Into Thin Air (7 page)

In 1988, a guide from Auckland named Gary Ball became Hall’s primary climbing partner and closest friend. Ball reached the summit of Everest with Hall in 1990, and soon after returning to New Zealand they concocted a scheme to climb the highest summits on each of the seven continents, à la Dick Bass—but to raise the bar by doing all seven of them in seven months.
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With Everest, the most difficult of the septet, already taken care of, Hall and Ball wangled backing from a big electrical utility, Power Build, and were on their way. On December 12, 1990, mere hours before their seven-month deadline was due to expire, they reached the crest of the seventh summit—the Vinson Massif, at 16,067 feet the highest point in Antarctica—to considerable fanfare throughout their homeland.

Despite their success, Hall and Ball were concerned about their long-term prospects in the professional climbing racket. “To continue receiving sponsorship from companies,” explains Atkinson, “a climber has to keep upping the ante. The next climb has to be harder and more spectacular than the last. It becomes an ever-tightening spiral; eventually you’re not up to the challenge anymore. Rob and Gary understood that sooner or later they wouldn’t be up to performing at the cutting edge, or they’d have an unlucky accident and get killed.

“So they decided to switch direction and get into high-altitude guiding. When you’re guiding you don’t get to do the climbs you necessarily most want to do; the challenge comes from getting clients up and down, which is a different sort of satisfaction. But it’s a more sustainable career than endlessly chasing after sponsorships. There’s a limitless supply of clients out there if you offer them a good product.”

During the “seven summits in seven months” extravaganza, Hall and Ball formulated a plan to go into business together guiding clients up the Seven Summits. Convinced that an untapped market of dreamers existed with ample cash but insufficient experience to climb the world’s great mountains on their own, Hall and Ball launched an enterprise they christened Adventure Consultants.

Almost immediately, they racked up an impressive record. In May 1992 Hall and Ball led six clients to the summit of Everest. A year later they guided another group of seven to the top on an afternoon when forty people reached the summit in a single day. They came home from that expedition, however, to unanticipated public criticism from Sir Edmund Hillary, who decried Hall’s role in the growing commercialization of Everest. The crowds of novices being escorted to the top for a fee, huffed Sir Edmund, “were engendering disrespect for the mountain.”

In New Zealand, Hillary is one of the most honored figures in the nation; his craggy visage even stares out from the face of the five-dollar bill. It saddened and embarrassed Hall to be publicly castigated by this demigod, this ur-climber who had been one of his childhood heroes. “Hillary is regarded as a living national treasure here in New Zealand,” says Atkinson. “What he says carries a lot of weight, and it must have really hurt to be criticized by him. Rob wanted to make a public statement to defend himself, but he realized that going up against such a venerated figure in the media was a no-win situation.”

Then, five months after the Hillary brouhaha flared, Hall was rocked by an even greater blow: in October 1993, Gary Ball died of cerebral edema—swelling of the brain brought on by high altitude—during an attempt on 26,795-foot Dhaulagiri, the world’s sixth-tallest mountain. Ball drew his last, labored breaths in Hall’s arms, lying comatose in a small tent high on the peak. The next day Hall buried his friend in a crevasse.

In a New Zealand television interview following the expedition, Hall somberly described how he took their favorite climbing rope and lowered Ball’s body into the depths of the glacier. “A climbing rope is designed to sort of attach you together, and you never let go of it,” he said. “And I had to let it just sort of slip through me hands.”

“Rob was devastated when Gary died,” says Helen Wilton, who worked as Hall’s Base Camp manager on Everest in 1993, ’95, and ’96. “But he dealt with it very quietly. That was Rob’s way—to get on with things.” Hall resolved to carry on alone with Adventure Consultants. In his systematic fashion he continued to refine the company’s infrastructure and services—and continued to be extraordinarily successful at escorting amateur climbers to the summits of big, remote mountains.

Between 1990 and 1995, Hall was responsible for putting thirty-nine climbers on the summit of Everest—three more ascents than had been made in the first twenty years after Sir Edmund Hillary’s inaugural climb. With justification, Hall advertised that Adventure Consultants was “the world leader in Everest Climbing, with more ascents than any other organisation.” The brochure he sent to prospective clients declared,

So, you have a thirst for adventure! Perhaps you dream of visiting seven continents or standing on top of a tall mountain. Most of us never dare act on our dreams and scarcely venture to share them or admit to great inner yearnings.

Adventure Consultants specialises in organising and guiding mountain climbing adventures. Skilled in the practicalities of developing dreams into reality, we work with you to reach your goal. We will not drag you up a mountain—you will have to work hard—but we guarantee to maximise the safety and success of your adventure.

For those who dare to face their dreams, the experience offers something special beyond the power of words to describe. We invite you to climb your mountain with us.

By 1996 Hall was charging $65,000 a head to guide clients to the top of the world. By any measure this is a lot of money—it equals the mortgage on my Seattle home—and the quoted price did not include airfare to Nepal or personal equipment. No company’s fee was higher—indeed, some of his competitors charged a third as much. But thanks to Hall’s phenomenal success rate he had no trouble filling the roster for this, his eighth expedition to Everest. If you were hell-bent on climbing the peak and could somehow come up with the dough, Adventure Consultants was the obvious choice.

