LOPSANG: [UI].
ANATOLI: It is impossible, Lopsang. I spent very big power, without rest, like thirty-five hours.
LOPSANG: Yeah, so I am coming through the all together night with Scott, and because I come down to Camp IV.
ANATOLI: I understand.
LOPSANG: I thinking, so all members are [at] Camp IV, but I not thinking—
ANATOLI: I told you exactly—
LOPSANG: And so I am so crazy, very some crazy. So I see my friend Scott, and I get up and so he tell me, “I need Anatoli send up.” And so I come down. So I think that all member right at Camp IV, good; only Scott up. But after, so I am come down so I—[UI]—and after, so just morning. I have some member some day. Pemba tells me. Also night, Anatoli maybe at camp, give to tea, will make it hot, he tell me. And, so I think, so, Anatoli strong; he use oxygen; he going to up. I think after morning, so I ask other Sherpa, “Anatoli’s going up?” No. And, so then after I tell two Sherpa who going, two strong Sherpa, I give ten thousand, ten thousand Nepali rupee I give to. Please Scott take down. But, two Sherpa going up. No life.
KLEV: I have a question for Neal. We heard that Anatoli’s instructions from Scott were to save himself and go to camp and make tea, make ready for members. Did you have any instructions directly from Scott?
NEAL: I did not. When I passed Scott, [I] just said, “Hi, how’s it going?” I gave him a slap on the back. I was somewhat preoccupied because I had just tried to orchestrate everybody getting off the summit. I’d been screaming at Charlotte and kept telling Lene, no more pictures, let’s go, and Sandy had been there a little bit and tried to get them to come behind me. I was more interested in looking up the hill and making sure that everybody was coming as quickly as they could. I knew that Scott was close. We’ve climbed together before. I had a pretty strong bond with him, and just a look from him and one from me, I think, indicated what had to be done, and that was okay. He was close, tag the summit and get the hell out of there. And, I figured he would catch us very shortly on the way down. I wasn’t worried about him at the time.
SANDY: Neal, maybe you should give a quick bit about your experience on the descent, because you sort of led the band of the four of us.
NEAL: This is my interpretation of how we came down. We started off at the summit and still pretty euphoric for the first part of the snow. Obviously everybody made it to the summit and was very happy, and we were still seeing people coming up that were celebrating in their triumph, so the seriousness of it, I don’t think, [had] set in with everybody. All the people—but, I was very, very nervous and very anxious. I actually wanted to leave the summit much earlier with maybe Martin or Klev, but every time I got ready to stand up and go, it seemed like another person or another wave of people would come over the ridge, some including our members. I was very surprised that people kept coming. I thought that they would have either turned around on their own or by somebody else. I didn’t feel it was right for me to leave at that time, until everybody had reached the summit. They were so close. I knew Anatoli had gone down. I had no problem with that. I knew that it would have been nice for him to stay, but at the same time it wouldn’t have necessarily facilitated our descent any better. I wasn’t aware of his instructions to go down immediately from Scott, but, after hearing that, I support that. I think that’s a very good idea, and in fact, had he not gone down, his efforts at the bottom collecting people wouldn’t have been possible. So, anyway, we got to the Hillary Step, and I was right behind Sandy. She seemed to be the one most out of it at the time. Behind me were Charlotte, Tim, and then Lene. When we got to the Hillary Step, it’s a real jungle of old ropes and pieces of tattered cord. Sandy was having [a] very difficult time even deciphering which cord was the one to hook into and how to negotiate the footsteps. I walked down to her. We tried to rappel her down, but the cords were too tangled by the wind, so we had to undo that and she hand “rap’d” down with some assistance. She got down to the rest of the ridge, and I looked behind and it seemed as if the other people were making pretty good progress, so I wasn’t too worried about them. At the rock just below the South Summit, Klev was sitting there. He had been testing oxygen bottles. There didn’t seem to be too many left. There was one that was full, or practically full, I was aware of, and then a couple others that had somewhere between three to five.* Klev, that was my recollection. I knew that I was close to or out of oxygen at the time, as well as some of the other members. Maybe Klev can help me with some of the arrangements that we had on bottles for different people. It’s somewhat of a blur to me. I was pretty out of it at the time, myself, but I do recall taking one bottle myself that had a pressure of either three or five, and then the other bottle that I was still breathing on had the opposite, either three or five, I can’t remember. The full bottle, I believe at that time, went to Lene—
LENE: Yes, it did.
NEAL: —and the other people were still coming and Klev was there. Charlotte came by and passed and walked to the South Summit, and it’s my recollection that Tim also did, so they were on their way. I was screaming at Sandy to get going and she also did. Lene I believe followed me. I’m not exactly aware of when Klev left, whether he was behind me or in front of me.
