To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  I spend my first night of our summit run at Camp I, at the top of the Ice Fall. We had established the camp a month earlier and there is evidence of the glacier’s motion over that time. The camp has moved, shifted with the sliding glacier, now further down the mountain from where we first set it up. New crevasses, fissures in the ice, have emerged. The camp is literally flowing down the mountain. This would be my last night overlooking the Ice Fall. I wouldn’t miss it.

  I know that for some climbers every bit of the route up Everest is memorable, every step is emotional, the very strain and punishment of arriving at a camp worthy of a lengthy dispatch home.

  I understand that, and I recognize that those climbers are probably taking in their surroundings. I couldn’t do that.

  In my case, the route to the highest camp, Camp IV, at 26,000 feet, was uneventful. Certainly, things occurred between the morning I left the Ice Fall to when I arrived at Camp IV. In fact, only half our team made it up to Camp IV, the rest turning back in exhaustion and defeat. But I remember little of it.

  For me, the deepest memories don’t begin until that evening, when I awoke from a rest and pulled on a boot, readying myself for the summit.

  My watch alarm wakes me at 10 P.M. and I tug my headlamp over my hat and twist the lens to switch on the beam. I shine the light up at the thermometer that dangles from the roof of the tent. Forty below zero.

  Outside my tent flap are the last three thousand vertical feet of ice and granite that lie between me and the summit of Everest. It’s time for the final push.

  I had planned out exactly what I’d be wearing. I already have on my down suit and a thin pair of gloves. The rest is laid out along the tent wall or tucked deep in my sleeping bag to keep it warm: inch-thick boots, climbing harness, mitts, oxygen bottle, backpack. I would strap it all on in that order. I lift up out of my sleeping bag and grab a boot.

  With a hand on each side of the boot, I pull up hard, pressing down firmly with my left foot, not sure what to expect.

  My left leg can be a challenge; it has never been 100 percent since I broke my fibula, cleaving it into two in that rock climbing accident. This time, the leg slides neatly into place.

  At 26,000 feet I have to pause for a few breaths before I lace up.

  The second layer of the boot is also a tight fit. I slide in with a tug and pull the Velcro tight to fix it in place. The final layer is a Gore-Tex shell that keeps the boot windproof and waterproof. I wrap it around the boot and push down on the seal. Done.

  I look down at my watch. It looks like it reads 10:30 P.M. That can’t be right. It can’t possibly be later than 10:05. I rub my thumb over the face of the watch thinking that some condensation is obscuring the numbers. It now reads 10:31 P.M.

  I stare down in disbelief. It has just taken me a half hour to put on one boot.

  Time has become taffy, stretched out beyond recognition. What I thought were mere seconds were actually, somehow, elongated into minutes. It is now clear, undeniable, that I am massively deteriorating, mentally and physically. Everest is tearing me down. The thin air is crushing me. I have to get this climb done as quickly as possible. I pull on the other boot, strap on the rest of my gear, and head out of the tent, up toward the summit.

  Over the next few hours, I reach what climbers refer to as the Balcony, the gateway to the Everest ridgeline and one of the last patches of flat ground until the summit, 2,500 feet above. That would be my last restful moment for the next twenty hours.

  The snow begins shortly after 5 A.M. I knew it was coming, every climber on the mountain that morning knew it was coming. The forecasts hadn’t been good and the wind had been picking up for the last couple of hours, the sky looking heavy.

  Within minutes the view in front of me is obscured by snow. I am just a few dozen feet below the South Summit, the false summit, a spot that rises up sharply, feeling like the peak only to drop back down, requiring the climber to make another push upward still hours away from the real summit.

  As I climb higher, the clouds abruptly thin. I pull up a few more feet, onto the South Summit, and the clouds of the storm blow below me and I stand up in the full light of the morning. The storm is there, beneath me, raging, but I am a dozen feet above it all, looking out over a tranquil sun-filled sky. I can see Everest’s summit ahead of me cutting up through the clouds, oblivious to the storm.

