The major rigor of Base Camp is boredom; you spend a lot of time getting ready to do things, and a lot of time recovering from doing them, and therefore a lot of time doing nothing. Knowing this from previous excursions, I brought along a favorite author, Carl Hiaasen, to help beguile the hours, plus a little book on learning to juggle, a skill I thought would be fun to master. I became a familiar camp figure, fumbling away in front of my tent. Those of us who had trouble keeping the Sherpas’ names straight also used the downtime to take Polaroids of them and then memorize their faces.
For entertainment there was a stereo. Each morning after the Sherpas had burned juniper and chanted their Buddhist prayers, Robin Williams roared “Good Morning, Vietnam!” across the camp, blasting us from our sleeping bags. The rest of the day was rock and roll, plus Indian music from the cooking tent.
We had a couple of parties, for which we broke out the beer. Some people ended up dancing on our dining tent’s stone table. It wasn’t a mosh pit, exactly, but not unlike one. There were also theme-night dinners, when the food and its preparation and everyone’s dress were supposed to complement one team member’s salient characteristic.
I’d brought with me several pounds of bodybuilding powder, which I consumed daily to help keep my weight up. So at my theme dinner, the crowd showed up looking like drug dealers. For table decoration, someone produced a mirror and did lines of my powder on it.
By far the predominant physical feature of Base Camp is the great Khumbu Icefall, which begins just a quarter mile away and stretches up the mountain for two miles and almost two thousand vertical feet.
The Icefall is the midsection of the Khumbu Glacier. It starts above Base Camp at a declivity where the glacier pushes itself out over a precipice, creating giant blocks of ice that tumble downward with an ear-splitting roar. These so-called seracs are the size of small office buildings. They can weigh hundreds of tons. Once inside the Icefall, they continue to groan and thunder along. The whole dangerous mess moves downhill at about four feet a day in the summertime.
Back in 1953, when Edmund Hillary’s expedition encountered the Khumbu Icefall on its way to the first successful climb of Everest, team members thought up colorful and highly descriptive names for various stretches of the Icefall. These included Hellfire Alley, the Nutcracker, Atom-Bomb Area and Hillary’s Horror. In 1996, we chose to call a giant leaning serac at the top of the Icefall the Mousetrap; no one wanted to be the mouse squashed when the highly unstable Mousetrap inevitably slammed shut. It would snuff out more than just your tender spirits.
In Base Camp, the gargantuan collisions register through your feet as well as your ears, creating in the first-time visitor to Mount Everest the unnerving impression that serial earthquakes and train wrecks are occurring simultaneously just outside your tent.
But that’s only the noise.
The reason the Khumbu Icefall concerns you in Base Camp is that it stands between you and the summit. You must go up and down the thing at least five times, spend about twenty hours in it, like an ant trapped in the bottom of an ice machine, if you are to successfully climb Everest.
One of the Icefall’s more challenging features is the lightweight aluminum ladders you use to negotiate its jumble of slippery, cantilevered walls and deep crevasses. Anchored to the shifting ice, and lashed to one another, the ladders have a makeshift look and feel to them. On your five round-trip circuits of the Khumbu Icefall, you cross approximately seven hundred of these ladder bridges.
Your first traverse is a religious experience, certainly not something you can practice at home. When you pass through the Icefall, you try to do so at first light, so you can see, but before the surrounding hills and ice fields can reflect the high-altitude sun’s intense radiation directly onto the Icefall, partially melting and dislocating the ladders’ moorings, and also energizing the chockablock seracs, loosening them to tip, slide and crash all the more.
It can get extremely warm around Base Camp on a sunny day in May. A thermometer left out in the afternoon sun by the Hillary expedition reportedly registered a high temperature of about 150 degrees.
Above the Icefall’s upper edge, and also hidden from your view, is the gradually sloping valley of the Western Cwm (pronounced koom), which rises another two thousand feet toward an immense, jagged amphitheater, anchored on the left by Everest, with 27,890-foot Lhotse in the center and, on the right, the third of the three brute sisters that dominate the high terrain, 25,790-foot Nuptse.
