The Climb Read online

  To Boukreev’s surprise and relief, the weather on May 7 was calm, without wind, and the temperature, although it had been as low as minus fifteen degrees centigrade during the night, began to rise steadily and warm the climbers’ tents. As the climbers luxuriated in the relative warmth, Fischer was, yet again, moving through the Icefall. Whatever his condition had been in Base Camp the day before, he was now, according to one source, in serious decline.

  Somewhere near the upper terminus of the Icefall, he encountered Henry Todd of Himalayan Guides on the fixed ropes. Ten years older than Fischer and by his own admission, a much slower climber, Todd was surprised to see they were moving at the same speed as they moved up the mountain. “Normally,” Todd said, “he just flashed up these things.”

  “Bloody hell,” Todd said to Fischer. “What are you doing down here? Your people are going up to Camp III. You’re not going up to III?” Fischer, Todd said, didn’t respond immediately, but began to cough, “seriously cough.”

  “He said he had had to take Dale [Kruse] down. I said, ‘But, Dale was already ill. Why didn’t you send him down with somebody else?’ And he said to me, ‘The man was in tears, and I couldn’t send him with anyone else… . I didn’t want Anatoli or Neal or one of the Sherpas [to do it]. He’s my friend.’ ”

  Todd recalled, “He [Fischer] was just burning himself up. I knew he wasn’t well.” That observation was troubling enough to Todd, but what concerned him even more was one of Fischer’s parting comments. “I’m worried about these people. I’m worried about the situation.”

  That evening Scott rejoined us, and in the mess tent he expressed relief that Dale had made it down safely. The climb, he said, was over for Dale. That problem was solved, but Scott had some concerns about our oxygen situation and some of the clients, so we spent some time discussing those matters. I asked him if arrangements had been made for me to climb with oxygen if I made that decision, and he said that I seemed to be doing okay, that probably I would not need it. Not wanting to commit until summit day when I could read my condition clearly, I explained that I was not 100 percent certain and wanted the same amount of oxygen that was being supplied for the clients.

  About Sandy, Scott was more optimistic than he had been earlier in the expedition. He said he thought she had a chance to summit. I agreed, but I remained concerned about how she had spent the past weekend in Pheriche instead of resting. About Charlotte and Tim we had a joint concern, but Scott thought Charlotte’s successful experiences on her two previous expeditions to 8,000ers and Tim’s athletic ability would prevail.

  Like me, Scott was not sure if he was going to climb without oxygen. He said that he had already summited Everest without it and that he would see how he felt on summit day. About Neal, Scott said he was uncertain, and that he thought Neal should probably climb with it, but it would be Neal’s decision to make.

  The next morning, after a brief delay due to high winds, the Mountain Madness expedition headed toward Camp III. Because the weather was clear and the route from Camp II to Camp III could continuously be kept in view, Boukreev and Fischer decided to depart later than the clients, while Beidleman stayed with the pack ahead. As Boukreev and Fischer clipped on to the fixed ropes, they continued their conversation of the night before, again reviewing the clients and talking about oxygen. Fischer expressed his appreciation that Boukreev had been able to convince Lene to climb with oxygen. Somehow, where Fischer had come to a dead-end, Boukreev had been successful in making a case. But even on oxygen, they agreed, she was an unknown. She was a well-conditioned athlete, but altitude was a leveler; she could go down at any time. And the same was true for Klev Schoening, who had looked aggressive in his efforts, perhaps a little too aggressive. Boukreev had been telling the climbers, “You have to pace yourself. It’s not who gets up first; it’s who gets up.” But to a competitive athlete who likes to lead, to be first, Boukreev thought, that’s a hard lesson to get across. He wasn’t sure that Klev Schoening had understood him when he would say, “Save yourself.”

  Martin Adams remembered Boukreev saying the same thing to him on their previous climb on Makalu. “Toli would say ‘Martin, save yourself. Save yourself,’ because I would try to keep up with him. And I never understood until later what he meant. I thought he was saying don’t fall in a crevasse, don’t screw up, but what he was trying to tell me was, ‘Save your energy.’ ”

  As Scott and I climbed, although we had departed late, we passed almost all of Rob Hall’s clients, and Scott observed that his clients were not nearly as well conditioned as ours. Overall, we had a younger team and they were outperforming Rob’s climbers in every respect. I shared his opinion, but where he saw something good, I saw a potential problem.

