Left for Dead

by Beck Weathers

  So, I decided that my next major destination would be the bottom of the world.

  Fun facts about Antarctica: At 5,100,000 square miles, it is the fifth largest continent after Asia, Africa and the Americas, and about twice the size of Australia. It has the highest average elevation of any continent, mainly because most of Antarctica is buried under about six thousand feet of ice. In some places the ice is more than two miles thick. No surprise, then, that Antarctica has the most fresh water (frozen, of course) of any continent.

  According to one estimate, if all that ice were to melt, the world’s oceans would rise fifteen to twenty feet.

  Adíos, Miami.

  Yet Antarctica also has the driest climate on earth, much drier even than the Sahara.

  Nothing the unaided eye would recognize as a living thing exists in the continental interior. Antarctica is a frozen desert. Its tallest peak, the 16,860-foot Vinson Massif (named for that intrepid Georgia congressman Carl G. Vinson) in the Ellsworth Mountains, wasn’t identified until 1957, or climbed until 1966. At the time of my visit, January 1993, only fifteen previous expeditions—probably fewer than fifty people—had reached Vinson’s summit.

  “Antarctica,” warned a brochure, “is one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet. The logistical problems are enormous, the weather highly unpredictable and tempestuous. Distances are immense, and facilities scarce. Safety and self-sufficiency are paramount concerns.”

  This is the list of gear I took for the climb:

  For my feet:

  two pairs, light polypropylene socks

  two pairs, heavy polypropylene socks

  one pair Janus double boots with built-in supergaiter overboots

  Polar Guard booties

  For my body:

  two pair light polypropylene underwear

  two pair expedition-weight polypropylene underwear

  one pair baggie shorts Synchilla bibs

  Marmot Gore-Tex bibs

  Retropile jacket

  Gore-Tex mountain shell

  Marmot Alpinist down parka with hood

  For my head:

  one thick Synchilla balaclava

  one neck gaiter

  one ski hat

  one bandanna

  one fool’s hat (This was my innovation. I figured if you’re going to act like a fool, you might as well look like one.)

  one sun hat

  one face mask

  two pairs of glasses

  one pair UV-coated sunglasses

  two ski goggles (two lenses) 100 percent UV and IR protection

  two glasses straps

  one antifog fluid

  one glass-cleaning cloth

  one set of earplugs

  For my hands:

  two pair expedition-weight polypropylene gloves

  two pair of overmitts with liners and loops

  Pack:

  expedition backpack

  sleeping bag—Marmot Penguin

  one closed-cell foam pad one Therm-A-Rest pad

  vapor barrier liner

  Technical equipment:

  chest and seated harness

  crampons—twelve-point

  ice ax with wrist sling

  ice hammer

  two 6-millimeter prussic loops

  three locking carabiners

  four regular carabiners

  one pair ski poles

  one large duffel bag

  rappel device

  ascenders (pair) with slings

  fixed rope sling

  pack sling

  Personal gear:

  medical kit (including aspirin and Diamox)

  sweatband

  lip cream (SPF 15+)

  sunblock (SPF 15+)

  moleskin and second skin

  large cup

  large bowl

  two spoons

  three wide-mouth water bottles with insulated covers

  Swiss army knife

  tube of hand cream

  parachute cord

  roll of duct tape

  two Bic lighters

  camera and film

  several stuff sacks with nylon loops

  reading books

  toilet paper

  shortwave radio

  toilet kit

  hard-candy snacks

  garbage sacks

  hand towel

  money and tickets

  water-purification tabs

  Bactrim DS

  Imodium

  Pepto-Bismol tabs

  Dalmane

  freezer bags

  mesh bags

  The expedition began with a flight to Santiago, Chile, and then on to Punta Arenas, a community of approximately 100,000 situated at about 54 degrees south latitude on the Strait of Magellan in Chilean Patagonia. Punta Arenas sometimes is called the Earth’s southernmost city.

