The Climb Page 14

  Somewhere around 5:30 P.M. Boukreev joined Gammelgaard, Adams, and Schoening in their tent; Fischer settled into the other tent with Beidleman, Pittman, Fox, and Madsen. The wind persisted, and everyone hunkered down, wondering what the next few hours would bring.

  The original plan, agreed upon in Base Camp before the last push began, was that the Mountain Madness climbers would depart Camp IV at midnight on May 9 and head for the summit. But in Boukreev’s tent, according to Martin Adams, the general feeling was that the climb wasn’t going to happen on the magic day. “The wind was blowing hard enough that you didn’t want to mess around with climbing. And generally, we felt like we’d blown it.” Gammelgaard, too, had her concerns. “The night we arrived at the South Col, it was blowing heavily and it kept on blowing… . And I had doubts in me, and I know there were some people in our tent talking about it. ‘Are we going to climb or are we not going to climb?’ Because I don’t personally think it’s a wise thing to start out climbing after a big storm because it’s not a good sign.”

  In another tent at Camp IV, there were similar doubts and conversations. Lou Kasischke, fifty-three, an attorney from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a client-climber in Rob Hall’s expedition, was sharing a tent with three other climbers: Andy Harris, Beck Weathers, and Doug Hansen. Everyone except Andy Harris, a Rob Hall guide, thought a summit bid the next day was a bad idea.

  Kasischke recalled, “It was a roaring storm out there at high camp, and I remember in our tent we were arguing … and it was three to one that we ought to be waiting. We were concerned that we really hadn’t had a full day of good weather, a full twenty-four hours of good weather, and we just … thought it would be smart to wait a day… . I mean, if it were this way twenty-four hours later, we were going to have a problem trying to get down.”

  Two tents. Two different expeditions. Eight climbers. Six votes: bad idea.

  Boukreev knew the call was out of his hands. Fischer would decide, and if the decision was made to go, he would need to be rested. Wanting to warm himself and the other climbers in his tent, he and Martin Adams scrounged for a pan in which to melt some snow over the high-altitude stove they had in their tent. But, as Adams recalled, they couldn’t find one. “Just another foul-up, but, hey, I had resigned myself to the fact that things were fouled up, and I just decided to do the best I could and not get too rattled about it.”

  Fortunately, the Sherpas thought to look in on the climbers in Boukreev’s tent and brought all of them some hot tea through the howl and blow of the storm, but Adams can’t recall that they had anything to eat. “Lene had good food with her, but we didn’t have a pot to cook it in.”

  After drinking some hot tea, I decided the best way of waiting was to sleep, so zipping into my bag, I fell almost immediately to sleep.

  As Boukreev slept, Gammelgaard and Adams tried, but they had a small problem: Klev Schoening was threatening to leave the tent and sleep outside in the storm! Adams remembered, “When we were trying to sleep, Klev, who I think was suffering symptoms of AMS, started yelling at everybody to move over, which was a little strange, because Lene, Toli, and I were already squeezed into one-half of the tent while Klev was in the other half with our packs.” Gammelgaard and Adams exchanged smiles and quizzical looks, but didn’t respond, because, as Adams said, “Klev is a nice guy. We didn’t take it personally. It wasn’t his attitude; it was the altitude.”

  For Schoening it was a jumpy, quirky night. Boukreev, however, slept solidly, only to be awakened just before 10:00 P.M. by something that at first puzzled him, the absence of the howling wind.

  There was no fluttering of the tent fabrics; the wind had totally died. All I could hear around me was the sound of the Sherpas firing up high-altitude stoves, bits and pieces of their conversation, and the clattering of equipment. Ahead, I figured, was the summit assault, and I didn’t have any wish to do it. For some reason my internal voice was quiet, and I didn’t have the usual pre-assault high when every muscle is ready and poised for the first command.

  In Fischer’s tent, too, Beidleman recalled, the climbers began to stir at 10:00 P.M. “Ten o’clock exactly is when I heard the first Sherpas rumbling around, and approximately fifteen minutes or so after that we had a pot of tea from the Sherpas. We spent the next hour and fifteen minutes organizing ourselves, and at approximately eleven-thirty we piled out of the tents.”

