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  At 8,600 meters a series of rock steps better suited for mythical, claw-footed creatures than mortals in cumbersome down climbing suits needed to be negotiated, and fixed ropes were required from that point to the South Summit at 8,748 meters. Beidleman, after more than an hour of waiting, spoke with Boukreev and said he intended to go ahead of the numbing climbers and see to the fixing of ropes ahead.

  I agreed with Neal and said I thought it was a reasonable decision, and I offered him the canister of oxygen I was carrying. I was feeling well acclimatized and strong, and I knew I would be okay to go ahead. My original intention had been to leave the oxygen and retrieve it on my descent, but when I considered we were running a little late and Neal was going to be doing hard work, I offered it to him and he accepted it.

  With Klev Schoening tailing behind, Beidleman followed Lopsang and Ang Dorje over a bulge and broke through some fresh snow to a ledge, where he found Lopsang bent over, vomiting. Realizing that Lopsang was in no position to take on the labor of fixing ropes, Beidleman took some rope from Lopsang’s pack and with Ang Dorje’s assistance began to thread the rope toward the South Summit. In some places they found old ropes in place that could be trusted; in others they had to thread with new ropes, which was arduous work. As Beidleman and Ang Dorje advanced, Boukreev began to motivate clients, to get them onto their feet.

  I started to hurry them up, because we had already been on the Balcony more than an hour and we were falling behind schedule. On the fixed ropes I stopped to let a few clients pass me, and I fell back in the hope that I might see Scott, but I couldn’t see him. I had wanted to talk with him about our clients, because since leaving Camp IV we had had no discussions and I was unsure about many details. About the general plan, yes, I understood, but things were changing. Should I now be going up or falling back? Should I be moving aggressively toward the summit or rendering help?

  Finally, after not seeing him after waiting, I decided to continue my ascent, thinking that because he had slept on oxygen the night before and was climbing on oxygen, he would soon catch up to me and we could have our talk. Moving up I could see that the clients were in good condition, but not going too cheerfully.

  At 9:58 A.M. Beidleman made it to the South Summit, and thirty minutes later, by his recollection, he was followed by Martin Adams. Beidleman remembered thinking they were getting late and said, “I was very antsy.” For an hour and a half to two hours, Adams recalled, he and Beidleman sat at the South Summit alone. “Basically, the problem was that everybody behind us was jammed up on the fixed ropes. Somehow, I think, some of Rob Hall’s slower clients had gotten in front of our group and they couldn’t pass.”

  One of Hall’s clients, Frank Fischbeck, fifty-three, a Hong Kong publisher, had turned back within hours after leaving Camp IV, the first of the ascending clients on May 10 to return. As of 10:30 A.M., Hall’s seven other clients were staggered between the Balcony and just below the South Summit, jumbled among all of Fischer’s clients—except Martin Adams—and the Taiwanese climbers. If each climber had been using oxygen at the flow rate suggested by Henry Todd, they were on their second canister and had one to two hours of oxygen left. Their third and last canister (six more hours of oxygen at the recommended flow rate) had yet to arrive on the South Summit. The Sherpas carrying the extra oxygen, like the clients, were also strung between the South Summit and the Balcony. It was, said one of Fischer’s clients, “a jungle fuck.”

  Three of Hall’s clients, John Taske, fifty-six, Lou Kasischke, and Stuart Hutchison, thirty-four, were near the back of the logjam, moving up the ropes Beidleman and Ang Dorje had fixed to the South Summit and climbing behind the Taiwanese, who were moving slowly and impeding their progress. Climbing separately, each was in his own hypoxic consideration of the scene developing in front of them. Each of them had begun to consider turning back.

  Lou Kasischke remembered, “I moved past John, and then Stu, who had been right ahead of me, was coming back, and Stu and I had a conversation. The only thing I can remember about my conversation with Stu was that he was convinced of two things. One was that Rob was going to be turning everybody around because it was too late. He said he didn’t see any way that, given the logjam … that we were going to be able to make it back by … one o’clock. We had a one o’clock turnaround time. And Stu was convinced of that. And what I remember about my conversation with Stu was, well, I’m not ready yet… . I remember saying that and moving on, but I didn’t get very far.