  Civilian access to Antarctica is strictly controlled. About the only way to get there is via Adventure Network International (ANI), a Canadian-owned company formed in 1985. My guide, Martyn Williams of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was an ANI co-founder, along with Pat Morrow.

  Besides our group heading for the Vinson Massif, ANI also was providing transportation and logistical support to three other expeditions on the ground, or rather ice, in Antarctica.

  One was the American Women’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition. These women brought parachutes with them, hoping that if the wind was right they could open them and skim along on their skis that way. That plan didn’t work. They made it to the South Pole, but then had to return to Patriot Hills, the staging base in Antarctica for ANI.

  Likewise, three Japanese adventurers trying to get to the South Pole didn’t, and returned with frostbitten cheeks, a condition with which I’d later become familiar.

  Then there was Erling Kagge, a thirtyish Norwegian whose fairly audacious plan was to cross from the coast to the South Pole alone and unaided on cross-country skis, making about forty or fifty kilometers a day. The staple of Kagge’s diet was to be raw bacon, which has the highest caloric return of any kind of food. Bacon, at least theoretically, is ideal fuel for someone moving rapidly across a flat frozen expanse, dragging along behind him a sled weighing about 350 pounds. The trick, I was told, is to eat a little bit of bacon all the time. You cannot sit down to a big happy meal of it, even if you wanted to. Kagge kept his in a little pouch on his belt, and constantly chewed the stuff as he went along.

  Eskimos, of course, eat blubber, which fires their engines in much the same way bacon did Kagge’s. If you think that near the close of the millennium someone might have come up with something a bit more palatable, more high-tech than raw pork for Kagge, at least it sounds no worse than “hoosh,” a vile melange that was the standard food for arctic explorers for decades. According to a recipe provided by Malcolm Browne in The New York Times, hoosh was a stew of seal or penguin meat, mixed with lard, flour, cocoa, sugar, salt and water. The tasteless freeze-dried mulch and cardboard I consumed on most of my mountain expeditions was ambrosia by comparison.

  Kagge made it to the South Pole. He’d already conquered the North Pole. In 1994, he summited Everest with Rob Hall, and made a little bit of history by doing a live radio broadcast from the highest point on Earth.

  Martyn Williams would be leading me and Barbara Gurtler, a petite and compact grandmother from St. Louis. There also were two other two-person expeditions joining us for the climb. One was the team of Charlotte Fox and Nola Royce, a school administrator and former competitive bodybuilder from upstate New York. They were in the care of Skip Horner, a Montanan who was the first person ever to guide all Seven Summits. Also on board was Sandy Pittman, who was climbing with a male friend, Chris Kinnen. Their guide was Pete Athans.

  Punta Arenas is remote, and once you get there you still have about two thousand miles to go. Since it would be inordinately expensive for ANI to ship aviation fuel that far, the company must use airplanes capable of making the four thousand-mile round trip on one tank of
kerosene.

  The craft of choice in January of 1993 was a DC-6, which could make it to Patriot Hills and back in twelve hours, in perfect flying conditions. This is a meteorologically active part of the world, however, and a half day of perfect weather is difficult to guarantee. We got to know Punta Arenas quite well before finally taking off.

  Everything connected with this particular adventure would be delayed and protracted, including the warfare between Peach and me that broke out in its aftermath.

  After waiting for days to depart, there was the long flight to Patriot Hills, where the DC-6 disgorged us and immediately hightailed back to Chile. The abrupt leave-taking is absolutely necessary. If a storm comes up while the plane is on the ground, it likely never will leave. If anything goes wrong—such as a shift in the wind—on the way home on half a tank of fuel, a header into the Strait of Magellan is a distinct and unwelcome possibility.

  Patriot Hills in January 1993 consisted of a couple of large tents and some ice tunnels dug for new arrivals, such as ourselves, who might require immediate shelter. There were no permanent aboveground structures. The tunnels also are used for storage. Because the weather at the time of our arrival was more or less clement, we put up our tents and built ice walls around them, just as I’d done on Denali.

