by Ed Viesturs
For me, guiding on Everest is a huge responsibility. I’m not in it just to make money—I feel a constant obligation to watch out for each client’s safety, and if one of them succeeds in reaching the summit, I share fully in his or her joy. It’s an ethic I first learned on Mount Rainier, and it’s an integral part of why I climb. Not just to notch summits for myself, but to enable others to achieve what for most of my clients turn out to be goals that are among the high points of their whole lives.
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One of the side benefits of all the technical apparatus Nova brought to the expedition was the relative ease with which I could stay in touch with Paula back in Seattle. I missed her badly, and it was tough not to be with her as the baby gestated inside her. My diary entries recorded those bursts of happiness when we could talk by sat phone or trade e-mails.
April 8
I was glad to hear she & baby are fine & everything is OK. We talked for 18 minutes. . . . I love her [here I drew the sign for “infinity”]!!
April 14
Called Paula but we kept getting disconnected at the end because of a battery glitch. But she’s fine & it was great to hear her laugh.
April 28
Called Paula—I love to hear her cheerful voice. Baby’s got a heartbeat! We’ll do an ultrasound June 12th. Got her Care package from NOVA—beautiful letter & great pics. . . . Can’t wait to get back to Paula & home.
After the expedition, once Paula had her ultrasound, we knew that we were expecting a boy, and we started thinking about what to name him.
Except for Peter’s edema and Jorge’s limitations, our climb went smoothly through the first weeks. We got Camp III established on the Lhotse Face by the relatively early date of April 26. After a descent to base camp for R & R, we were ready to make our push. In my optimism, I anticipated a summit day on May 7, which might allow me to be home as early as May 18. On May 3, eagerly gearing up for the push, I wrote in my diary, “It’s been a beehive of activity here this morning—packing, showering, shaving, getting ready to go. We’re ready to get movin’ so it worked out great. Let’s hope that the weather stays with the forecast.”
Well, Everest is fickle. Extremely high winds during the following days put an end to our plans for an early dash. My spirits drooped. “Way too many people at base camp!” I griped in my diary. And after making another trip up to Camp II, I wrote, “Icefall is getting very funky this time of year. Only wanna do one more round trip and then that’s it. ‘Everest Anonymous.’ ”
Meanwhile, over the radio, all the way up the mountain, David Breashears, Dave Carter, and I had to perform the tests that Liesl was using to gauge our mental and physical states. The mental exercises were the more grueling. In fact, as we failed at one or another, we often collapsed in hysterics. For example, we’d be read over the radio a really convoluted sentence that we were supposed to repeat from memory: “On Monday, John went to his cousin Frank’s red house and together they bought three blue leather jackets at Joe’s store, which had mostly pants for sale.” Man, that would be hard enough to repeat at sea level!
Or we’d be handed plastic cards with color names printed on them, except that the word blue, for instance, would be printed in red. With a stopwatch clicking, we’d flip through these cards as fast as possible, trying to utter the color of the printed word, not the word itself.
David, who is a competitive perfectionist by nature, was so determined to perform the tests well that if he bollixed one up, he’d blame it on “test anxiety” and ask if he could start over. Dave and I would jeer, “No way, dude, that’s it.”
We finally got Camp IV established on the South Col on May 22. On the way up to the col, the Sherpa carrying a stuff sack with some of David’s personal gear lost his load when he briefly put the sack down, only to watch it tumble thousands of feet down the Lhotse Face. At the South Col, David was missing such crucial items as his mittens, oxygen mask, goggles, and overboots. We found replacements for most of this gear, but no spare overboots, which meant that he’d have to go to the top wearing only his double plastic boots, making his feet far more vulnerable to the cold.
Even before this mishap, David wasn’t sure he wanted to go to the top. We all had trepidations about the summit push, as we watched the numbers of climbers camped at the South Col swell. For all of us, weather would likely dictate the timing of summit day, and we feared a repeat of the traffic jam of 1996. My diary recorded David’s ambivalence.
