The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

  6.14 Alan Hinkes on the summit (Matt Dickinson/Alan Hinkes collection)

  6.15 Matt Dickinson on the summit, “fun camera” photo (Lhakpa Sherpa)

  6.16 First-degree frostbite on Matt Dickinson’s fingers (Sundeep Dhillon)

  6.17 Matt Dickinson and Alan Hinkes in Kathmandu (Simon Lowe/Alan Hinkes collection)

  Second Section

  6.18 Matt Dickinson and Brian Blessed at Base Camp (Roger Portch)

  6.19 Sundeep Dhillon practices dentistry on Kees ’t Hooft

  6.20 The North Face of Everest from the Tibetan Plateau

  6.21 Everest from the Rongbuk Monastery

  6.22 Ned Johnston filming on the Rongbuk Glacier

  6.23 The Sherpa team at the puja ceremony

  6.24 Advance Base Camp

  6.25 Members of the Himalayan Kingdoms team on the North Col

  6.26 The B Team at Base Camp

  6.27 The storm over the North Face

  6.28 The North and Northeast Ridges

  6.29 Rob Hall at the puja ceremony on the southern side of the mountain (Caroline Mackenzie)

  6.30 Beck Weathers (Caroline Mackenzie)

  6.31 The helicopter rescue of Makalu Gau (Caroline Mackenzie)

  6.32 Rob Hall’s team (Caroline Mackenzie)

  6.33 Brian Blessed on the North Ridge

  6.34 The final Summit Ridge

  6.35 Mingma, Gyaltsen, and Matt Dickinson on the summit (Lhakpa Sherpa)

  Maps

  4.1 The route from Kathmandu through Tibet to Everest Base Camp

  5.1 Mount Everest from the north

  7.1 Mount Everest from the south

  Introduction

  Just before 4:00 P.M. on May 10, 1996, Audrey Salkeld, an Everest historian and researcher, was typing one of her two daily Internet reports into an Apple Mac notebook in a tent at Everest Base Camp when the bitter chill of the afternoon set in. Salkeld was on her second Everest expedition, hired by the American IMAX filming expedition to generate newsletters and keep the world informed of their progress.

  At 5,360 meters (17,585 feet), Base Camp is a cheerless place at the best of times, but once the sun has dipped beneath the surrounding ridges, it is like living in a freezer. Shivering with the cold, Salkeld left the mess tent and walked across the ice moraine of the Khumbu Glacier toward her tent to find some extra clothing.

  Glancing into the sky to the south, she became one of the first people, probably the very first, to see what was sweeping up from the lower valleys of the Himalayas toward Everest. It was a sight that fixed her to the spot, all thoughts of seeking out a few more layers of clothing momentarily forgotten.

  Sudden squalls are common in the afternoon on Everest but Salkeld had never seen anything like this before. She describes it as looking like a “tire-dump fire, great billowing lilac clouds racing up from the south.” She called other members of the team out from their tents, and they stood watching in awe as the apocalyptic vision crept silently and swiftly toward them.

  At speeds touching eighty to one hundred kilometers (fifty to sixty miles) per hour, the storm whipped into the camp just minutes later, plunging the temperature down by ten or fifteen degrees in as many seconds, ripping into the tents in a blinding fury of driving snow. The storm swept up the southern flanks of Everest, engulfing the ice-clad slopes effortlessly in a swirling mantle of hurricane-force winds. Within minutes it had the northern side in its grip, and then it rose to take the summit. The mightiest mountain in the world disappeared from view as the storm took control.

  If Shiva—the Hindu god of destruction—and Nemesis—the Greek goddess of retribution—had joined forces they could not have done a better job of devastation than nature itself did that day. The timing was uncanny, as bad as it was possible to be. If the storm had struck in winter no one would have been hurt. But as chance would have it, the tempest arrived on the busiest day of the Everest calendar, right in the middle of the premonsoon climbing season.

  Our expedition, a British attempt on the North Face via the Northeast Ridge, was at Camp Three (6,450 meters, or 21,161 feet), poised on the edge of our own summit attempt when the storm thundered in.