  Next morning, or what passed for morning—the antipodal summer sun stays above the horizon twenty-four hours a day—we all climbed into a twin-engine Otter for the two-hour flight to Base Camp at ten thousand feet on Vinson. It was very cold. We landed upslope, passed a sign that said, WELCOME TO VINSON BEACH and deplaned.

  Once our tents were up, we needed to move a cache up to Camp One. You’ll recall that my packing list didn’t mention either skis or snowshoes, which both Barbara Gurtler and I had been assured we would not require. The snow was hard packed, we were told.

  That was not true. Barbara, who is small and light, was not seriously inconvenienced. But I was heavy enough that with every step I created postholes above my knees. This made me seriously unhappy. We made our way up through some crevasses, dumped the stuff and returned. Everyone else shussed down the hill in about two seconds. It took me forever. Thirty hours after taking off, we finally had dinner and went to sleep.

  I believe it was the next morning that I clambered out of my tent and was stunned to see three identical suns suspended in the sky above us. I knew nothing until that moment of sun dogs, in which a layer of ice in the atmosphere reflects an image of the sun onto multiple points in the sky.

  The additional suns lent the already surreal landscape an even more unworldly cast. I was very much reminded of the opening scenes of Star Wars, and the multiple suns over Luke Skywalker’s home planet.

  It was in the mess tent where I first encountered Rob Hall—in the form of a poster for the guide service he’d begun with his then-partner and close friend Gary Ball. They called themselves Hall and Ball. It sounded like a rock band.

  I was deeply impressed to learn that Hall and Ball had managed to climb all seven summits in just seven months, an incredible logistical feat that culminated where I was standing, the Vinson Massif, on December 12, 1990.

  In October of 1993, Gary Ball would succumb to cerebral edema—HACE—high on 26,795-foot Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas, the world’s sixth tallest mountain. Rob Hall was in the tent to hold his friend as he fell into a coma, and then buried Gary Hall the next day in a crevasse.

  Our first day of climbing we were out in our T-shirts and made it to High Camp across a small ice field in good shape. Next day, however, the leading edge of a storm system reached us before we could summit, driving the entire group back down to High Camp. We tried, and succeeded, on our second march to the top, which proved anticlimactic. All we found up there was a ski pole stuck in the ground. The view from the top of Vinson reportedly is spectacular. I’ll never know; my glasses were fogged over. We couldn’t see squat anyway. Everything was gray. Then the weather started to deteriorate. My return to Base Camp was done blind, more or less, just as I’d been blind on the way down from Denali. I managed to set a new world’s record for falling into crevasses. I dropped into five of them on that single day.

  The Otter came to fetch us on schedule, but by the time it arrived the weather had gone to pieces at Patriot Hills, which meant the pilot and his mechanic were stuck. They tossed out their beds and tents and set up housekeeping with the rest of us—the metal inside the plane would make it feel much colder than in the tents—and waited for the weather to improve. It didn’t for a couple of days.

  We were forced to excavate old food caches at Base Camp, some frozen eggs and vegetables that had been there for ages. Sandy Pittman, I recall, had this enormous bag of gourmet food: seaweed salad, smoked duck and the damnedest other delicacies, as well as a video camera with which she could play movies in her tent. She did share some of her luxuries with the group. But Sandy, who was generally a good sport and able expedition member, also had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which she would not share with me no matter how long I stood outside her tent with my little tin cup.

  Otherwise very little transpired out there in the middle of nowhere, except that Barbara Gurtler contrived to set our mess tent on fire. She incorrectly started up the stove, which flamed up the side of the tent, sending us all either diving into the snow outside, or putting the fire out.

  The miniconflagration aside, Barbara was generally appalled at our cooking conditions. Martyn, for example, prepared what he called a lying dinner; he cooked up anything he found lying around.