  “It was about eleven-thirty and I was near the back of the logjam. I’ve been at this for a long time, and I’m pretty good at managing fatigue and hardship. I’ve just learned how to do it—I’m a long-distance runner. I really think of myself as an endurance athlete. And I had been pretty much tuning everything out of my existence and just kind of bumping along. Now that isn’t necessarily a compliment, because that’s a dangerous thing to do… . I’m just moving along, one step at a time. And as I was then backed up in the logjam—I remember this was just below the South Summit—I dropped down to my knees and just clipped into the rope, just resting. I was very, very dehydrated, and I took off one of my gloves to scoop up some snow, which isn’t necessarily the smart thing, but it was the only thing that I had to work with. My water was a block of ice in my backpack. I realized that all of my fingers were frostbitten. And I took off the other glove—same thing. But actually that was really no surprise to me, I already knew that. But I guess I just didn’t care because summiting Everest was so important to me, that I was just going to go no matter what. But as I was waiting, I started—kind of a wake-up call in a sense, and I started to now think about what was really happening to me. And as I was kneeling there, I now started to look inside of myself and really to see my state of fatigue. Also, you know, these breathtaking views that we were able to see at the Balcony, as we made the turn—the most spectacular sights I’ve ever seen—really, now you couldn’t see them anymore. You looked back, down the mountain, and there was very poor visibility. Now I’m not saying there was horrendous weather—it was not horrendous weather. But it was changing weather. And when I asked Lhakpa, who was one of our Sherpas—I asked him how much longer—I knew I was pretty close—he told me two hours. I asked him where he thought we were, and he said eighty-seven hundred meters. I wasn’t even capable—my brain wasn’t capable of—I usually think in terms of feet—and I wasn’t even capable at that point of translating that into feet, which was kind of how my brain was functioning. But when he told me two hours, I think my heart just sunk to my feet. I think at that moment it was sort of like lightning striking me. I knew that I had a problem. And it was never a question as to whether I could go another two hours, that was never the question. And I could get to the top. But I started to have serious questions about my ability to get down. And I thought I was either going to die coming down or—I’d get down somehow. I mean, I’ve been in tough spots before and I’ve always kind of toughed it out, but … And there were two voices talking to me. I mean, I still remember this, probably some moments that I will never forget. People have always warned me about the inability to reason at that high altitude, but I’ll never forget these moments because I had these two voices struggling away, that one voice just telling me to go for it, ‘Do it, you can do it, what’s the big deal, another two hours.’ But that other voice was saying, ‘Lou, you’re going to die coming down, or even if you can tough it out, you’re going to lose these fingers.’ To this day, I’m just amazed that I actually turned around. I told Lhakpa, I said, ‘Lhakpa, you go and tell Rob I’ve decided to go back.’ But that took place over about four or five minutes.

  “I suspect Stu’s comments were also influential, on a lower level. But I remember when I made my decision, it was based on simply me and my inability at that point to get there and back alive. Or at least in one piece.

  “I would have to sum it up just by saying that I didn’t think that I could get there and back alive or, best case, I’d lose some fingers and t
oes. And the other thing, too, is, I’m a little different from, I think, a number of the other people in that I wasn’t really subject to a lot of the same pressures. I mean, I wanted to go to the summit of Everest. I mean, God, I wouldn’t have been there beating my brains out if I didn’t. But … I live in Detroit. I’d come back to Detroit and say, ‘I just climbed Mount Everest.’ People round here would look at me and say, ‘Yeah, and did you hear about the Detroit Redwings?’ … I mean, nobody here cares, or for that matter even knows where Mount Everest is. ‘Oh, yeah, that’s that highest in the world, isn’t it?’ In fact, a number of people said, ‘I thought you already climbed that.’ So to me, in my perspective of things, it wasn’t life-and-death to me, it wasn’t the most important thing in the world, and I wasn’t going to have newspapers writing stories about me. And media, fame and fortune, world records, and all that kind of stuff, which were kind of the stakes for … some of the others in our expedition. It meant a lot to me, I don’t want to suggest that it didn’t. But it just didn’t—my ambition to get there just wasn’t suffocating every other thought that I had in my mind.”

