The Climb

by Anatoli Boukreev

  Because they had been running late on the ascent, everyone except Beidleman had elected to pick up their third bottle on the ascent. Beidleman’s third bottle he’d gotten from Boukreev at the Balcony earlier in the day, when Boukreev had given him the bottle he’d carried from Camp IV.

  So, when Beidleman and the clients arrived at the South Summit, their cache of oxygen should have included three full canisters* and whatever partial canisters had been discarded when the climbers had changed bottles on the way up. But Beidleman recalled not finding what he expected. “There didn’t seem to be too many left. There was one that was full, or practically full,” and a few others, he added, that were partially full. “The full bottle, I believe at that time, went to Lene.”

  Beidleman took one of the partially full canisters that had been found, but it is unclear if any others were taken. At least two Mountain Madness clients, Charlotte Fox and Martin Adams, have said that they did not take any additional oxygen.

  Adams recalled, “I got to the South Summit before the clients who had summited behind me, and I came down off the ridge to the small alcove where Neal and I had waited earlier that morning. Andy Harris was there going through this mound of oxygen canisters, maybe about twenty, looking to see what was available, I guess. I just went on. There wasn’t any oxygen there with Martin Adams’s name on it. I just kept on moving.”

  Just after leaving the South Summit, according to Adams, Boukreev passed him at a fast pace headed down the mountain. “I’m going down the ridge, doing fine, and Anatoli comes by, sizes me up, sees I’m doing okay and keeps on going. For me, it was business as usual, Anatoli’s going by, and I had no problems with that.”

  About fifteen minutes after I left the South Summit, maybe somewhere around three-forty, I was on the fixed ropes, and the visibility began to deteriorate somewhat. The wind was blowing a light snow across the route, but I could still make my way with no serious concern, and I could clearly see Camp IV below.

  When I got to the Balcony, I was surprised to find a climber who asked me about Rob Hall, wondering where he was. And I asked if he was okay. And he said, “Okay, but where is Rob Hall?” This man was very cold, like frozen; he was hardly able to talk to me. And I told him I saw Rob Hall on the summit, that maybe in one or two hours he would come. I was worried about him and also for my clients, so I looked up the Southeast Ridge, and maybe at about 8,650 meters in the rocks I saw between the clouds someone coming down, and I thought, “Okay, everything is okay. I thought it might be Andy Harris, a guide from Rob Hall’s expedition who can come and help his client.”*

  Boukreev continued his descent, constantly monitoring the weather. It was, he said, “Normal for Everest; not at that moment possible to say it was a serious problem, because I had a clear view of the climbing route.”

  *Boukreev assumed that all seven Sherpas who had been with the expedition at Camp IV had made an attempt on the summit. Fischer, at Camp IV, had given all the Sherpas the go-ahead to do just that. But, unbeknownst to Fischer and Boukreev, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa had circumvented Fischer and told one of the Sherpas in his charge, Pemba Sherpa, that he wanted him to stay behind to receive incoming climbers as they returned to Camp IV.

  *Krakauer had foundered just below the Hillary Step on that section of the route that had gone unfixed.

  †See Into Thin Air, p. 188.

  *The two “safety” canisters for Boukreev that he’d not needed and had left behind and the “third” canister for Beidleman that he’d not collected, because he’d gotten his third from Boukreev at the Balcony.

  *Boukreev had encountered Beck Weathers, a pathologist from Dallas, Texas, whom Hall had instructed not to advance any higher, because he had been having problems with his vision. When Boukreev encountered him, Weathers had been waiting for more than eight hours to be assisted down the mountain by an Adventure Consultants’ expedition member.

  CHAPTER 17

  SNOWBLIND

  According to Dr. Hunt, who was in Base Camp and had being getting sporadic radio reports from the mountain since 6:00 A.M., she had spoken with Fischer when he was on the summit (sometime around 3:45 P.M.) and he had reported that all the clients had made the top. Congratulating him and asking him how he was, she heard him report, “I’m so tired.” Realizing how late it was to be on the summit and hearing Fischer’s description of his condition, Hunt pushed the transmit button on her radio and said, “Get down the mountain.”

