Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  Ed Viesturs, a member of the IMAX team and a close friend of Hall, spoke to him several times as the day wore on. ‘Rob, you gotta get moving. Put that pack on, get the oxygen going, get down the hill.’

  Viesturs used humour to try and get a response out of Hall: ‘We’re going to get down, and we’ll go to Thailand, and I’ll get to see you in your swimsuit with your skinny legs.’ And, ‘You’re lucky, Rob, your kid’s going to be better looking than you.’

  Hall responded to the chiding, as Viesturs recalls. ‘He laughed. He said, “Geez, thanks for that.”’

  By ten o’clock that morning, five Sherpas carrying extra oxygen and flasks of hot tea had set out from camp four in a last-ditch attempt to rescue Hall, Fischer and Makalu Gau. Their actions were heroic to say the least, particularly as they were still physically exhausted from the rigours of the previous day.

  They found Scott Fischer and ‘Makalu’ Gau on a ledge about 400 vertical metres above the Col. Fischer was alive, just, but he did not respond to the Sherpas and they decided he was too close to death to be rescued. The Taiwanese climber was in slightly better shape and the Sherpas were able to rouse him to a semi-conscious state after giving him tea and oxygen. Cradled between three of the Sherpas, Gau was able to stagger down to camp four.

  Meanwhile Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri bravely continued up towards Hall, determined to reach him if they possibly could. Risking their own lives, they fought on until high winds defeated them approximately 300 metres below Rob Hall’s position. The Sherpas could do no more … no human being could. It was 3 p.m., and the New Zealander now had just hours to live.

  Just before nightfall, at 6.20 p.m. Hall made his last radio contact with the world. Fittingly, the final words he spoke were to his wife.

  ‘Hi, my sweetheart. I hope you’re tucked up in a nice warm bed. How are you doing?’

  ‘I can’t tell you how much I’m thinking about you,’ Jan Arnold replied. ‘You sound so much better than I expected. Are you warm, my darling?’

  ‘In the context of the altitude, the setting, I’m reasonably comfortable,’ Hall told her.

  ‘How are your feet?’

  ‘I haven’t taken me boots off to check, but I think I may have a bit of frostbite.…’

  ‘I’m looking forward to making you completely better when you come home. I just know you’re going to be rescued. Don’t feel that you’re alone. I’m sending all my positive energy your way!’

  Hall’s last words to his wife were unbearably poignant, ‘I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.’

  Hall did not speak on the radio again and within a few hours he was dead.

  *

  At camp four on the afternoon of the 11th, the scene was not unlike the aftermath of a battle. The surviving climbers were in a state of shock, their tents ripped and half destroyed, everyone trying to come to terms with the catastrophe that had come out of the blue. In the normal run of events, the climbers would have descended that day following their summit attempt. As it was, they did not have the strength. Breathing oxygen from the IMAX tents (given without hesitation by IMAX leader David Breashears even though it threatened the success of his own multi-million-dollar expedition), they lay in the ever-strengthening wind in a state of mental and physical paralysis.

  Then, at about 4.30 p.m., as one piece of bad news seemed to follow another, a single, astonishing ray of hope came out of the blue.

  Beck weathers rose from the dead.

  The Texan pathologist had been unconscious and without shelter for more than fifteen hours after passing out during the storm of the previous night. Like Yasuko Namba, who lay nearby, he had been considered beyond help and left to die. Weathers later recalled, ‘I’d lost my right glove. My face was freezing. My hands were freezing. I felt myself growing really numb and then it got really hard to stay focused, and finally I just sort of slid off into oblivion.’

  Having entered that ‘oblivion’, and with his body core frozen to within the tiniest possible margin of the point at which death would be inevitable, Weathers recalls nothing whatsoever of the long hours that followed as his body was battered by the freezing hurricane-force winds.

  Then, incredibly, some primeval survival instinct fired up a spark of life in the deep-frozen core of Beck weathers’ brain. Breaking the crust of ice crystals that coated his face, he was able to open his eyes for the first time. What he saw shocked him into consciousness.