  Fischer had previously announced to his team that he and Rob Hall had decided to join forces on summit day, and Boukreev had expressed concern. Hall’s climbers could slow them up, he had told Fischer. Now, on this stretch of the route, not as difficult or dangerous as it would be above Camp IV on summit day, the evidence—specifically, the Hall team’s butts—had been in their faces.

  Boukreev’s concerns about Hall’s climbers were shared by several other members of the Mountain Madness expedition. One said, “It was kind of like, ‘Why are we getting in with these guys? They’re weaker than we are; what good’s it going to do?’ But I think Fischer was tailing Rob Hall; … he went to Nepal and said, ‘I’m going to do it just like Rob Hall does it.’ That’s the impression I had.”

  Climbing ahead of Fischer as he dropped back, Boukreev continued to pass climbers as he moved toward Camp III. Ascending, he saw some climbers above him coming down the fixed rope. Stopping as they approached in order to unclip and let the descenders navigate a passing, Boukreev recognized among the climbers an old acquaintance, Ed Viesturs from the IMAX/IWERKS team. Hardly winded, Viesturs was his usual calm self. Boukreev, leaning into a ski pole that he used for balance on the snow and ice, talked with Viesturs about conditions above.

  “We’re coming down,” Ed told me. He said they didn’t like the weather, that it was too unstable and they were going to hang back for a few days and see if the weather would stabilize.

  Viesturs recalled the meeting and the events leading to the IMAX/IWERKS team’s decision to descend. “For our filming purposes we wanted to have a lonely summit ridge, and for safety’s sake we didn’t want to be with forty other people on the summit ridge … so we decided we’d go a day before them.”

  While the Fischer and Hall teams were spending the night of May 7 at Camp II, the IMAX/IWERKS team was above them at Camp III, preparing to make a bid for the summit on May 9, but Viesturs said that when they awoke, they had a change of mind. “We spent a windy, windy night at Camp III and got up, and it was still windy up high… . And David [Breashears] and I both knew that it wasn’t the window we were waiting for… . So, we said, ‘What the hell! We’ll go down; we have time; we have patience; let these guys [below us] do their climb and we’ll come back up when the weather is more stable and better.’ ”

  Encountering Boukreev, Viesturs remembers that he and some of his fellow expedition members were a little embarrassed. “We shook hands and said hello, have a good time; it was very cordial… . We felt a bit sheepish coming down. Everybody is going up and we thought, ‘God, are we making the right decision?’ But, we just said, ‘Well, this is our decision.’ Here this whole group is going up, smiley, happy faces, and we’re going down, deciding that it wasn’t time yet for us to go to the summit.”

  It was fair weather as Viesturs and Boukreev stood and talked. Viesturs wished Boukreev good luck, maneuvered around him on the fixed rope, and headed down. As Boukreev looked after him and the other IMAX/IWERKS climbers, he could see the Hall and Fischer teams in motion, set on the summit, two days away.

  *Mountain Madness advertising had said they would provide leadership “for all summit attempts,” implying there could be more than one attempt made.

  CHAPTER 13

  I
NTO THE DEATH ZONE

  Like Ed Viesturs, I was not happy with conditions on the mountain. After more than two decades of climbing I had developed certain intuitions, and my feeling was that things were not right. For several days the weather had not been stable, and high winds had been blowing at higher elevations. I wanted very much for my feelings to be heard, but it had become increasingly clear to me that Scott did not look upon my advice in the same way as he did Rob Hall’s. I thought about my attempt to convince Scott to take our clients down to the forest zone to rest prior to our summit bid and his unwillingness to consider the proposal. My voice was not as authoritative as I would have liked, so I tried not to be argumentative, choosing instead to downplay my intuitions.

  At Camp III, on the ice ledges that Boukreev and the Sherpas had cut into the face of Lhotse, the clients and the guides settled into three tents. Fox, Madsen, and Klev Schoening shared one; Fischer, Beidleman, and Pittman shared another; Boukreev, Gammelgaard, and Adams were in the third. According to Boukreev, all the climbers seemed to be doing well and, in fact, were “joking and jovial.”