April 23
Have to catch up with David @ CIII in 2–3 days. Now he seems to want to perhaps go to the summit with us. . . . David is very down today. . . . Asking himself what he’s doing here.
May 22 (on the South Col)
David called me & discussed his doubts about going up. . . . I think he’d lost his motivation cause he’d been here so many times. I told him to give it a shot & see how everything looked @ the South Summit—then he could make a decision. He decided to go.
In the end, at Camp IV, we all resolved to go up. If we started at 10:00 p.m., we ought to get the jump on most of the other teams, whose typical departure times would be two or three hours later. To avoid the predictable bottleneck at the Hillary Step, we’d carry an extra rope to fix there as a “down line,” so we wouldn’t have to wait our turns to clip on to the single rope in place that served both climbers still heading up and those already descending from the top. David also realized that it would be vital to the Nova production to film Dave Carter and me all the way to the top. We set off in the middle of the night of May 22–23, leaving our tents at 10:00 p.m. as planned.
I shared the trail-breaking with two of the Sherpas, Mingma and Dorje. Veikka followed some distance behind as he climbed without bottled oxygen. And David filmed like a pro. Compared with the monster IMAX camera he’d deployed the year before, the video camera he used this year was a piece of cake to operate. There was a full moon in a clear sky, but a bitter wind blew across the southeast ridge. Just before sunrise, however, the wind suddenly dropped. It was turning into one of the most beautiful days I’d ever had on Everest.
I’d been gearing myself up for the ordeal of passing Scott’s and Rob’s bodies. From a certain distance, I spotted the ledge where Scott had met his end. The trail up the southeast ridge passed farther from that ledge than it had in 1996, maybe out of respect for his dead body. As I had the year before, I saved my visit to my old friend for the descent. Higher, near the South Summit, I was actually relieved not to see Rob’s body. The snows of winter had apparently buried it.
At the Hillary Step, however, we were in for a shock. There, hanging head down, one foot tangled in the fixed ropes, was another corpse. It had to be that of Bruce Herrod, the South African who had been the last to reach the summit in May 1996, and who, apparently exhausted, had been unable to down-climb the Hillary Step. We guessed that he had tried to rappel a fixed rope, only to have a foot snag and flip him upside down, from which position he had been too weak to extricate himself. It must have been an agonizing way to die.
We were the first climbers to pass this way since Herrod had perished. We cut him loose from the fixed ropes and watched as his body plunged down the south face. That may seem to nonclimbers a heartless act, but nearly all mountaineers would have done the same—it’s customary to drop a dead body found high on an 8,000er into a nearby crevasse. It’s literally impossible to carry a body down the mountain from 28,700 feet. And there are worse places to lie for eternity than on the slopes of Everest.
We reached the summit at the remarkably early hour of 6:50 a.m. Dave Carter was in ecstasy, having finally made it to the top of the world, although he was gasping for breath, even with bottled oxygen. I was pretty jazzed myself. With David filming, we spent almost forty minutes on top. I broadcast a live Internet feed to the Nova Web page. And we even performed our mental tests on the summit.
It might have seemed like a clockwork ascent, but we were on the verge of a catastrophe. As we started down, Dave Carter’s con
dition rapidly worsened. Guy and I short-roped him to the foot of the ridge where it met the relatively level terrain of the South Col. From that point, he managed under his own steam to stagger several hundred yards over to our tents. There, however, he started to fall apart.
Not surprisingly, my diary ends at the South Col. The drama that occupied the next two days left me far too exhausted to record the events. In his tent, Dave coughed incessantly and could not catch his breath, no matter how high we cranked the oxygen flow. For some reason he was developing a build-up of phlegm in his trachea that restricted his airflow. No matter how hard he tried to cough it out, the obstruction wouldn’t budge. We knew that if we couldn’t get Dave lower on the mountain at once, he would die.
