The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  Through a telescope at Camp II, I watched the drama unfold. The slowness of so many of the climbers, all on the same route, created the “traffic jam” that had so much to do with the catastrophe. I had always set 2:00 p.m. as my own summit turnaround deadline on an 8,000-meter peak, which gave me enough time to get back to high camp before dark. But on May 10 at 2:00 p.m., there was a whole string of climbers still moving upward, many of them well below the South Summit. Actually, for them the turnaround deadline was perhaps irrelevant, since running out of bottled oxygen was their greatest threat, not returning after dark. By now that procession of climbers had been moving uphill for more than fourteen hours. They were simply too slow, and they were running out of energy as well as oxygen.

  I couldn’t help myself—as I looked through the telescope, I muttered out loud, “Guys—you left at midnight. It’s two o’clock!” And, “Dudes, what are you doing? Wake up! Turn around, turn around!”

  My diary entries at the time sound in retrospect like a telegraphic announcement of impending tragedy:

  May 10 (Late):

  Rob & Scott’s team[s] caught out late in wind/whiteout. People tired/running out of O’s, can’t find camp/cold/tired, very windy. Big mistake today—climbed too late, bad weather/too long, [therefore] running out of oxygen.

  May 11:

  Up @ 6 AM. Veikka monitoring radio all night from Rob’s tent. Rob called @ 5:30 AM from S. Summit. Doug died during the night. Rob in bad shape—HACE [high-altitude cerebral edema]/weak/hypothermic/hypoxic/tired. We tried to get him to keep moving—after 3 hrs he still hasn’t moved. I tried to kick his butt into gear over radio. Very emotional for me—& everyone. Jan called and we broke down. Very tough to hear. Tried to get 2 Sherps to Rob—high winds turned them back.

  Not surprisingly, my diary ends with this entry. I simply didn’t have the time, the energy, or the heart to record either what I was feeling or what we did after May 11. We had suddenly found ourselves in the vortex of a whirlwind of shock, sorrow, and desperate rescue efforts.

  • • •

  Of course the tragedy put our own IMAX ambitions in limbo. David at once donated the oxygen bottles we’d cached at the South Col to the effort to save the weakest survivors. Now the locks on our tent zippers, which I had thought ridiculous in the first place, proved only a minor hindrance, as we told Jon Krakauer to go ahead and slice through the tent walls with a knife to get the oxygen. We left the IMAX camera behind as we climbed up the Lhotse Face toward the South Col. At 25,000 feet, we took over the shepherding of Beck Weathers all the way down to Camp I, at the upper lip of the Khumbu Icefall, where a very gutsy Nepali pilot landed to pick him up and whisk him to a Kathmandu hospital. MacGillivray Freeman might well have welcomed David’s filming the rescue, but they put no pressure on him to do so, and he decided it would be morally indefensible to capture such agony on film. Our focus now was not on filming, but on helping others. There was no way to do both.

  At base camp, Paula had been following the disaster with mounting alarm and horror. For the first time, she truly recognized how dangerous Himalayan mountaineering was. In the unfolding drama, she played a key role, monitoring radio calls and keeping many of the teams up to date on what was happening on the mountain. But to Paula it was unimaginable that after the deaths of so many climbers, including our friends Rob and Scott, we might still think of trying to complete our IMAX project. Then she overheard David casually remark on the radio, “When this is all over, we’ll regroup and go back up.” Privately, I had made the same decision. I wanted to go back up and finish what we had started. Not in spite of what had happened, but to turn the disastrous season into something more positive. Had we gone home at that point, as most of the others on Everest had done, our only option would have been to come back the next year, with a smaller team, to finish our IMAX film. Why not finish it now?

  Paula, however, simply lost it. David’s fiat seemed premature to her, as she assumed that at least we’d have a team meeting to discuss what to do. But in the end, she realized that the decision was not one in which she even had a vote. She stayed at base camp for the memorial service, then hiked down to Dingboche with some of the surviving clients from Rob’s team. The warmer, thicker air and the greenery of the forest helped to calm her nerves. After a few days in the lowlands, while she struggled with her feelings, she hiked back up to base camp. And from that moment on, she poured her heart into supporting my effort to make the IMAX film happen and to climb to the summit once more.

