Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

  Lopsang left Fischer and Gau on a ledge 1,200 feet above the South Col and fought his way down through the storm. Unable to see, he got far off route toward the west, ended up below the level of the Col before he realized his error, and was forced to climb back up the northern margin of the Lhotse Face* to locate Camp Four. Around midnight, nevertheless, he made it to safety. “I go to Anatoli tent,” reported Lopsang. “I tell to Anatoli, ‘Please, you go up, Scott is very sick, he cannot walk.’ Then I go to my tent, just fall asleep, sleep like dead person.”

  Guy Cotter, a longtime friend of both Hall’s and Harris’s, happened to be a few miles from Everest Base Camp on the afternoon of May 10, where he was guiding an expedition on Pumori, and had been monitoring Hall’s radio transmissions throughout the day. At 2:15 P.M. he talked to Hall on the summit, and everything sounded fine. At 4:30, however, Hall called down to say that Doug was out of oxygen and unable to move. “I need a bottle of gas!” Hall pleaded in a desperate, breathless voice to anyone on the mountain who might be listening. “Somebody, please! I’m begging you!”

  Cotter grew very alarmed. At 4:53 he got on the radio and strongly urged Hall to descend to the South Summit. “The call was mostly to convince him to come down and get some gas,” says Cotter, “because we knew he wasn’t going to be able to do anything for Doug without it. Rob said he could get himself down O.K., but not with Doug.”

  But forty minutes later, Hall was still with Hansen atop the Hillary Step, going nowhere. During radio calls from Hall at 5:36, and again at 5:57, Cotter implored his mate to leave Hansen and come down alone. “I know I sound like the bastard for telling Rob to abandon his client,” confessed Cotter, “but by then it was obvious that leaving Doug was his only choice.” Hall, however, wouldn’t consider going down without Hansen.

  There was no further word from Hall until the middle of the night. At 2:46 A.M., Cotter woke up in his tent below Pumori to hear a long, broken transmission, probably unintended: Hall had been wearing a remote microphone clipped to the shoulder strap of his backpack, which was occasionally keyed on by mistake. In this instance, says Cotter, “I suspect Rob didn’t even know he was transmitting. I could hear someone yelling—it might have been Rob, but I couldn’t be sure because the wind was so loud in the background. But he was saying something like, ‘Keep moving! Keep going!’ presumably to Doug, urging him on.”

  If this was indeed the case, it meant that in the wee hours of the morning Hall and Hansen—perhaps accompanied by Harris—were still struggling from the Hillary Step toward the South Summit through the gale. And if so, it also meant that it had taken them more than ten hours to move down a stretch of ridge that was typically covered by descending climbers in less than half an hour.

  Of course, this is highly speculative. All that is certain is that Hall called down at 5:57 P.M. At that point, he and Hansen were still on the Step; and at 4:43 on the morning of May 11, when he next spoke to Base Camp, he had descended to the South Summit. And at that point neither Hansen nor Harris was with him.

  In a series of transmissions over the next two hours, Rob sounded disturbingly confused and irrational. During the call at 4:43 A.M., he told Caroline Mackenzie, our Base Camp doctor, that his legs no longer worked, and that he was “too clumsy to move.” In a ragged, barely audible voice, Rob croaked, “Harold was with me last night, but he doesn’t seem to be with me now. He was very weak.” Then, obviously befuddled, he asked, “Was Harold with me? Can you tell me that?”*

  By this point Hall had possession of two full oxygen canisters, but the valves on his mask were so choked with ice that he couldn’t get the gas to flow. He indicated, however, that he was attempting to de-ice the oxygen rig, “which,” says Cotter, “made us all feel a little better. It was the first positive thing we’d heard.”

  At 5:00 A.M., Base Camp patched through a call on the satellite telephone to Jan Arnold, Hall’s wife, in Christchurch, New Zealand. She had climbed to the summit of Everest with Hall in 1993, and she entertained no illusions about the gravity of her husband’s predicament. “My heart really sank when I heard his voice,” she recalls. “He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I’d been up there; I knew what it could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, ‘You might as well be on the moon.’”