The climb to the summit and back had taken fifteen hours. All we wanted to do was collapse in our tents, celebrate our triumph, and get a full night’s sleep. Instead, I volunteered to take Dave down the Lhotse Face. He was not only my client, after all, but a good friend of many years’ standing.
The descent was a nightmare. Dave would take a few steps, then collapse, gasping for breath. I’d let him rest for a moment, then prod him to move on. Again and again and again . . .
By nightfall, we’d only regained Camp III at 24,000 feet on the Lhotse Face. I had hoped that we could have descended all the way to the comfort of Camp II, but because of Dave’s distress, we were moving slower than a snail’s pace. Inside one of our tents, I tended to him as a nurse would a baby. Dave simply could not catch his breath. He was fully aware of his predicament.
I got on the radio to base camp, where our expedition doctor, Howard Donner, gave me advice. I was trying to get Dave to relax, but when he felt he couldn’t breathe, a kind of panic seized him, which only exacerbated his coughing and gasping. Donner told me that if the mucus plug got worse, I should try the Heimlich maneuver in an attempt to dislodge the obstruction. At last I did, holding Dave in a bear hug from behind, my hands clasped against his chest, as I squeezed with my fist in as forceful a jerk as I could muster.
My efforts succeeded in forcing up only tiny bits of mucus. Unfortunately, they also caused Dave to lose control of his bladder. Eventually he soaked all of his clothing, so he stripped down to his underpants. All through the night, we alternated thrusts and rest. We worked out a system: Dave would point to his throat, then pee out the door, and I’d try yet another violent Heimlich squeeze or two. An outside observer might have been morbidly amused to watch this strangely choreographed dance. To us it was a grim, exhausting fight for survival.
I began to think Dave was going to die. I actually considered performing a tracheotomy, a technique I’d learned in vet school. It would have been a desperate last remedy, but with Donner guiding me over the radio, I might be able to cut a new air passage just below the mucus plug in Dave’s throat, saving his life. How we’d get him down from Camp III after that, I didn’t even want to contemplate.
At dawn, we decided to try to head down to Camp II. Just before leaving the tent, I gave Dave a last series of Heimlich thrusts, as strong as I could manage. All of a sudden he coughed up the mucus plug. It was slimy green, bloody, and the size of a half dollar. As disgusting as the plug looked, we were overjoyed to see it lying in the snow.
Guy Cotter arrived just as we were starting down from Camp III. Dave’s condition had so much improved that he was able to climb down the slopes under his own power, with Guy and me in solicitous attendance. Later, at base camp, he recovered completely.
I’ll never know for sure how close a call Dave had, but in the middle of the night it certainly felt like touch-and-go.
Sixteen years later, Dave and I remain good friends. He still climbs and guides a little, but his main focus is on running his family’s lumber business in Indiana. That narrow escape from a gruesome fate on Everest, choking to death on his own mucus, seems to have welded a lasting bond between us. And long after 1997, Dave’s mother sent me a Christmas card every year, thanking me for saving her son’s life.
What’s more, Liesl got her film. Everest: The Death Zone, with Jodie Foster narrating, ran on PBS in 1998, garnering rave reviews. A decade and a half later, you can still rent the DVD on Netflix, where it’s posted with ratings from no fewer than 25,187 viewers. The unscripted climax of the film, of course, turning science into high drama, is Dave’s fight for survival as he coughs and gasps his way down the Lhotse Face.
And oh, yes—on October 29, Paula gave birth to our son, after I rushed her to the hospital in the nick of time. We named him Gilbert Edmund Viesturs. Paula and I had started our family, even though I still had six summits to reach to complete my Endeavor 8000. And though I could hardly have imagined it at the time—by the end of 1997, I thought I was done with the mountain for good—two more trips to Everest loomed in my future.
8
The Hard Way
Unsoeld and Hornbein’s traverse of Everest via the West Ridge in 1963 represented a gigantic breakthrough in Himalayan mountaineering. During the next decade, most of the expeditions that attempted the mountain were content to repeat the two conventional routes, via the South Col and southeast ridge and via the North Col and northeast ridge. But the most ambitious climbers starting scheming up ways to tackle the two most obvious remaining challenges on Everest—the massive east or Kangshung Face, and the equally massive Southwest Face, a daunting triangle of steep snow and ice topped with rugged bands of rock.