The Cwm (Welsh for “valley”) was named in 1921 by George Mallory, who led the first three assaults on Everest, all from the Tibetan side. Mallory, when asked why he wished to climb Everest, quipped famously, “Because it is there.” He may also have been the first person to summit Everest. Then again, maybe he wasn’t.
On June 8, 1924, the thirty-eight-year-old Mallory and his protégé, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, twenty-two, were seen by Noel Odell, a member of their team, about nine hundred feet below the summit and climbing strongly. Then Mallory and Irvine were swallowed from view by a cloud, and disappeared with no trace.
Mallory’s fate remained a mystery for seventy-five years, until May of 1999, when an American expedition organized specifically to hunt for the famed British climber found his frozen body approximately two thousand feet below the summit, where he apparently had fallen. Whether George Mallory made it to the top before his fatal plunge is an unsettled debate. His altimeter, a monogrammed scarf, some letters and a pocket knife were recovered in 1999, but the Kodak cameras that Mallory and Irvine brought along to record their ascent were not found; nor (yet) was Irvine’s body.
A brief note on my own equipment for Everest: I bought new boots for this trip to replace a set I’d purchased seven years before. They were from the same company, allegedly the same size exactly.
I’d never bought the idea that you need to break in new mountaineering boots; either they fit you from the beginning or they don’t. My old boots had developed holes you could shine a light through. I didn’t think they could withstand one more expedition.
Unfortunately, the new boots rubbed both my shins, which soon were ulcerated. Wounds at high altitude do not heal. I knew I wouldn’t recover until I was off the mountain.
One strategy was to keep the boots loose. But no matter what I did, each step was an agony. I had no choice, in the end, but to wrap my shins in bandages, suck it up and learn to live with it. There was no sense in complaining about something I couldn’t change.
When you first arrive at Base Camp, you are acutely aware that every motion you make seems to suck the oxygen out of your body. We do not fully understand all the adjustments the human body makes to the stresses of altitude, but we have learned some techniques for acclimatizing ourselves to the high-altitude environment.
If you, the reader, were by some magic instantly transported to the top of Mount Everest, you would have to deal with the medical fact that in the first few minutes you’d be unconscious, and in the next few minutes you’d be dead. Your body simply cannot withstand the enormous physiologic shock of being suddenly placed in such an oxygen-deprived environment.
What a climber must do, as we did over several weeks, is to start at Base Camp, climb up, and then climb back down again. Rest and repeat. You keep doing this over and over on Everest, always pushing a little higher each time until (you hope) your body begins to acclimatize. You basically say to your body, “I am going to climb this thing, and I’m taking you with me. So get ready.”
But you must be patient. Climb too fast and you elevate your risk of high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), in which your lungs fill with water and you can die unless you get down the mountain very fast. Even deadlier is high altitude cerebral edema (HACE), which causes the brain to swell. HACE can induce a fatal coma unless you are quickly evacuated.
There’s no way to know beforehand if you are susceptible to these medical conditions. Some people develop symptoms at altitudes as low as ten thousand feet. Moreover, veter
an climbers who’ve never encountered either problem can develop HAPE or HACE without warning.
Similarly unpredictable is a much more common menace, hypoxia, caused by reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. In its milder forms, hypoxia induces euphoria and renders the sufferer a little goofy. Severe hypoxia robs you of your judgment and common sense, not a welcome complication at high altitude. Climbers call the condition HAS, High Altitude Stupid.
My wife offers her own cogent acronym, NUTS, as in Nothing Under the Sun would get her up there in the first place.
The techniques of adapting to altitude are of vital importance to your survival, and not necessarily at extreme altitude only. As recently as twenty years ago, high-altitude sickness killed one in fifty trekkers through the Khumbu each year.
Among the very rarest medical emergencies associated with high-altitude climbing is the one that I unwittingly pioneered, one that nearly killed me. Or it may have saved my life. I’m not sure. There’s a sound argument for either point of view.
I’ll get to that later.
