Into Thin Air (39 page)

Perhaps the simplest way to reduce future carnage would be to ban bottled oxygen except for emergency medical use. A few reckless souls might perish trying to reach the summit without gas, but the great bulk of marginally competent climbers would be forced to turn back by their own physical limitations before they ascended high enough to get into serious trouble. And a no-gas regulation would have the corollary benefit of automatically reducing trash and crowding because considerably fewer people would attempt Everest if they knew supplemental oxygen was not an option.

But guiding Everest is a very loosely regulated business, administered by byzantine Third World bureaucracies spectacularly ill-equipped to assess qualifications of guides or clients. Moreover, the two nations that control access to the peak—Nepal and China—are staggeringly poor. Desperate for hard currency, the governments of both countries have a vested interest in issuing as many expensive climbing permits as the market will support, and both are unlikely to enact any policies that significantly limit their revenues.

Analyzing what went wrong on Everest is a useful enough enterprise; it might conceivably prevent some deaths down the road. But to believe that dissecting the tragic events of 1996 in minute detail will actually reduce the future death rate in any meaningful way is wishful thinking. The urge to catalog the myriad blunders in order to “learn from the mistakes” is for the most part an exercise in denial and self-deception. If you can convince yourself that Rob Hall died because he made a string of stupid errors and that you are too clever to repeat those same errors, it makes it easier for you to attempt Everest in the face of some rather compelling evidence that doing so is injudicious.

In fact, the murderous outcome of 1996 was in many ways simply business as usual. Although a record number of people died in the spring climbing season on Everest, the 12 fatalities amounted to only 3 percent of the 398 climbers who ascended higher than Base Camp—which is actually slightly below the historical fatality rate of 3.3 percent. Or here’s another way to look at it: between 1921 and May 1996, 144 people died and the peak was climbed some 630 times—a ratio of one in four. Last spring, 12 climbers died and 84 reached the summit—a ratio of one in seven. Compared to these historical standards, 1996 was actually a safer-than-average year.

Truth be told, climbing Everest has always been an extraordinarily dangerous undertaking and doubtless always will be, whether the people involved are Himalayan neophytes being guided up the peak or world-class mountaineers climbing with their peers. It is worth noting that before the mountain claimed the lives of Hall and Fischer, it had already wiped out a whole corps of elite climbers, including Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker, Matty Hoey, Jake Breitenbach, Mick Burke, Michel Parmentier, Roger Marshall, Ray Genet, and George Leigh Mallory.

In the case of the guided ilk, it rapidly became clear to me in 1996 that few of the clients on the peak (myself included) truly appreciated the gravity of the risks we faced—the thinness of the margin by which human life is sustained above 25,000 feet. Walter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when things go wrong up in the Death Zone—and sooner or later they always do—the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to save a client’s life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives. Four of my teammates died not so much because Rob Hall’s systems were faulty—indeed, nobody’s were better—but because on Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance.

In the midst of all the postmortem ratiocination, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that climbing mountains will never be a safe, predictable, rule-bound enterprise. This is an activity that idealizes risk-taking; the sport’s most celebrated figures have always been those who stick their necks out the farthest and manage to get away with it. Climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of prudence. And that holds especially true for Everest climbers: when presented with a chance to reach the planet’s highest summit, history shows, people are surprisingly quick to abandon good judgment. “Eventually,” warns Tom Hornbein, thirty-three years after his ascent of the West Ridge, “what happened on Everest this season is certain to happen again.”

For evidence that few lessons were learned from the mistakes of May 10, one need look no farther than what happened on Everest in the weeks that immediately followed.

On May 17, two days after Hall’s team quit Base Camp, over on the Tibetan side of the mountain an Austrian named Reinhard Wlasich and a Hungarian teammate, climbing without supplemental oxygen, ascended to the high camp at 27,230 feet on the Northeast Ridge, where they occupied a tent abandoned by the ill-fated Ladakhi expedition. The following morning Wlasich complained that he felt ill and then lost consciousness; a Norwegian doctor who happened to be present determined that the Austrian was suffering from both pulmonary and cerebral edema. Although the doctor administered oxygen and medication, by midnight Wlasich was dead.

Meanwhile, over on the Nepalese side of Everest, David Breashears’s IMAX expedition regrouped and considered their options. Since $5.5 million had been invested in their film project, they had a big incentive to remain on the mountain and undertake a summit attempt. With Breashears, Ed Viesturs, and Robert Schauer, they were without question the strongest, most competent team on the mountain. And despite giving away half of their supply of oxygen to assist rescuers and climbers in need, they were subsequently able to scrounge enough gas from expeditions leaving the mountain to replace most of what they’d lost.

Paula Barton Viesturs, Ed’s wife, had been monitoring the radio as Base Camp manager for the IMAX crew when disaster struck on May 10. A friend of both Hall’s and Fischer’s, she was devastated; Paula assumed that after such a horrifying tragedy the IMAX team would automatically fold up their tents and go home. Then she overheard a radio call between Breashears and another climber, in which the IMAX leader nonchalantly declared that the team intended to take a short break at Base Camp and then go for the summit.

“After all that had happened, I couldn’t believe they’d really go back up there,” Paula admits. “When I heard the radio call, I just lost it.” She was so upset that she left Base Camp and walked down to Tengboche for five days to collect herself.