The Kangshung Face had first been approached by Mallory and Guy Bullock toward the end of the sprawling 1921 reconnaissance on the first expedition ever sent to Everest. Appraising it as a route to the summit, Mallory declared, “Other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically, it was not for us.” For six decades thereafter, not a single attempt on the face was launched. The approach to the foot of the wall on the Kangshung Glacier represented a complex logistical puzzle of its own—as I would find out in 1988, when Andy Politz and I and our colleagues from the state of Georgia got smacked flat by its stern and scary challenge.
The Southwest Face, on the other hand, loomed over every expedition that crossed the Western Cwm on the way to the Lhotse Face. By 1997, I’d stared up at that formidable 7,000-foot-high precipice on five separate expeditions. The most striking aspect of the face was its inescapable danger, for a huge, steep snow slope narrowed to a broad gully a little more than halfway up, and it was obvious that all the avalanches and falling rocks coming down from above would be funneled into that chute. Yet there was no other reasonable line of access to the upper face. What’s especially fiendish about the wall is that the technical difficulties are concentrated in the last 2,500 feet below the summit. Getting to those rock bands meant running a gauntlet of falling debris over and over again. Then, even with bottled oxygen, surmounting the final cliff would obviously require climbing of a higher standard than had yet been tackled on Everest, even on the West Ridge.
The first attempt on the Southwest Face was undertaken by a Japanese expedition in the postmonsoon season of 1969. Though the trip was billed as a reconnaissance, several climbers on the team reached the remarkable high point of 26,200 feet. Among the members was Naomi Uemura, who would go on to become famous as the first person to reach the North Pole solo and the first person to climb Mount McKinley solo. Still trying to up his personal ante, Uemura disappeared in 1984 trying to climb McKinley solo in winter.
The Japanese returned in force in the spring of 1970, with a team of no fewer than forty climbers. But they failed to improve on the 1969 high point, instead turning their attention to the standard South Col route.
All this activity stirred the ambition of Norman Dyhrenfurth, still hungry for yet another first on Everest to cap his immensely successful AMEE in 1963. In the spring of 1971, he led an international expedition, with thirty-one members from eleven different countries, to attempt both the West Ridge direct (a straighter line than the Hornbein Couloir) and the Southwest Face. It was a real all-star team, including such paragons as
Dougal Haston, Don Whillans, Toni Hiebeler (the German who’d led the first winter ascent of the Eiger Nordwand), Naomi Uemura, Pierre Mazeaud (one of the best French mountaineers of his day), and Carlo Mauri (the great Italian who, with Walter Bonatti, had made the first ascent of stunning Gasherbrum IV in 1958).
Dyhrenfurth’s avowed goal was to create “an experiment in understanding and cooperation among nations.” Alas, the gathering turned into quite the opposite sort of melee, as nationalism reared its ugly head, with each country’s representatives jockeying for the leading roles on the two routes. The Australian journalist Murray Sayle, along on assignment for The Sunday Times, later wrote a wickedly funny tell-all account of the expedition mess for Life magazine, detailing such scenes as the Swiss couple Michel and Yvette Vaucher throwing snowballs at the British tent. Dyhrenfurth later went on record castigating Sayle’s “deplorably inaccurate and misleading account.”
It may be on this expedition that occurred an exchange that has since become a semiapocryphal legend among mountaineers. During the trip, over the radio, several members heard that a major international soccer match between Germany and England had ended in a German victory. According to the story, the German members of the team walked over to the tent housing Don Whillans, the acerbic and brilliant Brit. “Hey, Don,” the Germans crowed, “did you hear that we just beat you at your national pastime?”
“Oh, aye,” rejoined Whillans without missing a beat. “But we’ve beaten you twice at yours, haven’t we?”