  Some climbers who are reading this will understand what I did next; others may not. Without consideration, without any reflection or pause, I pushed on.

  Of course, I had plenty of good reasons to turn around.

  I had completely lost visual contact with my team. Some were ahead of me, some behind. Some, as I found out later, had already turned around, recognizing the dangers of climbing into a storm, accepting the end of their summit attempt and returning to Camp IV. As a result I was now climbing solo, uncomforted by the silhouette of a teammate, alone to decide, alone to slip and vanish without witness.

  The storm would only get worse. In fact, just moments earlier I had radioed back to Base Camp to let them know my position and alert them to the fact that the weather was rapidly deteriorating. It turns out that the team at Base recorded my message and a year later, when a movie about the expedition aired on the National Geographic Channel, you hear my voice radioing these few desperate words: “It’s complete whiteout conditions here. I can’t see a damn thing and the team is totally spread out.”

  Then my radio goes silent.

  The easy explanation for why I pushed ahead to the summit is that hypoxia, the lack of oxygen, was clouding my judgment and that now, in the rich air of sea level, I can recognize the foolishness of my decision and admit that the right thing to do at that moment was turn around.

  But no.

  In hindsight, even knowing now that a crisis was about to ensue, I still would not have done it differently.

  I dropped down off the South Summit and back into the storm, crossing the knife edge without incident. With the storm worsening, I knew that it would present a challenge on my way back, but for now I would focus on the summit, just a hundred feet above me.

  The final challenge to reaching the summit is the Hillary Step, forty feet of near-vertical granite with pockets of deep snow.

  I have been on climbs before when I’m near a summit, having just made what I thought was the final big push, only to discover when I come up over the ledge that I still have another more exhausting haul to go. It can be dispiriting to confront another challenge when you are already so depleted.

  But when I stood at the base of the Hillary Step, I didn’t feel despair or frustration. I wasn’t distraught, or crushed. I didn’t need to pause and refocus my energy. Instead, I was thrilled.

  I am taking deep rasping breaths, satisfied, on my knees at the summit of Mount Everest.

  For the last several hours I’ve been climbing alone, no one in sight. Now I can see a climber rising up over the ridge. He walks up beside me and drops down in the snow.

  I haven’t radioed Base Camp since just before the South Summit. I have no idea how long ago that was, perhaps hours. I click on the power and give Base the news.

  “This is Slake. I’m on the summit.” I couldn’t have chosen duller words.

  Cheers erupt from the radio.

  They are miles away, separated by storm, crevasse, and rock. They couldn’t reach me by any means no matter their desire or wealth. I couldn’t be more detached. Yet I hear their voices and realize I couldn’t be more connected.

  This stranger on the summit with me has no radio. I believe he is looking at me, though it’s impossible to tell through his tinted goggles.

  I decide to give him the chance to experience what I’m feeling: a sense of connection despite our utterly desperate circumstances. I hand him the radio. I don’t even know what language he will speak.

  He pushes down on the button and says a few soft words in what I suspect is Russian.

  He releases the button and all we hear is stat
ic. I imagine that the team at Base is baffled. The Russian isn’t a member of our expedition. Our team has no attachment to him, no reason for celebration.

  Cheers erupt again from the radio.

  They know all they need to know. This Russian is on the summit, and like any other climber who has struggled through the storm to get to this point, he deserves his moment of triumph.

  I take the radio from his hand and make one last transmission from the summit.

  “I’m on my way down.”

  The shouts of good luck fade as I spin down the knob and click off the radio. I have been on this mountain for fifty-four days and I spent just two minutes on the summit.

  I stand up and begin my trip home.

  This is the last place on Earth you would expect a fork in the road. Yet, here it is, at 29,029 feet, the highest point on the planet, and I’m heading in the opposite direction from the Russian. He turns north, heading down to Tibet, and within a few moments his silhouette vanishes behind a curtain of snow. I turn south, toward Nepal, into the teeth of the storm.

  I am facing a growing list of problems.

