The Climb
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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THIS EDITION OF THE CLIMB IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
ANATOLI NIKOLIAVICH BOUKREEV
DIMITRI SOBOLEV
VLADIMIR BASHKIROV
BRUCE HERROD
LOPSANG JANGBU SHERPA
SCOTT FISCHER
YASUKO NAMBA
ROB HALL
ANDY HARRIS
DOUG HANSEN
NGAWANG TOPCHE SHERPA
CHEN YU-NAN
Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits.
—ANATOLI BOUKREEV
WITH EVERLASTING THANKS TO
LINDA WYLIE
BETH WALD
TERRY LEMONCHECK
ALEX DAVIS
SIMONE MORO
ERVAND ILINSKI
RINAT KHAIBULLIN
GENE AND SHIRLEY FISCHER
JEANNIE FISCHER-PRICE
BOB PALAIS
DYANNA TAYLOR
GARY NEPTUNE
Climbing today is not only mainstream, it is business, and with that comes the rising tendency for climbing decisions—objectives as well as tactical decisions on a climb—to be business decisions as well. The up side to that is that now climbers—like skiers and sailors before them—can make a living from what they love to do. The down side can be seen in increased crowds at the crags, the proliferation of new regulations aimed at climbers, and today and forevermore, the “circus” at Everest Base Camp.
—CHRISTIAN BECKWITH,
“PREFACE,” AMERICAN ALPINE JOURNAL, 1997
The mountain doesn’t play games. It sits there unmoved.
—BRUCE BARCOTT,
“CLIFFHANGERS,” HARPER’S MAGAZINE, AUGUST 1996
AUTHORS’ NOTE
Five days after the Everest tragedy of May 10, 1996, nine climbers sat in a circle at the Mountain Madness Everest Base Camp and recorded their thoughts and memories. Many of the details and some of the quotes in this book are drawn from those recorded recollections. Anatoli Boukreev, a participant in the taped “debriefing,” has drawn upon that source and wishes to thank everyone who participated. Their attempts at truth-telling and self-reflection have added considerably to the historical record. Quotes, when taken from the debriefing tapes, have been noted with this symbol:
PROLOGUE
In ancient Buddhist scriptures the Himalaya are referred to as the “storehouse of snow,” and in 1996 the storehouse was filled again and again as unusual amounts of snow fell in the mountains.
In the early evening of May 10, 1996, a particularly vicious storm blew into Mount Everest and lingered at its highest elevations for more than ten hours. Twenty-three men and women, mountaineers who had climbed the mountain that day from its southern side in Nepal, could not make it to the safety of their highest-altitude camp. In a virtual white-out, battered by hurricane-force winds strong enough to blow over a semitrailer truck, the climbers fought for their lives.
The mountaineers had been caught in the Death Zone, the elevations above 8,000 meters where extended exposure to subzero temperatures and oxygen deprivation combine and kill, quickly.
As the climbers fought for survival, they were often blind but for an arm’s length. Sometimes there were ropes to secure and guide them. The pressure gauges on their oxygen tanks fell to zero, and the raging confusion of hypoxia began to conquer most rational figurings. The foretelling numbness of frostbite pushed the possibilities of amputations from remote to probable. In the dark and the screaming howl of the storm the climbers began to bargain. My fingers for my life? Fair enough; just let me live.
Below the descending climbers, in the high-altitude camp they were struggling to reach, a Russian mountaineer and climbing guide was fighting his own battle: yelling, cajoling, and pleading with other climbers to assist him in an effort to rescue those who were above, lost in the storm.
Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev made a decision, one that some would later call suicidal. He decided to attempt a rescue, to go into the storm solo, into a pelting blow of snow, into a lacerated darkness, into the roar of what one climber described as “a hundred freight trains passing over your head.” Boukreev’s efforts resulted in what the mountaineer and writer Galen Rowell would later call “one of the most amazing rescues in mountaineering history.”
Two weeks after the disaster on Mount Everest, Boukreev flew from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Denver, Colorado, where he was met by friends and driven to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to recuperate from his ordeal. Upon arriving, he asked to meet me, because a few months earlier, at a mutual friend’s request, I had arranged for him the purchase of a camera and its delivery to the Everest Base Camp. On May 28, 1996, we met for the first time.
I had seen photographs of Boukreev that had been taken prior to the events on Mount Everest. Lean, taut, with a confident smile, is how I imagined him. As I walked into our mutual friend’s house, he rose slowly from a chair to greet me. His eyes were sunken, tired. The tip of his nose and places on his lips were crusted in black, the telltale dead skin that comes with severe frostbite. He was distant; he looked as if he’d moved out of his body and into a place that had no address.
Something about him was familiar—the hollowness, the emptiness behind the eyes. As he took a step forward to shake my hand, I made the connection: a Russian soldier I’d encountered in Mozambique during the war there, sitting in the back of a canvas-covered troop transport, an AK-47 cradled in his lap. He’d looked at me with those same eyes and warned away my attempts to record him on motion-picture film. It had been a disturbing moment, not so much for the casualness with which he pointed his weapon, but for the blankness he wore on his face.
