When I was sitting there, someone I do not know approached me out of the darkness and snow, and he spoke with me as if he was a friend, but I did not recognize him. I thought maybe he was from the Taiwanese expedition or from Rob Hall’s expedition, but I was not certain, and he asked me, “Do you need help?” And I said, “No. It is okay.” And so he told me that he had to return to blinking the lights, and I told him I could make it to my tent. And after some time, I don’t know how much, I found my tent, took off my pack and crampons, knocked the snow and ice off my boots, and without any power, went into the tent, but it was empty. Nobody had come. Nobody.
Boukreev was alone in his tent. A stone’s throw away another climber, Lou Kasischke from the Rob Hall expedition, was also alone. His tentmates, Andy Harris, Beck Weathers, and Doug Hansen, had yet to return.
“I got back to camp about four-thirty or five,” Kasischke said, “and I just collapsed in my sleeping bag from exhaustion… . I don’t think I had a molecule of energy left in me. Later [I] awoke or regained consciousness … and it was a terrifying experience for me. Actually, it was the wind that woke me up. It was just pushing me around inside of my tent. It was actually getting under the floor of the tent, picking me right up in my sleeping bag and slamming me back down and pushing me around, and I regained consciousness and I couldn’t see! … It was probably the worst moment of my life, because I was very confused. I couldn’t figure out really even where I was, what time it was, what day it was, why I was alone and why I couldn’t see, and it took me probably a couple of minutes to figure that out. Whoa, wait a minute, you’re at high camp, you’re snowblind, and now the storm is in full force And I don’t know what time it was. I tried to backtrack it a bit—and I’ll tell you what happened next, but I’m figuring it’s eight, nine o’clock. See my tentmates—nobody’s there … This went on for hours. I was able to control my anxiety enough to know that I had to stick with my sleeping bag, that if I tried to go anyplace or do anything, that I was probably going to die … I couldn’t figure out why I was alone. I was yelling for help, but I soon figured out nobody could hear anything. I mean, it was just like a hundred freight trains running on top of you, and I was screaming, but you know, a person five feet away couldn’t hear anything.”
*Pemba Sherpa had been on previous Everest expeditions. In 1994 he had worked as a “kitchen boy” at Base Camp. He’d never been higher than Camp IV.
*A couloir is an angled gully.
†A controlled slide that is done in a crouch, standing, or sitting.
‡ Jon Krakauer has not the same memory. He says that he “did no glissading whatsoever during the descent” and that, perhaps, Adams had mistaken Yasuko Namba for him. Adams insists it was Krakauer. Such are memories at high altitude.
*Two of the six climbing Sherpas from the Mountain Madness team did not summit. They turned around at the South Summit and had already returned to Camp IV.
CHAPTER 18
WALK OR CRAWL
After the run-out of his glissade, Adams picked up the last run of fixed ropes below the Balcony at about 8,350 meters and reached their terminus at 8,200 meters sometime after Boukreev had ended his first foray into the storm. During that course of rope he hadn’t seen Krakauer or any other climbers. He was alone.
“I started out across the South Col and I’m moving along pretty well, and then I step into a narrow crevasse. I pulled myself out of that, and then the lights went out, because it had turned dark. And then, I went just a short distance more and fell into another crevasse, and that one was worse. My right leg and arm both went in, and they were dangling down, and I thought this may be it, and I was afraid to move. So, I surveyed my situation and I could see a solid patch of blue ice off to my right and above eye level, and I swung my ice ax that I had in my right hand and I got a purchase with my pick. Somehow I was able to leverage myself out, and I just picked myself up and continued on down.”
As Adams pulled himself out of the second crevasse into which he had fallen, his face was encrusted with snow and ice; his lips had turned a flat, morgue blue.
