The Climb Read online

  The “Icefall Doctor,” as the lead Sherpa of the effort is known around Base Camp, oversees the extremely dangerous job of putting into place aluminum ladders (in 1996 more than seventy), some of which provide the means for climbers to ascend vertically and the others to span the crevasses. Given the distances that have to be covered over the yawning fissures, sometimes more than three or four ladders are overlapped at their ends and lashed together with climbing rope in order to cover a span. The challenge is to cross the ladders while clipped to fixed ropes, literally rope handrails, that are installed for the season. The “clipping on” is most usually done with a carabiner attached to a short length of rope affixed to a climbing harness. An aluminum alloy oval or D-shaped link (something like a large chain link), a carabiner can be snapped open and closed to allow a climber to attach or remove himself from a run of rope. Less often, and usually in a vertical ascent, climbers might use a jumar (sometimes referred to as a mechanical ascender), a handheld, metallic device with a self-braking mechanism. The jumar is fastened to the fixed rope and the rope feeds through the device as you hold it in your hand and push it ahead of you. If you pull the jumar toward your body (or fall backward), a cam grips the rope and holds you in position. So, in a pushpull rhythm called jugging, you advance along the ropes.

  Moving through the course you hear creaks, splinters, and moans, because the landscape, just as it is at Base Camp, is always on the move. Your prayer is that none of the sounds is announcing a catastrophic shift, one that could cause a crevasse to suddenly gape under a spanning ladder or to topple a crystalline bank building onto the route.

  Fischer had told his clients that to qualify to climb higher on the mountain they had to be able to clear the Icefall, bottom to top, in under four hours. The stakes were high, and Klev Schoening said, “The hors d’oeuvres are over, and we’re into the meat and potatoes big time!”

  The instructions to the Mountain Madness clients on how to navigate the Icefall, one client remembers, were brief and succinct. “But as far as ‘Watch out for this!’ or ‘Watch out for that!’ it was more like ‘Watch out for yourself!,’ and that was it.”

  For most of the climbers the most unsettling moments were not the hand-over-hand moves up the vertical ladders, but the crossings of the crevasses on the ladders that had been lashed together. Advancing, stepping on one rung, then onto another, their crampons clunking and occasionally snagging, the climbers often found themselves bouncing over a maw of ice that, in a misstep, if they were not properly clipped on, could swallow them down. If they could be found and reached after a fall, they could imagine a rag-doll extraction, a slack, cold body being raised in its climbing harness.

  According to Martin Adams, “Some people would walk across the ladders; some people would crawl. And, quite frankly, Sandy and Lene probably crossed the ladders as well if not better than anybody else… . They were very well-balanced, and they weren’t intimidated.” Charlotte Fox, according to one of Pittman’s Internet dispatches, found that “butt scooching”—pulling herself across on her butt—was sometimes considerably less terrifying than teetering on her crampons and peering down into an ice vault with the capacity of a municipal parking garage. On May 10, Fox would turn thirty-nine, and she was keen on seeing that day.

  All of the climbers made it through in less than the four hours Scott had required, and I was generally pleased, but I was surprised by the number of clients who did not have the self-reliance to move through it without being almost constantly monitored by a guide. Some of them, I was afraid, had the idea that a guide should control all the situations they might encounter. I would just wonder, “What is going to happen when there is nobody to hold their hands?”

  Boukreev had begun to consider the Mountain Madness Everest equation. They were all factors: the guides, the clients, and the Sherpas. If they went up healthy and properly acclimatized and they made good decisions and their efforts were added and multiplied correctly and the weather gave them grace, he knew everyone could come back alive. But to what extent could he rely upon the clients’ abilities to look after themselves, to take appropriate action in critical situations when the guides weren’t looking over their shoulders?

