by Sharon Wood
After he climbs back into the tent, I sit up and reach outside to light the stove in the vestibule while Albi fires up the hanging stove inside. The pot of water we melted the night before is frozen over with a thick skin of ice. He breaks it with a can of bacon and drops it in to thaw.
Kevin’s voice comes over the radio. “Good morning to all you campers out there! Anyone up and at ’em yet?”
“Hi Kevin,” Albi says, “this is us at Four. You copy?”
“Five by five. How’s life above seven thousand metres?”
“Just peachy, Kevin.”
“You guys heading to Five today?”
“You betcha.”
A raspy whisper comes on. “This is Jim and James at Five. We’re out of here and down for a rest today.”
“Holy shit, Jim!” Kevin says. “Are you putting on your best sexy morning-after voice, or are you sick?”
“Lost my voice yesterday,” Jim says. “James and I had a rough night last night. Couldn’t keep anything down. Over.”
“This is Dan from Basecamp. Copy?”
“Yep, read you five by five, Dan,” Kevin says. “Are you and Chris going to lie low?”
“We’re going to take a slow walk up to Camp One and see how it goes.”
Jim rasps, “Why not stay in Basecamp and rest for a few days?”
“Cuz I’ll go fucking crazy is why.”
Albi pulls the can of bacon out of the boiling water. He pours the water into a bottle for us to start drinking and puts the pot back on the stove. Then he upturns the can and a pork popsicle slides out and sizzles when it hits the bottom of the pot.
“This is Jane at Two. Dave and Laurie are headed up to Four today and they want to know if you need anything.”
I hold up the empty bacon can and point at it. Albi says, “More bacon, please.”
“Copy that,” Jane says. “They also asked if there are enough sleeping bags up there for them tonight.”
“Yep, Woody and I are returning to Two tonight after we carry to Five. Jim, do you need anything up there?”
“Keep those spools coming,” Jim says. “Hopefully you guys can finish stringing out the ropes to Five over the next few days.”
“How much do you figure is left to go to reach Five?”
“Maybe three hundred metres—two spools should do it. James and I thought it might be easier to finish it from this end rather than working out of Four.” His voice dwindles to a whisper. “But after last night, we’re not sure about that. Too soon to be this high. And yeah…we need a snow cave. Lotta work to do. We’ll see you guys somewhere on the ridge. This is Five, over and out.”
I empty packets of instant oatmeal into our cups and add boiling water, a dollop of butter, and a couple of spoonfuls of brown sugar and powdered milk. The scent of bacon wafts thick and heavy in the confined space of the tent. Albi serves it into our cups on top of the oatmeal.
“Want this? He tips the pot to show me the crispy bits floating in a centimetre of fat. I hold my cup out. “I hope any worries you might have had last night will be put to rest with your appetite for bacon at 7,300 metres, Woody. Just keep eating this way and you’ll do fine.”
“Yeah,” I say, “I hope you’re right.”
Once we turn the stove off, we start to stuff our sleeping bags and pack food away between bites and gulps of water. Albi mutters and cusses as he rifles through the piles in search of his sunglasses. “I give up,” he sighs and flops back on the mess for a rest. A few minutes later he says, “You ready?” I nod at the door then push everything aside. I scooch around to put my feet out the door.
“Aha,” he says as he plucks his glasses from where I was sitting. “You hid them on me, didn’t you?”
He joins me at the door and between more gulps of water, we bend to put on our boots and strap on our crampons.
I feel sluggish from the sleeping pill I took a few hours before. I lean against Albi and groan, “I don’t feel so good this morning.” He plucks at my crampon straps, like guitar strings, to check that they are taut then lifts my jacket to look at my harness, and gives me a nod.
In the same breath it takes him to lurch onto his feet and out the tent, he grunts, “Come on, old girl, you’ll feel better once you press the pedal down to burn off some of that bacon.” He reaches down to give me a hand up, and I look up at him and pause.
“What?” he asks as he waits with his hand out. His face is peppered with spotty growth, flakes of burnt skin and tooth paste lines at the corners of his mouth.
