerbated the sense of chaos and despair. Thanks to the relentless din of nylon flapping in the wind, it was impossible to communicate from tent to tent. The batteries in our one remaining radio were nearly depleted. An atmosphere of terminal entropy pervaded the camp, heightened by the fact that our team—which for the preceding six weeks had been encouraged to rely thoroughly on our guides—was now suddenly and utterly without leadership: Rob and Andy were gone, and although Groom was present, the ordeal of the previous night had taken a terrible toll on him. Seriously frostbitten, lying insensate in his tent, at least for the time being he was unable even to speak.

With all our guides hors de combat, Hutchison stepped up to fill the leadership vacuum. A high-strung, self-serious young man from the upper crust of English-speaking Montreal society, he was a brilliant medical researcher who went on a big mountaineering expedition every two or three years but otherwise had little time for climbing. As the crisis mounted at Camp Four, he did his best to rise to the occasion.

While I tried to recover from my fruitless search for Harris, Hutchison organized a team of four Sherpas to locate the bodies of Weathers and Namba, who had been left on the far side of the Col when Anatoli Boukreev brought in Charlotte Fox, Sandy Pittman, and Tim Madsen. The Sherpa search party, headed by Lhakpa Chhiri, departed ahead of Hutchison, who was so exhausted and befuddled that he’d forgotten to put his boots on and had tried to leave camp in his light, smooth-soled liners. Only when Lhakpa pointed out the blunder did Hutchison return for his boots. Following Boukreev’s directions, the Sherpas quickly found the two bodies on a slope of gray ice freckled with boulders near the lip of the Kangshung Face. Extremely superstitious about the dead, as many Sherpas are, they halted 60 or 70 feet away and waited for Hutchison.

“Both bodies were partially buried,” Hutchison recalls. “Their backpacks were maybe 100 feet away, uphill from them. Their faces and torsos were covered with snow; only their hands and feet were sticking out. The wind was just screaming across the Col.” The first body he came to turned out to be Namba, but Hutchison couldn’t discern who it was until he knelt in the gale and chipped a three-inch-thick carapace of ice from her face. Stunned, he discovered that she was still breathing. Both her gloves were gone, and her bare hands appeared to be frozen solid. Her eyes were dilated. The skin on her face was the color of white porcelain. “It was terrible,” Hutchison recalls. “I was overwhelmed. She was very near death. I didn’t know what to do.”

He turned his attention to Beck, who lay twenty feet away. Beck’s head was also caked with a thick armor of frost. Balls of ice the size of grapes were matted to his hair and eyelids. After clearing the frozen detritus from Beck’s face, Hutchison discovered that the Texan was still alive, too: “Beck was mumbling something, I think, but I couldn’t tell what he was trying to say. His right glove was missing and he had terrible frostbite. I tried to get him to sit up but he couldn’t. He was as close to death as a person can be and still be breathing.”

Horribly shaken, Hutchison went over to the Sherpas and asked Lhakpa’s advice. Lhakpa, an Everest veteran respected by Sherpas and sahibs alike for his mountain savvy, urged Hutchison to leave Beck and Yasuko where they lay. Even if they survived long enough to be dragged back to Camp Four, they would certainly die before they could be carried down to Base Camp, and attempting a rescue would needlessly jeopardize the lives of the other climbers on the Col, most of whom were going to have enough trouble getting themselves down safely.

Hutchison decided that Lhakpa was right—there was only one choice, however difficult: let nature take its inevitable course with Beck and Yasuko, and save the group’s resources for those who could actually be helped. It was a classic act of triage. When Hutchison returned to camp he was on the verge of tears and looked like a ghost. At his urging we roused Taske and Groom and then crowded into their tent to discuss what to do about Beck and Yasuko. The conversation that ensued was anguished and halting. We avoided making eye contact. After five minutes, however, all four of us concurred: Hutchison’s decision to leave Beck and Yasuko where they lay was the proper course of action.

We also debated heading down to Camp Two that afternoon, but Taske was insistent that we not descend from the Col while Hall was marooned on the South Summit. “I won’t even consider leaving without him,” he pronounced. It was a moot point, regardless: Kasischke and Groom were in such bad shape that going anywhere was out of the question for the time being.