  What Boukreev brought to the calculations were his training and experience at high altitude, the attributes Henry Todd had hired him for the year before. “When I used him in ‘95, it was perfect. He was absolutely super. He did exactly what he was supposed to do. I knew who he was; I knew what he was capable of… . If anything went wrong, I wanted a rope bullet up that hill—a rope gun.” In Todd’s mind, Boukreev’s value was in his power and the margin of safety he could bring to a climb. If clients got into trouble, he could “get them, bring them down.” In Todd’s opinion Boukreev was not a hand-holder. To hire him with that in mind, Todd thought, would be a gross misappropriation of his talents. “It’s not what he’s designed for. It’s like using a racing car for taking children to school.”

  Our return through the Icefall was uneventful, and everyone returned to Base Camp with a little more assurance, pleased with their success. As had been planned, the clients looked forward to two days of rest while the Sherpas erected tents at Camp I and supplied it in preparation for our next excursion, when clients would overnight there for the first time.

  During this rest period, Boukreev began to openly question the readiness of some of the clients who had been signed on. Boukreev, while generally satisfied with client performance, had some concerns about Dale Kruse and Pete Schoening and their capacities for the climb ahead, but Fischer, Boukreev remembered, reassured him, “Pete will listen to me. He’s got the experience; he doesn’t get ambition and reality mixed up.” And, about Kruse: “Dale is an old friend; it’ll be easy for me to turn him around. For him it’s not that big a deal. He’ll have had some good food, drink a little beer in Base Camp. No big deal.”

  Privately, to a member of his support team, Fischer was expressing both concern for Kruse and a frustration. Kruse on the trek in and in the early days at Base Camp had been distancing himself from the group, being somewhat “antisocial” and going to “his own beat.” Fischer knew Kruse was struggling, but “early on it was bugging Scott. And Scott was just saying, ‘He’s just going to have to deal with it himself.’ ” Fischer thought that Kruse needed to power through the problem. As one observer saw it, “I think Dale was suffering the whole time… . As a team player, in his emotional state, for sure he was the weakest link, and not in an offensive way. He just was very, very, very quiet, and I think he was being screwed up by the altitude… . I think he was hypoxic from probably sixteen, seventeen thousand, but he was so quiet. It was really hard to get a read on him.”

  As the clients were making their adjustments to altitude, so were they having to adjust to each other. “Look, many of us, before we got to Kathmandu, didn’t know each other that well,” one of the clients said. “Think of it as a blind date. All you initially have in common at the bottom is the reason you’re there, the top of the mountain. So, there’s this feeling-out period, getting to know one another. At altitude you want to know who you’re climbing with. If things get strange, you can’t call a cab and go home… . Surprisingly, given the randomness of our jumble, we were, with few exceptions, a relatively homogeneous group.”

  By several accounts, Tim Madsen was quiet, something of a loner, “as quiet as they come,” a member of the Mountain Madness team described him. “He was just as quiet as Dale … like a closed book, totally.” Although Madsen and Kruse were “odd fits,” they got on well with everybody. In fact, as one Mountain Madness staffer recalled, everybody except Sandy Pittman and Lene Gammelgaard seemed to get along “pretty darned well.”

  “What I noticed,” said one of the Base Camp residents, “was that after a while [there] was a kind of competition going on between Sandy and Lene… . Lene looked at Sandy as a big show-off… . Sandy is this multimillionairess throwing around Ivana Trump’s name and Tom Brokaw’s … dropping names and what
she’s written and what she’s doing and how powerful she is… . Lene, on the other hand, was [talking about] a life of detachment and how you don’t need anybody… . I think that their drive came less from the innate love of climbing, but more from trying to establish … identity… . Neal just about came unglued with both of them … not uptight, but like he was really going to have to just grit his teeth to make it through these two female personalities… . Neal started getting really disgruntled.”