  We immediately knew that this was something far more dangerous than any other storm that had hit us in the eight weeks we had been there. The temperature fell to ten degrees below freezing, then twenty, then thirty degrees below. The wind became a constant, bullying force, pulling guy ropes from the glacier ice, tumbling fully laden equipment barrels into crevasses, and demolishing our canvas mess tent with frightening ease. The dome tents, built to withstand hurricane-force winds, creaked and groaned under the beating, distorted into shapes they were never designed for and straining the Kevlar poles to their limits.

  In an attempt to record the event on film, we staggered out into the maelstrom, dressed in every piece of down clothing we could get our hands on.

  We could have been in the Antarctic, on the Greenland ice cap, or at the North Pole, so complete was the blanket of driving snow that obscured every feature around us. Not a single landmark, not even the huge North Ridge, was visible through the raging whiteout of the blizzard, and the nearby tents of the Indian expedition were likewise invisible.

  Through the white wall of snow, and rising above the tempestuous roar of the wind across the glacier, came another sound: a sinister howl that told of even greater powers at play in the altitudes above us—the scream of the storm as it whirled across the North Face at 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) and above.

  There, in the “Death Zone,” more than thirty climbers were fighting for their lives. On the northern side, three Indian climbers were stranded, exhausted and with their oxygen supplies running out, high on the Northeast Ridge. On the southern side, two commercial expeditions were strung out between the South Col and the summit—the Mountain Madness team led by Scott Fischer, and the Adventure Consultants team of Rob Hall.

  The night that faced them was a night from hell. By the end of the following day, the three Indian climbers on the north side and five of the climbers on the south were dead. The toll included, incredibly, Hall and Fischer. The total of eight fatalities made this the single greatest loss of life in any twenty-four-hour period on the peak.

  But that was not the end of the drama.

  The day of the storm was the blackest of many black days in a season of terror, in which one disaster followed another. There had been two other deaths prior to the storm. There were two more deaths to come. It changed the fortunes of every team on the mountain, including our own, and it ignited a flurry of sensational debate around the world as newspapers and television news programs tried to make sense out of what had gone wrong.

  The storm left a mountain of questions in its wake. How could world-class mountaineers like Rob Hall and Scott Fischer lose their lives on a mountain they knew so intimately? Why were so many inexperienced climbers high on the mountain when the storm hit? Why did a team of Japanese climbers and their Sherpas pass the dying Indian climbers and yet fail to try and rescue them?

  The storm lasted less than twenty hours but for those of us who decided to carry on and try to rebuild our shattered hopes of a summit bid, it never really stopped. The fatalities it caused, the doubts it raised, the powers of nature it demonstrated, were with us for every step we took. It altered the physical process of climbing the mountain and turned our plans upside down, but most of all it played havoc with our minds, preying on the insecurities we all shared in that most dangerous of places, and ultimately stopping in their tracks all but two members of our expedition.

  For me, a total novice at this deadly game of high-altitude Russian roulette, these questions were at that moment in time as unfathomable as they were to anyone who had never stepped into the Death Zone—that beckoning, and terrifying, world where there is just one-third the oxygen at sea level.

  I was on Everest to make a film, not to climb it. I had employed other, far more qualified people to do that job for me. I had never climbed Ben Nevis or Sno
wdon, never stood on the summit of a single Alpine peak, yet, as the events of the season unfurled, my desire to experience the Death Zone for myself became impossible to resist.

  It was an obsession that took me to the very edge of self-destruction. But it also took me to the summit of Everest.

  — 1 —

  Feeling more dead than alive, I staggered the final few steps into Advance Base Camp just as darkness swept across the Tibetan Plateau and chased the last glimmer of light out of the Himalayas. It was 6:35 P.M. on May 20, 1996.

  I stood alone, swaying unsteadily on my feet, trying to work out what I should do next. For a few moments I was dimly aware of the snow-covered tents around me. There was a shout from the darkness. A glowing headlamp bobbed up and down as a shadowy figure emerged from somewhere and picked its way toward me across the rocks of the glacier.