Over dinner we talked. My attempts to revive my college Russian were useless, so Boukreev spoke in English, fluid and understandable enough, but simple in its constructions. He wanted to talk about Everest, not to tell his story, but to inquire out loud about what had happened. He was trying to understand what he had just been through.
The next day we met again, and then the next, and we talked. Our mutual friend told me that Boukreev was having dreams at night, troubling dreams about being on Mount Everest, knowing that he had to get oxygen to stranded climbers whom he could never find. He never told me about the dreams, but he told me about what had happened on Everest, how he had come to the mountain, how he had left it in the last days of May. His stories were not dramatically told, not embellished. A brewed pot of tea had the same rhetorical weight as being lost in a blizzard. I came to appreciate his forthrightness, his responses to my questions that with my growing curiosity became harder and more detailed. We began to tape our conversations.
On June 3, 1996, Boukreev and I agreed to collaborate on this book. We would cooperate, yes, but I explained I would want to range beyond his experiences, to ask my own questions. The id
ea appealed to Boukreev. He knew some pieces, but was missing others. For his own reasons he was as curious as I about where the trail would take us.
On January 13, 1997, after getting a contract from St. Martin’s Press, our interviewing and writing efforts began. Boukreev contributed his personal journals, letters, expedition logs, and memories. He regained the twenty pounds he’d lost on Mount Everest; the smiles returned to his face. I traveled, met those who had climbed with him and the friends and associates of those who had not returned. With the help of translators, interpreters, and friends, and through intervening tragedies and between the moments of our ongoing lives, we assembled this story of the climb.
—G. Weston DeWalt, Santa Fe, New Mexico
March 25 Kathmandu to Syangboche to Namche Bazaar
March 26 Namche Bazaar
March 27 Namche Bazaar to Thyangboche
March 28 Thyangboche to Pangboche
March 29 Pangboche to Lobuche
March 30 Lobuche to Everest Base Camp
March 31 Base Camp
April 1 Base Camp
April 2 Base Camp
April 3 Base Camp
April 4 Base Camp
April 5 Base Camp
April 6 Base Camp to Gorak Shep to Base Camp
April 7 Base Camp
April 8 Base Camp (Expedition Members Arrive)
April 9 Base Camp
April 10 Base Camp
April 11 Base Camp through Khumbu Icefall to Camp I to Base Camp
April 12 Base Camp
April 13 Base Camp to Camp I
April 14 Camp I to Camp II to Base Camp
April 15 Base Camp
April 16 Base Camp
April 17 Base Camp to Camp I
April 18 Camp I to Camp II
April 19 Camp II (Fix Ropes to 7,100m) to Base Camp
April 20 Base Camp
April 21 Base Camp
April 22 Base Camp
April 23 Base Camp to Camp II
April 24 Camp II to 7,300m-Return to Camp II
April 25 Camp II (Rest)
April 26 Camp II to Camp III to 7,550m-Return to Camp III
April 27 Camp III to Camp IV-South Col to Camp III
April 28 Camp III to Camp II (Assisting Fischer with Kruse)
April 29 Camp II to Base Camp (With Kruse and Gammelgaard)
April 30 Base Camp
May 1 Base Camp to Dingboche
May 2 Dingboche to Pheriche to Ama Dablam Garden Lodge-Deboche
May 3 Deboche
May 4 Deboche to Base Camp
May 5 Base Camp
May 6 Base Camp to Camp II
May 7 Camp II
May 8 Camp II to Camp III
May 9 Camp III to Camp IV–South Col
May 10 Camp IV to Summit-Return to Camp IV (Rescue)
May 11 Camp IV to 8,350m (Fischer Rescue Attempt)
May 12 Camp IV to Camp II
May 13 Camp II to Base Camp
May 14 Base Camp
May 15 Base Camp (Taped Debriefing)
May 16 Base Camp-Begin Ascent of Lhotse 8:30 PM
May 17 To Summit of Lhotse to Camp III
May 18 Camp III to Camp II
May 19 Camp II to Base Camp–Descend to Syangboche through Night
May 20 Syangboche to Kathmandu by Helicopter
CHAPTER 1
MOUNTAIN MADNESS
A star, one that didn’t belong, appeared in the night sky over the Himalaya in March 1996. For several consecutive days the star had been moving over the mountains, its trailing tail fanning into the darkness. The “star” was the comet Hyakutake. It was the beginning of the spring season on Mount Everest (8,848 m), that interval of time between the decline of winter and the coming of the summer monsoons when, historically, expeditions to Everest have been most successful, and Hyakutake’s stellar trespass was considered an ominous sign by the Sherpas in whose villages the cosmic smear was a matter of concern and conversation.
The Sherpas, an ethnic group indigenous to Tibet, many of whom now live primarily in the highland valleys of Nepal, derive a substantial part of their family incomes from the mountaineering expeditions that come to the Himalaya. Some work as porters, cooks, and yak drivers; others take on the more dangerous and more lucrative roles as high-altitude support personnel, joining foreign expeditions in their ultimate wager: skill and endurance pitted against a physical environment that precludes prolonged human existence.