  At 5:31, Hall took four milligrams of oral dexamethasone and indicated he was still trying to clear his oxygen mask of ice. Talking to Base Camp, he asked repeatedly about the condition of Makalu Gau, Fischer, Beck Weathers, Yasuko Namba, and his other clients. He seemed most concerned about Andy Harris and kept inquiring about his whereabouts. Cotter says they tried to steer the discussion away from Harris, who in all likelihood was dead, “because we didn’t want Rob to have another reason for staying up there. At one point Ed Viesturs jumped on the radio from Camp Two and fibbed, ‘Don’t worry about Andy; he’s down here with us.’”

  A little later, Mackenzie asked Rob how Hansen was doing. “Doug,” Hall replied, “is gone.” That was all he said, and it was the last mention he ever made of Hansen.

  On May 23, when David Breashears and Ed Viesturs reached the summit, they would find no sign of Hansen’s body; they did, however, find an ice ax planted about fifty vertical feet above the South Summit, along a very exposed section of ridge where the fixed ropes came to an end. It’s quite possible that Hall and/or Harris managed to get Hansen down the ropes to this point, only to have him lose his footing and fall 7,000 feet down the sheer Southwest Face, leaving his ice ax jammed into the ridge where he slipped. But this, too, is merely conjecture.

  What might have happened to Harris remains even harder to discern. Between Lopsang’s testimony, Hall’s radio calls, and the fact that another ice ax found on the South Summit was positively identified as Andy’s, we can be reasonably sure he was at the South Summit with Hall on the night of May 10. Beyond that, however, virtually nothing is known about how the young guide met his end.

  At 6:00 A.M., Cotter asked Hall if the sun had reached him yet. “Almost,” Rob replied—which was good, because he’d mentioned a moment earlier that he was shaking uncontrollably in the awful cold. In conjunction with his earlier revelation that he was no longer able to walk, this had been very upsetting news to the people listening down below. Nevertheless, it was remarkable that Hall was even alive after spending a night without shelter or oxygen at 28,700 feet in hurricane-force winds and windchill of one hundred degrees below zero.

  During this same radio call, Hall asked after Harris yet again: “Did anyone see Harold last night except meself?” Some three hours later Rob was still obsessing over Andy’s whereabouts. At 8:43 A.M. he mused over the radio, “Some of Andy’s gear is still here. I thought he must have gone ahead in the nighttime. Listen, can you account for him or not?” Wilton attempted to dodge the question, but Rob persisted in his line of inquiry: “O.K. I mean his ice ax is here and his jacket and things.”

  “Rob,” Viesturs replied from Camp Two, “if you can put the jacket on, just use it. Keep going down and worry only about yourself. Everybody else is taking care of other people. Just get yourself down.”

  After struggling for four hours to de-ice his mask, Hall finally got it to work, and by 9:00 A.M. he was breathing supplemental oxygen for the first time; by then he’d spent more than sixteen hours above 28,700 feet without gas. Thousands of feet below, his friends stepped up their efforts to cajole him to start down. “Rob, this is Helen at Base Camp,” Wilton importuned, sounding as if she was on the brink of tears. “You think about that little baby of yours. You’re going to see its face in a couple of months, so keep on going.”

  Several times Hall announced he was preparing to descend, and at one point we were sure he’d finally left the South Summit. At Camp Four, Lhakpa Chhiri and I shivered in the wind outside the tents, peering up at a tiny speck moving slowly down the upper So
utheast Ridge. Convinced that it was Rob, coming down at last, Lhakpa and I slapped each other on the back and cheered him on. But an hour later my optimism was rudely extinguished when I noticed that the speck was still in the same place: it was actually nothing but a rock—just another altitude-induced hallucination. In truth, Rob had never even left the South Summit.

  Around 9:30 A.M., Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri left Camp Four and started climbing toward the South Summit with a thermos of hot tea and two extra canisters of oxygen, intending to rescue Hall. They faced an exceedingly formidable task. As astounding and courageous as Boukreev’s rescue of Sandy Pittman and Charlotte Fox had been the night before, it paled in comparison to what the two Sherpas were proposing to do now: Pittman and Fox had been a twenty-minute walk from the tents over relatively flat ground; Hall was 3,000 vertical feet above Camp Four—an exhausting eight- or nine-hour climb in the best of circumstances.