I let out a weak laugh. “You’re looking a little rough.”
“Yeah? Well, if you haven’t noticed, I’m the one on my feet and raring to go. I may not be pretty but I can lift heavy things.” I grab his hand and he pulls me to my feet. “Hmm, not so heavy anymore.” He puts his arm around me and gives me a squeeze. “Let’s hope this weather holds out for us to get up this sucker by your birthday.” My birthday is in three weeks, on May 18.
It is calm enough to hear my crampons bite into the snow. Grateful for the ski pole I use as a third point of contact, I teeter through my first few steps before I find my balance. The ridge starts out wide and narrows to an airy catwalk where we straddle the border of Tibet and Nepal with a 1,500-metre plunge off either side. When the ridge grows too narrow, we walk below the knife-edge and push against the sidehill with a ski pole to keep us out and over our feet.
Although the two-kilometre-long span between Camps Four and Five is the easiest ground on the route, it feels like the hardest yet. The effects of the altitude increase exponentially above 7,300 metres in terms of the time and energy it takes to do anything.
Halfway across the ridge we see Jim and James coming toward us. Every dozen or so steps they double over and droop. When we meet, they collapse onto their packs and sit with us for a few minutes.
James brings his head up from his knees and says, “Oh, man, that’s a lot of up and down and walkin’ sideways. Going by how shitty we felt over there, it sure feels like a heck of a lot more than just three hundred metres higher. One night at Five feels like enough for us right now.” He coughs, then turns and retches. We all have that high-altitude hack by now, but some have it worse than others.
Albi and I reach the end of the ropes a couple of hours later. By then the ridge has broadened out again on a section we will call the Football Field. It is easy walking, but we know by now that if the wind is strong enough to blow us off our feet, it could blow us off the ridge, so we run a rope out and walk the remaining distance to get our first look at Camp Five.
A low wall of snow blocks surrounds the single tent that Jim and James have collapsed and weighed down with spools of rope. The handle of the carpenter’s saw they used to cut blocks out of the rock-hard snow sticks out from a chink in the wall. Just beyond camp, the summit pyramid—a whole other mountain—rises another 1,200 metres into an ink-blue sky.
On our way back, we see Dave and Laurie appear on the spur, coming up from Camp Two and making their way toward Camp Four. They are already at Camp Four digging out the tent by the time we arrive.
“How’d it go over there?” Dave asks.
“Good, but harder than I thought it would be for such easy ground,” I say. “I think I was still dehydrated from coming up too fast yesterday. The new altitude starts talking to you about halfway across, probably around that 7,400-metre mark. We were lucky with the weather, though. Sure glad to be heading down.”
“We’ll probably do the same as you guys after we haul a load across to Five tomorrow,” says Dave.
Laurie points at the tent still half buried in drifted snow. “I can’t believe you guys spent the night in that. I went to move in and the tent floor is like a hole. How’d you sleep in there?”
“Some of us didn’t,” I say.
As I prepare to leave, I give Dave a hug, then Laurie. I ho
ld onto him a little longer and say, “Don’t work too hard on digging out that tent, eh? You guys have a long day tomorrow and like I said, it feels hard.”
About an hour later, Albi and I arrive at Camp Two in time to catch the tail end of the evening radio call. Kevin and Jane are standing out beyond the cook shelter in order to get line-of-sight reception from Camp Four.
Dave says, “Laurie just gave this place a major remodelling job. He’s got a real bad headache and I’m worried that it might be something more.”
“This is Dr. Bob at Basecamp. I assume you’ve got some Tylenol up there?”
“Better than that. Laurie just took a couple of Diamox and is working on downing a couple of litres of water. We’ll wait and see how he feels in an hour or so.”
“This is Jim at One. How about we keep our radios on and do another check-in at eight?”
An hour later, Dave reports that Laurie’s headache is getting worse. Dr. Bob suggests he take some Tylenol and check in again at nine.