  Concerned about Fischer’s condition, Hunt also spoke with Lopsang, and the two of them agreed to speak again at 6:00 P.M., but less than an hour after her radio contact, things changed dramatically. “Four-thirty that evening,” according to Dr. Hunt, “the people from Rob Hall’s camp came down here [Mountain Madness Base Camp] and said, ‘We need to get some oxygen sent back up the mountain. We think one of your team members has collapsed at the Hillary Step and Rob Hall is with him.’ … Rob Hall was sending messages to them [his Base Camp] that ‘I’m with this guy, and he’s collapsed above the Hillary Step.’ ”

  Immediately an effort was made to respond to the reported emergency, said Dr. Hunt. “We do everything we can to try to get oxygen sent up. One of the things is, we actually talked to Pemba and asked Pemba to keep trying to get ahold of Lopsang or anyone up the mountain and asked Pemba himself if he could go, and he said the weather was too bad, he didn’t want to go.”*

  With no radio, Beidleman, who could conceivably have responded to the radio call and the reported emergency above him, continued his descent. “Somewhere just over the top [of the South Summit] and down the fixed ropes, I saw Charlotte standing over the top of Sandy with a big grin on her face. She was holding a needle in her hand, waving it to me… . I came over to her on the downhill side, and Charlotte told me that she had just given Sandy a dexamethasone shot and that Sandy looked pretty out of it at the time.”

  Dexamethasone is a steroid that decreases brain swelling and contributes to the reversal of effects of HACE. Each Mountain Madness client, in a medical kit provided by Dr. Hunt, had carried a syringe with an injectable dose onto the mountain, and Fox had been waving the empty syringe at Beidleman.

  When Beidleman arrived on the scene, he said, he was “trying to figure out how to get her [Pittman] going,” and he checked her oxygen gauge and discovered she had less than an hour’s supply left. Seeing Gammelgaard come up behind him and recalling that she had picked up a new bottle on the South Summit, Beidleman asked Gammelgaard to swap cylinders with Pittman.

  Gammelgaard gave up her canister, but not without some reservations. “I know at this point that this is dead serious. This is not funny, this is really serious. The worst thing is happening; I know that … I’m the strongest, so I gave her my oxygen, which is basically very stupid, because you have two people who are out of it. But, if I have more than you have, and we are a team and you are in trouble … that’s just the way it is.”

  At that point Gammelgaard said that the group was doing a good job, “the best they can helping each other and acting responsible… . Neal is doing the right things, the best things you can do. He is doing what I do, what Klev would do, what Tim would do.” They were working as a team, not being led, according to Gammelgaard, but cooperating in their individual efforts to survive.

  Beidleman had turned the regulator on Pittman’s new cylinder, the fifth she’d gotten that day, up to a flow rate of three or three and a half because, according to Beidleman, “I wanted her to liven up pretty good.” The gush of oxygen and the effects of the “dex,” which can induce a mild euphoria, seemed to stimulate Pittman, who recalled, “Within fifteen minutes I felt pretty frisky again. I was renewed.”

  On the move again, Beidleman got in front of Pittman on the fixed rope, and with Gammelgaard, Fox, and Madsen continued to descend.

  Below, Adams had clipped off the fixed rope onto which Beidleman and the others had just clipped on. He was somewhere between the South Summit and the Balcony, and he was in trouble. “I’m going int
o these whiteout conditions and I couldn’t see any footprints to follow, and my glacier glasses are starting to fog, so I took off my oxygen mask, because by doing that I could get my glasses to clear a bit. But, after a short while I went back to it, went down a bit more, and then realized I’d run out of oxygen.”

  Adams had exhausted his third bottle and did not have another to replace it. He’d honored the “three’s the limit” rule; the only oxygen that was available to him was at Camp IV, more than six hundred vertical meters below.

  “I just jettisoned my cylinder and kept heading down, trying to find the next set of fixed ropes, and I got a little disoriented, didn’t know exactly which way to go, left or right around a crevasse that in my hypoxic state I couldn’t remember from the ascent, so I just sat down, figuring I could make some sense out of it all if the visibility improved. I don’t know how long it was, five minutes or thirty minutes or an hour, I couldn’t tell you; I just sat there.”

  Adams had descended to just below the Balcony, and descending just above him was Jon Krakauer, moving slightly ahead of Mike Groom, one of Rob Hall’s guides, and Yasuko Namba. Namba, an Adventure Consultants client, had summitted right behind the last of the Mountain Madness clients.