  Then, with all the suddenness of a power cut, both my knees collapsed. I found myself lying on my back, staring at a sky full of stars, with a jumbo-jet pilot named Roger kissing me on both cheeks and calling me a bastard. We held each other in a bear hug for what seemed like ages as Rogers words of congratulation worked their way through the fog that shrouded my brain.

  For the first time in many weeks, a half-forgotten sensation overwhelmed me to the edge of tears. The feeling of being safe. It was over. The summit of Everest was behind me.

  I opened my mouth to reply to Roger but all that came out was a gabble of unintelligible words. Confused by a mixture of euphoria and shock, my brain scrambled by the effect that extreme altitude and dehydration had wrought, I was unable to string two words together.

  It didn’t even occur to me to wonder where my fellow climber Al Hinkes had disappeared, even though we had descended from the North Col together. As far as I was concerned, he had simply vanished. (In fact, as Roger later told me, he had gone to his tent to sort himself out before searching for food and drink.)

  Roger pulled me to my feet, helped me out of my rucksack, and unstrapped my climbing harness. Then he supported me into the unbelievable warmth of the mess tent where our Sherpa team was sitting around two steaming pots of food in a haze of kerosene fumes and cigarette smoke. Excited faces crowded round in a babble of conversation. I was guided onto a seat while Dhorze the cook prepared some sugared tea.

  My three layers of gloves were pulled off by eager hands, revealing the frozen fingers within. There was a whistle as my right hand emerged to reveal two frostbitten middle fingers. The end of each was consumed by a growing gooseberry-sized blister of fluid, the skin marbled and cheeselike in texture.

  Kippa Sherpa mimed the motion of a saw, cutting across the fingers. “Like this!” he laughed.

  “No. No.” Ang Chuldim, long experienced in judging the severity of frostbite, turned my hand in his and spoke reassuringly. “First degree. But fingers probably survive OK. No cut!”

  As I sipped the drink, the sweetness of the tea mingling with the bitter taste of blood oozing from the blisters on my lips, I felt the tent begin to spin. As the kerosene fumes seemed to engulf me, the familiar rise of nausea in my throat warned me I was about to vomit. I managed to stagger into the cleaner air of our own mess tent where I put my head between my knees and tried to ward off the fainting fit that threatened to black me out.

  The cool air and the tea revived me, and it suddenly struck me as strange that Roger was here alone.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “They’ve gone down to Base Camp.”

  “Oh.”

  Roger’s generosity in staying was now all the more apparent. Advance Base was no place to linger and he had waited here for several days even though the rest of the team had evacuated down to the warmer and more hospitable climes of the Rongbuk Valley base sixteen kilometers (ten miles) away. His gesture moved me greatly.

  “Thanks for being here.”

  “Well, I thought there had to be someone to welcome you back to the land of the living.”

  I finished the tea and walked like a drunk back outside with Roger to the tents. I knew one of them was mine but in my fuddled state I couldn’t remember which. Roger pointed out the correct one and I unzipped it and climbed in as he pulled the foam sleeping mat and sleeping bag from my rucksack. He pointed to my feet.

  “You can’t go to sleep with your boots on.”

  He unlaced them and pulled them off. I could feel the frozen fabric of the inner socks ripping against the dried blood where blisters had eroded my skin. This was a moment I had been dreading. I hadn’t looked at my feet since the day before our summit bid and they were feeling very odd—swollen and numb, just like my fingers.

  Roger went to fetch more fluid for me while I gathered the courage to shine the flashlight on my toes.

  They were encrusted with blood. At first I was horrified, then, looking closely, I realized the damage was superficial: the blood was from the constant chafing of my plastic boots, and the swelling was from the impact of striking my feet into the ice. There were two small areas of frostnip but nothing more. In my nightmares I had imagined my toes would already be going black and gangrenous.

  Roger was back. He took a look at my feet.

  “Looks like you’ve got away with it.”

  “Yeah. Looks like I have.”

  Roger gave me a big smile and said, “I’ll see you in the morning.” He zipped up the tent and I heard his footsteps move away.

  Lacking the energy to pull off the down suit, I shoved my feet into the sleeping bag and wrapped the top end of the bag around my upper body. Then I sucked down a full liter of tea, reveling in the warming sensation as the hot fluid ran through my body.