KLEV: I’ll jump in. When I came across from the [Hillary] Step to the South Summit, Jon Krakauer was in distress there, and that kind of slowed me up. I think I was— There was nothing I could really do to help him. I don’t think I had the wherewithal to do that, but I wanted to stay there until I saw some action was being taken, because they did have two guides on either side of him.* When Neal arrived at the South Summit, he looked at me and said, “What the heck are you doing here? Get out of here.” It was at that time that Neal—he’d recognized the urgency of the hour and maybe the storm—and it was at that time that the fire was lit under me. And I think I left just about the time you got there. You really motivated me to get down.
SANDY: I’m going to have to change the tape, but I’m going to listen to what’s on it first.
NEAL: —his suits are for a hundred dollars or a hundred thousand dollars, that’s beside the point. These questions—
SANDY: This is tape three, Everest debriefing, May fifteenth, 1996. We were at the point in the last tape where Neal was talking about his descent and speaking sort of generally for—
LENE: Please don’t speak for me.
SANDY: —for the descent—at least the four of us—right? Neal, Tim, Charlotte, and me.
NEAL: Excuse me. I’d like to explore that comment. What does that mean?
LENE: I said, “Please don’t speak for me.” Because, she said she was generally speaking for us and I said, “Please don’t speak for me.”
SANDY: I said the four of us, and I articulated it was Tim, Charlotte, because you guys, you and Klev, sort of descended in a slightly different pattern than we did, but, anyway, Neal was, in the last tape, talking about his descent, and I am willing to let him speak for us until he misspeaks. Are you?—Okay—Neal?
NEAL: Okay, yeah. I am just thinking about something here that’s very upsetting. Anyway, I don’t quite remember where I was, somewhere around the South Summit, in the last tape. The focus that I had at that particular point was on Sandy. I thought that she was the one that was having the most difficulties, as I think I indicated. When I left the South Summit or the rock below the South Summit, somewhere just over the top 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 don’t recall where the other people were at that time exactly, other than what I said previously about when I thought they left the South Summit. 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.* We were trying to figure out how to get her going. Two things happened, and I don’t recall the order in which they happened. Maybe somebody can help me. The two things were that, number one, I rea
lized that we had to motivate pretty heavily on Sandy. I got in front of her, clipped on the rope. This was at the point where if you go out skier’s left, if you will, you can slide down the fixed lines. I grabbed Sandy’s harness and started her down and told her a process that I had used before many times, pretty successfully, which was that I would start her down. I would slide down the rope on my butt, somewhere between ten to fifty feet, depending on the steepness of the hill, and then she was just to basically slide on her butt, out of control if necessary. The snow that she built up in her feet against my back would stop her and we could start over. And, if she didn’t have enough strength to start that process, then I would continue grabbing her harness and pulling her down. The other thing that happened, and again, I can’t recall the order in which this happened, was that we looked at her oxygen tank and the pressure was getting down there somewhere, maybe ten megapascals. I knew that Lene had just gotten a fresh bottle of oxygen, and I asked if she would switch bottles with Sandy, since she could move a lot faster and make it down. Lene agreed to that and we did. Again, I can’t remember if that occurred before Sandy started sliding or if it happened a little bit further down. Does anybody recall?
SANDY: I don’t recall where it was.
TIM: I think it happened approximately the same spot that Charlotte gave Sandy the shot.
NEAL: All at one time?
TIM: Yes.
LENE: Yeah, because I was right behind them—[UI].
SANDY: I’d buy that, because within fifteen minutes I felt pretty frisky again. I was renewed.
NEAL: We turned, or I turned the oxygen bottle up to three or three and a half on Sandy because I wanted her to liven up pretty good. She followed me down in the fashion I described earlier to the bottom of the upper set of fixed lines, the bottom one being the most complicated with a little bit of a traverse. I had to grab her and yank her several times off to the skier’s right to get her to the flat. Once she got to that point, you have to walk without a line, but she seemed to be more alert and conscious, and I recall reaching into her pack and turning the flow rate down slightly so that she would have enough oxygen to make it down. Near the bottom of the fixed line Lene passed me on my left looking down. She looked like she was doing okay. I wasn’t too worried about her at the time. She looked like she understood the urgency of the matter and was going fast. Above me Tim and Charlotte were coming down. They looked under control, and I wasn’t too worried about them at the time. We all walked as a group, carefully, down the very exposed, unroped section between the two fixed lines, basically to the Southeast Summit. On the Southeast Summit, Klev was just ready to leave, and I believe, with Lene. They had pointed down a slightly different variation to get to the top of the line, which actually ended some, maybe, fifteen to twenty meters from the Southeast Summit. Instead of traversing over to the rocks, a very scary process, the new snow allowed us just to skate straight down the middle, I believe.
KLEV: Excuse me. This is Klev. Are you talking about below the Southeast Ridge?
NEAL: Yes, from the Southeast Ridge down.