  ‘Initially I thought I was in a dream,’ Weathers told his fellow team member Jon Krakauer, ‘When I came to, I thought I was lying in bed. I didn’t feel cold or uncomfortable. I sort of rolled on to my side, got my eyes open, and there was my right hand staring me in the face. Then I saw how badly frozen it was, and that helped bring me round to reality. Finally I woke up enough to recognise I was in deep shit and the cavalry wasn’t coming so I better do something about it myself.’

  In fact the ‘cavalry’ had already been, and pronounced him as good as dead. Two rescue attempts had reached Weathers where he lay and both had decided that to try and drag him into camp would merely prolong the inevitable.

  Now, squinting half-blind into the wind, Weathers made a guess where the tents of camp four would be and stumbled towards them. With his right arm frozen out in front of him, and his face still largely covered with ice, he made a gruesome sight as he reached the tents, reminding the awestruck climbers at the camp of a ‘Mummy in a low-budget horror film’.

  But this was no cheap piece of fiction. Weathers was suffering from the extreme ravages of frostbite and exposure, and in the opinion of Stuart Hutchinson, the doctor that examined him, ‘None of us thought Beck was going to survive the night. I could barely detect his carotid pulse, which is the last pulse you lose before you die. He was critically ill. And even if he did live until morning, I couldn’t imagine how we were going to get him down.’

  To the utter astonishment of his fellow climbers Beck Weathers did survive the night. And not only that. Like ‘Makalu’ Gau he recovered sufficiently to stand on his own two feet the next morning. He had to, it was his only hope of survival.

  On Sunday the 12th, the descent began. Metre by metre, ‘Makalu’ Gau and Beck Weathers were supported off the South Col, down the Geneva Spur and right down the Lhotse Face to camp two. It was a rescue of epic proportions, given the immensity of the terrain and the appalling physical condition of the injured climbers. In this as in many other aspects of the story, Weathers and Gau were lucky. Two waiting teams of extremely strong climbers, the IMAX team of David Breashears and the Alpine Ascents team of Todd Burleson, climbed up to assist the exhausted Sherpas with their task.

  Meanwhile, at base camp, the final piece of the rescue was being put into place. Guy Cotter, an Adventure Consultants guide who had come across from nearby Ama Dablam to help co-ordinate moves to fight the crisis, had managed to persuade the Nepalese Army to fly a helicopter up from Kathmandu to airlift Weathers and Gau to hospital.

  Helicopter evacuations from base camp are not unusual, but Weathers and Gau were in too ravaged a state to be brought back through the maze of crevasses of the Khumbu icefall. If it happened at all, the rescue would have to happen in the Western Cwm, at an altitude which would endanger the pilot and his machine.

  The pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri, flew his French-made B2 Squirrel up the icefall and circled above the waiting climbers at just a shade under 20,000 feet. To say that he was pushing the operational envelope of his aircraft would be putting it mildly. The last helicopter to fly into the Cwm had crashed on the glacier below.

  The rescuers had created a giant red cross in the snow, etched into the white surface by dribbling Kool-Aid drink out of a bottle. The Nepali pilot hovered above it and ‘Makalu’ Gau was loaded on board. Half an hour later the courageous pilot returned for Beck Weathers.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Madan’s action was the last in a long line of heroic actions which in combination saved the lives of the Americ
an and Taiwanese climbers. A couple of hours later the two men were being treated in a Kathmandu hospital, and they were then evacuated to their home countries.

  *

  On the northern side of the mountain the storm had also taken its toll, but the central story which had emerged was not at all like those from the southern side where heroism and selfless action had saved lives which would otherwise have been lost.

  In the north, a climbing team in desperate need of help after failing to return to their top camp were passed by a team whose priorities lay with their own summit bid and not with an attempt at rescue.

  The climbers in peril were the three Indians of the Indo-Tibetan border police team who had failed to return to camp six at 8,300 metres after their announced summit success of the afternoon of the 10th.

