Into Thin Air (36 page)

Athans and Burleson arrived at Camp Four in midmorning, immediately began distributing IMAX gas bottles to those of us starved for oxygen, then waited to see what came of the Sherpas’ efforts to rescue Hall, Fischer, and Gau. At 4:35 P.M., Burleson was standing outside the tents when he noticed someone walking slowly toward camp with a peculiar, stiff-kneed gait. “Hey, Pete,” he called to Athans. “Check this out. Somebody’s coming into camp.” The person’s bare right hand, naked to the frigid wind and grotesquely frostbitten, was outstretched in a kind of odd, frozen salute. Whoever it was reminded Athans of a mummy in a low-budget horror film. As the mummy lurched into camp, Burleson realized that it was none other than Beck Weathers, somehow risen from the dead.

The previous night, huddling with Groom, Beidleman, Namba, and the other members of that group, Weathers had felt himself “growing colder and colder. I’d lost my right glove. My face was freezing. My hands were freezing. I felt myself growing really numb and then it got really hard to stay focused, and finally I just sort of slid off into oblivion.”

Through the rest of the night and most of the following day, Beck lay out on the ice, exposed to the merciless wind, cataleptic and barely alive. He has no recollection of Boukreev coming for Pittman, Fox, and Madsen. Nor does he remember Hutchison finding him in the morning and chipping the ice from his face. He remained comatose for more than twelve hours. Then, late Saturday afternoon, for some unknowable reason a light went on in the reptilian core of Beck’s inanimate brain and he floated back to consciousness.

“Initially I thought I was in a dream,” Weathers recalls. “When I first came to, I thought I was laying in bed. I didn’t feel cold or uncomfortable. I sort of rolled onto my side, got my eyes open, and there was my right hand staring me in the face. Then I saw how badly frozen it was, and that helped bring me around to reality. Finally I woke up enough to recognize that I was in deep shit and the cavalry wasn’t coming so I better do something about it myself.”

Although Beck was blind in his right eye and able to focus his left eye within a radius of only three or four feet, he started walking directly into the wind, deducing correctly that camp lay in that direction. Had he been mistaken, he would have stumbled immediately down the Kangshung Face, the edge of which lay just thirty feet in the opposite direction. About ninety minutes later he encountered “some unnaturally smooth, bluish-looking rocks,” which turned out to be the tents of Camp Four.

Hutchison and I were in our tent monitoring a radio call from Rob Hall on the South Summit when Burleson came rushing over. “Doctor! We need you bad!” he yelled to Stuart from just outside the door. “Grab your stuff. Beck just walked in, and he’s in bad shape!” Struck dumb by Beck’s miraculous resurrection, an exhausted Hutchison crawled outside to answer the call.

He, Athans, and Burleson placed Beck in an unoccupied tent, bundled him into two sleeping bags with several hot-water bottles, and put an oxygen mask over his face. “At that point,” Hutchison confesses, “none of us thought Beck was going to survive the night. I could barely detect his carotid pulse, which is the last pulse you lose before you die. He was critically ill. And even if he did live until morning, I couldn’t imagine how we were going to get him down.”

By now the three Sherpas who had gone up to rescue Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau were back in camp after bringing down Gau; they’d left Fischer on a ledge at 27,200 feet after concluding that he was beyond saving. Having just seen Beck walk into camp after being given up for dead, however, Anatoli Boukreev was unwilling to write Fischer off. At 5:00 P.M., as the storm intensified, the Russian headed up alone to attempt to save him.

“I find Scott at seven o’clock, maybe it is seven-thirty or eight,” says Boukreev. “By then it is dark. Storm is very strong. His oxygen mask is around face, but bottle is empty. He is not wearing mittens; hands completely bare. Down suit is unzipped, pulled off his shoulder, one arm is outside clothing. There is nothing I can do. Scott is dead.” With a heavy heart, Boukreev lashed Fischer’s backpack across his face as a shroud and left him on the ledge where he lay. Then he collected Scott’s camera, ice ax, and favorite pocketknife—which Beidleman would later give to Scott’s nine-year-old son in Seattle—and descended into the tempest.

