Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

Doc stood at the edge of the precipice. Her headlamp hardly made a dent in the gaping blackness, but it reflected brightly off the makeshift bridge of four aluminum ladders lashed together end-to-end. It was the only way across the chasm facing us.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she said.

  Admittedly, this was an intimidating first Khumbu Icefall ladder crossing because it was so long. The fact that it was still black outside was a blessing, though. At least she wouldn’t know this crevasse was probably one of the ones so deep you couldn’t see the bottom.

  “Congratulations, you’re not in Base Camp anymore,” I joked, trying to help her relax.

  Doc unclipped from the rope with a resolute snap, stepping back to clip in behind two of the A-Team clients. “I need a minute.”

  I could empathize with her hesitation. Crossing the ladder bridges—which occur on the Nepal side of Mount Everest and nowhere else in the world—is terrifying the first few times.

  Two clients later and Doc was next in line again.

  “Come on, Doc, no sense stalling,” I said. “There are about ten more of these you’re going to have to cross before Camp One.”

  “That isn’t very encouraging.”

  “Most of them aren’t this wide.”

  There was a groan from deep within the bowels of the perpetually unstable icefall. That got her moving.

  Her crampons clunked dully as she placed her first foot on the rungs of the frost-covered ladder. Taking another step, she shook her head. One more step, and she’d be standing above the open air of the chasm, feeling the full wobble and vibration of the ladder. “This is insane,” she said, but she kept going.

  Doc exhaled loudly as soon as her feet were off the ladder and back on snow. I tipped forward to the fronts of my crampons and bounced my heels a few times to stave off the shivers in the five-degree air as I waited for the rest of A-Team to cross. Five degrees wouldn’t be bad at all if I were moving, but standing around in it was torture.

  By the time the sky was lightening, I was so frozen that I eagerly anticipated the warmth of the coming sun, even though with the warming came added risk in the already unstable icefall. Because of their enormous size, the ice blocks all around us gave the illusion of stability, but in reality, the blocks were like sandcastles at the ocean’s edge. The daylight increase in temperature gradually melted their foundations and each block could potentially be just a breath away from tipping.

  Ideally, we would have been out of the icefall by this time, but there had been some traffic jams on the ladder bridges with the Go Big expedition coming down from a rotation. I’d heard reports over my radio that the Cuban team had already reached Camp One, but the tail end of A-Team had at least another hour to go.

  I let my ascender hang on the fixed line so I could wiggle some feeling back into my freezing fingers and toes, and then I caught back up to the last client: Phil. His progress had been steady but tediously slow.

  The sky grew lighter until we no longer needed our headlamps. I followed Phil through a maze of ice into a foreboding slot canyon, then up out of it using a vertical ladder. Even through the thick layers of my mittens, the cold from the metal zapped away any warmth I’d gained from wiggling my fingers.

  On this plateau there was a clear view of the top of the icefall, after which would be the tents of Camp One. But first, we had to get through the rest of the icefall. Phurba, Glissading Glenn, Dorje, and Johnsmith were far ahead of us now. There was a block of ice as big as an office building to our right, and it was leaning at such a threatening angle that I longed to sprint away from Phil and up the plateau to get out of its way.

  “You’ve got this,” I said. “Just keep it steady.”

  He nodded, but instead of starting to walk again, he coughed. “I’m fine,” he said through a few more coughs. “I just need a minute.”

  “Take one minute if you must, but it’s really best to keep moving,” I said.

  Halfway through Phil’s minute, there was a crash louder than thunder.

  It took a few seconds to register that the crash was near but thankfully not on top of us. Thinking immediately of the men just ahead, I ripped off my backpack to grab the avalanche shovel and probes.

  After several frantic radio calls, Jim had it all sorted out. All Global clients and guides were accounted for. It was a serac collapse somewhere between the rest of A-Team and us.

  Tashi.

  Now I was thankful for Phil’s slow progress. Elated, actually. And I wanted out of this icefall. Right now.