  Like most of the summiteers on the southern side, the three Indians on the North-East Ridge were still alive as day broke on the 11th. Frostbitten, their oxygen finished, they were in desperate need of fluids and oxygen if they were to stand any chance of survival. Down at camp three, their distraught leader, Mohindor Singh, kept a vigil at the radio in the tent next to ours, hoping against hope for a miracle. The Indian leader knew, as we all did, that the chances of surviving a second night out would be negligible for the three climbers, but if they could somehow make it back to camp six then at least there would be a fighting chance of saving one life and perhaps more.

  The conditions were too severe to allow a rescue party from the Indian team to go up and in any case their arrival would have been too late; the distances involved on the northern side are greater than those on the southern. To get a rescue team from where we were at camp three to camp six would take a minimum of two days, or even three if the winds remained strong.

  As luck would have it, a team of five strong climbers – two Japanese and three Sherpas – was about to stumble upon the Indians. They were equipped with oxygen, fluid and food – all the ingredients for a rescue. The Japanese climbers were twenty-one-year-old Eisuke Shigekawa and thirty-six-year-old Hiroshi Hanada from the Japanese-Fukuoka Everest expedition.

  The Japanese team had made no secret of their intention to summit on 11 May. The complicated pyramid of logistics involved in any summit attempt means that it actually makes good sense to work backwards from a given summit day when calculating the supplies of oxygen, gas and food which have to be portaged on a tight schedule to the higher camps. Most Everest expeditions work this way – but most have the flexible attitude that although everything should be ready for a given summit day, other factors will probably cause delays.

  Ironically our own original proposed summit day had been 10 May, but the bad weather in the days prior to that date had delayed our departure. The Japanese, more committed than most to their pencilled in ‘ideal’ date of the 11th, seemed hell-bent on summitting that day almost regardless of what the weather was going to do.

  Having sat out the storm at camp six (which in itself must have been a terrifying experience) on the exposed North Face, the Japanese team, apparently ignoring the fact that the weather was still obviously very dangerously unstable, left the 8,300-metre-high base on schedule not long after midnight on the 11th.

  By 8 a.m. the five climbers had climbed up the steep cliffs of the yellow band and reached the first step – a twenty-metre-high cliff which is the first of the major obstacles on the North-East Ridge. Here, to their surprise, the Japanese team came across one of the Indian climbers, who was badly frostbitten and clearly suffering from the ravages of acute mountain sickness after a night out without oxygen. No communication passed between the Japanese team and the stricken Indian. According to the lead climbing Sherpa, who later spoke to journalist Richard Cowper about the incident, the Indian just ‘made a big noise’.

  The Japanese team hardly paused. Leaving the Indian lying in the snow, they continued their climb towards the summit. Later, at the top of the second step, the Fukuoka team found the other two Indians, also horrifically frostbitten and close to death.

  Again they continued. Again as the lead Sherpa Kami later confirmed to Richard Cowper in an interview, they made no attempt to assist the Indians but carried on into the worsening wind towards the summit. The fact that they made it at all speaks for just how determined the Japanese team were to reach the top on such a marginal day, as the rescuers on the southern side had found as they attempted (and failed) to reach Rob Hall on the south summit. In a howling gale, the Japanese summitted just before midday and began their descent, which would once more take them past the Indian climbers.

  Down at advance base camp, all was confusion. The Indian team were frantic for news of their missing team members and whether or not any rescue attempt was to take place. At 4 p.m. on the 11th, just after Sundeep, Roger, Tore and Simon arrived at the camp, Indian leader Mohindor Singh asked Sundeep to accompany him as translator to the Japanese leaders’ tent where vital radio communications were being made.

  ‘Singh was desperate to get news of his climbers,’ Sundeep recalls, ‘and he knew there was a chance that at least one might be rescued by the Japanese climbers as they descended.’