  As the clients and guides came out of their tents and looked into the night sky, they saw an inverted bowl of lacquered black jammed with stars. The rages of the wind had died to a whisper of breeze. Boukreev said, “It was as if the mountain was beckoning with a finger and speaking softly, ‘Come on. Come on.’ ”

  Outside, with enough light from the moon to illuminate their movements, Boukreev and Beidleman saw that the clients were properly strapped into their crampons and did a global check of their conditions and equipment. As they worked, according to Boukreev, Fischer began to distribute oxygen to the clients. Adams has recalled that Boukreev gave him two canisters and told him to check their pressures, a precaution against getting a partially filled bottle.

  In total, the Mountain Madness climbers had sixty-two canisters at Camp IV, nine Zvesda canisters and fifty-three of the lighter Poisk canisters. Fifty-one percent (by volume) of the oxygen purchased from Henry Todd was on hand for the summit bid. Most of the rest had been consumed (the largest amounts by Pete Schoening and by Ngawang Topche Sherpa); a small amount remained at Base Camp for emergency medical purposes.

  Given how they intended to use it, the quantity of oxygen available to the Mountain Madness expedition at Camp IV was minimal. The nine Zvesda canisters, because they were heavier, had been reserved for sleeping on the night before the summit bid. The fifty-three Poisk canisters had been set aside for the May 10 climb.

  Six Sherpas were climbing with the expedition; five of them were planning to climb with oxygen; the climbing sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, was climbing without. Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa did carry one canister for emergency purposes; the remaining five each carried two canisters for their own use on the climb and an additional two canisters for use by the clients and guides. So, total, the Sherpas took twenty-one bottles from Camp IV to carry up the mountain.

  The six climbing clients, Fischer, and Beidleman carried two bottles each, and Boukreev carried one. Guides and clients, total, carried seventeen bottles.

  Combined, all climbers carried thirty-eight Poisk canisters, which left fifteen full Poisk canisters and whatever little was left over from the Zvesdas from the night before at Camp IV. It was a slim margin of safety, certainly not enough to allow the climbers to overnight if they ran into complications on their summit bid and wanted to make a second bid on May 11. It was May 10 or not at all, which was not a surprise to Fox and Madsen, who had already been told, one shot, no more.

  The oxygen consumption/use calculations Fischer based his oxygen plan upon were, in part, based upon advice from his supplier Henry Todd. Todd estimated that each of his Poisk canisters, if consumed at his suggested flow rate of two to two and one-half liters per minute, would last for six hours. “Two should last you for twelve hours, and that twelve hours should take you to the summit [from Camp IV] and back down to pick up a third bottle at the South Summit.” On paper, the plan looked bulletproof.

  The Mountain Madness climbers leaving at midnight, if the weather held and there were no complications, could reasonably expect to be on the summit in ten to eleven hours. If they stayed at Todd’s recommended flow rate, they would be sitting on top of Everest with one or two hours of oxygen left in their canisters. From the summit, again assuming favorable weather and no surprises, it would take individual climbers anywhere from three-quarters of an hour to an hour to descend to the South Summit. At the South Summit, as had been planned, each descending climber would pick up a third canister that the Sherpas were to cache there. With an additional six hours of O’s, assuming all went well, every climber could make it back to Camp IV on the bottle
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  As the climbers loaded their two tanks of oxygen into their rucksacks, Fischer asked, “Is anybody ready? Because Lopsang is, and if anybody is ready, they should go with him.” Pittman stepped forward. Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa approached Pittman and, with what one climber referred to as a girth hitch, fastened a short length of rope around Pittman and hooked the rope to his climbing harness with a carabiner. Somewhere around midnight, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa took off for the summit, Pittman on a towline behind him. Shortly after her, at Beidleman’s urging, Charlotte Fox strode away from Camp IV, ten minutes into her thirty-ninth birthday.

  At the South Col the temperature was severely cold, and there was a fresh dust of snow. As for me, after I’d slept, I felt a new wave of strength, but I still had not decided whether I would climb with oxygen or without, so I put a canister and a mask into my rucksack just in case. Somewhere near the back of our pack I departed camp with Martin Adams.