  In No Shortcuts to the Top, I recounted our successful climb back up the mountain, more than a week after nearly everyone else had gone home. We got all our climbers to the South Col, but David “parked” Sumiyo there, knowing she’d never make it to the summit.

  In the middle of the night of May 22–23, I left camp before anyone else, since climbing without bottled oxygen and breaking trail, I would, we all thought, be slow enough that David, Robert, Araceli, Jamling, and the Sherpas would catch up. Somehow, though, the camera crew never caught up to me. Despite all the emotional strain I’d gone through during the previous two weeks, I never climbed better at high altitude than I did that morning. I had the feeling that nothing could stop me, not even the knee-deep snow that I plowed through with a vengeance. Reaching the summit at 10:00 a.m., I radioed Paula, and she cheered my triumph wholeheartedly.

  David caught up to me on the summit, where we congratulated each other with tears in our eyes. But it was too cold to wait for the others, so I started down. Ironically, this meant that none of the IMAX footage from the summit day had me on camera. That didn’t matter to me. What did matter was that David, Robert, Araceli, and Jamling got to the top and back safely, and that David got the footage he needed. The film that resulted, called simply Everest, remains the highest-grossing IMAX movie yet made.

  The hardest part of that otherwise glorious summit day—indeed, one of the hardest experiences of my life—was passing the bodies of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. On the way down, I stopped and sat beside each of them, as I struggled with my emotions. Sitting next to Scott’s frozen body at 27,300 feet, I couldn’t help speaking out loud to him. “Hey, Scott,” I said, “how you doing?” Of course there was no answer but the wind.

  “What happened, man?”

  • • •

  There was of course no time left in the spring of 1996 for Manaslu, and after Rob’s death, Veikka and I would not have had the heart for another expedition even if there had been time. In terms of my Endeavor 8000, I was in a sense “stuck” on eight of the fourteen highest peaks, with six to go. But I was in no rush to finish my campaign: no matter how long it took, I relished the journey. Thus in the fall of 1996, rather than go after one of the six, I returned to Cho Oyu, which I’d already climbed in 1994. Doing so was in part to honor Rob, for we had agreed to co-lead an Adventure Consultants team to the seventh-highest peak in the world, and clients had already signed up for the expedition.

  Rather than let the company founder, Guy Cotter took over the running of Adventure Consultants. The Cho Oyu trip went smoothly, and I was happy to reach the summit on September 29 with two of the clients.

  Already in the works for the spring of 1997 was yet another film project on Everest. With the runaway success of the IMAX movie, David Breashears had come into his own as a filmmaker. Nova, the highly acclaimed PBS series out of Boston, approached David about making the first serious cinematic exploration of what happens to the human body and mind at the most extreme altitudes on earth. The project was the brainchild of Liesl Clark, a talented director who, though not a climber herself, had a passion for making documentaries about outdoor adventure.

  Either just before or during the 1997 expedition, David and Liesl became a couple. Personal relationships can sabotage an expedition, but in this case, their pairing would only enhance the making of the film that was later titled Everest: The Death Zone. David would shoot with a video camera all the way up the mountain, while from base camp, Liesl and ou
r doctor, Howard Donner, would direct the rigorous testing that revealed just what happened to our brains and bodies as we climbed above 26,000 feet.

  I was David’s first choice to be the guinea pig for the film. Although I might otherwise have been tempted to plan an expedition to Manaslu or Shishapangma for the spring, once more David’s offer was too good to refuse. And once again, I would use Everest as a springboard in another twofer, with an attempt on Broad Peak in Pakistan scheduled for the summer.