The gale that struck on Saturday evening was even more powerful than the one that had lashed the Col the night before. By the time Boukreev made it back down to Camp Four the visibility was down to a few yards, and he almost failed to find the tents.

Breathing bottled oxygen (thanks to the IMAX team) for the first time in thirty hours, I fell into a tortured, fitful sleep despite the racket produced by the furiously flapping tent. Shortly after midnight, I was in the midst of a nightmare about Andy—he was falling down the Lhotse Face trailing a rope, demanding to know why I hadn’t held on to the other end—when Hutchison shook me awake. “Jon,” he shouted above the roar of the storm, “I’m concerned about the tent. Do you think it’s going to be O.K.?”

As I struggled groggily up from the depths of my troubled reverie like a drowning man rising to the ocean’s surface, it took me a minute to notice why Stuart was so worried: the wind had flattened half our shelter, which rocked violently with each successive gust. Several of the poles were badly bent, and my headlamp revealed that two of the main seams were in imminent danger of being ripped asunder. Flurries of fine snow particles filled the air inside the tent, blanketing everything with frost. The wind was blowing harder than anything I’d ever experienced anywhere, even on the Patagonian Ice Cap, a place reputed to be the windiest on the planet. If the tent disintegrated before morning, we would be in grave trouble.

Stuart and I gathered up our boots and all our clothing and then positioned ourselves on the windward side of the shelter. Bracing our backs and shoulders against the damaged poles, for the next three hours we leaned into the hurricane, despite our surpassing fatigue, holding up the battered nylon dome as if our lives depended on it. I kept imagining Rob up on the South Summit at 28,700 feet, his oxygen gone, exposed to the full savagery of this storm with no shelter whatsoever—but it was so disturbing that I tried not to think about it.

Just before dawn on Sunday, May 12, Stuart’s oxygen ran out. “Without it I could feel myself becoming really cold and hypothermic,” he says. “I began to lose feeling in my hands and feet. I worried that I was slipping over the edge, that I might not be able to get down from the Col. And I worried that if I didn’t get down that morning, I might never get down.” Giving Stuart my oxygen bottle, I rooted around until I found another one with some gas left in it, and then we both began packing for the descent.

When I ventured outside, I saw that at least one of the unoccupied tents had blown completely off the Col. Then I noticed Ang Dorje, standing alone in the appalling wind, sobbing inconsolably over the loss of Rob. After the expedition, when I told his Canadian friend Marion Boyd about his grief, she explained that “Ang Dorje sees his role on this earth as keeping people safe—he and I have talked about it a lot. It’s all-important for him in terms of his religion, and preparing for the next go-around in life.
^*
Even though Rob was the expedition leader, Ang Dorje would see it as his responsibility to ensure the safety of Rob and Doug Hansen and the others. So when they died, he couldn’t help but blame himself.”

Worried that Ang Dorje was so distraught that he might refuse to go down, Hutchison beseeched him to descend from the Col immediately. Then, at 8:30 A.M.—believing that by now Rob, Andy, Doug, Scott, Yasuko, and Beck were all surely dead—a badly frostbitten Mike Groom forced himself out of his tent, gamely assembled Hutchison, Taske, Fischbeck, and Kasischke, and started leading them down the mountain.

In the absence of any other guides, I volunteered to fill that role and bring up the rear. As our despondent group filed slowly away from Camp Four toward the Geneva Spur, I braced myself to make one last visit to Beck, whom I assumed had died in the night. I located his tent, which had been blasted flat by the hurricane, and saw that both doors were wide open. When I peered inside, however, I was shocked to discover that Beck was still alive.