KLEV: From the Southeast Ridge down, Lene and I stayed on what I believed were the original fixed ropes that we used coming up.
LENE: Yes.
KLEV: Yes, Lene?
LENE: Yes. That is why Neal is saying that. Instead of sort of traversing over the rocks to start with, we just sort of went right through the snow because it was so deep, it slowed us down.
KLEV: Okay, yes.
NEAL: On my descent, somewhere near or somewhere, I believe, below the upper set of fixed ropes, the bottle of oxygen that I had that had a pressure of three or five ran out. I went for a while with no oxygen at all and just was starting to stumble myself. I ran into Tashi Sherpa and asked him to switch the hose from one bottle to the other. I am not sure if he took the old bottle out or not. I could have been carrying two bottles still at that point. I know that I only had a very small pressure left and asked him to turn it to the smallest setting, which was, I believe, half a liter a minute. I continued down. We organized ourself a little bit at the Southeast Summit, excluding Klev and Lene, who had descended just prior to me arriving there. Tim and Charlotte looked pretty good. In fact, I remember Charlotte preparing herself a little bit. She had reached into her pack and maybe even gotten something to eat or a headlamp. I don’t exactly recall what it was, but both of them looked pretty good. Sandy was still doing okay but moving slowly at the time.
KLEV: Approximate time? Do you have a guess what time that was? I’m curious what time we—
SANDY: It was near dark.
NEAL: Yeah, at that time I—
TIM: Six [6:00 P.M.].
LENE: I know we left about six o’clock. Klev, when we headed down, it was about six o’clock.
NEAL: I wasn’t looking at my watch. My impression was that the valley floor was basically dark or very close to dark and that we were traveling only in the light of the fact that we were up very high on the mountain, alpenglow through the storm. It was snowing at the time but not extremely windy. We could see—I could recall seeing an occasional light flicker down near Base Camp through snow and mist. I knew that we were close, but still had a lot of time to go. I was still very worried about getting down, but having made it off of the most exposed section, the upper part towards the South Summit, I was feeling a little bit confident and that we were moving pretty well. Same process on the next set of fixed lines. Slid on my butt down; people behind me followed; seemed to do pretty well. I recall about that time seeing quite a ways below me two men tethered together. As we found out later, that would be—
SANDY: Beck Weathers.
NEAL: —Beck Weathers in front and Mike somebody-or-another [Mike Groom], the guide for Rob Hall, behind. They were moving very slowly, but I recognized the jacket eventually on the guide and figured he was in good shape and under control. At the bottom of the second set of fixed lines there is several hundred meters vertical of some difficult descent on shale, which was snow-covered at the time. Occasionally a track could be found, but we were following the path or following the figures ahead of us in general terms. Again, some of the people behind lagged just a little bit and I recall waiting several times. Klev and Lene were ahead. They were figures; they were dark objects walking. I don’t recall exactly how—what distance they were at the time. Eventually, we got to the final ledges which lead you to the top of the very first fixed line if you’re coming up, clipped onto that, waited for a while, and watched as Tim, Charlotte, and Sandy followed down behind. Again, they seemed to be doing pretty well. I started down the line and somewhere, maybe a third of the way down the line, there was a body sitting, facing down, on the line, not really moving, or moving very, very slowly. I got to this point and there were other people around, possibly Beck Weathers and Mike, the guide. It could have been Lene and Klev. I wasn’t sure, but I recall going in front of the person on the line and I thought it was Lene. I yelled at her several times. I moved her [oxygen] mask around or whatnot and realized it was not Lene. I recognized the woman as the Japanese woman from Rob Hall’s group [Yasuko Namba]. She was not moving whatsoever, 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 that 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, rolling, depending on the terrain, down with her behind me. Several times her feet and her crampons went through my 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. Sometime after we started, Tim and Charlotte came behind. We were in a larger group now—maybe even two of the Sherpas—I don’t recall the faces. Tim offered assistance I recall. I remember hearing his voice. 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 th
e 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, something to that effect, over some of those crevasses. 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. It was dark. 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 by the arm and she—we walked, staggered, arm in arm together. There were two Sherpas with us at the time, and I believe that Klev and Lene had left us, heading towards Camp IV in the direction they thought was correct. The distance that they were in front of us was probably not very far, but under the condition—
[GAP ON RECORDING]
KLEV: Once Lene and I connected with your group—you, Tim, Charlotte—we absolutely stayed with you because we had a couple Sherpas that we were putting our faith and our confidence in to lead us to camp.
NEAL: That’s correct, Klev, but wasn’t it—I recall vaguely that your group, or the group that I was in, had walked some distance after the fixed line and then we saw you come from our right or below and come back to us. So I’m assuming that you had left towards Camp IV in a direction, and again, this may only have been thirty seconds or a minute.
The Climb Page 36