On the morning of March 31, two days after arriving in Kathmandu, the assembled members of the 1996 Adventure Consultants Everest Expedition walked across the tarmac of Tribhuvan International Airport and climbed aboard a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter operated by Asian Airlines. A dented relic of the Afghan war, it was as big as a school bus, seated twenty-six passengers, and looked like it had been riveted together in somebody’s backyard. The flight engineer latched the door and handed out wads of cotton to stuff in our ears, and the behemoth chopper lumbered into the air with a head-splitting roar.

The floor was piled high with duffels, backpacks, and cardboard boxes. Jammed into jump seats around the perimeter of the aircraft was the human cargo, facing inward, knees wedged against chests. The deafening whine of the turbines made conversation out of the question. It wasn’t a comfortable ride, but nobody complained.

In 1963, Tom Hornbein’s expedition began the long trek to Everest from Banepa, a dozen miles outside Kathmandu, and spent thirty-one days on the trail before arriving at Base Camp. Like most modern Everesters, we’d elected to leapfrog over the majority of those steep, dusty miles; the chopper was supposed to set us down in the distant village of Lukla, 9,200 feet up in the Himalaya. Assuming we didn’t crash en route, the flight would trim some three weeks from the span of Hornbein’s trek.

Glancing around the helicopter’s capacious interior, I tried to fix the names of my teammates in my memory. In addition to guides Rob Hall and Andy Harris there was Helen Wilton, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of four who was returning for her third season as Base Camp manager. Caroline Mackenzie—an accomplished climber and physician in her late twenties—was the expedition doctor and, like Helen, would be going no higher than Base Camp. Lou Kasischke, the gentlemanly lawyer I’d met at the airport, had climbed six of the Seven Summits—as had Yasuko Namba, forty-seven, a taciturn personnel director who worked at the Tokyo branch of Federal Express. Beck Weathers, forty-nine, was a garrulous pathologist from Dallas. Stuart Hutchison, thirty-four, attired in a Ren and Stimpy T-shirt, was a cerebral, somewhat wonkish Canadian cardiologist on leave from a research fellowship. John Taske, at fifty-six the oldest member of our group, was an anesthesiologist from Brisbane who’d taken up climbing after retiring from the Australian army. Frank Fischbeck, fifty-three, a dapper, genteel publisher from Hong Kong, had attempted Everest three times with one of Hall’s competitors; in 1994 he’d gotten all the way to the South Summit, just 330 vertical feet below the top. Doug Hansen, forty-six, was an American postal worker who’d gone to Everest with Hall in 1995 and, like Fischbeck, had reached the South Summit before turning back.

I wasn’t sure what to make of my fellow clients. In outlook and experience they were nothing like the hard-core climbers with whom I usually went into the mountains. But they seemed like nice, decent folks, and there wasn’t a certifiable asshole in the entire group—at least not one who was showing his true colors at this early stage of the proceedings. Nevertheless, I didn’t have much in common with any of my teammates except Doug. A wiry, hard-partying man with a prematurely weathered face that brought to mind an old football, he’d been a postal worker for more than twenty-seven years. He told me that he’d paid for the trip by working the night shift and doing construction jobs by day. Because I’d earned my living as a carpenter for eight years before becoming a writer—and because the tax bracket we shared set us conspicuously apart from the other clients—I already felt comfortable around Doug in a way that I didn’t with the others.

For the most part I attributed my growing unease to the fact that I’d never climbed as a member of such a large group—a group of complete strangers, no less. Aside from one Alaska trip I’d done twenty-one years earlier, all my previous expeditions had been undertaken with one or two trusted friends, or alone.

In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber’s actions can affect the welfare of the entire team. The consequences of a poorly tied knot, a stumble, a dislodged rock, or some other careless deed are as likely to be felt by the perpetrator’s colleagues as by the perpetrator. Hence it’s not surprising that climbers are typically wary of joining forces with those whose bona fides are unknown to them.

But trust in one’s partners is a luxury denied those who sign on as clients on a guided ascent; one must put one’s faith in the guide instead. As the helicopter droned toward Lukla, I suspected that each of my teammates hoped as fervently as I that Hall had been careful to weed out clients of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another’s shortcomings.

* It took Bass four years to ascend the Seven Summits.

MARCH 31, 1996 • 9,186 FEET

There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind
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Thomas F. Hornbein

From Lukla the way to Everest led north through the crepuscular gorge of the Dudh Kosi, an icy, boulder-choked river that churned with glacial runoff. We spent the first night of our trek in the hamlet of Phakding, a collection of a half dozen homes and lodges crowded onto a shelf of level ground on a slope above the river. The air took on a wintry sting as night fell, and in the morning, as I headed up the trail, a glaze of frost sparkled from the rhododendron leaves. But the Everest region lies at 28 degrees north latitude—just beyond the tropics—and as soon as the sun rose high enough to penetrate the depths of the canyon the temperature soared. By noon, after we’d crossed a wobbly footbridge suspended high over the river—the fourth river crossing of the day—rivulets of sweat were dripping off my chin, and I peeled down to shorts and a T-shirt.