He was lying on his back across the floor of the collapsed shelter, shivering convulsively. His face was hideously swollen; splotches of deep, ink-black frostbite covered his nose and cheeks. The storm had blown both sleeping bags from his body, leaving him exposed to the subzero wind, and with his frozen hands he’d been powerless to pull the bags back over himself or zip the tent closed. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he wailed when he saw me, his features twisted into a rictus of agony and desperation. “What’s a guy have to do to get a little help around here!” He’d been screaming for help for two or three hours, but the storm had smothered his cries.

Beck had awakened in the middle of the night to find that “the storm had collapsed the tent and was blowing it apart. The wind was pressing the tent wall so hard against my face that I couldn’t breathe. It would let up for a second, then come slamming back down into my face and chest, knocking the wind out of me. On top of everything else, my right arm was swelling up, and I had this stupid wristwatch on, so as my arm got bigger and bigger, the watch got tighter and tighter until it was cutting off most of the blood supply to my hand. But with my hands messed up so badly, there was no way I could get the damn thing off. I yelled for help, but nobody came. It was one hell of a long night. Man, I was glad to see your face when you stuck your head inside the door.”

Upon first finding Beck in the tent, I was so shocked by his hideous condition—and by the unforgivable way that we’d let him down yet again—I nearly broke into tears. “Everything’s going to be O.K.,” I lied, choking back my sobs as I pulled the sleeping bags over him, zipped the tent doors shut, and tried to re-erect the damaged shelter. “Don’t worry, pal. Everything’s under control now.”

As soon as I made Beck as comfortable as possible, I got on the radio to Dr. Mackenzie at Base Camp. “Caroline!” I begged in a hysterical voice. “What should I do about Beck? He’s still alive, but I don’t think he can survive much longer. He’s in really bad shape!”

“Try to remain calm, Jon,” she replied. “You need to go down with Mike and the rest of the group. Where are Pete and Todd? Ask them to look after Beck, then start down.” Frantic, I roused Athans and Burleson, who immediately rushed over to Beck’s tent with a canteen of hot tea. As I hurried out of camp to rejoin my teammates, Athans was getting ready to inject four milligrams of dexamethasone into the dying Texan’s thigh. These were praiseworthy gestures, but it was hard to imagine that they would do him much good.

* In 1996, Rob Hall’s team spent just eight nights at Camp Two (21,300 feet) or higher before setting out for the summit from Base Camp, which is a pretty typical acclimatization period nowadays. Prior to 1990, climbers commonly spent considerably more time at Camp Two or higher—including at least one acclimatization sortie to 26,000 feet—before embarking for the top. Although the value of acclimatizing as high as 26,000 feet is debatable (the deleterious effects of spending extra time at such extreme altitude may well offset the benefits), there is little question that extending the current eight- or nine-night acclimatization period at 21,000 to 24,000 feet would provide a greater margin of safety.

* Devout Buddhists believe in
sonam
—an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.

9:45 A.M., MAY 12, 1996 • 25,900 FEET

The one great advantage which inexperience confers on the would-be mountaineer is that he is not bogged down by tradition or precedence. To him, all things appear simple, and he chooses straightforward solutions to the problems he faces. Often, of course, it defeats the success he is seeking, and sometimes it has tragic results, but the man himself doesn’t know this when he sets out on his adventure. Maurice Wilson, Earl Denman, Klavs Becker-Larsen—none of them knew much about mountain climbing or they would not have set out on their hopeless quests, yet, untrammelled by techniques, determination carried them a long way
.

Walt Unsworth

Fifteen minutes after leaving the South Col on Sunday morning, May 12, I caught up to my teammates as they were descending from the crest of the Geneva Spur. It was a pathetic sight: we were all so debilitated that it took the group an incredibly long time just to descend the few hundred feet to the snow slope immediately below. The most wrenching thing, however, was our shrunken size: three days earlier, when we had ascended this terrain we’d numbered eleven; now there were only six of us.