  And these were surely not the best of circumstances. The wind was blowing in excess of 40 knots. Both Ang Dorje and Lhakpa were cold and wasted from climbing to the summit and back just the day before. If they did somehow manage to reach Hall, moreover, it would be late afternoon before they got there, leaving only one or two hours of daylight in which to begin the even more difficult ordeal of bringing him down. Yet their loyalty to Hall was such that the two men ignored the overwhelming odds and set out toward the South Summit as fast as they could climb.

  Shortly thereafter, two Sherpas from the Mountain Madness team—Tashi Tshering and Ngawang Sya Kya (a small, trim man, graying at the temples, who is Lopsang’s father)—and one Sherpa from the Taiwanese team, Tenzing Nuri, headed up to bring down Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau. Twelve hundred feet above the South Col the trio of Sherpas found the incapacitated climbers on the ledge where Lopsang had left them. Although they tried to give Fischer oxygen, he was unresponsive. Scott was still breathing, barely, but his eyes were fixed in their sockets, and his teeth were tightly clenched. Concluding that he was beyond hope, they left him on the ledge and started descending with Gau, who, after receiving hot tea and oxygen, and with considerable assistance from Tenzing Nuri, was able to move down to the tents on a short-rope under his own power.

  The day had started out sunny and clear, but the wind remained fierce, and by late morning the upper mountain was wrapped in thick clouds. Down at Camp Two the IMAX team reported that the wind over the summit sounded like a squadron of 747s, even from 7,000 feet below. Meanwhile, high on the Southeast Ridge, Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri pressed on resolutely through the intensifying storm toward Hall. At 3:00 P.M., however, still 700 feet below the South Summit, the wind and subzero cold proved to be too much for them, and the Sherpas could go no higher. It was a valiant effort, but it had failed—and as they turned around to descend, Hall’s chances for survival all but vanished.

  Throughout the day on May 11, his friends and teammates incessantly begged him to make an effort to come down under his own power. Several times Hall announced that he was preparing to descend, only to change his mind and remain immobile at the South Summit. At 3:20 P.M., Cotter—who by now had walked over from his own camp beneath Pumori to the Everest Base Camp—scolded over the radio, “Rob, get moving down the ridge.”

  Sounding annoyed, Hall fired back, “Look, if I thought I could manage the knots on the fixed ropes with me frostbitten hands, I would have gone down six hours ago, pal. Just send a couple of the boys up with a big thermos of something hot—then I’ll be fine.”

  “Thing is, mate, the lads who went up today encountered some high winds and had to turn around,” Cotter replied, trying to convey as delicately as possible that the rescue attempt had been abandoned, “so we think your best shot is to move lower.”

  “I can last another night here if you send up a couple of boys with some Sherpa tea, first thing in the morning, no later than nine-thirty or ten,” Rob answered.

  “You’re a tough man, Big Guy,” said Cotter, his voice quavering. “We’ll send some boys up to you in the morning.”

  At 6:20 P.M., Cotter contacted Hall to tell him that Jan Arnold was on the satellite phone from Christchurch and was waiting to be patched through. “Give me a minute,” Rob said. “Me mouth’s dry. I want to eat a bit of snow before I talk to her.” A little later he came back on and rasped in a slow, horribly distorted voice, “Hi, my sweetheart. I hope you’re tucked up in a nice warm bed. How are you doing?”

  “I can’t tell you how much I’m thinking about you!” Arnold replied. “You sound so much better than I expected.… Are you warm, my darling?”

  “In the context of the altitude, the setting, I’m reasonably comfortable,” Hall answered, doing his best not to alarm her.

  “How are your feet?”

  “I haven’t taken me boots off to check, but I think I may have a bit of frostbite.… ”

  “I’m looking forward to making you completely better when you come home,” said Arnold. “I just know you’re going to be rescued. Don’t feel that you’re alone. I’m sending all my positive energy your way!”

  Before signing off, Hall told his wife, “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.”