“Right after I start down again,” Adams recalled, “I saw the light of a headlamp, and I walked up on somebody just sitting there about one hundred yards away from Camp IV. I’m wondering, ‘Who is this guy?’ and I’m thinking maybe he knows where the tents are, so I ask him: ‘Where are the tents?’ ”
Adams had run into Jon Krakauer, but neither of them in their debilitated conditions recognized the other in the darkness. Adams remembers that in response to his question, “the guy”—Krakauer—pointed off to his right, and Adams responded, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Then he asked, “What are you doing here?”
Adams thought he had run into somebody from an expedition waiting to ascend and who had wandered out from Camp IV. So, he was particularly confused when “the guy” said, according to Adams, “Watch out. It’s steeper here than it looks. Be careful. Go back to the tents and get a rope and some screws.”*
“I’m thinking at that point,” Adams said, “I’ve almost died coming down this mountain; this guy has been in camp all day doing nothing, gotten himself up a tree, and has the brass to tell me to go down, get some rope, and come back up to solve his problem! You gotta be kidding!” Adams had been descending without oxygen, operating only on instinct and experience. He was scrambling for survival.
Adams surveyed the slope of ice that he’d been warned about, but didn’t see it as anything particularly dangerous. “It was a face-out situation,” he said. “You needed to pay attention, but it wasn’t a big deal, no more than a steep grade you’d see on a mountain pass in Colorado. You could see the bottom where it flattened out. There was no hazardous exposure.”
Adams took two or three steps to move down the slope, tripped, pitched face and belly down onto the ice, and slid down onto the snow and shale surface of the South Col. “It was maybe a hundred feet,” Adams remembered, “and I got up, turned around, and waved at ‘the guy’ and headed in what I thought was the direction of the tents, which by then had disappeared from view.”
Above the Krakauer and Adams encounter, Madsen, Pittman, Beidleman, and Fox made it to 8,350 meters and the top of the last run of fixed ropes. Klev Schoening and Lene Gammelgaard, separated from the group at that point, were descending slightly ahead. Down the rope, Beidleman saw something blocking the route: “There was a body sitting facedown on the line, not really moving or moving very slowly.”
Thinking at first that he’d come across Klev or Lene, with whom he didn’t always have visual contact, he went in front of the slumped figure, looked more closely, and thought it was Lene who was down. He began to yell at her, to try to get her up and going, but she wasn’t moving, so he jiggled her oxygen mask around, trying to get a response. Then, he realized it was not Lene Gammelgaard, but Yasuko Namba from Rob Hall’s expedition.
“She was not moving whatsoever,” Beidleman said, “most likely out of oxygen. I tried to talk to her to show her how to go down the line faster. After a few minutes of doing this, I realized she either didn’t understand English or was incapable of doing what I was asking her to do. Again, I grabbed her harness and started sliding, standing, or rolling, depending on the terrain, down with her behind me. Several times her feet and crampons went through my [down] suit and into my back. She seemed to be capable of understanding what was going on, but was incapable of really physically helping the process much… .
“We eventually got down to the bottom of the fixed line after falling several times into crevasses that the lines went over. We had a hard time getting the Japanese woman to make the commitment to go over the crevasses. She was a little scared. I believe Tim helped me several times in picking her up, throwing her, pushing her, pulling her … over those crevasses.”
Somewhere Namba had separated from Mike Groom, with whom she’d been climbing earlier. Like Boukreev, Adams, and Krakauer before him, Groom had encountered Beck Weathers on the Balcony, where he was still waiting
for help, almost literally frozen to the spot where Hall had told him to stay until he could be assisted down.
Groom, when he observed Weathers’s condition, tethered him to his climbing harness and started him moving. As slow as they were moving under the circumstances, Namba had apparently not been able to keep up and had been left behind.
Beidleman, at 8,200 meters and within approximately eight hundred lateral meters of Camp IV, recalled that things went to hell. “At the bottom of the line the storm had intensified. The wind was blowing quite strong. Periodically you could see a light back at Camp IV. I got one last fix on the direction and then that was it. That was the last I saw of Camp IV.”