  First of all, I am descending into a blizzard alone. Over the last two hours our climbing team has gotten completely spread out along the southeast ridge and we’ve lost contact as our radios have become ineffective amid the twists and turns of Everest’s summit.

  At most, there is roughly thirty feet of visibility. The blizzard is so severe that the ridgeline blurs into the background of falling snow. Under ordinary circumstances I could easily deal with that. But here it won’t be easy because somewhere up ahead the ridgeline narrows to just a bit wider than my boot and there is a four-thousand-foot drop-off on either side.

  Making matters worse is the cornice of snow that hangs over that narrow ridgeline, creating an illusion that the path is a few feet wider than it actually is. If I place a foot on the snow cornice instead of the rock of the ridgeline, I’ll plunge through, falling nearly a mile down the mountainside.

  The good news is that there is shelter ahead; the bad news is that it’s on the other side of that corniced knife edge and still hours away.

  The tracks I left coming up to the summit just a few minutes ago have been scrubbed away by the wind and snow, but the direction I need to go is still obvious—even in a blizzard, down is still apparent when you’re standing on the highest point on Earth.

  I take in a big draw of air from my oxygen tank and the rasp is just audible over the thirty-mile-per-hour wind. With that, it’s time to go to work.

  I take my first step down the mountain and immediately feel depleted. Adrenaline is a direction-sensitive stimulant. My body has been producing gallons of it since I set out for the summit at midnight, but the moment I turned around to go back down the spigot went dry. I have felt this on every climb I have ever done and other climbers tell me they experience the same thing: adrenaline on the way up, an empty tank on the way down.

  These are the moments when I have my greatest focus. It’s not that my mind is sharp; at this altitude, with this level of fatigue, I know that my mind is as thick as timber. And it’s not that I’m broadly aware of my circumstances. In fact, now, at this moment, my world has become astonishingly small. It no longer consists of friends and family. My hometown, the smell of coffee, the push and hustle of my job, the last book I read—all of that is distant and forgotten.

  The only thing that exists in my life right now is the square foot of snow directly in front of me where I will plant my next step. I can sense that spot with absolute clarity. I can see the bend of the snow, feel the weight of the falling flakes, sense the flakes settle on the ridge creating a new contour. The shadows and folds of a small patch of snow and rock are my entire world now.

  I guide my foot to the spot I’ve been staring at and the metal claws of my crampon punch through the snow, gripping and taking my weight as I lean forward sinking deep into fresh powder. I take in three breaths before I’m ready for another step. I pull my boot out of the foot-deep hole of snow and plod forward. This descent is happening in slow motion, like walking through a vat of molasses.

  My speed is limited by the intense fatigue and the layers of clothes I’m wearing to weather the twenty-below-zero temperature. I’m encased in a down suit, hands sealed in thick gloves, my face layered in a mask and goggles. Two days from now, when I’m back in Base Camp, I will discover that there was a small gap in all that wrapping. A square of flesh on my cheek, no bigger than a postage stamp, was exposed to the subzero chill. The result is a patch of thick blackened skin, crisped like a burnt marshmallow. It takes months for the skin to return but it forever remains sensitive to the cold.

  As I move slowly down the mountain I see three figures ahead of me, barely visible in the blizzard. They stand no more than thirty feet away, but their movements are obscured in the swirling snow. With the wind howling, I can’t hear a word they are saying although it is clear they are trying to communicate. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, one of them sits down. The other two stand above him, hovering. They speak for a few more moments, turn, and then continue on down the mountain and out of sight.

  At this altitude, in this weather, sitting can mean only one thing. Whoever just sat down has decided to die. The climbers who are walking away have chosen to let that happen.

  How could those two climbers walk away? Over the next few hours, my understanding of that moment would turn inside out.

  I don’t know how I missed seeing him before, but another climber suddenly becomes visible and approaches the sitting climber. As I approach, I realize that I know them both. Jim Williams, my climbing partner from Wyoming, is standing above the sitting climber, Ang Nima, a Sherpa guide from Nepal.