  The Japanese leader radioed up to camp six where the first of the returning summiteers arrived sometime between 5 and 5.30 p.m. Due to some confusion, perhaps a result of the fact that information was being exchanged via radio link with poor reception and that the conversation was a three-way one in Japanese, English and Hindi, the hope of rescue was not at this stage dashed.

  ‘The radio call definitely gave myself and Singh the impression that one of the Indian climbers was being helped down – that he would arrive at camp six within the next couple of hours,’ Sundeep remembers. ‘In a way, that was the big mistake. If they had told Singh from the start that no rescue was possible then the situation would have been different. As it was, the first Japanese climber back to six – and then the second too – both gave the impression a rescue was under way.’

  But as the remainder of the five-strong Japanese team reached camp six, and still with no sign of any of the Indian team arriving, the penny finally dropped.

  ‘By about 8.30 p.m., when it was dark,’ Sundeep continued, ‘Singh and myself finally realised the truth. There had been no rescue. In fact there had been no rescue attempt at all. That was when we realised that all three climbers would certainly be lost.’

  Singh returned to his camp to give the dreadful news to his heartbroken team. Sundeep reported back to us in the mess tent.

  ‘That’s it,’ he told us, ‘there’s no chance of any rescue now. We have to assume the Indians are dead.’

  The meal that night in the frozen tent was one of unparalleled misery. Most of us sat, wrapped in our own morose thoughts, pushing forkfuls of oily noodles round a dirty plate and mulling over the fate of the Indian climbers.

  The next day, incensed by the way in which the Japanese had apparently ignored his stricken climbers, Singh called a meeting of all the other expedition leaders (but not the Japanese leader Koji Yada) in his tent on the morning of the 12th. The session was tape-recorded by the Indian team. He ran through the events of the previous two days and informed the gathering that he wanted to issue a joint statement, to be agreed by all present, condemning the Japanese for their failure to try a rescue.

  Having listened to the account, the other leaders (who included some extremely experienced Himalayan climbers) did not agree with Singh’s proposal. Some had doubts that the Indian climbers could have been rescued at all, others recalled similar incidents from their own climbing careers where they had had to leave living climbers behind who were beyond saving.

  Our own expedition leader, Simon Lowe, was one of those present:

  Basically Singh wanted us to slam the Japanese for what they’d done, but although we had huge sympathy with his point of view, we had no first hand knowledge of what had happened. Also, we couldn’t ignore the fact that the root cause of the tragedy was in their own actions. The Indian climbers put themselves in jeopard
y.

  Notwithstanding this disappointment, Singh did issue a press statement of his own, complaining of the Japanese actions.

  By the time the Japanese team returned to advance base camp, the news that they had ignored the dying Indians had whipped up a storm of protest which spread right across the world.

  Richard Cowper, the Financial Times journalist with our expedition, interviewed the two Japanese climbers and their Sherpas for a condemnatory article which appeared the following Saturday in the UK, and which considerably fuelled the debate. Asked why they had offered no assistance to the dying Indians, Shigekawa told Cowper, ‘We climb by ourselves, by our own efforts, on the big mountains. We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 metres is not a place where people can afford morality.’

  Hiroshi Hanada added, ‘They were Indian climbing members – we didn’t know diem. No, we didn’t give them any water. We didn’t talk to them. They had severe high-altitude sickness. They looked as if they were dangerous.’

  Later the Japanese team released a statement claiming that Kami Sherpa had helped free one of the Indians – probably Tsewang Smanla – from a tangle of fixed ropes near the second step. They also announced that there had been no indication at the summit that the three Indians had been there at all – a startling accusation which only compounded antagonism towards themselves at a time when feelings were already running high.

  (In fact the Japanese were right in this assertion, the Indians had not been on the summit when they had radioed back to their leader to report success. If they had been, they would have been standing right next to Hall, Lopsang and Doug Hansen … who reported no sign of them at all. It is now believed that in the conditions of limited visibility they mistook a lower pinnacle for the summit and in fact reached a high point about 150 metres from the top.)