Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  They saw no signs from the summit that the weather was about to deteriorate. A few clouds were playing around the lower valleys but no more than would be considered usual during a Himalayan afternoon.

  Congestion at the Hillary step further slowed progress for the remaining climbers but by 2.15 p.m., Lopsang Jangbu, Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fox, Tim Madsen and Lene Gammelgaard were at the summit. Rob Hall, Mike Groom and Yasuko Namba were not far behind them.

  Hall called down by radio to base camp manager Helen Wilton and doctor Caroline Mackenzie, who were waiting anxiously for news ten thousand feet lower down the mountain. ‘Rob told us he was on the summit and that it was quite cold,’ Mackenzie recalls. ‘Then he said he could see Doug [Hansen] coming up.’

  His words gave the base camp team the impression that Doug Hansen was just a few steps away from the summit, but that was not the case. In fact Doug Hansen was still struggling near the Hillary step, close to the end of his energies but still pushing himself at a snail’s pace for the top.

  By 3.15 p.m., Neal Beidleman – the Mountain Madness guide who had been waiting on the summit with three clients for Scott Fischer to arrive – decided he could wait no longer. Beidleman had no radio and could not determine where Fischer was. With his clients showing the signs of hypoxia, he began the descent. In fact Fischer did not make it to the top until 3.40 p.m., in a dangerously weak condition and with the storm about to break. He didn’t linger.

  Rob Hall stuck it out on the summit until 4 p.m. when Doug Hansen finally arrived. He had been on the top of Everest for nearly one-and-a-half hours by the time Hansen painfully made his way to the summit that he had so narrowly missed achieving the year before. Whether Hansen had the mental acuity left to realise where he was, or to feel any sense of jubilation, will never be known, because almost as soon as he got there, Hall turned him right round again and they began the descent.

  It didn’t take Hall long to realise that he had an extremely serious problem on his hands.

  In two radio calls, at 4.30 p.m. and 4.41 p.m., Hall informed his team that Hansen had run out of oxygen and was dangerously exhausted. Down in base camp, members of his team heard him calling for ‘Harold’ (his guide Andy Harris) to come back up with oxygen.

  Hearing this news, and unsure whether Harris had heard Rob Hall’s plea, Adventure Consultants doctor Caroline Mackenzie ran across to Scott Fischer’s base camp and asked them to radio up and determine whether any of the Mountain Madness team could help. In the ensuing radio conversations it became clear that Scott and his team were also in serious trouble and in no position to offer assistance to Hall.

  ‘That was when we realised the scale of what was going on,’ Mackenzie said.

  History was now repeating itself. Hansen had run out of energy after turning back the previous year but on that occasion he was lower on the peak. Now, one lethal barrier still lay in front of Hall and Hansen, the Hillary step, the steep ice climb which no semi-comatose climber could possibly descend.

  With Doug Hansen now in an advanced state of exhaustion and the storm rising, as he descended into the white-out, Rob Hall was faced with two choices: he could abandon Hansen and attempt to save his own life by a fast descent. Or he could attempt to bivouac with Hansen overnight in the hope that the storm would pass and enable them to escape the following day. Hall must have known he was in a life-threatening situation – his many years of experience would have told him that – and he certainly knew that his client Doug Hansen was in mortal danger, being in a state of near-collapse, and also much less experienced in the skills of survival in extreme conditions. They were both exhausted, probably dehydrated, and with their oxygen supplies running low if not already empty.

  During two calls between 5.30 and 6 p.m., members of Hall’s base camp team implored him to save himself. They were in no doubt at all that, without oxygen, Hansen would die and it was now abundantly clear that Hall, too, was in danger. Caroline Mackenzie was one of Hall’s team who spoke to him during those calls.

  ‘I asked Rob if Doug was still conscious and he said yes, he was. I think that was why Rob felt he couldn’t leave him. Doug was hypoxic but he was still conscious. There was no way Rob could leave him like that.’

