When An Doja and I arrived at Camp Three, it was late in the evening. We had about four hours before we would begin our final push to the summit. The plan was to climb through the night and summit by sunrise. Our USX team was split between two tents, with our Sherpas in other tents. The wind was howling and whipping the tents, as we were now exposed to the infamous North Face of Everest. It was hard to hear, and it would have been nice to simply press a button on our radios and talk to the tent fifteen feet from us. Instead, we yelled back and forth to confirm a 10:00 p.m. departure time.
By 9:50 p.m., I was geared up and sitting with my feet sticking outside the tent while I strapped on my boots. I was exposing myself to the elements, as putting the big, bulky boots with crampons on inside the tent would have ripped the floor to shreds. All climbers know that once you leave the warmth and safety of your tent, you need to depart as soon as possible to mitigate the risk of exposure to the extreme cold. In the death zone, where the altitude and lack of oxygen take such an excessive toll on the human body, keeping precisely to the schedule is essential, especially when attempting to summit.
To my surprise, I learned Dave and Chad weren’t ready to leave, and for good reason. They didn’t have enough water, boiled from the snow and then purified, to last them the next twenty-plus hours of climbing to the summit and then getting back down out of the death zone. Their equipment was subpar, and there was a miscommunication with their Sherpa.
How come we didn’t know this sooner? I wondered. Did one of them shout the update in the wind, and we just didn’t hear it?
This was the first ripple created by our deficiency in communication. I’ve learned the hard way that when you make one mistake in hazardous conditions, there’s a very good chance it will be followed by second-order mistakes and possibly several more rounds after that. Over the next seventy-two hours, the ripple effect would continue to spread outward, and several climbers from our team would be in life-threatening predicaments following the initial bad decision.
Please learn from my mistake, and never replace common sense with anything else. First, when you make a decision, you should always be able to check the “because it makes sense” box. If you can’t, it’s a dumb decision. Not bringing communication equipment did not check that box. It was dumb. Plain and simple. Second, communicating is not just yelling at another person, assuming the message has been understood clearly and entirely. That is talking at someone. It gives the perception that communication has taken place, when, in fact, it may not have. Communication requires taking the time to confirm that both sides are in sync with each other.
By the time we figured out why Dave and Chad were delayed, we’d had our feet outside in subzero temperatures for over fifty minutes. Our Sherpas stood outside, waiting to go. To limit further unnecessary exposure time, we decided to break into two teams.
“We’ve got to depart now,” I hollered toward their tent. “We’ll link up with you at the vertical steps approaching the summit.”
I was referring to several technically difficult points on the mountain that almost always take additional time to navigate. Our first team left by moonlight through the Exit Cracks, a series of gullies and rock ledges leading to the summit ridge. It wasn’t that steep, but the ropes and anchors were well worn, and extreme focus was necessary.
It wasn’t long before the first mishap. Something snagged my goggles, knocking them off my face and sending them toppling from rock to rock on the cliffs below, straight out of sight into the darkness. A rational person would have turned around right then, knowing that climbing without goggles is crazy. A snowstorm could be detrimental, causing blindness. I didn’t let it stop me, however, and made it past the First Step, the first of three technically challenging vertical pitches.
Around this point, we managed to link up as a team. I learned later that my goggles had toppled over a hundred meters in pitch darkness and landed at Dave’s feet. I could see their headlamps below but didn’t know Dave had picked up my goggles and put them in his pack. He hadn’t realized they were mine, and they remained in his pack even when we joined up. Dave was in the back of the climbing formation, and I was in the front, so he couldn’t see that I’d lost my goggles. What we didn’t realize was that in addition to Dave catching my goggles, he’d also caught a stomach bug.
In complete darkness at twenty-eight thousand feet, with the wind whipping and snow pelting our masked faces, yelling didn’t work very well, but we had no other way to communicate. Chad and Dave, now moving at a significantly slower pace, along with their Sherpa, fell behind the rest of the climbing team. We didn’t realize just how far behind they were until we were nearing the summit. Dave was in rough shape and not getting any better, but he pressed on. Not knowing what Dave was going through, the climbers in the front kept going, putting him at a greater risk of something going fatally wrong.
The climb gets significantly tougher at the Second Step. It’s almost impossible without the sketchy fixed ladder the Chinese put there years ago. The climb up the ladder was challenging, but we’d heard the way down was even more dangerous. It was notorious for the views of the steep drop-offs and the lifeless bodies of fallen climbers clearly visible below.
The voice of my Sherpa jerked me from my determined concentration as we approached the summit pyramid. “I can’t find the ropes,” he said, referring to the preset ropes anchored to the cliff side.
We needed the ropes to keep us safe on this final stretch to the summit, but fresh snow had covered them. The Sherpas shined their lights back and forth as they probed the snow with ice axes. Several tense moments passed. With nothing to clip into, this could be the end of our expedition.
If we can’t find the ropes, I’m going to try anyway.
Meeting the other climbers’ eyes, I saw them nodding in agreement. We could see the summit now. We would press on with no ropes on a cliff face on top of the world in pitch darkness with a possible 7,500-foot free fall. It was madness. And we made this decision with zero hesitation. Summit fever was burning ferociously now in all of us.