Charlotte Fox also recalled that lights and the tents of Camp IV were still visible when the climbers reached the bottom of the fixed ropes. She and the other climbers who had summited between two-fifteen and two-thirty had spent between forty and fifty-five minutes on the summit before starting their descent. At this juncture they could have used those minutes.
“It was dark,” Beidleman has said. “It was blowing very hard. It was snowing extremely hard. It was difficult to talk. All communication was by screaming, and usually only downwind. If somebody were upwind, they may or may not have heard. I don’t recall even being able to turn my head much to try to talk upwards. My headlight was still in my pack. I was unable to get it out because I had grabbed the Japanese woman [Yasuko Namba] by the arm and … we walked … arm in arm together. There were two Sherpas with us at the time, and I believe that Klev and Lene had left us, heading toward Camp IV in the direction they thought was correct.”
Gammelgaard said that she had teamed up with Klev Schoening because she had confidence in him and the two of them had “the same way of being on the mountain… . And we just rush down as fast as possible. And I had been running out of oxygen, and Klev sort of stops me once in a while and forces me to take his oxygen, which I sort of refused, ‘No! I don’t need it,’ but he could see how blue I was in the face for lack of oxygen.”
At the terminus of the fixed ropes, according to Gammelgaard, she and Klev had been bearing to their right, “sort of agreeing upon, ‘Okay, the camp must be over there.’… But then we see a huge mass of lights to the left and think, ‘Okay, if so many people are over there, we’ll join up with this group instead of going our own way.’ And that’s the wrong decision we find out later.”
A “dogpile,” as Beidleman would later call it, was forming up. Gammelgaard remembered it, including, “at the peak point … Beck Weathers, Yasuko Namba, Tim, Charlotte, Sandy, Neal, Klev, and I, and two or three Sherpas.” Beidleman remembered that Mike Groom was also a part of the group, but despite the presence of two guides there did not seem to be any clear leadership.
“It wasn’t really clear that there was a leader versus a non-leader or followers at that point,” Beidleman said, “because people were being buffeted around by the wind and walking based on whoever had a headlight in front of them. I tried to yell several times that we needed one leader and one headlight to follow, otherwise we would be wandering aimlessly. My intention was to not walk directly toward Camp IV, even though for one minute at the bottom of the fixed lines I knew the direction to it… . I had looked at the terrain from up above, before the storm came in, and made a decision that if the storm came, that the best thing to do would to be avoid the Lhotse Face and that precipice as much as possible.”
Beidleman, when he could exert his direction on the pack, was herding the climbers away from the route by which Krakauer, Adams, and Boukreev before him had descended and toward the eastern side of the South Col. The descent there wasn’t so steep and the climbers could avoid the possibility of walking off the face of Lhotse.
“I continued to walk with the Japanese woman on my arm,” Beidleman said, “and, I believe, Sandy, Charlotte, and Tim behind. Mike Groom and Beck were somewhat in front of us. The two fastest people at the time were the two Sherpas, and they seemed to dart in front of us in many different directions, or at least changing directions. I tried to remember watching my feet, to stay on a side hill, not too great of a side hill, but a slight side hill, which would put us at the saddle of the South Col, near a high point, and at that point is where a rock, a very distinct rock band, crosses the Col. And I knew that once we found that rock, if we just turned right and wandered downhill within the rocks, we would either hit the camp … or all the trash right around. That was the plan or the tack that I thought was best at the time. Because of the wind and because people were being pushed forward and backwards and wandering around, and also because I could not travel to the front of the group, carrying the Japanese woman, and I didn’t have a headlight out yet; it’s my impression that we side-hilled too much… . Once we lost the side hill, I personally lost all orientation to what direction we were walking. There was nothing left to follow in terms of terrain.