We talk among ourselves in the cook shelter as we wait for the next check-in. Kevin says, “Laurie’s been up to 7,300 metres several times and is well acclimatized by now. He should be feeling better after drinking all that water, not worse. This is serious. If they wait around any longer he may not be able to walk—let alone get down the ropes. He’s got to get out of there while he still can.”
Headaches are a common symptom of acute mountain sickness, which we all suffer to varying degrees when we gain a new altitude. But the urgency in Kevin’s voice jolts us onto another track of thought. Random as it may seem, we realize Laurie is likely suffering from high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), a condition in which fluids leak into the cranial cavity and compress the brain. It can be fatal unless the climber gets to a lower altitude immediately. But Laurie is stoic and dismisses it as nothing more than a dehydration headache. Denial and irrational thinking, however, are also symptoms of HACE. Kevin says, “Let’s get on the radio.”
Barry pre-empts us. “Hello all camps! This is Camp One, can you read me?” Once we all respond, Barry says, “It is the opinion of four high-altitude climbing veterans here at Camp One that Laurie needs to get down—now.”
“Dave here. Right-o, we’re getting suited up. I’m going to accompany Laurie and we’ve both got fresh batteries in our headlamps. We’ll leave our radio on and keep you posted.”
Dave later tells us that by the time he managed to get Laurie dressed, out the door and clipped into the rope, he was dopey, confused and unable to stand on his own. Dave draped Laurie’s arm over him and they descended locked together for about 150 metres. By then, Laurie’s condition had improved enough that he was able to start descending on his own, with Dave checking his rope transfers. Halfway down, Laurie was fully functional and when they arrived at Camp Two, he had no sign of a headache.
The randomness of Laurie’s affliction rattles me. If it can happen to the high-altitude veteran who has been to the top of Everest, it can happen to any of us. Had he been higher on the mountain and above the fixed ropes, he could have died.
Jim calls a meeting at Camp One to discuss strategy. In just two weeks we have gone from being ahead of schedule to being behind. He has vowed to bring everyone back alive, and the odds of accomplishing this on the formidable West Ridge are starting to look grim. Our team is wearing down; Laurie’s emergency evacuation and Chris’s and Dan’s health issues, which have hobbled them to the lower camps for the time being, have pushed Jim to propose we change our route from the West Ridge Direct to our Plan B, the Hornbein Couloir.
From the first time we saw the West Ridge Direct route, Albi and I believed the Hornbein was the only viable option for our small team. We assumed time and attrition would make it obvious. But half our team is adamantly against the switch. James is among the protesters, saying he would rather fail trying than compromise. I hear their objections as a threat. I think, This is going to divide us, and it will be all over if they don’t start being realistic. From high on the mountain, Albi and I rail and argue that the Hornbein Couloir is hardly a compromise. It is a far cry from a hike by anyone’s standards. Although Jim is in favour of changing to the alternate route, he doesn’t press us for a consensus vote now. We haven’t got time to waste on this!
In the end, however, it is by honouring the dissent—hearing everyone out, and giving everyone the time they need to let go of the old plan and grab hold of the new one—that Jim reunites us. A few days later, after dinner on our first night at Camp Five, Albi and I hear the radio come alive with an inaudible voice that sounds more like radio static.
“This is Barry at Four. I think that noise was Jim’s voice.”
“This is Jim,” he rasps. “Better now?”
“Yeah,” Barry says, “but it sounds like you’re not.”
“Saw Dr. Bob before he left this afternoon for Camp One. Says I’ve got laryngitis. Looks like I’ll be lying low for a few days to try and beat this, so we’ll be down one more climber. Relay to Albi and Woody that we’re all on board to switch to the Hornbein now. And ask them if they can start fixing tomorrow?”
Albi says, “We can hear you, Jim. That’s good to know that everyone’s on board for the switch. Woody and I will try fixing at least one spool. We’re down to two.”
“That’s what I thought,” Jim says. “The Americans are looking pretty hungry. I’ve arranged a trade of food for rope.”
Albi says, “Sounds good, Jim. Unless anyone has anything else to say, it’s nighty-night for us.” He tosses the radio on top of my sleeping bag and asks, “You and Laurie gained six hundred metres of vertical and fixed, what, a kilometre in three days?”