One of the body’s most important physiological adaptations to high altitude is the millions and millions of extra oxygen-bearing red blood cells that your bone marrow produces in response to chronic oxygen deprivation. The extra oxygen-carrying capacity is critical. Still, you thirst for air when high on the big mountains. Breathing is such hard work that 40 percent of your total energy output is devoted to it. Each day you can blow off an amazing seven liters of water through your lungs alone.
That leaves you constantly dehydrated. Also, you can no longer sleep or eat. Once in the Death Zone, above 25,000 feet, the thought of food becomes repugnant to most people. Even if you can force yourself to chew and swallow something, your body will not digest it. Yet you are burning about twelve thousand calories a day, which means you’re consuming your own tissue—about three pounds of muscle a day—in order to stay alive.
One of my enduring images of Rob Hall on Everest is of his marvelously plastic face, with character lines etched into it by a lifetime spent outside. If you made the least hint of a complaint or lament, Rob would squint up, looking like a demented Pop-eye, and ask, “You’re not gonna be one a’ them moaners, are ya?” I, of course, would reply, “No, Rob, no! I’m not going to be one of those moaners. No, sir.”
Besides Rob, our guides on Everest were Mike Groom, a plumber from Brisbane, Australia, and Andy Harris, thirty-one, a Kiwi like Hall, who was climbing and guiding for the first time on a so-called eight-thousand-meter mountain, of which there are just fourteen in the world. All soar into the troposphere within a few hundred miles of Mount Everest.
Take a look at any high-altitude camp and you’ll discover that this kind of mountaineering is not a beautiful-body sport.
In fact, climbers look pretty much like a bunch of homeless crowding around a steam grate. But Andy was the antithesis of this: a big, good-looking, athletic kid, and a certified mountain monster, despite his lack of experience on the biggest hills.
Then you get down to the grunts, my level. There we find my fellow climber and teammate, forty-two-year-old Jon Krakauer.
I’ve already mentioned Yasuko Namba, who on this outing would become the oldest woman ever to summit Everest, and the second Japanese woman to do so. By making it to the top that day, Yasuko also would complete the Seven Summits Quest. For these distinctions she would pay an enormous price.
So would Doug Hansen, a forty-six-year-old postal worker from Seattle. Doug had climbed to within three hundred vertical feet of the summit the previous year before being forced to turn back. This year, he was determined, at all costs, to summit Everest.
Rounding out the cast of characters was the baby of our grunt group, Stuart Hutchison, a thirty-five-year-old Canadian cardiologist, and Frank Fischbeck, fifty-three, a Hong Kong publisher of fine books and a gentleman of the old school. Frank provided a measure of civility and dignity to our otherwise pretty raucous group.
Probably everyone’s favorite member of our team was Dr. John Taske, fifty-six, an anesthesiologist and Aussie, like Mike Groom. Sharp-witted, with an open and engaging manner, John was a career army officer. Unlike most military physicians, he loved the tougher parts of army life. Nothing made him happier than an underwater demolition school or hazardous duty of any sort. He even earned a British SAS beret, when detached to the elite commando group, the first physician ever to do so.
John was as good at taking a joke as making one. Doug Hansen and I decided early on that John was romantically interested in a yak we called Buttercup. Since yaks were everywhere, it was easy to keep up a running gag about John and the amorous Buttercup. He seemed to enjoy the raw humor almost as much as we did.
The Australian also had flair. One day he emerged from his tent wearing a sombrero and a red-and-white outfit that looked like a striped sock. He looked more like a cartoon character than a climber. The Sherpas nearly fell out of their boots laughing. If you can wear a getup like that, I guarantee that you’re pretty sure of yourself in the company of other men.
Once we were all fully acclimated to altitude—just before our final summit push—Taske supervised a Harvard two-step physiology test for our group. We were curious to see how members of the expedition would handle brief periods of intense effort.
In the test, you repeatedly step up and down about two feet for approximately a minute. Your pulse is monitored before, during and after the exertion. I’d always assumed the mark of the well-trained athlete is a nice, low pulse rate that remains relatively low, even under stress, and recovers quickly afterward.
