INTO THIN AIR

by Jon Krakauer

For Linda;

and in memory of Andy Harris, Doug Hansen, Rob Hall, Yasuko Namba, Scott Fischer, Ngawang

Topche Sherpa, Chen Yu-Nan, Bruce Herrod, and Lopsang jangbu Sherpa

Introduction

In March 1996,

Outside

magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a

guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-

known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain,

but the summit came at a terrible cost.

Among my five teammates who reached the top, four, including Hall, perished in a rogue

storm that blew in without warning while we were still high on the peak. By the time I'd

descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives

would be lost before the month was out.

The expedition left me badly shaken, and the article was difficult to write. Nevertheless,

five weeks after I returned from Nepal I delivered a manuscript to

Outside

, and it was published

in the September issue of the magazine. Upon its completion I attempted to put Everest out of

my mind and get on with my life, but that turned out to be impossible.

Through a fog of messy emotions, I continued trying to make sense of what had happened

up there, and I obsessively mulled over the circumstances of my companions' deaths.

The

Outside

piece was as accurate as I could make it under the circumstances, but my

deadline had been unforgiving, the sequence of events had been frustratingly complex, and the

memories of the survivors had been badly distorted by exhaustion, oxygen depletion, and shock.

At one point during my research I asked three other people to recount an incident all four of us

had witnessed high on the mountain, and none of us could agree on such crucial facts as the time,

what had been said, or even who had been present. Within days after the

Outside

article went

to press, I discovered that a few of the details I'd reported were in error. Most were minor

inaccuracies of the sort that inevitably creep into works of deadline journalism, but one of my

blunders was in no sense minor, and it had a devastating impact on the friends and family of one

of the victims.

Only slightly less disconcerting than the article's factual errors was the material that

necessarily had to be omitted for lack of space. Mark Bryant, the editor of

Outside

, and Larry

Burke, the publisher, had given me an extraordinary amount of room to tell the story: they ran

the piece at 17,000 words-four or five times as long as a typical magazine feature. Even so, I felt

that it was much too abbreviated to do justice to the tragedy. The Everest climb had rocked my

LIFE to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete

detail, unconstrained by a limited number of column inches. This book is the fruit of that

compulsion.

The unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic. To

avoid relying on my own perceptions, I interviewed most of the protagonists at great length and

on multiple occasions. When possible I also corroborated details with radio logs maintained by

people at Base Camp, where clear thought wasn't in such short supply. Readers familiar with the

Outside

article may notice discrepancies between certain details (primarily matters of time)

reported in the magazine and those in the book; the revisions reflect new information that has

come to light since publication of the magazine piece.

Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I

did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the

expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I

ignored it - mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought

that writing the book might purge Everest from my life.

It hasn't, of course. Moreover, I agree that readers are often poorly served when an author

writes as an act of catharsis, as I have done here. But I hoped something would be gained by

spilling my soul in the calamity's immediate aftermath, in the roil and torment of the moment. I

wanted my account to have a raw, ruthless sort of honesty that seemed in danger of leaching

away with the passage of time and the dissipation of anguish.

Some of the same people who warned me against writing hastily had also cautioned me

against going to Everest in the first place. There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but

attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act-a triumph of desire over sensibility.

Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned

argument.

The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a

party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for

a very long time.

Jon Krakauer Seattle November 1996

Chapter One

It would seem almost as though there were a cordon drawn round the upper part of these

great peaks beyond which no man may go. The truth of course lies in the fact that, at altitudes of

25,000 feet and beyond, the effects of low atmospheric Pressure upon the human body are so

severe that really difficult mountaineering is impossible and the consequences even of a mild

storm may be deadly, that nothing but the most perfect conditions of weather and snow offers

the slightest chance of success, and that on the last lap of the climb no party is in a position to

choose its day....

No, it is not remarkable that Everest did not yield to the first few attempts; indeed, it would

have been very surprising and not a little sad if it had, for that is not the way of great mountains.

Perhaps we had become a little arrogant with our fine new technique of ice-claw and rubber

slipper, our age of easy mechanical conquest. We had forgotten that the mountain still holds the

master card, that it will grant success only in its own good time. Why else does mountaineering

retain its deep fascination?

Eric Shipton, in 1938

Upon That Mountain

Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice

from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the

vastness of Tibet. I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath

my feet was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of

emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually

standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.