On Wednesday, May 22, the IMAX team arrived on the South Col, in perfect weather, and set out for the top that night. Ed Viesturs, who had the starring role in the film, reached the summit at 11:00 Thursday morning, without using supplemental oxygen.
^*
Breashears arrived twenty minutes later, followed by Araceli Segarra, Robert Schauer, and Jamling Norgay Sherpa—the son of the first ascender, Tenzing Norgay, and the ninth member of the Norgay clan to climb the peak. All told, sixteen climbers summitted that day, including the Swede who’d ridden his bike to Nepal from Stockholm, Göran Kropp, and Ang Rita Sherpa, whose ascent marked his tenth visit to the top of Everest.

On the way up, Viesturs had climbed past the frozen bodies of Fischer and Hall. “Both Jean [Fischer’s wife] and Jan [Hall’s wife] had asked me to bring some personal effects back for them,” Viesturs says sheepishly. “I knew Scott wore his wedding ring around his neck, and I wanted to bring it down to Jeannie, but I couldn’t force myself to go digging around his body. I just didn’t have it in me.” Instead of collecting any keepsakes, Viesturs sat down next to Fischer during the descent and spent a few minutes alone with him. “Hey, Scott, how you doing?” Ed sadly inquired of his friend. “What happened, man?”

On Friday afternoon, May 24, as the IMAX team was descending from Camp Four to Camp Two, they encountered what remained of the South African Team—Ian Woodall, Cathy O’Dowd, Bruce Herrod, and four Sherpas—at the Yellow Band, on their way to the South Col to make their own summit attempt. “Bruce looked strong, his face looked good,” recalls Breashears. “He shook my hand really hard, congratulated us, said he felt great. Half an hour behind him were Ian and Cathy, collapsed over their ice axes, looking like hell—really out of it.”

“I made a point of spending a little time with them,” Breashears continues. “I knew they were very inexperienced, so I said, ‘Please be careful. You saw what happened up here earlier this month. Remember that getting to the summit is the easy part; it’s getting back down that’s hard.’”

The South Africans set out for the summit that night. O’Dowd and Woodall left the tents twenty minutes after midnight with Sherpas Pemba Tendi, Ang Dorje,
^*
and Jangbu carrying oxygen for them. Herrod seems to have left camp within minutes of the main group, but he fell farther and farther behind as the ascent dragged on. On Saturday, May 25, at 9:50 A.M., Woodall called Patrick Conroy, the Base Camp radio operator, to report that he was on the summit with Pemba and that O’Dowd would be on top in fifteen minutes with Ang Dorje and Jangbu. Woodall said that Herrod, who wasn’t carrying a radio, was some unknown distance below.

Herrod, whom I’d met several times on the mountain, was an amiable thirty-seven-year-old of bearish build. Although he had no previous high-altitude experience, he was a competent mountaineer who’d spent eighteen months in the frigid wastes of Antarctica working as a geophysicist—he was far and away the most accomplished climber remaining on the South African team. Since 1988 he’d been working hard to make a go of it as a freelance photographer, and he hoped reaching the summit of Everest would give his career a needed boost.

When Woodall and O’Dowd were on the summit, as it turned out, Herrod was still far below, struggling up the Southeast Ridge by himself at a dangerously slow pace. Around 12:30 P.M. he passed Woodall, O’Dowd, and the three Sherpas on their way down. Ang Dorje gave Herrod a radio and described where an oxygen bottle had been stashed for him, then Herrod continued alone toward the top. He didn’t reach the summit until just after 5:00 P.M., seven hours after the others, by which time Woodall and O’Dowd were already back in their tent at the South Col.

Coincidentally, at the same moment Herrod radioed down to Base Camp to report that he was on top, his girlfriend, Sue Thompson, happened to call Conroy on the Base Camp satellite phone from her London home. “When Patrick told me that Bruce was on the summit,” Thompson recalls, “I said, ‘Fuck! He can’t be on the summit this late—it’s five-fifteen! I don’t like this.’”

A moment later Conroy patched Thompson’s phone call through to Herrod on top of Everest. “Bruce sounded compos mentis,” she says. “He was aware that he’d taken a long time to get there, but he sounded as normal as one can sound at that altitude, having taken his oxygen mask off to speak. He didn’t even seem particularly breathless.”

Nevertheless, it had taken Herrod seventeen hours to climb from the South Col to the summit. Although there was little wind, clouds now enveloped the upper mountain, and darkness was fast approaching. Completely alone on the roof of the world, extremely fatigued, he must have been out of oxygen, or nearly out. “That he was up there that late, with nobody else around, was crazy,” says his former teammate, Andy de Klerk. “It’s absolutely boggling.”

Herrod had been up on the South Col from the evening of May 9 through May 12. He’d felt the ferocity of that storm, heard the desperate radio calls for help, seen Beck Weathers crippled with horrible frostbite. Early on during his ascent of May 25, Herrod climbed right past the corpse of Scott Fischer, and several hours later at the South Summit he would have had to step over Rob Hall’s lifeless legs. Apparently, the bodies made little impression on Herrod, however, for despite his lagging pace and the lateness of the hour he pressed onward to the top.

There was no further radio transmission from Herrod after his 5:15 call from the summit. “We sat waiting for him at Camp Four with the radio on,” O’Dowd explained in an interview published in the Johannesburg
Mail & Guardian
. “We were terribly tired and eventually fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning at about 5:00 A.M., and he hadn’t radioed, I realised we had lost him.”

Bruce Herrod is now presumed dead, the twelfth casualty of the season.

* Viesturs had previously ascended Everest in 1990 and ’91 without gas. In 1994 he climbed it a third time, with Rob Hall; on that ascent he used bottled oxygen because he was guiding the peak and thought it would be irresponsible to do so without it.

* A reminder: the Sherpa named Ang Dorje on the South African team is not the same person as the Sherpa named Ang Dorje on Rob Hall’s team.