“By then I was very worried that we were headed for a repeat of what happened on K2 in 1986,” says Hutchison. On July 4 of that year, seven Himalayan veterans—including the legendary Austrian
bergsteiger
Kurt Diemberger—set out for the summit of the world’s second-highest mountain. Six of the seven reached the top, but during the descent a severe storm struck the upper slopes of K2, pinning the climbers in their high camp at 26,250 feet. As the blizzard continued without letup for five days, they grew weaker and weaker. When the storm finally broke, only Diemberger and one other person made it down alive.

Saturday morning, as we discussed what to do about Namba and Weathers and whether to descend, Neal Beidleman was mustering Fischer’s team from their tents and hectoring them to start down from the Col. “Everyone was so messed up from the night before that it was really hard getting our group up and out of the tents—I practically had to punch some people to get them to put their boots on,” he says. “But I was adamant that we leave immediately. In my view, staying at twenty-six thousand feet longer than absolutely necessary is asking for trouble. I could see that rescue efforts were under way for Scott and Rob, so I turned my full attention to getting our clients off the Col and down to a lower camp.”

While Boukreev remained behind at Camp Four to wait for Fischer, Beidleman herded his group slowly down from the Col. At 25,000 feet he paused to give Pittman another injection of dexamethasone, and then everyone stopped for a long time at Camp Three to rest and rehydrate. “When I saw those guys,” says David Breashears, who was at Camp Three when Beidleman’s crew arrived, “I was astounded. They looked like they’d been through a five-month war. Sandy started to break down—she was crying. ‘It was terrible! I just gave up and lay down to die!’ All of them appeared to be in severe shock.”

Just before dark, the last of Beidleman’s group was working their way down the steep ice of the lower Lhotse Face, when, 500 feet from the bottom of the fixed ropes, they were met by some Sherpas from a Nepali cleanup expedition who’d come up to assist them. As they resumed their descent, a volley of grapefruit-sized stones came whizzing down from the upper mountain and one of them struck a Sherpa in the back of the head. “The rock just creamed him,” says Beidleman, who observed the incident from a short distance above.

“It was sickening,” Klev Schoening recalls. “It sounded like he’d been hit with a baseball bat.” The force of the blow chipped a divot as large as a silver dollar from the Sherpa’s skull, knocked him unconscious, and sent him into cardiopulmonary arrest. As he flopped over and started sliding down the rope, Schoening jumped in front of him and managed to halt his fall. But a moment later, as Schoening cradled the Sherpa in his arms, a second rock came down and smashed into the Sherpa; once again the man took the impact squarely on the back of his head.

Despite this second blow, after a few minutes the stricken man gasped violently and began breathing again. Beidleman managed to lower him to the bottom of the Lhotse Face, where a dozen of the Sherpa’s teammates met them and carried the injured man to Camp Two. At that point, says Beidleman, “Klev and I just stared at each other in disbelief. It was like, ‘What’s going on here? What have we done to make this mountain so angry?’”

Throughout April and early May, Rob Hall had expressed his concern that one or more of the less competent teams might blunder into a bad jam, compelling our group to rescue them, thereby ruining our summit bid! Now, ironically, it was Hall’s expedition that was in grave trouble, and other teams were in the position of having to come to our aid. Without rancor, three such groups—Todd Burleson’s Alpine Ascents International expedition, David Breashears’s IMAX expedition, and Mal Duff’s commercial expedition—immediately postponed their own summit plans in order to assist the stricken climbers.

The day before—Friday, May 10—while we in Hall’s and Fischer’s teams were climbing from Camp Four toward the top, the Alpine Ascents International expedition headed by Burleson and Pete Athans was arriving at Camp Three. On Saturday morning, as soon as they learned of the disaster that was unfolding above, Burleson and Athans left their clients at 24,000 feet in care of their third guide, Jim Williams, and rushed up to the South Col to help.

Breashears, Ed Viesturs, and the rest of the IMAX team happened to be in Camp Two at that time; Breashears immediately suspended filming in order to direct all of his expedition’s resources toward the rescue effort. First, he relayed a message to me that some spare batteries were stashed in one of the IMAX tents on the Col; by midafternoon I’d found them, allowing Hall’s team to re-establish radio contact with the lower camps. Then Breashears offered his expedition’s supply of oxygen—fifty canisters that had been laboriously carried to 26,000 feet—to the ailing climbers and would-be rescuers on the Col. Even though this threatened to put his $5.5 million film project in jeopardy, he made the crucial gas available without hesitation.