  Andy Harris, the Adventure Consultants guide, moved up from the south summit with two full oxygen cylinders, but with darkness falling and the storm at full tilt, no further radio conversations were heard from Hall until the following morning.

  In the dark, Hall and Hansen could not continue. With fatigue compounding the chances of a slip, with visibility reduced to just a few metres, and with life threatening drops on either side of the route, the best Hall could hope for was to find shelter … perhaps to scrape a hollow in the snow and wait for the blizzard to end.

  That night can only be imagined in the darkest corners of the mind. Others have described their experiences in similar circumstances and perhaps, in their words, we can get a glimpse of the horror of a night out in an Everest storm.

  This is how Peter Habeler, Reinhard Messner’s partner for the 1978 first ascent of Everest without supplementary oxygen, described his own survival in a similar storm:

  What it means to survive a stormy night at such an altitude can only be imagined by somebody who has personally experienced it. Even under the most favourable circumstances every step at that altitude demands a colossal effort of will. You must force yourself to make every movement, reach for every handhold. You are perpetually threatened by a leaden, deadly fatigue. If you are exposed in such a situation to a storm, with squalls which reach a maximum speed of 130 kilometres an hour; if a heavy snowdrift sets in, so dense that you can no longer see your hand in front of your face, your position becomes practically hopeless. You must cling on firmly to the ice in order not to be hurled off the mountain. Everybody is left to his own resources. If something happens to you, help is out of the question. Everybody has enough to do in trying to save themselves.

  But Rob Hall was not in a position to think only of his own survival. He had a professional and moral duty of care to Hansen which meant that leaving him was not an option. Setting aside the personal relationship which had built between the two men, this ‘code of conduct’ alone was enough to keep Hall there – if the weather was giving him a choice at all.

  Elsewhere, amidst confusion and a general breakdown of communications as radio batteries died and headtorches gave their last glimmer of light, others were also finding it nigh on impossible in the white-out to find their way back to the camp on the South Col.

  The main group of climbers – eleven of them in total – was wandering the Col from side to side, blinded by driven snow and unable to find their tents. The problem was compounded by the fact that in the darkness it was impossible to wear ski goggles or glacier glasses (which are both heavily tinted), thereby exposing the eyes directly to the stinging fragments of airborne ice.

  Two of the group – Neal Beidleman from the Mountain Madness team, and Mike Groom from Adventure Consultants – were guides. They had two Sherpas to assist them with the seven clients. Having lost their bearings they wandered the Col for two hours, becoming increasingly disoriented and exhausted. Finally the two guides realised that to continue was futile until visibility improved. They found the shelter of a small rock and grouped together in a huddle to preserve as much body warmth as they could.

  In the tents of camp four, just a few hundred metres away, the luckier members of the ill-fated summit day lay, for the most part, comatose in their tents. The only climber with the strength to push himself out into the white-out blizzard to try and guide in the lost climbers was Scott Fischer’s guide – Anatoli Boukreev.

  Boukreev had been hired for $25,000 US dollars to assist Scott Fischer and the Mountain Madness team but his guiding tactics on this ill-fated summit day had been unconventional to say the least. In agreement with Fischer, he had climbed without using supplementary oxygen and had therefore been less able to wait around to assist the slower members
of the group on their descent. Without the benefit of the extra oxygen, Boukreev was more vulnerable to the cold and to the ravages of altitude and this made a fast descent desirable. By 5 p.m. he was back in camp four at the South Col, preparing extra oxygen and liquids for the descending climbers who were now fighting their way through the blizzard.

  Although members of Fischer’s own team would later question Anatoli Boukreev’s actions in descending so quickly from the summit to camp four without waiting to assist any clients, Boukreev became belatedly one of the heroes of the hour once he realised the real scale of the mounting disaster.

  Even though the blizzard had now reduced visibility to just a few metres, and despite the exhaustion of having climbed to the summit just hours before, Boukreev found the strength to go out on two attempts to find the lost climbers. He went alone, for there was no one else at the Col with the strength to join him. At that point, Boukreev later recalled:

  Visibility was maybe a metre. It disappeared altogether. I had a lamp, and I began to use oxygen to speed up my ascent. I was carrying three bottles. I tried to go faster, but visibility was gone … it is like being without eyes, without being able to see, it was impossible to see.