  The story line of the Nova film dictated the premise that David’s crew had come along to study climbers making an otherwise routine attempt on Everest from the south. So Guy Cotter put together another Adventure Consultants team, with me as the assistant guide. Three clients signed up, one of whom was Dave Carter, my former RMI buddy who had helped me guide Hall Wendel in 1991. Dave hadn’t reached the summit that year, so he was eager to give Everest another shot. And I was confident that he was strong enough to get to the top, unless really bad weather or snow conditions shut us down. Dave would stand in as our “client” for the film.

  Liesl’s presumption was that experienced high-altitude veterans such as David and myself ought to test better than someone like Dave Carter, no matter how fit he was. So David, even while making the film, would also have to submit to the sometimes maddening battery of tests Liesl and Howard inflicted on us at each camp.

  Another “project” claimed my attention that spring, one that had little to do with mountaineering. In February, on the first anniversary of our wedding, Paula and I went to Mexico for a brief vacation. She had just turned thirty. I had known since the first days that we dated that having kids was a number one priority for her, and now she decided it was time to start. I wanted kids myself, but wasn’t sure exactly when. But when Paula suggested that we start to build a family, I thought, Why not?

  Paula got pregnant during the early part of 1997. I knew it would be really hard on both of us to be separated while the baby grew inside her, but a quite deliberate calculation went into our timing. It was utterly essential that I be there when Paula gave birth. If she got pregnant in February, the child would be born in late October or early November, months during which I had lined up no expeditions. (We would subsequently plan the births of all four of our children around just such a schedule.)

  Rounding out our party was Veikka Gustafsson, who would be neither a guide nor a true client. Using our camps and supplies, Veikka hoped to get up Everest without supplemental oxygen. When he’d summitted as Rob’s client in 1993, he’d breathed bottled gas, and though as the first Finn to climb Everest, he immediately became one of his country’s top sports heroes, Veikka had the same kind of purist ideals that I’d always espoused. For him, the bottled oxygen was a nagging asterisk. Trying Everest without the stuff was a preliminary step in his own campaign to reach the summit of all fourteen 8,000ers, every one of them without supplemental oxygen—a goal he finally achieved in 2009.

  On April 4, I reached base camp below the Khumbu Icefall, once more ahead of the rest of our team, who would arrive a few days earlier. This was my ninth expedition to Everest, my fifth on the South Col route. And it was my fourth straight spring season on the mountain. It all seemed so familiar, the routine of setting up a comfortable base camp, the sizing up of the other parties camped nearby. I might have felt that Everest was getting too routine—was I in danger of becoming one of those one-mountain specialists who keeps returning to guide clients up a route he believes he’s got “wired”? I didn’t think so, since each trip had a different objective, and I could never afford to become complacent on Everest. Paula frequently reminded me of this with an aphorism she had come up with: “Just when you think you have it all figured out, you don’t.”

  A rigorous study of high-altitude physiology actually appealed to me immensely. After all, in vet grad school I’d studied a lot of physiology. And just the year before, two doctors from the University of Washington Medical Center—one of them being my hero Tom Hornbein—had put me through a grueling workout to gauge such measures of my physical capacity as VO2 max, lung capacity, and anaerobic threshold. (It turned out that my very high scores were probably mostly due to the luck of my genes. Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

  This year at base camp, however, there were haunting memories of the tragedy of 1996. The events of the previous year were still fresh in my mind, yet it was hard to believe that they had really happened. Not watching Rob putter around base camp or Scott saunter by with his “What, me worry?” grin on his face felt distinctly odd. And I knew that if I got to the summit again, I’d once more have to pass by the frozen bodies of my two former comrades. That would be an emotional tribulation I’d have to prepare for days in advance. Since no one had been back up there since the previous spring, David Breashears and I hoped that if we found the bodies, we could investigate them more carefully than the year before, in hopes of gleaning new insights into what had gone wrong for Rob and Scott.