It was early in the afternoon of May 10, 1996. I hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours. The only

food I'd been able to force down over the past three days was a bowl of ramen soup and a

handful of rice peanut M&Ms. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs

that made ordinary breathing an excruciating trial. At 29,028 feet up in the troposphere, so little

oxygen was reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the

circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired. I'd arrived on

the summit a few minutes after Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian climbing guide working for an

American commercial expedition, and just ahead of Andy Harris, a guide on the New Zealand-

based team to which I belonged. Although I was only slightly acquainted with Boukreev, I'd come

to know and like Harris well durpped four quick photos of Harris and the preceding six weeks. I

sna Boukreev striking summit poses, then turned and headed down. My m. All told, I'd spent less

than five minutes on the roof of the world.

looking A moment later, I paused to take another photo, this on the Southeast Ridge, the

route we had ascended. Training my down lens on a pair of climbers approaching the summit, I

noticed something that until that moment had escaped my attention. To the south, where the

sky had been perfectly clear just an hour earlier, a blanket of clouds now hid Pumori Ama

Dablarn, and the other lesser peaks surrounding Everest. Later-after six bodies had been

located, after a search for two others had been abandoned, after surgeons had amputated the

gangrenous right hand of my teammate Beck Weathers-people would ask why, if the weather

had begun to deteriorate, had climbers on the upper mountain not heeded the signs? Why did

veteran Himalayan guides keep moving upward, ushering a gaggle of relatively inexperienced

amateurs--each of whom had paid as much as $65,000 to be taken safely up Everest-into an

apparent death trap? Nobody can speak for the leaders of the two guided groups involved,

because both men are dead. But I can attest that nothing I saw early on the afternoon of May 10

suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down. To my oxygen-depleted mind, the clouds

drifting up the grand valley of ice known as the Western Cum* looked innocuous, wispy,

insubstantial. Gleaming in the brilliant midday sun, they appeared no different from the

harmless puffs of convection condensation that rose from the valley almost every afternoon. As I

began my descent I was extremely anxious, but my concern had little to do with the weather: a

check of the gauge on my oxygen tank had revealed that it was almost empty. I needed to get

down, fast. The uppermost shank of Everest's Southeast Ridge is a slender, heavily corniced fin

of rock and wind-scoured snow that snakes for a quarter mile between the summit and a

subordinate pinnacle known as the South Summit. Negotiating the serrated ridge presents no

great technical hurdles, but the route is dreadfully exposed. After leaving the summit, fifteen

minutes of cautious shuffling over a 7,000-foot abyss brought me to the notorious Hillary Step, a

pronounced notch in the ridge that demands some technical maneuvering. As I clipped into a

fixed rope and prepared to rappel over the lip, I was greeted with an alarming sight. Thirty feet

below, more than a dozen people were queued up at the base of the Step. Three climbers were

already in the process of hauling themselves up the rope that I was preparing to descend.

Exercising my only option, I unclipped from the communal safety line and stepped aside. The

traffic jam was comprised of climbers from three expeditions: the team I belonged to, a group of

paying clients under the leadership of the celebrated New Zealand guide Rob Hall; another

guided party headed by the American Scott Fischer; and a noncommercial Taiwanese team.

Moving at the snail' pace that is the norm above 26,000 feet, the throng labored up the Hillary

Step one by one, while I nervously bided my time. The Western Cum, pronounced koom, was

named by George Leigh Mallory, who first sbaw it during the initial Everest expedition of 1921

from the Lho La, a high pass on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Cum is a Welsh term for

valley or cirque. after I did, soon pulled up Harris, who'd left the summit shortly behind me.

Wanting to conserve whatever oxygen remained in my tank, I asked him to reach inside my

backpack and turn off the valve on my regulator, which he did. For the next ten minutes I felt

surprisingly good. My head cleared. I actually seemed less tired than I had with the gas turned

On. Then, abruptly, I sensed that I was suffocating. My vision dimmed and my head began to

spin. I was on the brink of losing consciousness. Instead of turning my oxygen off, Harris, in his

hypoxically impaired state, had mistakenly cranked the valve open to full flow, draining the tank.

I'd just squandered the last of my gas going nowhere. There was another tank waiting for me at

the South Summit, 250 feet below, but to get there I would have to descend the most exposed

terrain on the entire route without the benefit of supplemental oxygen. And first I had to wait for

the mob to disperse. I removed my now useless mask, planted my ice ax into the mountain's

frozen hide, and I exchanged banal congratulations with the hunkered on the ridge. As "Hurry it

up, hurry it up, climbers filing past, inwardly I was frantic: I silently pleaded. "While you guys are

fucking around here, I'm losing brain cells by the millions! Most of the passing crowd belonged to

Fischer's group, but near the back of the parade two of my teammates eventually appeared, Rob

Hall and Yasuko Namba. Demure and reserved, the forty-seven-year the oldest woman old

Namba was forty minutes away from becoming best to climb Everest and the second Japanese

woman to reach the hig she point on each continent, the so-called Seven Summits. Although

weighed just ninety-one pounds, her sparrowlike proportions disguised a formidable resolve; to

an astounding degree, Yasuko had been propelled up the mountain by the unwavering intensity

of her desire. Later still, Doug Hansen arrived atop the Step. Another member of our expedition,

Doug was a postal worker from a Seattle suburb who'd become my closest friend on the

mountain. "It's in the bag! I yelled over the wind, trying to sound more upbeat than I felt.