Right before we began to move without the ropes, one of the Sherpas found them and we were able to clip in and continue. Would I have made it without the fixed ropes? I’m not sure. But I was so focused on reaching the summit that I was willing to take a very big risk anyway.
May 24, 2016
Finally, I am here, standing in the exact destination I have dreamed about for two years. No ground on earth stands higher than the ground my feet are standing on: the summit of Mount Everest. The sun has just started to spill over the horizon on the last few steps as I make it to the peak.
Against a backdrop of breathtaking beauty, I pull out of my pocket the dog tags of Major Chris Thomas, one of the Soldiers we are climbing in honor of, who served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and died in an avalanche in 2015. I place them at the summit beneath the strings of colorful prayer flags. Then I pull out my cell phone to try to call Rachel, but it still won’t turn on. So I sit back to take it all in.
After two years in the making, thousands of hours of work, countless sleepless nights, dozens of people telling me I couldn’t do it, and pints of sweat shed from training, I am finally here. I stand on the shoulders of many others who believed in me. It is the climax of all my hard work, and although I am at the intersection of my dream and reality, I struggle to fully enjoy the moment. The view is indescribable, with the white Himalayan landscape spread before me as far as I can see, but it feels sort of anticlimactic. Now that I have made it, all I really care about is getting back down and going home to Rachel. Plus, it is really, really cold.
Back when I was a cadet training for Everest, my mom gave me a sign that said, “If you don’t climb the mountain, you can’t enjoy the view.” I thought it was inspiring, and every day I pictured the view of the snowcapped mountains from the summit. Now that I’ve actuall
y climbed the mountain and can see the view, I realize I’ve misinterpreted that quote. The view is not the reward. The reward is the person I’ve become by facing the mountain, the struggles that have shaped me, the adversity that’s defined me, the obstacles that have tried to stop me but failed, the naysayers who’ve knocked me down but been unable to keep me down. Having a dream, finding a way to accomplish it, and knowing the transformation that it’s had on me…this is my reward.
It will take a while for all this to truly sink in. For now, all I can think about is getting back down safely. The truth stares back at me. Getting down will be harder than getting to the summit. Ninety-five percent of deaths and accidents on Everest occur not in going up the mountain but in coming down.
I take one last look over the mountains, at the curvature of the earth, and I feel the deep ache filling my soul as my heart yearns for Rachel. I want to get off this mountain now, but I have a long way to go.
As I will soon find out, the way down will be the greatest threat to my future with Rachel, and our team will be split up, each of us left to fight for survival.
18
Snow Blind
HAROLD
I was standing on a ledge not much wider than a snowboard, the rock dropping away to empty space just inches from my feet, as An Doja sat in the snow haphazardly trying to put his mittens on backward.
What on earth is he doing?
Before I had time to shout the question out loud, An Doja lifted his head and said something. His words were swallowed by a fierce gust of wind.
“What?” I called out.
“Can’t see!” came An Doja’s reply as he motioned toward his eyes.
It took a few minutes for my oxygen-hungry brain to process this information. My strong and coolheaded Sherpa guide couldn’t see his mittens. Realization dawned slowly, but once it did, the implications were perfectly clear. An Doja isn’t just talking about mittens. He literally can’t see at all.
We had left our tents around 11:00 p.m. the night before to start our bid for the summit, then reached the top of the world at 7:42 a.m. We had now been descending for several hours. I was mentally and physically exhausted and still a very long way from safety. Climbers always talk about how things can get very bad very quickly on the mountain, and that’s exactly what was happening right now. The only person who could get me down the mountain had just lost his eyesight.
This is how people die on Everest, I thought.
As a West Point cadet, I’d been trained to rely on many skills and processes to navigate complex situations, and there was an acronym we followed: METT-T, Mission Enemy Terrain Troops-Time. How would that work here?
What was the Mission? Get to the bottom of the mountain without dying.
What was known about the Enemy? They don’t call it the death zone for nothing.
How would Terrain and weather affect the operation? Either they’ll kill us or they won’t.
What Troops were available? One Sherpa, current status: blind. Other teammates: location unknown, spread out on the mountain.
How much Time was available? Best estimate, less than enough.
Well, that isn’t exactly helpful. Things were definitely not looking good. I was scared out of my mind, but thinking about it wasn’t going to help me or An Doja. Nor was dwelling on the fact that my Sherpa had been sharing his protective goggles with me ever since the rock face ripped my own pair from my face during our ascent. We traded back and forth between his goggles and sunglasses, ultimately leaving us both with insufficient protection from the elements.
The glare of the sun off the ice in the thin Himalayan atmosphere was searing our retinas, while our eyeballs were under siege from wind-whipping clouds of snow crystals, which burned like liquid fire on the exposed skin on our faces. The dual-forced assault had taken its toll. An Doja had gone snow blind. He had the knowledge but not the sight. I had the will and determination to push on but no way to find my way down.
After pulling his mittens off again, An Doja rubbed his hands together, then pressed them against his eyes.