  At about 11:40, Lou Kasischke made his move and headed down, and Stuart Hutchison and John Taske also turned back. For them, Everest was over. Somewhere around noon, Kasischke has remembered, he ran into Scott Fischer.

  “We had a conversation, and I said to Scott, ‘Scott, I think it’s smart for me to go back.’ And one of the ironic things of my experience is that I really didn’t think too much of this at the time, but Scott looked right at me and said, ‘Good decision, Lou.’

  “He was the same old Scott—I mean, twinkle in his eye, snow in his hair—that look of his, that all-American look, that blond hair with the snow in it… . We just kind of hung out for maybe thirty seconds, and then he moved one way and I moved another.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THE LIST HUNDRED

  At the South Summit, one hundred meters below the peak of Everest, Martin Adams encountered a not very happy Beidleman. “I don’t know why, but he wasn’t saying much, seemed to be in a bad mood. I sat down, removed my pack, and got out some water because I was thirsty, and I offered some to Neal, who took it because his was frozen solid.”

  For a while, maybe twenty minutes, Adams recollected, they just sat there, saying little, and then Beidleman got up and descended to a natural alcove just below the South Summit where he was a little better protected from the wind. Adams followed, and as they resettled, according to Adams, Beidleman asked him, “How much oxygen do you have?” Adams took off his pack, because his pressure gauge, like all the climbers’, was affixed to the top of his canister. “ ‘I read five pounds on my gauge,’ and then I asked him, ‘How much have you got?’ and he said, ‘Me, too, five pounds, but I got a full bottìe from Toli, too.’ ”

  Adams’s impatience with the progress of the climb began to chafe against his natural inclination to take action. He was not the type to sit around. Even in his mildly hypoxic state he understood clearly that he was sucking the last of his oxygen from his second canister.

  “So, I knew it would have been pushing my luck, but I said to Neal, ‘Let’s go! Give me the full bottle of oxygen and let’s go.’ But, he said, ‘No, I’m not giving you this bottle.’ So, I said, ‘Okay, I’ve got five pounds, give me your five and let’s get out of here.’ And he agreed to that, but then we never went anywhere.”

  Adams developed a healthy preoccupation. He kept looking over his shoulder, looking for any one of the Mountain Madness Sherpas who were carrying the extra canisters of oxygen, and he remembers thinking about little else except his consideration of the question “When are things going to start going right?” It would be a while.

  Just before I reached the South Summit, I let Tim Madsen come around me on the fixed ropes, and I was encouraged to see him moving briskly under the power of oxygen. When I reached the South Summit, I saw there Martin, Neal, Ang Dorje, Tim, and a few others, but nobody was moving. It seemed they had no desire to move ahead. It was bright and sunny, and in our down suits, even though the wind was beginning to pick up, everyone was becoming warm. Our strength, because we had been climbing for so long, had begun to diminish, and no one seemed to be in a hurry.

  More than a hour after he had reached the South Summit, Adams recognized the first of the Mountain Madness Sherpas to arrive and went to him to get his third and last bottle. Discarding his almost empty canister and the one Beidleman had given him, Adams screwed his hose onto the full one and began to breath a little more easily. He had at least six more hours of O’s, more than enough, he thought, to summit and get back to Camp IV. Adams, a normally sagacious individual, made an assumption, fashioned it literally out of thin air. He was wrong.

  As I was resting, I was looking around, and I noticed that Ang Dorje looked tired. The other Sherpas, too, didn’t seem ready to go ahead, although I had understood from before the summit push that the Sherpas would be fixing the ropes on the Hillary Step.