  Compounding Beidleman’s difficulties with Pittman, according to the same source, were the problems she was having with her communications gear. “She did not know her equipment… . I bet he [Beidleman] put well over twenty-five hours into her equipment, and I said, ‘Neal, before you put any more time in, call NBC, man, and get your hourly rate. This is NBC for Christ sakes!’ They didn’t send up a technician to help her out. ‘Bill them for it,’ I told him. He said, ‘No, no …’ I thought, ‘God, if you’re that dumb …!’ ”

  Through all this, said one of Fischer’s confidants, “Scott was trying to keep his cool. He just didn’t want to get sucked into their [Pittman’s and Gammelgaard’s] shenanigans at all.” Privately, Fischer admitted that perhaps he’d made a mistake by bringing Pittman. “She was a big piece of work… . If she doesn’t make it to the top, she’ll blame it on him… . If she gets to the top, she won’t mention him… . We both talked about this pretty extensively.”

  My relationship with the team members was formed as the expedition progressed and it was different with each person. Before this expedition I had become pretty well acquainted with Neal Beidleman and Martin Adams through our Makalu expedition in the spring of 1994. Lene Gammelgaard looked at me with a great deal of respect. She had heard about me from Michael Joergensen, the first Danish mountain climber to reach the summit of Everest in the spring of last year when he took part in Henry Todd’s expedition. Lene, like me, wasn’t from the USA, and this made her distinctly different from the other expedition members. Moreover, she was not especially wealthy and was able to pay for only a part of the cost of this expedition herself. These things together, I think, isolated her a little from the other members of the expedition. My relationship with Charlotte Fox and Tim Madsen more or less took shape. We were very close in spirit because of our devotion to the mountains. The other expedition members acted cautiously toward me. Pete Schoening and his nephew Klev stuck together, isolated from the others. For them there wasn’t much difference between a Russian mountain climber hired for the expedition and the Sherpa high-altitude porters. Perhaps some of their reactions could possibly be explained by the not so distant memory of the Cold War. On top of that, my English left much to be desired and I couldn’t always freely answer their questions and vice versa. I couldn’t take the initiative and advise something practical like a guide is supposed to and to explain the importance of my advice.

  On Saturday, April 13, the Mountain Madness climbers went again into the Khumbu Icefall and, without incident, climbed through it and into the Western Cwm (pronounced coom), a panorama that no matter where the climbers stood their wide-angle camera lenses couldn’t contain the scene.

  The Western Cwm is a glacial hollow, an undulating sweep of snow and ice about four kilometers long that tilts gradually upward and is enclosed on three sides by the peaks and connecting ridges of Mount Everest, Lhotse, and Nuptse, the major peaks of the Mount Everest Massif. It offers from its vantage a view that is obstructed in Base Camp: the looming, magnificent, and daunting summit of Mount Everest.

  Gammelgaard, whose “can-do” personality and stoic style some found overpromoted, was overtaken by the beauty in front of her. “I consider myself being pretty tough … so not all that many things touch me … that deeply.” Encountering the sweeping, slowly rising plateau of the Western Cwm and the mountain she’d come to climb, Gammelgaard stood apart from the other climbers and silently wept.

  A half hour from the terminus of the Icefall, on the snow and ice of the Western Cwm, we had sited our Camp I in a place a little higher than we would normally have placed our tents because many expeditions had already clustered their camps in the location we would have preferred. But, the location we chose we felt was safe, placed in a position so that it would not be seriously threatened by avalanches.

  Mindful of their need to rehydrate and to warm themselves as soon as they arrived at Camp I, the Mountain Madness climbers began to melt snow on their high-altitude stoves suspended over their sleeping bags from the struts of their tents. Pittman, who reported on her experience of Camp I to the NBC Internet site, said that being at that altitude addled her mind to the point that watching snow melt became an entertaining experience, something like “watching TV.” She also thanked Gammelgaard, who had shared a tent with her, dug into her rucksack, and for dinner pulled out one tasty morsel after another, courtesy of one of her Danish sponsors. While in the neighboring tents the climbers ate just-add-hot-water specialties, the two shamelessly dug into dried fruits and nuts and spooned down something Pittman referred to as an “exotic Middle Eastern nomadic dish.” Climbing to high altitude can inhibit appetite, but the problem wasn’t registered in Pittman’s Internet dispatch. Whatever the personal differences between Gammelgaard and Pittman, they were both struggling to meet the same objective. Friends or not, they were in it together up to their glacier glasses and cooperating in their effort.