  Pittman, who wanted to file reports from Camps III and IV and then from the summit if she made it, had had one of the seven climbing Sherpas advancing with the team carry up a satellite phone she had been using at Base Camp. After a macaroni and cheese dinner with Fischer and Beidleman, she phoned in her dispatch to NBC. Barely able to talk because of her continuing Khumbu cough, she kept it short, letting anyone who wanted to know that she was melting water and eating red licorice and that the IMAX/IWERKS expedition had turned back, having failed to reach the summit. If she or any of the other climbers in her tent were concerned that Ed Viesturs and David Breashears, two of the world’s most highly regarded Everest veterans, had thought it prudent to go down and wait for a better window, she didn’t mention it.

  The next morning, May 9, we were awakened by the conversations of some Sherpas who were ferrying oxygen canisters from Camp II to Camp IV from where we would make our summit bid. As we were preparing our breakfasts on our high-altitude stoves, some of our Sherpas approached our tents and told us with great concern that one of the members of the Taiwanese expedition had earlier that morning stepped out of his tent to go the bathroom and, because he was not wearing crampons, slipped and fell into a crevasse. They were, they said, going to assist the Sherpas climbing with the Taiwanese in their efforts to extricate the climber, Chen Yu-Nan.

  As the Sherpas went to offer their assistance, Fischer and his guides hurried their clients through breakfast, eager to get them back onto the fixed ropes and to Camp IV, where they could rest in preparation for the next day’s summit bid. Most of the clients had changed into full-body down suits to protect against the serious cold they would encounter at Camp IV. All of them had placed a full canister of Poisk in their rucksacks and had draped their masks and connecting hoses over their shoulders, preparing to go on oxygen as they departed camp.

  As Henry Todd explained, Camp III is the point at which most climbers, if they’re going to climb with oxygen, strap on. “From III to IV you have got a little bit of climbing to do; you have to climb over the Yellow Band. This is the first time you’re doing something which is fairly strenuous. So … you don’t want to knack yourself, so you have a cylinder and you use it.”

  Boukreev was one of the last climbers to leave Camp III. Ahead of him on the route were the Mountain Madness climbers and climbers from two other expeditions that had also overnighted at Camp III: Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants and the American Commercial Pumori/Lhotse Expedition headed by the Americans Daniel Mazur and Jonathan Pratt. With more than fifty climbers ahead of him, Boukreev’s progress on the fixed ropes was slowed as he had to maneuver around one after another. At about 7,500 meters Boukreev encountered Fischer, who, like him, was climbing without oxygen.

  I said to him that I thought I should move to the head of the pack and to arrive first at the South Col, the site of Camp IV, before our clients to make certain that everything was ready for them. Scott agreed and said that he would drop back and do a “sweep” behind our clients. We then wondered where Neal was. Scott said that he was not ahead, and because I had passed a number of climbers whose faces were covered with oxygen masks, I couldn’t be certain where he was in the line of climbers. We thought he seemed to be ascending slowly, perhaps adjusting to the challenge of the altitude.

  Climbing steadily, Boukreev passed most of the climbers from Rob Hall’s expedition and those from Mazur and Pratt’s, and somewhere just above the top of the Yellow Band he passed the last of the Mountain Madness clients, Klev Schoening, who was going strong.

  He was ascending with a good speed, almost like mine, and I had to strain a little to keep ahead at the pace he was maintaining. This put me on notice, because I knew that tomorrow it would be necessary for me to maintain at least the pace of our fastest client. So, I kept the oxygen question open, thinking I would decide to use it or not to use it at the point we made our summit bid.

  When Boukreev arrived at the South Col around 2:00 P.M. he encountered a refrigerated pandemonium. Blowing across the South Col at more than 60 mph, the wind was tearing across the exposed, trapezoidal plateau. In freezing temperatures, amid a scatter of hundreds of depleted oxygen canisters jettisoned by previous expeditions, the Mountain Madness Sherpas had already set up one tent and were struggling to erect another. Gripping the edges of the tent in gloved hands, the Sherpas were wrestling the flapping, snapping construction to the ground, trying to anchor it to the mountain. For Boukreev, it was not a heartening scene.