  Jim was on the radio from Base Camp, echoing that exact sentiment, urging the remaining A-Team laggards to hurry up and get out.

  Five minutes of walking later, we reached the site of the serac collapse, where the fixed line dove eerily into a field of slushy snow. The outline of where the block had pulled away from the wall wasn’t large by Khumbu Icefall standards, but large enough to have been deadly for anyone beneath it. We had indeed been lucky.

  “We’re going to have to come off the line,” I told Phil. “We’ll be able to pick it back up as soon as we’re through this.”

  Phil was clearly shaken, but he was able to mimic my steps as I pulled my ascender off the line and clipped it to my harness. Honestly, I was shaken up, too. A serac collapse like that is exactly why you don’t want to be in the icefall when the day starts heating it up.

  The slope was barely angled more than a beginner ski run, but to be safe I got the spare rope out of my pack and tied us together with a pair of figure eights through our harnesses. I sent Phil out in front of me, and when he was about ten feet ahead, I began walking, too.

  This was the normal way to travel on a mountain. A mountain that did not have a collective pool of money to string twelve miles of fixed rope up the mountain like a handrail straight to the summit. I’d never traveled on a two-person rope team with just me and a client, and it was not a good feeling. Phil was skinny, but he was tall, and if he fell, the force would easily take me down, too. Thankfully, the slope was so gentle that a fall was unlikely.

  So, then, why was I nervous about this? My crampons crunched unsteadily through the mix of packed snow and ice. That unsteady sound was my answer. I hadn’t been through the icefall this year, and I didn’t know what this rubble was covering. What if we were on top of a crevasse?

  “Phil!” I yelled. I motioned urgently for him to follow me back to the side we’d come from.

  We had to get back to solid snow immediately. Sweat broke out across my forehead. I waved him on faster. As much as we needed to get out of the icefall, we had to do it the right way, even if it meant backtracking so we could belay each other across the rubble.

  Even through the panic, I worried that I was being paranoid. That method of crossing would take a half hour, at least. A half hour that we didn’t have.

  I desperately wished Dad or another Global guide were here to weigh in on what the best option was. But there was no one; just me and my client. This was being a high-altitude mountaineering guide. There is no one else.

  Just as my feet hit solid snow, there was an explosion, followed by a distinct whoosh and drop.

  The rope hissed and cracked as loud as a bullwhip.

  I didn’t even have time to scream.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I fell face-first to the ice, my shoulder slamming into the anvil end of my ice ax. I gasped and then frantically kicked my toe points into the snow to lock myself in place. Not a second later, the screaming rope caught up to me. Despite bracing myself, the force yanked me back a few feet and jerked the harness around my waist as if I’d been bungee jumping.

  Even without looking backward, I knew what had happened. The danger I’d sensed had come true: the rubble from the collapsed serac had formed a snowbridge that was hiding a crevasse. And then the crevasse had gobbled up the bridge as we stood atop it.

  Ever so slowly, I peered around, afraid to see what—or what wasn’t—behind me. I had about ten feet between me
and the newly opened void. It was a relief to have some distance, but Phil’s full weight and life dangled from my waist. I strengthened my grip on the ice ax, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Phil,” I yelled.

  “Down here,” he called.

  Thank god. He could speak. This was a good sign.

  The problem was that with Phil’s weight on my harness and having only one hand free, there was no way for me to build the anchor I needed to save us both. Especially since all the tools I needed to build that anchor were zipped in my backpack.

  “Hold tight,” I yelled. “Don’t move.”

  I wanted to scream in frustration. My tools were right there against my back, but they might as well have been on the moon right now.

  “Emily, come in, Emily,” Jim said on the radio.

  My radio had unclipped during the fall and was lying on the snow near my thigh. I strained for it, but the pain in my shoulder from falling on the ice ax made me curse.

  Jim was on the radio again. “Emily, check in for us, please.”

  I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to hold this position, and with an unbridged crevasse opened between me and the rest of the Global crew, it was fully up to me to somehow get stabilized so Phil could ascend out of the crevasse.