  Not surprisingly, Boukreev was unable to locate any of the lost climbers in the raging storm and he had no radio to guide him to anyone out in the void. He returned to camp four to await events.

  Just before 1 a.m., Scott Fischer’s guide Neal Beidleman staggered in with three of his clients, having taken advantage of a brief lull in the storm which enabled him to see the tents of camp four. He told Boukreev where he would find the others, huddled exhausted and hypothermic at the far end of the Col. Then Beidleman himself collapsed into his sleeping bag unable to move.

  The Khazak went out once more into the teeth of the storm and, having noticed the dim glow of a headtorch, did finally manage to locate the group. Boukreev managed to get three more climbers, including Sandy Hill Pittman, back to the camp, and in so doing he undoubtedly saved their lives.

  That left a total of seven climbers unaccounted for on the southern side of Everest as the night wore on. Rob Hall and Doug Hansen were somewhere near the south summit with Andy Harris either with them or not far away. Scott Fischer was on a ledge about 1,000 feet above the col with the Taiwanese climber ‘Makalu’ Gau. Beck Weathers and the Japanese climber Yasuko Namba had been given up for dead, last seen on the South Col.

  On the northern side, the three Indian climbers from the Indo-Tibetan border police team were also out in the full force of the storm with no shelter, no oxygen and no prospect of rescue.

  The Indian climbers were Tsewang Smanla, Tsewang Paljor and Dorje Morup, three out of the massive forty-strong team alongside which we had climbed on numerous occasions over the past weeks.

  In a desperate predicament, and faced with the impossibility of continuing, most climbers will opt for an emergency bivouac to try and survive a night out. Any source of shelter from the wind and cold is better than nothing, but the potential degree of shelter depends on the specific terrain. At its best, a sizeable hole can be cut with an ice-axe into a hard bank of snow or ice, at its worst a climber might resort to lying beneath an overhanging rock or scraping a shallow ‘grave’ to lie in.

  But Everest is not a good mountain on which to be seeking a bivouac site and the higher you happen to be, the fewer the options are. Even during ‘good’ weather, so much wind rips across its slopes that deep drifts of snow are rare. Where banks of solid ice can be found, it is likely to be as hard as iron, requiring a high expenditure of energy to excavate a space to crawl into. An ice-axe is a useful tool in such circumstances but its cutting blade is just a few inches across. Again this increases the task of cutting a decent shelter.

  Given the very daunting problems of finding a bivouac site, it is surprising how many climbers have survived bivouacs above 8,000 metres … something which early expeditions to Everest would have considered a preposterous idea.

  During the American expedition of 1963 Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein had made the first ascent of the West Ridge, reaching the summit at 6.15 p.m. They survived an emergency bivouac at 8,500 metres and Unsoeld lost nine toes to frostbite as a result.

  In September 1975, during their successful first ascent of Everest’s South-West Face, the renowned British climbers Dougal Haston and Doug Scott sheltered in a snow hole near the south summit of Everest having run out of daylight for their descent. Although they had no food and no sleeping bags they did have a small stove and a bivouac sheet. They spent the night fighting to keep warm blood circulating through their extremities in the desperate attempt to prevent frostbite. Dougal Haston described what must have been the worst night of their lives in Chris Bonington’s book Everest the Hard Way:

  There was no escaping the cold. Every position was tried. Holding together, feet in each other’s armpits, rubbing, moving around the hole constantly, exercising arms. Just no way to catch a vestige of warmth. But during all of this the hours were passing. I don’t think anything we did or said that night was very rational or planned. Suffering from lack of oxygen, cold, tiredness but with a terrible will to get through the night all our survival instincts came up front. These and our wills saw the night to a successful end.

