Death Zone

by Matt Dickinson

  But how would I explain that to my mother?

  Risking serious damage to upper and lower incisors, I managed to nibble off a symbolic raisin then replaced the offending pudding back in the pack to be consumed at a later date.

  Then, taking a last long look into Nepal, we began the journey back down to camp six.

  *

  For me, the descent was the most nerve jangling part of the nightmare. Having had just five extremely cold and restless hours of sleep out of the last fifty (and no sleep at all in the last thirty), I found myself fighting an overwhelming fatigue. The demands of the climb were more physically draining by far than anything I had ever done, and the fact that we had had no fluid for the entire fourteen climbing hours of summit day meant that both Al and I were right on the edge of acute mountain sickness with chronic dehydration threatening pulmonary or cerebral odeoma; and for me some kind of frostbite was now virtually inevitable.

  Downclimbing is always more dangerous than going up. The body is facing away from the face, so that the chances of an accidental slip become much more likely than they are on the ascent. Shod in the infernal crampons, skittering and clattering across the loose, frozen slabby rock of the North Face, I several times felt myself close to plummeting down the 10,000-foot precipice.

  As the hours went by, we negotiated the third and second steps, passed the bodies of the Indian climbers, and then abseiled down the first step. The traversing along crumbling ledges seemed to go on for ever. The Face feels bloody big on the way up, but on the way down it is absolutely huge, impossibly so. Concentrating on getting the figure-of-eight descendeur into the rope and clipped on to my harness at one of the vertical rock climbs, I managed to lose my balance. I swung round in an arc and smashed my knee hard against the rock. For a couple of seconds I thought I was going to faint.

  The three Sherpas watched from below, unable to help, as I dangled clumsily on the lifeline, swearing with the pain of the impact. My fall had been held by an ice stake driven into the snow above the cliff. I don’t know who put it there but whoever did made a good job. It took me several minutes to get myself disentangled and sorted out before I could continue the descent.

  Rest stops became more frequent. Every time I sat down, my eyes would spontaneously close and my mind drift off into the beckoning darkness of sleep. Then the red warning light would snap on and I would force my body to rise and carry on. Increasingly my mind was wandering into strange corners of imagination and I do not remember Al passing me on the Ridge and going ahead.

  The Sherpas were much faster than us now, and they reached camp six at least an hour before we did. The last section, down the evil gulleys of the yellow band, took me beyond the physical limits of my own endurance, I think it was gravity alone that was pulling me down. Al stayed with me more or less the whole way, waiting for me at the end of each rope length.

  The last 100 metres down to the sanctuary of camp six took me at least an hour to complete. Somewhere during the descent my oxygen cylinder had run out but I was too fazed to have noticed it.

  By the time we got there, all the warning sirens in my body were wailing for attention. A pulsating throb inside my skull was bleeping an emergency signal which told me that if I didn’t get some fluid inside me soon then I was likely to lapse into unconsciousness and enter a coma. The problem was that my body was so absolutely shattered that I knew there was no way I would be able to co-ordinate myself to get the cooker going.

  Simon had just arrived at the camp on his way up from camp five. He had no fluid on him and he looked extremely tired himself. He weakly shook Al’s hand then sat down in a heap. I asked him if the Sherpas had prepared any tea but he didn’t know. Al shouted over to the Sherpa tent but there was no reply. Somehow I got my pack off and wormed my way into the squalid interior of the tent. Al wasn’t far behind. I can faintly remember babbling for fluid.

  ‘You’ve got to help me, Al, I’m going down here. I can feel myself blacking out. You’ve got to get the fucking stove on, man, or I’m going to have a serious fucking problem.’

  Al, himself dazed and moving in slow motion, began the ever-lasting process. I could feel the waves of black overwhelming me but I fought back as hard as I could to stay conscious. Then we heard footsteps outside the tent. It was Sundeep, also arrived up from five, looking every bit as knackered as Simon, and swaying slightly as he leaned forward on his ice-axe.