  Also, there on the South Summit, I began to wonder again where Scott was. Here, I thought, maybe it would be necessary to turn some clients around, but there was no Scott to do it. I felt I did not have the right to make this decision. The clients had paid big money and had given Scott that authority, not me.

  Adams, who probably knew Boukreev better than any other client, has said that probably Boukreev couldn’t have turned climbers around, but speculates that Beidleman “might” have been able to do so. “I mean, it would have been a tough call, but I think if he’d exercised the leadership, they would have turned around… . But, hey, it’s conceivable that some of them might not have.”

  And, probably, some wouldn’t have. Gammelgaard has said that on summit day her state-of-mind would likely have overruled an attempt to turn her back. “You know, it’s a risky game when you’re out there. When you push for the summit, you know you risk dying. It’s a fucking dangerous bit of climbing … but you’re a risk taker; you’re an adventurer; you’re fucked-up somewhat or otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.” But, Gammelgaard added, if there had been rules laid down in advance, she would have followed them. “Okay, we’re an expedition. If we’d agreed to rules, no matter what I would have played by those rules. No matter what.” However, Gammelgaard has said, “I never heard anything whatsoever about a turnaround time on summit day. The only time I heard that we had a turnaround point was the first day going through the Icefall, and everybody played by that rule.”

  In a feature story about Fischer that appeared in the Seattle Weekly six weeks before summit day, the journalist Bruce Barcott commented upon Fischer’s philosophy about turnaround times. “Every climber has a set of personal guidelines he or she follows, little Stay Alive Rules. One of Fischer’s is the Two O’Clock Rule. If you aren’t on top by two, it’s time to turn around. Darkness is not your friend.”

  Fischer never set a definite turnaround time for his climbers on summit day. He never said, “If you’re not at X by whatever o’clock, you should turn around.” Instead, he had worked out with Beidleman and Boukreev a simple strategy, an adaptation of the tactic he’d been using throughout the expedition. His climbing sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, and his guides, Boukreev and Beidleman, would alternatingly lead; he would bring up the rear, and as he overtook stragglers, he would turn them around. If problems arose, he would establish radio contact with Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa, who, it was assumed, would always be at or near the front of the pack. Neither Beidleman nor Boukreev was issued a radio.

  Hall had hedged around setting a specific turnaround time. Some of his climbers understood it was one o’clock; some understood it was two; others thought it could be either one or two and that the call would be made on the mountain.

  After waiting almost an hour on the South Summit I began to understand that nobody was going to take any action, so I spoke with Neal, and we decided that we would work together to fix the ropes to the summit. Back on the ridge, I took out a few lengths of old rope from the snow, but th
en, to speed up the ascent, decided to move on to the Hillary Step and leave that section of the route to guides and Sherpas behind me.

  The Hillary Step is an upward thrust of the Southeast Ridge, a rocky tower about ten meters high, prominent enough that with a telephoto lens some of the Mountain Madness climbers had been able to survey it from Thyangboche. At its base, after twelve hours of climbing, it presents climbers with a formidable physical and psychological challenge. Exhausted, sucking in three or four breaths for every step you take, its in-your-face presence is intimidating and disheartening. It is a common turnaround point for climbers.

  I was familiar with this obstacle because in 1991 I had climbed Everest by this same route and had gone up the Hillary Step solo without fixed ropes, but good mountaineering skills are necessary on this pitch, and to secure our clients it was necessary to do this job. Neal stood below and played out the rope that he had gotten from one of the Sherpas, and, while Neal belayed me, I tied on to existing anchors that had been placed by earlier expeditions.

  Shortly after I reached the top of the Hillary Step and tied on, Neal came up, and he was followed by one of Rob Hall’s guides, Andy Harris, and one of Hall’s stronger clients, Jon Krakauer.

  Below the Hillary step, because he wanted to push the route forward, Boukreev had left a stretch of the route for those coming behind to fix for the clients, but Harris had advanced with Krakauer and not fixed any additional rope, leaving what Martin Adams would later call “the most exposed part of the climb where the climbers had to perform a pretty precarious solo traverse where a slip could be fatal.”