  The last of the clients and guides to leave Camp IV was Fischer, who, as had been agreed, would be the sweep. Climbing just ahead of him, the next-to-last climber to depart was Lene Gammelgaard. When she noticed that Fischer was not trailing her closely, Gammelgaard doubled back to check on him. “I was very happy to see that he was using oxygen. Because I’d tried to do whatever I could to say, ‘Use oxygen or stay at camp and guide the expedition from there,’ which is what he should have done. But, at least, okay, he was using oxygen, and I was very happy about it. Then I went off and stuck to the group… . It was very, very clear to me when I started out from the South Col that there was no way I wanted to be alone on summit day. I’d been climbing very much on my own up and down the Icefall and things like that. But, then it became obvious to me the power that psychologically comes to you by being in a group.”

  CHAPTER 14

  TO THE SOUTH SUMMIT

  As the Mountain Madness climbers moved away from Camp IV, they could see an undulating chain of lights, the headlamps of Rob Hall’s climbers, who had left camp thirty minutes ahead of them. Hall was taking fifteen climbers onto the mountain: himself, two other guides, eight clients, and four Sherpas, including Ang Dorje, his climbing sirdar, with whom Boukreev had worked in putting down fixed ropes.

  Trailing Rob Hall’s expedition did not make Gammelgaard happy. “It was a really good team, but they were old and they were slow. They were the strongest you can be when you’re forty-five or fifty, but it does mean you’re very, very slow.” Another Mountain Madness climber said, “In my mind, starting behind Rob Hall, then comingling with his group on the fixed ropes, probably cost our teams a couple of hours on the ascent.”

  Within two to three hours after leaving the South Col, the Mountain Madness climbers began to overtake Rob Hall’s climbers, and by 4:00 A.M. they were thoroughly comingled—Fischer’s team with Hall’s, Hall’s with Fischer’s, and both of them with three members of the Taiwanese National Expedition: Makalu Gau, the expedition leader, and two Sherpas. The Taiwanese, to the surprise of both Hall and Fischer, had decided to tag in behind the two teams in their bid for the summit, most likely for the purpose of slipstreaming, climbing in the wake of stronger climbers, who would break trail and fix ropes.

  For a couple of hours Boukreev climbed with Adams and then began to drop back after they had passed several other climbers, some from Rob Hall’s expedition and others from their own. Adams recalled that as they left Camp IV, he had told Boukreev that he felt lethargic, without much energy, but as they climbed, Adams found his stride. His acclimatization efforts and his use of oxygen were fueling what he considered “a great day.”

  Alternating the lead of the snake dance in the hours of breaking dawn were three climbers from Rob Hall’s expedition, Ang Dorje Sherpa, Mike Groom, one of Hall’s guides, and Jon Krakauer, the journalist-climber-client who had signed on with Hall in February after Outside decided not to buy his slot from Mountain Madness. At several places along the climbing route, according to Krakauer, the three climbers had come to a dead stop, not because of any difficulties or problems, but because Hall had instructed his climbers “for the first half of the summit day” not to put any more than one hundred meters between themselves “until” they reached the Balcony, a cleft at the base of the Southeast Ridge at about 8,500 meters. Krakauer, accustomed to independence of action as a climber, has said that he was frustrated at having his decisions tied to the lowest common denominators of the climb, but he felt his position as a client had “forced” him to give up his personal commitment to self-reliance and independent decision-making, to become a tin soldier.

  The differences between Hall’s and Fischer’s philosophies of guiding were emblematic of an ongoing debate between practitioners in the adventure travel industry. The camps of belief can be roughly divided between the “situationalists” and the “legalists.” The situationalists argue that in leading a risky adventure no system of rules can adequately cover every situation that might arise, and they argue that rules on some occasions should be subordinated to unique demands that present themselves. The legalist, believing that rules can substantially reduce the possibility of bad decisions being made, ask that personal freedom take a backseat.