  One reason I think I’ve avoided serious climbing accidents is that I never take mountains for granted. Each time I tried to climb Everest, it was as hard and as dangerous as the first time. No peak ever becomes a Yellow Brick Road, as Scott had half-jokingly called the South Col route. I knew that there was no way to reduce the risk on Everest to near zero, no matter how well prepared I was, and in my very first diary entry in 1997, I made a resolve about the Khumbu Icefall, the most dangerous part of the route. “Going up yesterday,” I wrote, “I decided to minimize my times through the icefall. I’m here to guide & not schlep loads.” On past expeditions I had always volunteered to carry many loads through the icefall, not only to do more than my fair share of the work, but to get as fit as possible. Now, on my fifth trip to the south side of Everest, the risk of traveling again and again through the perilous labyrinth of the icefall seemed hard to justify.

  On April 8, David, Liesl, the rest of the film crew, the Sherpas, Veikka, Guy Cotter, and our clients arrived. It’s really hard to judge the capabilities of clients you’ve never met before. You have to take them at their word on the résumés they submit. It turned out that the two clients besides Dave Carter who’d signed on with Adventure Consultants were relatively weak. One of them, named Peter, had trouble acclimatizing from the start. On April 20, less than two weeks into the expedition, he came down with pulmonary edema at base camp. Guy had to put him in a Gamow bag, a portable pressure chamber that artificially simulates a lower altitude with thicker air. That action probably saved his life. Only a couple of days later, Peter got heli-evacuated to Kathmandu.

  The other client was a real piece of work. He was a Spaniard whom I’ll call Jorge. Guy told me that, according to his résumé, Jorge had traveled to both the North and South poles, and that now he wanted to add the “third pole” to his credentials. I thought, Wow, Jorge sounds like the second coming of Erling Kagge. But we learned early on that the guy had been flown to the South Pole, and that his Arctic exploit consisted of being flown to within one degree of the North Pole and skiing the last sixty-nine miles (with guides)—a fairly popular tourist option.

  When I met Jorge at base camp, I was surprised and disappointed to greet a sweaty, pudgy, obviously out-of-shape fellow. Sure enough, on the mountain he never got higher than Camp II. Guy, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, invented a string of nicknames for Jorge, which included “the Gimp,” “Fatso,” and “the Penguin.”

  Back home, Jorge had already made quite a fuss about his impending triumph on Everest. His wife was pregnant, and Jorge had actually planned with doctors, via sat phone calls from the expedition, to have them induce the birth to coincide to the minute with Jorge’s final steps to the summit!

  The guy had another habit that was peculiar at best. He was fixated on his bowel movements, and always told us when he was heading off to go, as well as how it went after he got back. Veikka and I turned Jorge’s toilet routine into a private joke that we kept using on many later expeditions. Whenever one of us had to take a crap, we’d announce,
“I’m going to have a meeting with Jorge.” On returning, the other guy would ask how it went. The answer involved reporting that the meeting with Jorge had required a lot of paperwork.

  In Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer created the indelible cartoon portrait of the client so helpless he can’t even put on his own crampons, but whom leaders like Rob and Scott coddle up the mountain, and in some cases, into death traps. With Sandy Pittman, Jon perfected the vignette of the Manhattan socialite with her espresso coffee maker at base camp, who gets short-roped by a Sherpa to ensure her success on Everest. Actually, though, Sandy had climbed some creditable mountains before Everest, and while she may have been a bit full of herself and entitled, she wasn’t a clueless novice who had no business on Everest.

  As far as I know, no client has ever been pulled, carried, or dragged by a guide or a Sherpa to the top of Everest. Yet thanks to the cleverness of Jon’s caricatures, and to a morbid armchair desire to see rich fat cats who plunk down sixty-five grand for a shot at Everest get their due by dying on the mountain, the nonclimbing public assumes that all Everest clients fit that stereotype. This really bugs me. It doesn’t even begin to fit the mold of the folks I’ve guided on any of the 8,000ers. In 1997, in Peter and Jorge, we did indeed have clients who weren’t equal to the challenge of Everest. But we never guaranteed them the summit, and we never encouraged them to try to exceed their limits. When it became clear that they couldn’t go high, we sent them back to base camp—or, in Peter’s case, to Kathmandu.