“An Doja, your hands will freeze!” I called, making my way toward him as I pulled up the slack of the rope anchored in the wall so it would not get caught in my crampons.
I unzipped my yellow-and-blue expedition suit, specifically designed to withstand the treacherous conditions that exist at eight-thousand-meter peaks. Built for extremes, the down-filled suit is like a super-powered onesie with a hood. It had held up great so far, except for some crampon rips at the bottom that I tried my best to patch. I put one hand on An Doja’s shoulder and pulled him toward me. The suit shielded him enough to allow him to warm the ice crystals on his eyes.
I pulled the goggles from my head and scraped at them with my fingers. Between the unrelenting drifting of powdery snow and my own exhalations forced upward from my oxygen mask, the goggles were hopelessly iced over. Without them, I ran the risk of becoming snow blind too, but when I put them on, everything from the Himalayan vista spreading out before me to my own black-and-yellow boots transformed into a blur of shapes and shadows. It was easier to see with the sunglasses, but then I was more exposed to the elements. We traded so An Doja could have the goggles to warm his eyes and I could have the sunglasses to see better for a while.
The weather had taken a turn, with clouds rolling in from the north and gale-force winds blasting into us. An Doja and I were still in the oxygen-starved death zone. We had no way to communicate with our team members or with Base Camp. I was far from an experienced mountaineer, but I knew that to remain where we were made our survival impossible. In reality, my body was already beginning to shut down.
At an altitude of over twenty-six thousand feet, the combined forces of oxygen deprivation and changes in atmospheric pressure cause the human body to go into a radical mode of self-decay. Blood flow to the muscles and brain is reduced, throwing the physical body into a state called necrosis. Blood thickens like syrup, cells begin to die, and after some time, organs begin to shut down.
I understood the science of the death zone as well as the next guy, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of what’s been called Rainbow Valley. I had passed through it in pure ignorance on the ascent due to the utter darkness. But early on the way down, I saw what I thought was a blue duffel bag that had been left behind in the snow, just a foot or so from where I was walking. Only as I was passing it did I realize with sickening clarity that the shape was a corpse, its limbs and head buried in snow and ice so that only the back of the torso in a blue down jacket was visible.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, I noticed more bodies below in the distance: spots of color amid the gray rock and white snow. Some of these climbers had slipped and fallen over the edge. Some had become disoriented with altitude sickness and gone the wrong way. Some had dropped from exhaustion.
For hundreds of people, Everest is their final resting place because it is too expensive and risky to move their bodies. The dead range from the poorly prepared to world-class mountaineers. I knew that any one of those splashes of color could be me.
An Doja gave a thumbs-up and a nod. “I’m good to go.”
It was time to get moving.
Every step was agony. I tried to block from my thoughts any factor that was not in my personal control.
The vicious gusts of wind that were shoving me off balance and making my bones ache with cold.
Not in my control.
The drunken zombie effect caused by the altitude that was sapping my strength and breath and draining the life from my blood.
Not in my control.
The burning pain in my toes that was giving way to numbness.
Not in my control.
The need to keep moving down the mountain at all costs, no matter how agonizing…that was something I could co
ntrol. So I focused every ounce of concentration I had on my feet. Everything else fell away as my life narrowed into a single repeated objective: Take a step. Take another step. Take another step.
I thought about Rachel, 9,487 miles away and at this very moment likely worried out of her mind about me. I had passed along a request earlier to some Sherpas heading down from Camp Three for Tommy to get word to my family that we had safely arrived at the final camp and were going to make the push to the summit. I was not sure if my message ever made it there.
The unthinkable reality was that I didn’t know for certain if I was going to make it back. But I viewed that outcome as simply unacceptable. No force in the world was going to keep me from Rachel. Despite the year I’d spent training for this trip, I was completely unprepared for the reality of being on Everest and the toll it would take on me physically. I knew I had to harness every weapon in my physical and spiritual arsenal now. I added a silent mantra with each footstep. Focus. Step. Pray. Every inch of progress was a step closer to Rachel and to our future together. For me, that future was worth climbing every massive peak in the Himalayas.
The wind speed continued to increase, and the blasts of blowing snow and ice crystals were now almost constant. When An Doja stopped to unclip his carabiner from the rope at an ice screw and clip it back in on the other side, I turned and looked over my shoulder at the summit. I knew there was just about zero chance of catching a glimpse of Chad and Dave, but every once in a while, I looked anyway.
The summit and most of the mountain above us was no longer visible—all I could see was a swirling wall of clouds and blowing snow. It was like the mountain had disappeared, like there was nothing above me but the sky and the darkening storm.
An Doja was moving again, and I matched his pace, pausing at the same ice screw to move my carabiner around it. The wind changed direction suddenly, now hitting us from behind, so the frozen powder was no longer blowing painfully into my face. The terrain above the Third Step is a steep and exposed snowfield, with very little protection from the full force of the elements. It was at the entrance to this snowfield that we had searched for the ropes on the way up. One small mistake, as simple as placing a foot a few inches in the wrong direction, can mean death.
A Higher Calling Page 14