  “So, I see these climbers coming down, and I think, ‘Great! I’ll just go down with them,’ and Krakauer walks past me and I get up and ask Groom which way I’ve got to go, and he points me in the right direction, and I walk with him for a few minutes, and I ask him again which way do I need to go down, and he points me toward a couloir.* And Krakauer, right in front of me, hardly hesitates and he starts glissading† down on his rear in the fresh snow. And, I’m thinking that’s a good idea, so I give him maybe fifteen yards, and I’m in there right behind him.”‡

  Adams was trying to shave minutes off his descent time, and he picked up quite a few. His “run,” according to Adams, was as much as a hundred yards, maybe more.

  Exactly at what time of day Adams hit the run-out of his glissade can only be a guess. Adams said that he was not wearing a watch on summit day. Below them, Adams remembered, the storm was abating and you could clearly see the way to Camp IV.

  Boukreev estimates that he arrived at Camp IV somewhere around 5:00 P.M. As he approached the cluster of Mountain Madness tents, he saw several Sherpas, including Lhakpa Galgen Sherpa, a climbing Sherpa from Henry Todd’s Himalayan Guides, who was establishing a camp for Todd. Lhakpa and Boukreev exchanged a greeting, then Boukreev was met by Pemba Sherpa, who was carrying some hot tea. Boukreev thought that Pemba had made the attempt that day but had turned around and come back. Boukreev was not aware that Pemba had been in Camp IV all day.*

  Anticipating that some other climbers would be descending immediately behind him, Boukreev asked Pemba to brew up some more tea, then headed toward the tent where he, Adams, Gammelgaard, and Schoening had settled in the night before, almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier. Curiously, Pemba mentioned nothing about the radio communication that Ingrid Hunt said had occurred around 4:30 P.M., when he’d been asked if he would take oxygen up the mountain, and as the evening wore on, nothing was ever said to Boukreev about the possibility of an emergency situation above the Hillary Step.

  Radio communications between Dr. Hunt at Base Camp and Fischer and Lopsang on the mountain were problematic, and as the emergency went from serious to critical, Dr. Hunt was growing increasingly panicked. According to Dr. Hunt, “I would give a message to Ngima [Base Camp sirdar], and he would then in Nepali relate it to Gyalzen Sherpa [at Camp II] to Pemba [at Camp IV], and likewise when Pemba wanted to relay something—when anything was relayed down from the mountain, it would be through … Gyalzen, through Ngima, and then for me.”

  It had been Dr. Hunt’s impression throughout summit day that she wasn’t getting accurate or complete information from Ngima Sherpa, that messages were being “augmented” to put the best spin on them. Compounding her problem was that communications seemed to be sporadic with Pemba. “I don’t know why… .”

  Frustrated with the quality and quantity of information she was getting from the Sherpas, Dr. Hunt shuttled back and forth between the Mountain Madness encampment and Rob Hall’s because, according to Hunt, “Rob Hall’s camp had better communications, so I was getting more information up there, but I was constantly talking on my radio to Ngima, saying, ‘Any news? Any news?’ ”

  Around five-fifteen, I think, maybe a short while later, I went to my tent, took off my crampons, pack, and overboots and zipped into my tent. My tent was positioned so I could see to the South Summit at 8,748 meters, but nothing was visible to me above 8,300 meters where the bottom of the storm cloud had settled, but I was still not worried, because this pattern was not unusual for that time of day, and often the clouds are blown off the mountain.

  Boukreev had been in the tent maybe thirty to forty-five minutes, warming himself, observing the weather, and considering his options when Pemba came with a pot of hot tea.

  I had been hoping that I wouldn’t have to go back up, because, of course, it would be difficult, hard work after the climb, but I understood that the situation might not improve and no climbers were coming in, so I asked Pemba to prepare for me a thermos of hot tea and to bring me three bottles of oxygen.

  In a few minutes Pemba brought me the hot tea and three bottles of oxygen and put them outside my tent, and I pulled them and my pack inside, where I packed everything and prepared to go out.