“We wandered as a group for a while. I don’t know how long. It seemed like quite a while. We were moving slowly. Different people would come to the front and fall behind, but we kept yelling, all of us, to stay together as a group. I felt very strongly that if any person made an attempt to find the camp by themselves or left the group, that either they would be extremely lucky and find the camp, but most likely be lost completely. At some point in this wandering, we most likely got turned around and got onto the Tibetan side of the South Col. Even though this may have been something that I understood in my mind at the time, my oxygen had run out a long time ago, everybody else was staggering around, and it just was extremely hard to think and to try to make sense out of the things that we saw, the direction of the wind or whatnot—it was like being inside of a milk bottle. The winds were blowing—I’ve asked people, trying to estimate, I don’t know—anywhere from, on the low side, forty miles an hour up to maybe gusts of eighty or more. They were enough to knock us off of our feet many times. Finally, during this walking or at some time during this walking, maybe an hour’s worth, I’m guessing, people were getting extremely cold, all faces were iced up. Maybe another headlamp went out, I don’t recall… . We were on very difficult ice with rock sticking through. The dip in front of us was illuminated by the headlamp, it rose up a little bit, and I walked to the edge of the rise and looked over, and whether I actually saw something or sensed something, I just knew that was totally dangerous. There was no terrain like that on the South Col that we should be even close to, and I got very, very scared and came back to the group. I recall, with the help of Tim and Klev, yelling and screaming at people that we absolutely had to stay together, and I suggested or yelled or barked or ordered or whatever it was, that we huddle up and wait. I remembered from the night before that during the very bad storm, somewhere before ten o’clock, before we left, a similar storm had subsided and became very still. I was banking on the fact that if the storm did let up for just a minute, or we could see some stars or see the mountains, we could get our orientation and we could at least pick the direction that we wanted to go. I had no idea if we were looking at the Kangshung Face or the Lhotse Face or any other face up there.
“We did decide to huddle up. We got into a big dogpile with our backs to the wind. People laid on people’s laps. We screamed at each other. We beat on each other’s backs. We checked on each other. Everybody participated in a very heroic way to try to stay warm and to keep each other awake and warm. This continued for some period of time—I don’t know how long. Time is very warped, but it must have been awhile because I was extremely cold pretty shortly after that. We were checking fingers. We were checking each other’s consciousness. We just tried to keep moving. It was something of an experience that I’ve never really had before, being what I felt so close to falling asleep and never waking up. I had rushes of warmth come up and down through my body—whether it was hypothermia or hypoxia, I don’t know—a combination of both. I just remember screaming into the wind, all of us yelling, moving, kicking, trying to stay alive. I kept looking at my watch … hoping that the weather wou
ld clear.
“At some point in the night, the winds did not subside, but the snow let up a couple times. Once, just enough, I looked up and I recall seeing vaguely some stars, and then it closed in again. That gave me a lot of hope and I recall talking to Tim and Klev that there were stars and that we could figure out what was going on. And we all started thinking in those terms and turning our minds onto what we could possibly gain by seeing stars or the mountains. Another time after that it cleared again, enough to look up. The wind was still howling, but I recall yelling myself that there was the Big Dipper and the North Star. Either Klev or Tim said, ‘And yes, there’s Everest.’ I remember looking at it and being perplexed—not even knowing if it were Everest or Lhotse.”
The dogpile had situated itself less than twenty meters from the Kangshung Face, about four hundred meters from Camp IV. In clear weather they could have made the camp in ten to fifteen minutes, but they were hopelessly lost, and the storm was not abating.
I don’t know how long I was in the tent after I returned from my first attempt to find our climbers, but I was alternating between trying to restore my power, walking the camp perimeter and going out of the tent to observe the situation. Finally, I heard some noises and I zipped open the tent and it was Martin.* His face was covered with ice, and he was not saying much, just groaning, and I asked him, “Martin, are you okay?” He said nothing. I took off his crampons, and I asked “Where is everybody?” but he didn’t answer so well. I think maybe his face was frostbitten, and I helped him into the corner of the tent and into a sleeping bag, and I got one of the three oxygen bottles and put a mask to his face.
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