  The next morning Boukreev and some of the other expedition members advanced up the Western Cwm to where Camp II (6,500 m) would be sited, while the others descended to Base Camp straight away, but by the time dinner went down on the table in the Base Camp mess tent, everyone had returned safely.

  On April 15 and 16, the climbers curbed their crampons and luxuriated in the mandatory rest. Breakfast spreads of pancakes and yak-cheese omelettes accompanied by Starbucks coffee, hot showers, sunbathing, reading a favorite book, watching a movie on a Sony Watchman—these were the challenges of the Mountain Madness acclimatization routine. On April 17, they were back at it.

  All the team members except Sandy and Tim left early for our third excursion through the Khumbu Icefall. Scott and I felt the clients were capable of making their passage without close supervision. Sandy lingered behind to do some work in her communications tent. Tim, who was suffering acute symptoms of AMS, had the day before descended to Pheriche with our team doctor, Ingrid, who was also experiencing problems… . I wasn’t too surprised by their difficulties because neither of them had been to high altitude before and the challenge was new to their bodies.

  Despite Bromet’s concern about how Pittman would eventually handle Fischer in the media, he continued to participate in her NBC World Wide Web site, and on the morning of their third excursion he spent more than an hour in her communications tent and participated in an on-line Internet chat with Pittman and Sir Edmund Hillary, who was then in Kathmandu. Hillary, despite his well-known criticism of commercial expeditions to Mount Everest and his expressed feeling that they denigrated the mountain, had agreed to the conversation and offered some sage advice: “For any expedition you must treat the mountain with considerable respect. If you’re an athlete and are affected by the altitude, go lower in altitude and recover. In the ultimate, success on Everest demands a certain degree of physical fitness.”

  While Pittman was signing off and tending to other communications chores, Fischer and Boukreev left Base Camp to play “sweep,” to push on and assist any stragglers.

  Boukreev has estimated that more than one hundred climbers went through the Icefall that day. Sherpas from various expeditions with packs and haul bags full of gear and supplies were working their way up the mountain to establish higher camps. Like Fischer’s clients, climbers from other expeditions were also on the move, making their acclimatization excursions.

  Scott and I, as we were on our way to Camp I, took notice of the climbers from some of the other commercial expeditions. We agreed that our climbers in comparison looked far better, although I noted to myself that t
he overall level of ability and preparedness of all the commercial clients, including ours, seemed lower than those who had climbed from the Tibetan side the year before.

  If we got lucky, I thought, we would make it. Scott, Neal, and I would have to plan our ascent so that all of the team members who qualified for the summit would find themselves at Camp IV at just the right time for an attempt. Even then, if we got it right, we would still be dependent upon the weather. Against this we had no insurance. No one of us could protect against the dangers of high winds or other dramatic shifts in the weather. Perhaps, if we were unlucky in our timing, we could descend and reconsider. If there was the desire, the time, and the strength, maybe we could wait for a more favorable situation and try again. But then, what would be the condition of our clients and our oxygen supply? I had my doubts that many of the clients would be strong enough to stay at high altitude until the weather became more favorable, and I didn’t know if, when the time came, we would have enough oxygen to make a second attempt. Ultimately, I knew, the mountain would make many of the decisions for us.

  If there was for Boukreev a transitional day on the expedition, this was probably it. As Fischer fell behind in the line of travel to check on Pittman, who was still climbing behind them, Boukreev found himself alone, thinking about the decision he’d made to sign on to the Mountain Madness expedition. He’d never seen anything quite like this: the electronic fussiness, the publicity-mongering, the pampering and politics.

  Reflecting on my past experience and the variability of weather above 8,000 meters, I mused on the possibilities ahead. I thought, what on earth would happen if we found ourselves in a critical situation at high altitude? Would my strength and that of Scott, Neal, and the Sherpas be enough to handle the situations that might develop?