  “You okay?” I yelled down to Phil.

  “I think so. I’m not that far from the top. I can just—”

  “No! Don’t move. Just wait.”

  I reached around to try to unzip my backpack, but the pain was too great. Instead, I threaded my left arm between the pack and my lower back, attempting to unzip it from the bottom. That didn’t work, but I was able to nudge it enough that I might be able to reach the zipper pull with my teeth.

  My radio crackled. “We’re looking from both ends with binoculars,” Jim said. “We don’t see you. Thom’s sending someone down from Camp One.”

  They wouldn’t be able to get to us without a ladder. I prayed there was an extra in Camp One and that they would know to bring it.

  Phil’s weight dug into my bruised waist. My wrecked shoulder throbbed from my grip on the ice ax. Ironically, Phil and I were currently positioned in the ultimate mountaineering dilemma: cut your partner off the rope and save yourself, or both die together? But this was a commercial expedition where Phil was a paying client, not a partner.

  Don’t think about that. Keep your head. Gravity and friction are in your favor. There are other guides just a quarter mile away. Do whatever it takes to hang on.

  I pushed my face into the small opening in my pack I’d managed to unzip, grabbing one of the avalanche pickets with my teeth. That’s when I saw someone rappelling down the wall of ice from which the serac had broken off. Luke.

  I yelled for him to stop and not come any farther because the wall was unstable, but he ignored me.

  Luke landed safely on our side of the crevasse. Wordlessly, he twisted three ice screws into the solid snow, put himself on a flat rappel back to me, tied a figure eight on a bight to the other end of the rope, and clipped it to the daisy chain on my harness. He pulled the slack out of the rope, bent it through the ATC on his harness, and just like that, I was on an anchor, and Phil’s weight was off me and onto Luke’s belay.

  He called directions down to Phil as I eased off the ice ax. I twisted around to sit and scooted farther back from the lip of the chasm. I kept a close eye on Phil as he pulled himself over the edge and crawled up to us.

  When all three of us were at the anchors, I called Jim on the radio to give an update.

  “What’s Luke doing down there?” he replied.

  Luke hadn’t been the one Thom sent down? He must have come on his own while they were still trying to reach me on the radio.

  “Yes, it’s Luke with us,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “We’re going to need a ladder to get across the crevasse, otherwise we’ll have to descend to Base Camp.”

  Thom confirmed there was an extra ladder at Camp One and told us Hulk and Phurba were on their way down with it. Thank god, because I wasn’t sure I had it in me to go all the way back down the gauntlet of the icefall right now.

  “Well, that was a scare,” Phil said when the radio calls were done.

  You have no idea.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think so. But I owe you a big thank-you.”

  “Luke’s the one who should get the thanks.”

  Phil thanked him, but it was me who he hugged afterward.

  In all this, Luke hadn’t said a single word, and he continued to say nothing during the never-ending wait for Phurba and Hulk to arrive, set up the ladder, and redo the fixed line.

  I snuck a glance at him. He was frowning, and his index finger tapped anxiously on his knee.

  I couldn’t even imagine what he must be thinking about me. I had made a terrible mistake in going across the rubble in a rope team instead of belaying Phil from a fixed anchor. Not only had I nearly gotten a client killed, it was Luke who had seen me in a position that could have only been caused by me backtracking out of a mistake, and Luke who’d had to put himself in a suicidal position to save my neck.

  My head sagged with humiliation. I didn’t have any idea how I was going to cope with what had happened, let alone the repercussions it would have on my relationship with Luke. Last night, everything had seemed so sure between us. Now, nothing was.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I yanked off my crampons, closed the tent door, and pulled my sleeping bag out of its stuff sack. I lay down immediately, burying my face in the chilly down.

  The sleeping bag next to me was Luke’s. As the two junior guides on teams with an odd number of guides, we shared a tent at Camp One and at Camp Two. I was glad he’d continued on to the main tent to check in with Thom, because I needed some time to pull myself together.