  For me, one of the most difficult things during an ascent of Everest is a squall that tries to rip you off the mountain. It is one of my greatest enemies at high altitude. Almost always, if I can choose, I would prefer foul, calm weather over any day during which the wind is blowing as fiercely as it was at the South Col that afternoon.

  Afraid they could lose the tent in their efforts, Boukreev pulled off his rucksack and grabbed for a loose, flying corner and tried to wrestle it to the ground. He’d seen more than one expedition foiled when a high-altitude shelter was lost and forced a descent to the safety of a lower camp. He was not going to see that story written on his watch. While Boukreev muscled the tent, the Sherpas threaded the struts and threw their own weight into the effort. As they fought against the wind, Klev Schoening, who had come up behind Boukreev, offered to help, and Boukreev asked him to climb into the tent, to pin it to the ground while Boukreev and the Sherpas finished securing it.

  I felt that for Klev it would be better for him to get some rest and to get ready for the assault. I thought his strength on oxygen might deceive him into thinking that his energy was without limits.

  The initial plan had been to erect three tents for the clients and guides, but because the wind was not dying, in fact was increasing in velocity, Boukreev thought it would be smarter to settle in only two. By distributing the climbers into fewer tents, he thought, they could trap more body heat for the cold night ahead, and if the worst should happen, if they lost a tent, they would have a reserve shelter to protect the climbers.

  Standing slightly hunched with his back to the wind that threatened to pitch him over, Boukreev conferred with one Sherpa and then another, putting his mouth a few inches from their ears and yelling to be heard. In the cacophony they found consensus, and the third tent was left in its stuff bag.

  Working steadily to secure the tents and protect them from the ripping forces of the wind, Boukreev saw Gammelgaard and Adams arrive, looking tired but not complaining of any serious problems, and steered them into the tent with Schoening. Beidleman took shelter in the other tent when he arrived. According to Boukreev, it “seemed as if he was feeling the altitude,” which made Boukreev think that Beidleman’s decision to climb with oxygen was a “right one.”

  As the wind continued to pick up through the afternoon, Boukreev’s concerns increased exponentially. The weather variable in the Everest equation was threatening a sum
mit bid, and some of the Mountain Madness factors hadn’t yet shown up to figure into the calculations. By 5:00 P.M., according to Boukreev, Fischer and Pittman had yet to arrive at Camp IV.

  Wondering how we were going to proceed, I decided to speak with Rob Hall, whom I had seen supervising the construction of his own camp, and when I approached him near one of his tents, we had to scream to be heard over the constant roar of the wind. “What are we going to do? I’m sure that the weather is clearly not good enough for assaulting the summit.” To this Rob Hall said: “My experience is that often it is calm after a squall like this, and if it clears in the night, we will make our bid tomorrow. If the weather doesn’t change by midnight, then my group will wait another twenty-four hours. If the weather is still bad on the second day, then we will descend.”

  For some reason I cannot explain I did not share Rob Hall’s optimism, and I thought it highly unlikely the weather would stabilize. My intuitions continued to bother me, and I fully expected that we would not climb the next day.

  Finishing his conversation with Hall and concerned that Fischer had yet to arrive in camp, Boukreev walked away from Camp IV and began to backtrack toward Camp III. About forty meters from the tents, through a wind-driven snow that had begun, Boukreev saw Fischer moving in his direction with some other climbers in tow. Among them Boukreev recognized Sandy Hill Pittman.

  Scott, yelling to be heard, asked me in what tents everyone should go, and I explained to him that instead of the three tents we had struck only two. When he suggested that we pitch another one, I explained the circumstances and the rationale for my decision, and he agreed with what had been done. Then we had a discussion about the weather, and as I had told Rob, I told Scott, “I don’t think conditions are so very good, and I think we should consider descending.” Then, I told Scott that I had spoken with Rob about the weather, and I told him of Rob’s intentions to wait to see if the storm cleared. After our conversation it was clear to me that Scott agreed with Rob. If the weather cleared, we would climb.