  ‘Have you got any juice?’ I asked him.

  He pulled his oxygen mask aside and mumbled something. I saw the padded water bottle strapped to his belt and pointed to it. My brain had just enough power to utter one more sentence.

  ‘I have to have some liquid, Sundeep. I won’t take it all but I need something or I’m going to collapse.’

  That was what I was trying to say but all that came out was an unintelligible stream of gibberish. But Sundeep understood and passed the bottle in. I drank one-third of the contents then passed it to Al who also drank.

  Half an hour later we drank the first tepid cup of liquid from the melted pan of snow. That was when I finally let myself believe that I was going to survive.

  12

  At 2.30 the following morning, Simon, Sundeep and two Sherpas set out for their own summit bid. The noise of their preparations woke me up but I was too fatigued to put my head out of the tent and wish them good luck. They climbed up the cliffs of the yellow band making slower progress than we had the day before and reached the Ridge one hour after sunrise. There, in a rising wind, they reluctantly conceded defeat. It was clear to them both that they would not make it to the summit.

  Roger and Tore also did not realise their dream of making it to the top of Everest. Roger had turned back from a position just above camp five after realising that, although he felt he could reach camp six, he was absolutely sure he would not get any higher. Tore, who had had a bad day climbing up to the Col on 17 May, turned back in the high winds midway up the North Ridge on the following day.

  Al and I left camp six in the early morning of the 20th for our ten-hour descent to advance base camp. As we passed Reinhard’s tent I suddenly realised that I had completely forgotten about the Austrian climber who now lay dead inside. I hurried past – if hurried is the right word to describe my hobbling progress – closing my mind to the awful temptation to look inside.

  The next day, in a radio call, Reinhard’s distraught wife asked Simon and Sundeep to bury her husband as best they could. Exhausted after their own aborted summit attempt, they did not have the strength to scrape even the slightest hollow in the iron hard, frozen, ground. With the help of Ang Chuldim, the best they could do was to collapse the tent over the body, wrapping it like a shroud and placing a few rocks and empty oxygen cylinders on top. It took them several hours. Simon made a simple cross out of a couple of shattered tent-poles he found lying around, and the three climbers stood with their heads bowed in the biting wind around the grave.

  Simon said a brief, dignified prayer for Reinhard which moved them all to tears. Then, with hands and feet already dangerously frozen, they began their descent to the Col which they reached on the evening of 21 May. They made it safely down to advance base the following day.

  Simon remained at advance base camp to supervise the clearing of the mountain while the rest of us descended to base camp and began to pack. By the 24th, all tents and refuse had been removed by the Sherpas from camps four and five, and a train of yaks carried the gear back down to the Rongbuk glacier.

  Three days later we left in a convoy of Jeeps for Nepal, each of us wrapped up in our own thoughts as the vehicles sped down the dusty track past the Rongbuk monastery. At the top of the Pang La pass the vehicles paused and we climbed out and looked back at Everest for the last time. The plume was running, just as it had been when we saw the mountain from the same position on our way into base camp. Standing apart from the others I found myself searching for words to offer a mountain that I was pretty sure I would never set eyes on again.

 
; In the end a whispered ‘thank you’ was all I could manage before we climbed back into the Toyotas and set off across the rolling Tibetan plateau.

  *

  Kathmandu was a shock after the arid months in Tibet. The teeming traffic and crowded alleyways of Tamel seemed impossibly colourful and exploding with life compared to the monochrome, brutal mountain environment we had come to accept as home.

  Craving fats and protein, I immediately set about trying to restore some of the eleven kilogrammes I had lost. In our first day back in Kathmandu I ate several fried breakfasts, pancakes and cream, chocolate cakes, banana cakes, fruit and ice-cream and a huge sizzling steak and chips. That night I was voluptuously sick for my gluttony. Kees was worse; his eating session put him in bed for three days with a gastric fever which was a bit rough when his wedding was just a week away.