  Critics of the legalist philosophy argue that an omniscient, rule-based position that minimizes independent action is being promulgated largely out of fear of bad publicity or lawsuits that might result from a lack of demonstrable “responsibility.” These critics find it confoundingly odd that an industry that promotes the values of personal freedom and initiative would expound a philosophy that minimizes the pursuit of these very values.

  According to Krakauer, at 5:30 A.M. he and Ang Dorje, after a stop-and-go progress that had cost them more than an hour, reached the Balcony at 8,500 meters, but stopped there and sat down on their backpacks, not advancing any higher.

  At about 8,400 meters I began to encounter deep snow, but my progress was not as slow as it might have been because members of Rob Hall’s expedition had broken trail ahead of me. I arrived at the Balcony somewhere around 6:00 A.M. just as the sky was breaking into light with fantastic, beautiful colors. Looking at the sky and to the summit of Lhotse at exactly our altitude, I judged we had no immediate weather problems to worry about.

  At the Balcony the climbers from the three ascending expeditions began to bunch. At this natural resting place about the size of a franchise-motel room, climbers used the panting pause to switch from their first oxygen canister to their second, to drink some liquids to rehydrate, and, if they had the energy and coordination, to take some photographs. Adams said that at that altitude he and the other climbers were moving from a place “where you could hardly think to where you couldn’t think at all.” They were parked in “the Death Zone,” that stretch of vertical real estate between Camp IV and the summit of Everest where prolonged exposures to the cold and oxygen deprivation conspire to cut you down. Lingering above Camp IV has all the pleasurable possibilities of picnicking in a minefield.

  The Mountain Madness clients understood that the ropes that needed to be fixed between Camp IV and the summit were to have been fixed by the time they reached the Balcony. Pittman recalled, “I … heard that the lines were all to be fixed by our Sherpa and Rob Hall’s Sherpa in advance, and that they were going to leave at ten o’clock; we were going to leave at midnight.” Klev Schoening agreed, “That was my understanding of what was supposed to transpire.” And, Gammelgaard concurred, “I heard specifically that Scott said that the lines would be fixed in advance so that the members should at no point wait.”

  Most of the members of both the Fischer and Hall expeditions agree about what was supposed to have happened. They were told that Ang Dorje, Hall’s climbing sirdar, and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, Fischer’s climbing sirdar, were supposed to leave Camp IV well ahead of the clients and fix ropes so that as the clients and guides advanced, they would not have to wait. But that’s not what happened. Neither Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa nor Ang Dorje Sherpa nor any other Sherpas had departed early to fix ropes.
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  When he was debriefed after the climb, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa said that a member of a Montenegrin expedition that had made a failed bid on the summit on May 9 had told him, “Already fix rope, you no need anything.” Subsequently, when Jon Krakauer wrote about the climb for publication, he cast suspicion on the explanation, saying that guides from Fischer’s and Hall’s expeditions who should have been told there had been a change in plans were not and that Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa and Ang Dorje Sherpa both left Camp IV with their expedition members carrying three hundred feet of rope in their packs, an action “for which there would have been no reason” if fixed ropes were in place.

  Krakauer’s “evidence” has been troubling to some, who have found it circumstantial. Fischer did not arrive at Camp IV until five-thirty on the evening of May 9, and by several accounts was, at best, extremely tired. In the gale that was blowing, with the security of the camp and climbers on his mind and struggling with his own well-being, it seems entirely within reason that he had gotten a report from Lopsang and felt he had one less thing to worry about. To not consider that scenario—and a similar one for Rob Hall—is to suggest the possibility that both Fischer and Hall made a purposeful decision to hold their Sherpas back or not to inform their guides, when they started the climb, of their Sherpas’ failure to perform. Either action would have seriously compromised their guides and clients; it could have contributed to their deaths. Whatever their philosophical differences and personal styles, that was not the kind of men they were.

  As for the rope that Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa and Ang Dorje Sherpa carried onto the mountain, many experienced high-altitude climbers have wondered, why not? A climbing sirdar would take rope onto the mountain for the same reason you keep an extra pair of shoelaces in your dresser drawer. Things happen. A rising storm can bury ropes. You can find ropes improperly fixed. An alternative route might have to be established. An accident might necessitate additional ropes. Your information might not be 100 percent reliable.