  I was desperate for sleep, but my mind had now woken from its frozen state and was scrabbling to catch up with events. Much of what I had seen and experienced had been lived through the distorting haze of altitude, and now my memory banks were trying to make some sense out of a mental filing system in total disarray. The events were there all right, in crystal definition, but their order had been shuffled and, in the case of certain nightmare images, put into a state of suspended animation from where they could not easily be retrieved.

  They would flood back soon enough but for now they were under lock and key.

  My overriding emotion was one of intense relief at ending the ordeal. Pathetically grateful to have gotten off the mountain alive, one fact played through my mind stronger than any other: that I was one of the lucky ones.

  Together with Al Hinkes and the team of three climbing Sherpas, we had all survived the Death Zone and returned intact from the summit of Everest. Now I found myself running a mental check on the state of my body, ticking off the damage.

  I estimated I had lost eleven kilograms (about twenty-four pounds) of body weight. My legs were now so completely stripped of fat that I could easily encircle my thigh with my two hands. I had first-degree frostbite on two fingers and a range of superficial injuries that are common at extreme altitude; radiation burns on my ears and lips; and pus-infected fissures on my fingers and toes. Both my eyes had retinal hemorrhages where blood capillaries had burst during the ascent. My kidneys were throbbing with the dull ache of days of fluid deprivation. My bowels were chucking out alarming quantities of blood every time I got up the courage to defecate.

  The persistent racking cough, the torn muscles around my rib cage, and the raging sore throat had been with me for so many weeks now that I scarcely noticed them.

  But that list of minor ailments was nothing. The mountain had let me off extremely lightly and I knew it. In physical terms, the cost of my Everest summit had been negligible. If Ang Chuldim was right about my fingers, then I wouldn’t lose anything. In a couple of months I would be healed and no sign would remain—on my body at least—that I had ever been here at all.

  For twelve other climbers in this premonsoon season, the attempt to climb to the summit of Everest had proved fatal. The bodies of ten of them still lay on the high slopes of the mountain. Only two of the corpses had been retriev
ed. The shock waves of this disaster were still reverberating around the world. The cost in human suffering, for the families, friends, and loved ones of those who died, is incalculable.

  Others had escaped from the Death Zone with their lives, but the price of their survival had been painfully high. One American climber and one Taiwanese had each suffered major amputations due to frostbite, losing an arm, fingers, and toes, and suffering facial disfigurement.

  In short, this had been a disastrous season on Everest and one that had caught the attention of the world’s media in a way that hadn’t happened since the blaze of publicity heralding the first ascent in 1953.

  Before I lapsed into unconsciousness, my hand moved up instinctively to check the small rectangular container that lay against my skin in the breast pocket of my thermal suit: the tiny digital video tape that contained footage from the summit of the world. My hand was still in the same position, cradling the precious roll of rushes, when I awoke fifteen hours later.

  For the next forty-eight hours I lay on my back in the tent, neither moving nor speaking. Occasionally the Sherpas, Al, or Roger would check that I was OK and bring in some tea or food, but basically I just lay there, staring at the canvas interior of the tent.

  My mind was in shock, replaying slowly through the events of the last ten days since the storm swept in. Thinking of the place we had been. Thinking of the Death Zone.

  The term “Death Zone” was first coined in 1952 by Edouard Wyss-Dunant, a Swiss physician, in a book called The Mountain World. Drawing on the experiences of the Swiss Everest expedition of that year (which had so nearly made the summit), he described with remarkable accuracy the effects of altitude on the human body.

  Wyss-Dunant created a series of zones to help his readers understand. At the 6,000-meter (19,685-foot) zone, Wyss-Dunant concluded, it was still possible for the human body to acclimatize in the short term. At the 7,000-meter (22,965-foot) zone no acclimatization was possible.

  To the zone above 7,500 meters (24,606 feet), he gave a special name. He called it, in German, Todeszone, or Death Zone. Above that altitude, not only could human life not be sustained, it deteriorated with terrifying rapidity. Even using supplementary oxygen, no one can remain in the Death Zone for long.