  For the first time we had a chance to see how sharply the world’s press had focused on the Everest disaster. Isolated from all but radio reports on the mountain, we had seen none of the sensational newspaper and magazine articles which had followed the event. Now in the bookshops of Kathmandu we found out just how big an impact the storm and the fatalities had made. The front covers of Time and Newsweek were both devoted to the disaster and friends and family faxed us other articles from the UK.

  The reports differed hugely in the quality of research which had gone into them and certain aspects of the stories – enduring controversies both from the south and north sides – did not always tally with our own opinions – or what we had seen on the mountain.

  The tragedy of the Indian climbers – and the perceived failure of the Japanese team to attempt a rescue was one example.

  The widely accepted story had it that the lowest of the dead Indian climbers was found just 100 metres from safety above the top camp. This information – also used by Richard Cowper in his Financial Times article of 18 May entitled ‘The climbers left to die in the storms of Everest’ filtered down from climbers at the high camp on the northern side in the days following the storm. The fact that Cowper ran the information is not a negative reflection in any way – he was writing in good faith with the best information he could get his hands on at the time.

  Nevertheless, the ‘100 metres’ figure added fuel to the fire – and made the Japanese actions seem even more heartless. If the Indian climber was ‘100 metres from safety’ then the Japanese failure to rescue him on the 11th was completely indefensible. The figure makes it sound like he was almost within reach.

  In fact, having seen the precise position of the lowest of the Indian bodies (i.e., the one nearest to camp six), the figure of 100 metres is way off the mark. As Al, the Sherpas and myself found, the climber was on the Ridge, at least 300 vertical metres above camp six – and perhaps as much as 500 metres in actual climbing distance from safety. It had taken us at least four-and-a-half hours of hard, continuous, climbing from camp six to get to the position of the Indian body.

  But even those figures do not reveal the true nature of the Indian’s position. To have got him down to camp six, any rescuers would have had to have negotiated his semi-conscious body down the yellow band – the massive strata of rock which creates the barrier of crumbling cliffs we had climbed through the night.

  The terrain is extremely steep, with several small cliffs which have to be downclimbed with extreme care even by a fit climber. There are few if any secure belay points in the rotten rock, and the snow gulleys – the natural cracks and fissures – which are used for the descent are barely narrow enough to allow a standing climber to pass, let alone big enough for a comatose body to be lowered down.

  In short, I do not believe that a rescue attempt was ever a real possibility even if a stretcher was available (it wasn’t), and it is my opinion that any climber arriving on the stricken Indians in the position (and condition) they were in on the mountain would immediately conclude, as the Japanese did, that they were beyond rescue.

  Why the Japanese climbers did not seek to alleviate the last hours of suffering for the Indians by giving them fluid or oxygen is a separate question and one which only they can answer.

  The other debate which our team, like every other, endlessly discussed amongst ourselves was also the subject of intense speculation in the media: why did Rob Hall and Scott Fischer summit so late when they were both known to favour the ‘turn-around’ tactic of setting a time when team members would be turned back regardless of where they were? What were the turn-around times and why didn’t the two teams stick by them?

  In his book Into Thin Air, journalist Jon Krakauer (a member of Hall’s team) writes:

  At base camp before our summit bid, Hall had contemplated two possible turn-around times – either 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. He never declared which of these times we were to abide by, however – which was curious, considering how much he’d talked about the importance of designating a hard deadline and sticking to it no matter what. We were simply left with a vaguely articulated understanding that Hall would withhold making a final decision until summit day, after assessing the weather and other factors, and would then personally take responsibility for turning everyone around at the proper hour.

  Fischer’s group were also not made aware in advance of a specific turn-around time which would be applied although, again, both 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. had been mentioned. In fact, come summit day, both guides were relying on their own experience to decide on the point at which their groups should go no further. This would depend on a complicated set of factors including the speed of the group and the condition of the weather.