  At this point, I made a connection with one of the great mountaineers of this century, Reinhold Messner. As we excavated the old food caches, we came across a pack of chocolate pudding inscribed with Messner’s name. He’d been there years before. The way I see it, at least at some level Reinhold and I have dined together.

  Deep into the second day of our frozen exile, thick clouds descended all around us, a worrisome development. We discovered at the same time that the Otter was frozen to the ice. We tried rocking the plane, and prying it loose with shovels. Just as local visibility was about to hit zero we broke the plane free, jumped in and headed back to Patriot Hills, where the DC-6 would retrieve us for the return flight to Punta Arenas.

  At least that was the plan.

  On its way from Chile, the big plane blew an engine and turned back. Working D-6 replacement engines never are as plentiful as you’d like them to be—the nearest available one was found in Florida—so we had no choice but to chill our heels the week or eight days it took to get the big bird safely airborne again.

  Nola Royce:

  They had a solar-powered radio set up at Patriot Hills. It could reach Punta Arenas. When we discovered we were going to be stuck for a while, we all gave names of family and friends who needed to be told why we were delayed. These were supposed to be relayed on from Punta Arenas. Some people don’t understand that you can’t just pick up a telephone when you are out in the middle of nowhere.

  I don’t know how many calls got through, but mine didn’t. My aunt in New York was just frantic to find out what had happened to me, just absolutely frantic. Nobody contacted her.

  Peach:

  When Beck went off on these trips, he’d never call home to check on us. He would go for weeks without communicating.

  I was used to that. What I wasn’t prepared for was to go to the airport to pick him up and find he wasn’t on the plane. I was totally undone by this.

  I called the tour operator. They told me that he must be all right, because if he were dead I already would have been contacted! Then I called a travel agent friend, who informed me that someone had canceled Beck’s reservation home. It was days before I knew about the blown engine on the DC-6, and that Beck was all right.

  This incident was a turning point.

  Pat White:

  I remember how terrified Peach was. For several days she didn’t know where the hell he was, how he was or whether he was dead or alive. It was a terrible foretaste of wh
at she’d go through when she was told he’d died on Everest. I waited with her until she heard something. We all just had knives in our stomachs. Peach swore she wouldn’t go through that again. I saw her anger and determination.

  We weren’t in any danger at Patriot Hills, but there also wasn’t much to do while we were waiting for the DC-6 to be fixed. So some of us helped out on a project. ANI owned a single-engine Cessna, which the company kept year-round at Patriot Hills. In the past, their practice had been to excavate a hole in the ice and snow and then to ease the plane down into it, nose first. Then they’d fill up the hole, leaving a bit of the Cessna’s tail showing so they could locate the plane the following summer.

  This year, we created sort of a subsurface ice grotto into which we carefully lowered the airplane backward, and then fitted the cavity with a plywood ceiling and ramp so that the Cessna was both protected and could be easily wheeled out for use the next year.

  We had just finished—Patriot Hills was beginning to feel like a penal colony—when the DC-6 hove into view, ready to whisk yours truly back to Peach’s side. When I did finally land in Dallas, an unseasonable chill had descended; the drive back home from the airport was not cordial. Peach informed me we were going to see a marriage counselor.

  Meg, Beck, Peach and Beck II, fall 1999.

  Beck and Peach, 1998.

  Howard Olson.

  PART FOUR

  TWENTY-TWO

  Peach:

  I don’t think Beck had a clue of the distress this episode caused me. My hair started falling out, and I lost about forty pounds over a three-month period.

  In most of our conversations, if you could call them that, she beat on me incessantly. I’d never seen anybody fight. My parents never fought. So when Peach showed her anger, I’d withdraw, which made her feel even worse. She’d come back at me even harder.

  Eventually I’d get thoroughly ticked off and we’d argue. But mostly I’d be silent. She’d come right out and say what bothered her. I just could not do that. I wasn’t very good at it at all. I’d shut down—withdraw. My stomach would go into knots for days. And we’d just keep going over the same territory.