  My radio crackled. “Emily, this is Greg. You there?”

  I didn’t have the energy to reach for my radio, but if I didn’t, someone from Global would come get me.

  “Yeah, hi D—Greg.”

  “Switch over to ninety-nine, will you?”

  I sat up and spun the channel knob. “I’m here, Dad.”

  “You okay? I heard about what happened.”

  Dad would know about the serac falling and the snowbridge collapse, but none of the specifics of my actions. Only Luke knew that.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Everyone’s fine. I’m just warming up in my tent.”

  He keyed the mic but didn’t speak right away, as if deciding what to say. “All right, I’ll let you go. Dinner when you get down?”

  “Okay, Dad. Yeah, sounds good.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  When we got off this rotation, I wondered if I would confess the details of what had gone down. What would he think?

  I dialed back to Global’s main channel and laid the radio on the ground. I was still shivering with a bone-deep freeze, so I hurried to take some ibuprofen for my shoulder and then crawled inside my sleeping bag.

  Outside the tent, there were crampon-crunch footsteps coming my way. I pulled the sleeping bag over my face and pretended to sleep.

  The tent unzipped, and Luke crawled in. He probably wouldn’t disturb me. The thinner air in the on-mountain camps made it difficult to sleep, and all of us were careful not to wake a person who had managed to doze off.

  From the dark bag where I was now trapped, I listened to him settling into his sleeping bag, then digging through his backpack. There was a click, followed by the snap of earbuds into a jack and the faint trace of music beats.

  I was lying on the shoulder that had taken the brunt of my ice ax, and after a while I couldn’t bear it anymore. I rolled over, sighing and smacking my lips a couple of times to make it seem like it was all in my sleep. Now I was facing Luke.

  Sensing a bit of light, I cracked one eye open. I was still concealed by the sleeping bag hood, but there was enough of a gap that I coul
d see Luke. I nudged the hood up a tiny bit more. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep.

  What would happen with us next? He had the easiest excuse in the world to put the brakes on us. There’s a reason guides in relationships are not allowed to work on the same expedition: in an emergency, there is preferential treatment. Today had proven that. Luke had acted outside of Jim’s direction, leaving his own clients to come back for me, and in order to reach Phil and me across the crevasse, he’d taken a risk that Jim would have never allowed.

  I wanted the relief of a good cry, but after endangering other people’s lives as I had today, I didn’t deserve relief. In defeat, I let the sleeping bag fall back across my face. The blessing about sleeping at elevation is that even though it is a struggle, when you add enough cold, terror, and exhaustion—like today—it’s impossible not to.

  The sun was on the other side of the tent when I woke. I sat up with a start, my head crashing into a pole. I swore loudly, which made Luke jerk awake. He rubbed his eyes.

  Then, everything came flooding back. The weight of Phil’s body hanging from my harness. Unzipping my backpack with my teeth. The relief at seeing Luke and how he hadn’t been able to look at me afterward.

  I might have a long list of impressive summits under my belt, but I had not been a guide or the expedition leader on any of them. All I’d done was walk up mountains behind Dad. I was a sham, and Luke knew that now.

  “I brought you some hot chocolate,” he said, reaching for a thermos in the corner. “It’s probably not warm anymore, but it might not be frozen yet.”

  A lump of guilt lodged in my throat. He’d risked his own life to save mine and Phil’s.

  “Thanks for the hot chocolate,” I said. “And for saving my life. You shouldn’t have. But you did, and I’m beyond grateful.”

  “Of course I should have.”

  “No. It was too dangerous.”

  He looked at me oddly.

  The shame. I pressed my fingers to my throbbing temple.

  “Maybe we should talk about it,” he said.

  He waited for me to look at him, but I couldn’t. Instead, I gently stretched my aching shoulder. “There’s nothing to talk about. Other than to apologize. I made a huge mistake today, and I’m sorry I put you in that position.”