  On 10 May, by 2 p.m. just six of the climbers had made it to the summit so why weren’t the remainder told to retreat? Perhaps one answer is that most of them were extremely close to the summit at that precise point. Close enough to arrive there in a line of eight climbers from 2.10 onwards. It was over the deadline, yes, but at the moment the deadline had expired, the main group had been perhaps less than fifty metres from the summit and within sight of it. In that situation, it is extremely unlikely that any of the clients would have obeyed the orders of their leaders to retreat, effectively negating the whole point of the turn-around – which requires total discipline by the leader. To turn someone around at the bottom of the Hillary step is one thing, but to try and turn them around as they climbed the final summit ridge would be nigh on inconceivable.

  The flaw was that whilst most of the climbers were on the summit on or before 2.30 p.m., two key climbers were not. As the main body of climbers began their descent, Doug Hansen – Hall’s client – and Scott Fischer, who was having an extremely hard time on his ascent, were both still battling up. Fischer summitted at 3.40 p.m. and left fifteen minutes later.

  Why did Fischer continue to climb up? He’d been to the summit before of course, and all of his clients had summitted and gone down. But Fischer knew that Rob Hall and Lopsang, Fischer’s right-hand man and strongest Sherpa, were both on the summit waiting. That knowledge, along with his high level of personal motivation, must have encouraged him to continue. To have turned around himself just under the nose of his friend and competitor would have been a difficult thing to live with. They were both members of the mountaineering elite, and it can be imagined that Fischer would have lost a lot of face if – for whatever reason – he hadn’t followed his clients up.

  For Hall, too, the presence of Lopsang and Fischer must have been an additional inducement to let Hansen continue. With three (normally) strong guides in place, Hall must have reckoned they would have a fighting chance of getting Hansen down. Three of the strongest guides in the world had lulled themselves into a false sense of security. But by the time Hansen arrived, the exhausted Fischer and Lopsang had already gone.

  Rob Hall waited until 4 p.m. for Doug Hansen to reach the summit, a full two hours after his latest announced turn-around time. Why did he allow himself to be trapped into what was (with the benefit of hindsight) clearly a dangerously late summit scenario?

  For the probable answer we have to
turn back the clock one year, to the Adventure Consultants’ summit bid of May 1995. On that expedition, Rob Hall had turned back Doug Hansen at the south summit at about 2 p.m. Hansen had wrestled with the bitter frustration of that ‘so near but so far’ decision and then decided with Hall’s enthusiastic support to give it another go in 1996. Hansen was no millionaire; he had a modest salary as a postal worker and had taken extra work to pay to join the expedition. It was very unlikely that Hansen would ever be able to afford to come again.

  The two men were close friends and Hall had a special commitment to get Hansen to the top. As he waited on the summit for his client to appear, Hall must have been fighting a titanic struggle within himself. Turning Hansen around again, this time even closer to the summit than the previous year, would have been an unbearably difficult thing to do.

  In the end, the desire for his client to reach the top clouded Hall’s judgement sufficiently for him to wait.

  And wait.

  As Hansen came up, the clouds came with him, and then so did the wind. Fischer and Lopsang were already out of sight. Hall was left on his own with his exhausted client as the storm swept in.

  True to the highest principles of his profession, Hall stayed with his client until the end.

  *

  By 6 June, all members of the Himalayan Kingdoms 1996 North Ridge expedition had returned to their ‘normal’ lives.

  Simon, the expedition leader, returned to the Himalayan Kingdoms office in Sheffield and resumed his duties as operations manager. He plans to return to Everest in 1999 on the southern side, and this will be his fourth attempt at the mountain.

  Barney was back in the Himalayas within a few months, guiding a small group of five clients for Himalayan Kingdoms on Cho Oyu (8,201 metres) to the west of Everest. As on our Everest expedition, Barney did not reach the summit, having turned back again with a client. Since then he has been working partly on guiding contracts and partly on petroleum surveys in countries such as Pakistan.