By 1996, in the seventy-five years that had passed since the first attempt was made on its summit in 1921, more than 140 climbers had died on Mount Everest. Almost 40 percent of those fatalities had been Sherpas. So, when the natural orders were disturbed, the Sherpas took notice.
Kami Noru Sherpa is in his midthirties, married, and the father of three children. He is one of the new generation of Sherpas who have, since the 1950s, exchanged their traditional dress for Gore-Tex parkas and embraced the cash economy of mountaineering. In 1996, as he had been for the past several years, Kami Noru Sherpa was hired by Himalayan Guides, a commercial adventure company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, to serve as a sirdar (manager) for an Everest expedition.
Headed by the bearded and burly Englishman Henry Todd, a fifty-one-year-old former rugby player turned expedition packager, Himalayan Guides had the distinction of never having lost a client. Todd’s practicality and good luck in the mountains and his cooperative relationship with Kami Noru Sherpa had brought them both a measure of success in the Himalaya.
In the spring of 1995, Todd had offered a commercial expedition to Mount Everest, taking his client climbers to the mountain from the north side, from Tibet. The expedition had been an unqualified success. Eight climbers from his expedition had made it to the top. After such success, Todd and Kami Noru Sherpa were riding high, but not to the point of overconfidence. In fact, in March 1996, they were both anxious about the season ahead.
Kami Noru Sherpa had pointed out the errant “star” to Todd, and Todd recalls that Kami was disturbed by its presence. When Todd asked Kami Noru Sherpa what it meant to him and the other Sherpas, Kami said simply, “We don’t know. We’re not liking it.”
“It [the comet] had been there for some time,” said Todd, “and for the Sherpas it presaged things not going terribly well.” A superstition, yes, thought Todd, but a matter of serious concern, because the people who knew the mountain best said it mattered.
To the uncertain meaning of the stellar disruption Todd could add his own problem. As of late March the winter snows had yet to melt to the point where his yak caravan could safely travel the trekking trail that led to the Mount Everest Base Camp (5,300 m). Some Sherpa porters were getting through on a narrow snow-packed trail, but hardly anyone else. Since the quantity of supplies required by expeditions requires the carrying power and capacity of yak teams, the pace of his supply effort had been slowed considerably. It was a headache, not yet a nightmare, but a problem that could grow to that proportion if the trails remained impassable for much longer. The weather window for attempts on the Everest summit stays open only for a brief period and closes abruptly with the coming of the monsoon season. If expeditions are not adequately provisioned when the time for their summit bid arrives, they might as well have never traveled to the mountain.
As almost everyone does in the face of an uncertainty, Todd and Kami Noru Sherpa took actions that might forestall or minimize the problems that each of them faced. In Kathmandu, Nepal (1,400 m), where he was addressing an accumulation of logistical problems and waiting for snows north of him to further melt, Todd took delivery of several cases of J & B Scotch, a gift from one of his climbers who had been sponsored, in part, by the distillery. Giving careful packing instructions to his Sherpas who would be freighting the spirits to his Base Camp, Todd more than half-anticipated some nights when the libation might serve to take off the edge. Kami Noru Sherpa, not a Scotch drinker, prepared for what was ahead in his own way.
On March 29, in his slate-roofed stone
house in Pangboche (4,000 m), a village niched into a series of terraces overlooking the trekking trail that winds to the base of Mount Everest, Kami Noru Sherpa held a puja, a ritual thanks to the mountains and a prayer of blessing. At sunrise, in a large, second-floor room above a grain storage area, five Buddhist monks in maroon and saffron robes seated themselves in a circle. Encircling them were Kami Noru Sherpa and several other of the Sherpas from Pangboche who had been hired to work on Everest. A wavering, pale yellow glow from yak-butter lamps and a few stray beams of morning sun offered the only light, nicking here and there the weave of reds and blues in the Tibetan rugs on the hand-sawn plank floors. Spirals of smoke drifted from a cooking fire, and the rich, sweet smell of juniper branches escaped as they were burnt in offering.
The chants of the monks played off the walls and echoed back into their repetition, and with every redoubling came a calm and peace, an assurance that, if the Sherpas honored it, the mountain would protect them and deliver them home. As the puja ended, the monks gave each of the Sherpas a protective amulet, a knotted loop of red string. With quiet reverence and a bow of thanks, each of them accepted the gift and placed the string around their necks.
Over the next few days, as the snows continued to melt, Kami Noru Sherpa and the Sherpas would leave their homes and trek to the Everest Base Camp, where they would join the expeditions that had hired them. Working for anywhere from $2.50 to $50 a day, they would help establish camps, carry loads up the mountain, and cook for and serve the climbers who were coming to Everest in ever greater numbers.
In the early 1980s the number of climbers and expedition support personnel who would gather in the Everest Base Camp during the spring season could have fit into one Paris metro car. In 1996, more than four hundred people would eventually come up the trail and pitch their tents, giving the camp the appearance of a rock concert encampment. One climber described the 1996 Everest Base Camp as having all the appearances of “a circus, except there were more clowns in our tents.” By many accounts, there were some real “punters” on the mountain in 1996.