Two of us, Mike Groom and Lou Kasischke, had exactly this pattern. However, other adaptations seemed to work equally well. Jon Krakauer’s resting pulse was approximately 110. Under stress, it promptly plummeted to about 60, then rose back up to maybe 140. When the stepping stopped, it dropped back to 60 and rose right back to 110.
I had a resting pulse of about 90. When stressed, my pulse went straight up to 170 or 180 and stayed there. Soon as I stopped the two-step, it dropped to 60, and then came right back to 90.
I’m told that this pattern of response is similar to that seen among the Sherpas. Clearly a great deal remains to be learned about how we react to stress at high altitude.
The other team to figure large in the May 10 catastrophe was headed by Scott Fischer, a charismatic, ponytailed free spirit from Seattle who ran a high-mountain guide service called Mountain Madness. That pretty much summed up Scott’s idea of how you climb a mountain.
He was backed up by Neal Beidleman, who was not normally a guide but an aerospace engineer, as well as by Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian and one of the world’s premier high-altitude climbers.
In the Mountain Madness grunt section there was glamour, New York City socialite and celebrity journalist Sandy Hill Pittman. She appeared in climbing gear in Vogue before jetting off to Mount Everest, and filed Internet dispatches to NBC as we climbed the mountain. She may have gone to Everest that year in search of fame, but all that Sandy would achieve was notoriety.
When Sandy got back to New York, the media turned on her, portraying her as shallow, without character. That’s unfair. Sandy was a strong and determined climber, and a fairly engaging teammate. She was not the cause of our calamity; the storm was.
There also was Tim Madsen, of the Colorado ski patrol, and the object of his affection (as well as one of my favorite people), Charlotte Fox, a handsome gal who gives lie to the idea that high-altitude mountaineering is strictly a male-dominated, adrenaline-driven, macho sport.
I’d climbed with Charlotte in Antarctica and very much admired her, in part because I knew she could outclimb and outmacho me on the best day of my life.
Another fax home: “We have returned to Base Camp for 3 days of food & rest. … I remain well and have had only a minor dry cough, but no infections or GI problems. … I am convinced that Rob Hall’s attention to safety & detail is the best on the mountain. … I miss you terribly. All my love, Dear.�
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“It was good to know you had a nice adventure up on the mountain with the rest of the kids,” Peach typed in reply. She reported that Beck (we call him Bub) had a virus, which threatened his appearance at the fencing tournament in Kansas City. Meg’s room was being redecorated. Missy, our other dog, had peed all over the paper the painters had put on the floor. “Take care,” she closed. “Love and kisses, Peach.”
My final fax: “We go up the mountain day after tomorrow. I have the time to receive a fax from you tomorrow. Please drop me a line. It would also be nice if Bub and Meg could enclose a small note. … All my love, Dear.”
Bub politely declined my invitation to drop a note, but the Weathers women didn’t.
Peach: “I’m glad you’re having an adventure, and I hope your ailments are minimal. The plumber is here. The condensate drain on the air-conditioning unit is plugged. … Much love, Dear.”
Meg: “Dadoo. How are we? I’m better now. … We performed today for Mrs. Porter’s aunt’s birthday. She was 90 years old. For this and my piano recital I was shaking like Missy does when she goes to the vet. … I got my hair chopped off up to my shoulder (when wet) and about a little below my ears when dry. … Mom says, ‘Dinner!’ Have to be off, Love, Meg.”
THREE
Our climb began in earnest on May 9. By then we’d successfully negotiated the Khumbu Icefall, surmounted the Western Cwm, and now were halfway up a moderately steep, four-thousandfoot wall of blue ice called the Lhotse Face, which the prudent climber will traverse very carefully.
This extreme care is a function of the physics involved. With hard ice such as that found on the Lhotse Face, there is no coefficient of friction; you are traction free. Fall into an uncontrolled slide, and your chances of stopping are nil. You’re history. A Taiwanese climber named Chen Yu-Nan would discover the truth of this, to his horror, on the morning of May 9.
Because the Lhotse Face is a slope, you pitch Camp Three by carving out a little ice platform for your tent, which you crawl into exhausted, desperate for some rest. No matter how tired you are, however, you must remember a couple of fairly simple rules.
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