  These would be the last words anyone would hear him speak. Attempts to make radio contact with Hall later that night and the next day went unanswered. Twelve days later, when Breashears and Viesturs climbed over the South Summit on their way to the top, they found Hall lying on his right side in a shallow ice hollow, his upper body buried beneath a drift of snow.

  * It wasn’t until I interviewed Lopsang in Seattle on July 25, 1996, that I learned he had seen Harris on the evening of May 10. Although I’d spoken briefly with Lopsang several times previously, I’d never thought to ask whether he’d encountered Harris on the South Summit, because at that point I was still certain I’d seen Harris at the South Col, 3,000 feet below the South Summit, at 6:30 P.M. Moreover, Guy Cotter had asked Lopsang if he’d seen Harris, and for some reason—perhaps a simple misunderstanding of the question—on that occasion Lopsang said no.

  * Early the next morning while searching the Col for Andy Harris, I came across Lopsang’s faint crampon tracks in the ice leading up from the lip of the Lhotse Face, and mistakenly believed they were Harris’s tracks headed down the face—which is why I thought Harris had walked off the edge of the Col.

  * I’d already reported with absolute certainty that I’d seen Harris on the South Col at 6:30 P.M., May 10. When Hall said that Harris was with him up on the South Summit—3,000 feet higher than where I said I’d seen him—most people, thanks to my error, wrongly assumed that Hall’s statements were merely the incoherent ramblings of an exhausted, severely hypoxic man.

  EIGHTEEN

  NORTHEAST RIDGE

  MAY 10, 1996 • 28,550 FEET

  Everest was the embodiment of the physical forces of the world. Against it he had to pit the spirit of man. He could see the joy in the faces of his comrades if he succeeded. He could imagine the thrill his success would cause among all fellow-mountaineers; the credit it would bring to England; the interest all over the world; the name it would bring him; the enduring satisfaction to himself that he had made his life worthwhile.… Perhaps he never exactly formulated it, yet in his mind must have been present the idea of “all or nothing.” Of the two alternatives, to turn back a third time, or to die, the latter was for Mallory probably the easier. The agony of the first would be more than he as a man, as a mountaineer, and as an artist, could endure.

  Sir Francis Younghusband

  The Epic of Mount Everest,

  1926

  At 4:00 P.M. on May 10, around the same time a hurting Doug Hansen arrived on the summit supported by Rob Hall’s shoulder, three climbers from the northern Indian province of Ladakh radioed down to their expedition leader that they, too, were on top of Everest. Members of a thirty-nine-person expedition organized by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, Tsewang Smanla, Tsewang Paljor, and Dorje Morup had ascended from the Tibetan side o
f the peak via the Northeast Ridge—the route on which George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine had so famously disappeared in 1924.

  Leaving their high camp at 27,230 feet as a party of six, the Ladakhis did not get away from their tents until 5:45 A.M.* By midafternoon, still more than a thousand vertical feet below the top, they were engulfed by the same storm clouds that we encountered on the other side of the mountain. Three members of the team threw in the towel and went down at around 2:00 P.M., but Smanla, Paljor, and Morup pushed onward despite the deteriorating weather. “They were overcome by summit fever,” explained Harbhajan Singh, one of the three who turned around.

  The other three reached what they believed to be the summit at 4:00 P.M., by which time the clouds had become so thick that visibility was reduced to no more than 100 feet. They radioed their Base Camp on the Rongbuk Glacier to say they were on top, whereupon the leader of the expedition, Mohindor Singh, placed a satellite-telephone call to New Delhi and proudly reported the triumph to Prime Minister Narashima Rao. Celebrating their success, the summit team left an offering of prayer flags, katas, and climbing pitons on what appeared to be the highest point, and then descended into the fast-rising blizzard.

  In truth, the Ladakhis were at 28,550 feet when they turned around, about two hours below the actual summit, which at that time still jutted above the highest clouds. The fact that they unwittingly stopped some 500 feet short of their goal explains why they didn’t see Hansen, Hall, or Lopsang on top, and vice versa.

  Later, shortly after dark, climbers lower on the Northeast Ridge reported seeing two headlamps in the vicinity of 28,300 feet, just above a notoriously problematic cliff known as the Second Step, but none of the three Ladakhis made it back to their tents that night, nor did they make further radio contact.