  At 5:45 P.M., according to Dr. Hunt, she “learned that Lopsang and Scott were just below the South Summit; they were out of oxygen and Scott was very weak.” With that news the picture changed dramatically. She’d first been told by Rob Hall’s team that a member of the Mountain Madness expedition was in trouble above the Hillary Step. In fact, the person in distress was Doug Hansen, one of Rob Hall’s clients, the last climber to approach the summit that day.

  Hansen had been a member of Hall’s 1995 expedition to Everest and had been severely disappointed when Hall had turned his clients around on the South Summit. His return to the mountain in 1996 had been encouraged by Hall, who said he wanted Hansen to have another shot.

  Before daylight on summit day, Hansen had been climbing in front of Lou Kasischke, who remembered coming up behind Hansen as he “stepped out of line.” Hansen told Kasischke that “he was cold and he was going back.” But something had obviously spurred him on, because a little after 4:00 P.M., as Fischer was departing the summit, Hansen was staggering toward the arms of Rob Hall, who shouldered him to the goal he’d encouraged him to reach for. Kasischke has since wondered why, after having seemed so definite about his decision, Hansen had continued for another ten hours. “I mean, Doug changed his mind. Now, why did he change his mind? I don’t know. I’ve … speculated in some way that maybe Rob talked him into continuing.”

  The emerging picture, only pieces of which were visible to any one of the participants, was a nightmare. At 5:00 P.M. Rob Hall was with a client who had run out of oxygen above the Hillary Step. Lopsang had lingered behind Fischer to see that Hansen was safely under the control of Hall. He caught up with Fischer just above the Balcony, and Fischer, according to Lopsang, was in serious trouble, telling him, “I am very sick… . Lopsang, I am dead.”

  Unaware of the problems of Fischer and Hansen above, Boukreev understood that the Mountain Madness clients, none of whom had yet to appear, would soon be out of oxygen.

  Sometime, about 6:00 P.M., I understood I needed to go up, so I began my preparations, and by six-thirty I was out of my tent getting into my crampons. The weather was deteriorating above me, but at the South Col, it still was okay, stronger and increasing wind, but okay.

  Boukreev shouldered his pack containing three oxygen canisters, a mask, and regulator, and with an ice ax in one hand and a ski pole in the other, he headed back the same way he had come into Camp IV, to where the fixed ropes began at 8,200 meters. No more than ten to fifteen minutes away from his tent, the clouds that had been hovering above him dropped
onto the South Col. Almost simultaneously, a lateral blow of snow propelled by winds of at least forty to fifty miles per hour began to pelt Boukreev, and the sky began to change from crayon gray to bedsheet white.

  I realized then that my reserves might not be strong enough to handle the situation, so I began a flow of oxygen for myself. Looking behind me to see if I could keep a bearing on Camp IV, I could see that some people in Camp IV were flashing lights to try to guide the climbers who were still out, so I felt okay to continue my search. I moved onto some steep ice, understanding intuitively this was the way to the fixed ropes, but the poor visibility kept them hidden. I was using my ice ax on the ice, being careful, understanding that if I was too far off my course, I could slip and maybe fall down the face of Lhotse, and that would be the finish.

  As Boukreev continued his desperate search for the fixed ropes that he thought would guide him to the clients above, his visibility problems were compounded when his glacier glasses, as had Martin Adams’s during his descent, began to fog. When Boukreev would expel a breath, some of it would escape where his oxygen mask didn’t cleanly seal with his face, and his relatively warmer expelled breath condensed on his glasses and immediately froze. He was literally climbing blind. Finally, to restore what little visibility there was, Boukreev removed his oxygen mask and continued his search. Sometimes just an upward step would cause him to lose sight of the lights being flashed at Camp IV. A step down would restore his visual contact. His life was tethered to a beam of light. To go any higher, to search any longer, he knew, was foolish. Dead, he wouldn’t be able to help anyone; back at Camp IV, he thought, the climbers had perhaps come in, had somehow in an opening in the whiteout gotten by him and were back safe. If not, he could restore himself and make another attempt.

  About thirty meters from the tents when I returned, my power was almost gone. I took off my pack, sat on it, and put my head into my hands, trying to think, trying to rest. I was trying to understand the situation of the climbers. “What is their situation, their condition?” I am considering this. The wind is driving snow into my back, but I am almost powerless to move. How long I was there, I don’t remember. It is here that I start to lose track of time, because I am so tired, so exhausted.