  Their survival was all the more remarkable for the fact that neither Scott nor Haston suffered frostbite as a result of their bivouac … a testimony to their incredible resilience and survival skills.

  The two ex-SAS soldiers Brummie Stokes and Bronco Lane were less fortunate when they found themselves in a similar situation one year later. They too cut themselves a shelter into a stretch of ice beneath the south summit. Stokes later had to have all his toes amputated, and Lane also lost fingers.

  Surviving as a climbing pair is one thing – at least there is the comfort and body warmth of another human being to help you through the night, but surviving as a solo climber in a bivouac above 8,000 metres on Everest has to require a superhuman determination.

  One of the few people to be able to claim such a distinction is Stephen Venables. In 1988, as a member of an American expedition, Venables reached the summit alone after an epic ascent of the Kanshung (East) Face. He was the first British climber to reach the top without the use of supplementary oxygen. He, like Scott and Haston, ran out of daylight hours and was forced to spend the night out; he wrote of the ordeal in the compelling account Everest: Kanshung Face:

  I had no intention of dying that night. I was alone just above 8,500 metres but the wind which had frightened me so much by the Hillary step had now died away and the air temperature was probably not much lower than −20c. I was lucky with the conditions and I knew that I could survive in the excellent clothes I wore, but I had to resign myself to the probable loss of toes.

  Against all the odds Venables did survive. Back in the UK he later had three-and-a-half toes amputated after frostbite and gangrene set in.

  All the above climbers survived bivouacs above 8,000 metres and got away with their lives. With his extensive knowledge of mountain-craft and, knowing full well how many other people had survived bivouacs at these extreme altitudes, Rob Hall must have thought that he had a fighting chance of surviving if he could make it through to daybreak. Whether he believed that Hansen would make it through the night is another question and one to which we will never know the answer. In any case, Hall, acting faithfully according to the unwritten code of mountain guides everywhere, was not going to leave his client while he was still alive.

  But whilst in some ways, Hall and Hansen’s bivouac was similar to those of Scott, Unsoeld, Lane and Venables, it differed in one crucial respect: none of them had fought through the night against a storm of the severity of the one which raged about the slopes of Everest on that 10th of May.

  Venables talks of temperatures around −20°C. Rob Hall and all the other climbers who now found themselves trapped out on the mountain, were fighting −40 degrees and below … with a wind of 100 knots blowing every last ve
stige of warmth from their flesh.

  The next radio communication from Hall came at 4.43 a.m. on the 11th. Not surprisingly, his speech was slurred and he sounded disorientated and dazed after what must have been the most horrific night of his life.

  He told base camp that he was ‘too clumsy to move’ and reported that Andy Harris had been with him through part of the storm. He was unsure what had happened to Harris and, when asked about Doug Hansen he replied, ‘Doug is gone.’

  Thirty minutes later, by patching their base-camp radio set to a satellite telephone line, the Adventure Consultants’ support team enabled Jan Arnold, Hall’s wife, to talk to her husband from New Zealand. Arnold, who was seven months’ pregnant with their first child, had been to the summit with Hall in 1993, and knew, as any Everest summiteer would, precisely how desperate his situation was. ‘My heart really sank when I heard his voice,’ she later recalled. ‘He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I’d been up there; I knew what it could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, “You might as well be on the moon.’”

  With daylight to assist him, and with the worst of the storm now blown away, Hall now began to try and clear his oxygen mask of ice. He had two full oxygen cylinders with him but they were useless unless he could free his regulator and mask. Shivering violently, and with his hands almost certainly already frosbitten, his task must have been unbearably frustrating and painful.

  But by 9 a.m., Hall did manage to free the obstruction in his breathing equipment. He plugged into the oxygen for the first time since the previous afternoon and this news brought a burst of optimism to those who waited on tenterhooks below.

  The radio calls continued, as members of Hall’s team and fellow climbers tried to bully him into moving down the mountain towards camp four. Helen Wilton, Adventure Consultants’ base camp manager told him, ‘You think about that little baby of yours. You’re going to see its face in a couple of months, so keep on going.’