  Despite having vastly different starting points, our personal stories have now converged in a subzero whiteout on the summit ridge of Everest. Staring at each other in silence, we know that however this dilemma spins out, this moment will forever shape us.

  I break the silence. “Ang Nima, you have to get up; you have to get on your feet.”

  “No, this is not necessary. Everything is fine,” Ang Nima responds. There is no desperation in his voice. Instead, there is serenity, a delicacy. Listening to him you would think we were casually reminiscing over beers or lounging in a meadow on a warm summer evening.

  Jim’s voice crackles with a reminder that the situation is desperate. “If you sit, you will die. You have to keep moving.”

  “I will stay. You go.”

  Ang Nima’s mind must be in a fog.

  The mind is an inventive creature. At sea level in the comfort of your own home you can let it have free range and delight in its mischief. But the summit of Everest is not the place for mischief. This is where your brain tells you that you’re tired, that sitting for a moment will revive you, that all you need is a short rest to restart your failing engine. Those are the tantalizing whispers of Odysseus’s Sirens and to listen to those voices is to be lured to your death.

  Jim is shouting now, his voice barely audible over the sound of the screaming wind. “Get up now.” Each word is spoken like a hammer stroke trying to break through the frozen crystals of Ang Nima’s mind and bring back his focus.

  “I will be fine. Go. I will be back.”

  He’ll be back? And then I realize that Ang Nima isn’t being lulled into complacency. Instead, he has clarity; he has thought this through and his mind is settled. In fact, he has a reason to be content with his decision.

  What does it take to decide to sit down and die, to willingly accept the end? In the United States, the vast majority of our lifetime health costs will be spent in the last two months of our lives in a desperate effort to scrape out one more day, one more minute. We don’t accept the end so easily.

  Ang Nima lives in a different world. As he sits in the snow, reflecting back on his days, he is reassured by one simple fact: he is a good man. That, to him, can mean only one thing. He will be reincarnated into a life no worse than what he has had.
His conclusion, then, is that he can be calm amid the chaos. Buddhism is his universal health coverage.

  That belief also explains how his Sherpa friends could walk away and leave him sitting in the snow. They know Ang Nima; they know what a good man he is. Perhaps they envy him a little because he may return for an even better life. They can walk on with a clear conscience. All three are content.

  Reincarnation is a wonderfully serene worldview. But I don’t buy it. When people die, they are gone. I learned that as a child.

  Ang Nima believes that he is coming back; I am certain that he is not. Our worldviews are about to have a smackdown.

  To Nima’s credit, his view is shaped by two millennia of accumulated Buddhist teachings while my view is informed by merely a few centuries of advanced scientific experimentation and hypothesis. On the other hand, if Nima is wrong and I am right, then he is throwing away the one and only chance he has on this planet. With that, I decide that we must intervene. Jim is of the same mind. The only question is: what can we do?

  We are silent once again as Jim and I consider the situation. The only sound is the screaming wind that keeps the snow whipping around us like a thick white cyclone. It is lifeless up here, as inhospitable as the dark side of the moon. No animal, no plant, nothing can survive here. This is not a place to linger; from the moment you leave the summit you are in a constant state of escape. Nima now risks becoming a permanent resident, joining more than a hundred other climbers who are frozen into this desolate mountainside.

  We can’t carry Ang Nima down. At this altitude, under these circumstances, it will be hard enough just managing our own body weight.

  There is no point in radioing for help because no one would be able to get here in time.

  There is only one course of action. It carries risk, but Nima’s death is certain if we do nothing.

  Some high altitude climbers carry two emergency drugs: dexamethasone and dextroamphetamine. That latter drug has a familiar street name: speed. These drugs weren’t designed by the pharmaceutical industry to aid climbers; climbers just happened to discover the utility of these drugs in pulling out of dire situations such as this. Consequently, there is no guidance on dosage. If administered in the right amount, the dex cocktail can get a climber back up on his feet and home. If administered in the wrong proportions, the climber will never see home again.