“Maybe so,” I say, “but that was all below 7,300 metres in perfect weather conditions. Look how slow we moved across the ridge today and we were just walking.”
“There’s not much technical ground through the Diagonal Ditch,” he says, referring to the long gully slanting upward above Camp Five toward the North Face. “So stay with me here. Our window for the summit bid is May tenth to twentieth, ten days from now. Three teams split a thousand metres between them, each fixing two spools per shift. That’s doable. So in an ideal world, we’ve got six days of work left before we’re ready for the summit.”
“I think you’re being overly optimistic.”
“Perhaps, but then I’ve factored in four days of compensation for the altitude and weather. Even if it takes us the full ten days, that puts us right on schedule. Dwayne and Barry are right behind us, so we can safely assume they’ll be the first summit bid team given they’ve been working together for some time now and Dwayne has the most experience above eight thousand metres.”
“Okay,” I say. “Sounds like a plan. Barring any miracles, Dan’s out with whatever he’s got. Laurie’s out, Jim’s out with laryngitis, and Chris surely won’t be able to work high with the state of his ribs. So, as it is now, that leaves you and me; then Barry and Dwayne, who are right behind us; and a third shift of Dave, James and Kevin to cover those six days of fixing.”
With the anticipation of starting up new ground the next morning, and our first night at Camp Five, I take a sleeping pill to get a good sleep. But it never kicks in soon enough, and I find myself hovering in the in-between. Pinpricks of light, like stars, fade in and out of sight.
Two years ago, close to the day, our Makalu team stood at Advance Basecamp staring hard and long into the night at a place 2,700 metres above our heads for the faint twinkle of headlamps. Dwayne and Carlos had moved up to Camp Five the day before. They started their summit bid the next morning at 3 a.m. Twelve hours later, Carlos was in the lead when he discovered the body of a Czech climber who had hunkered down on the ridge two years before. The grim reminder and late hour turned them around one hundred vertical metres from the top. That small distance over easy ground to the summit, but above eight thousand metres, could have led them to the same fate.
Their descent seemed endless. Exhausted and hypoxic, building anchor after anchor, rappelling pitch after pitch, became a fight for their lives. I grew still as I watched, overcome by a powerful prescient thought, That fight will be mine one day. Ever since, I had sensed I was on an inexorable course toward that same nightmare, benighted on an eight-thousand-metre peak. Although I am safe now, I feel haunted. I follow those pinpricks of light into sleep.
When I open the tent to empty my pee bottle the next morning, I notice a cloud cap on Nuptse and a distant roar, indicating high winds aloft. I scrape the frost off the walls and prepare breakfast while Albi nurses a headache. The thought of bacon triggers an instant gag reflex, so we stick to oatmeal and force it down. We pull on our insulated one-piece suits for the first time, and I am first out of the tent, trussed and ready to go.
This time, I offer Albi the hand up. “Come on, old boy. What do you think, shall we start and get out of here at the first sign of that wind dropping down to this level?” He groans as he pushes himself to his feet. “I take that as a yes?”
It is the last time we will talk to one another until the end of the day. Knowing how wind can come up suddenly, we collapse the tent when we leave it and weigh it down. I load a spool into my pack while Albi slides the other one onto a broken ski pole for me to run out.
Within fifty metres I am climbing diagonally up and across loose shale and snow on the North Face. New ground pulls me on and distracts me from all else but my goal to run out the rope and search for the next point of solid rock to build an anchor. The wind picks up a bit over the next couple of hours, but I give it no further thought, as this is the norm not the exception. I am maybe 150 metres out now and focused on hammering another pin in, when a deluge of spindrift knocks my goggles off my face and me off my feet. I hear a shrill whistle over the wind and look down the line at Albi, who is waving madly at me to come back. Then he disappears behind pulsing streams of spindrift. I scrabble to my hands and knees, tie the end of the rope to the pin and start back across the face. Between ever-increasing gusts and the rock that skitters out from under my feet like loose shingles, I stagger toward Camp Five.