Exhausted, Doug mumbled something from behind his oxygen mask that I didn't catch, shook my

hand weakly, then continued plodding upward. At the very end of the line was Scott Fischer,

whom I knew casually from Seattle, where we both lived. Fischer's strength and drive were

legendary-in 1994 he'd climbed Everest without using bottled Oxygen-so I was surprised at how

slowly he was moving and how hammered he looked when he pulled his mask aside to say hello.

"Bruuuuuuce! " he wheezed with forced cheer, employing his trademark frat-boyish greeting.

When I asked how he was doing, Fischer insisted that he was feeling fine: "Just dragging ass a

little today for some reason. No big deal." With the Hillary Step finally clear, I clipped into the

strand of orange rope, swung quickly around Fischer as he slumped over his ice ax, and

rappelled over the edge. It was after three o'clock when I made it down to the South Summit. By

now tendrils of mist were streaming over the 27,923 -foot top of Lhotse and lapping at Everest's

summit pyramid. No longer did the weather look so benign. I grabbed a fresh oxygen cylinder,

jammed it onto my regulator, and hurried down into the gathering cloud. Moments after I

dropped below the South Summit, it began to snow lightly and visibility went to hell. Four

hundred vertical feet above, where the summit was still washed in bright sunlight under an

immaculate cobalt sky, my companions dallied to memorialize their arrival at the apex of the

planet, unfurling flags and snapping photos, using up precious ticks of the Clock. None of them

imagined that a horrible ordeal was drawing nigh. Nobody suspected that by the end of that long

day, every minute would matter. Far from the mountains in winter, I discovered the blurred

photo of Everest in Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels. It was a miserable reproduction in

which the jagged peaks rose white against a grotesquely blackened and scratched sky. Everest

itself, sitting back from the front ones, didn't even appear highest, but it didn't matter It was; the

legend said so. Dreams were the key to the picture, permitting a boy to enter it, to stand at the

crest of the windswept ridge, to climb toward the summit, now no longer far above... This was

one of those uninhibited dreams that come free with growing up. I was sure that mine about

Everest was not mine alone; the highest point on earth, unattainable, foreign to all experience,

was there for many boys and grown men to aspire toward, Thomas F Hornbein Everest: The

West Ridge The actual particulars of the event are unclear, obscured by the accretion of myth.

But the year was 1852, and the setting was the offices of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of

India in the northern hill station of Dehra Dun. According to the most plausible version of what

transpired, a clerk rushed into the chambers of Sir Andrew Waugh, India's surveyor general, and

exclaimed that a Bengali computer named Radhanath Sikhdar, working out of the Survey's

Calcutta bureau, had "discovered the highest mountain in the world." (In Waugh's day a

computer was a job description rather than a machine.)

Designated Peak XV by surveyors in the field who'd first measured the angle of its rise with

a twenty-four-inch theodolite three years earlier, the mountain in question jutted from the spine

of the Himalaya in the forbidden kingdom of Nepal. Until Sikhdar compiled the survey data and

did the math, nobody had suspected that there was anything noteworthy about Peak XV. The six

survey sites from which the summit had been triangulated were in northern India, more than a

hundred miles from the mountain. To the surveyors who shot it, all but the summit nub of Peak

XV several was obscured by various high escarpments in the foreground, of which gave the

illusion of being much greater in stature. But ac g to Sikhdar's meticulous trigonometric

reckoning (which took curvature of the earth, atmospheric reinto account such factors as

fraction, and plumb-line deflection) Peak XV stood 29,002* feet above sea level, the planet's

loftiest point. In 1865, nine years after Sikhdar's computations had been confirmed, Waugh

bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor

as surveyor general. As it happened, Tibetans who lived to the north of the great mountain

already had a more mellifluous name for it, Jornolurignia, which translates to "goddess, mother of

the world," and Nepalis who resided to the south called the peak Sagarmatha, "goddess of the

sky." But Waugh pointedly chose to ignore these native appellations (as well as official policy

encouraging the retention of local or ancient names), and Everest was the name that stuck, Once

Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before

people decided that Everest needed to be climbed. After the American explorer Robert Peary

claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909 and Roald Amundsen led a Norwegian party to

the South Pole in 1911, Everest-the so-called Third Pole-became the most coveted object in the

realm of terrestrial exploration. Getting to the top, proclaimed Gunther O. Dyrenfurth, an

influential alpinist and chronicler of early Himalayan mountaineering, was "a matter of universal

human endeavor, a cause from which there is no withdrawal, whatever losses it may demand."

Those losses, as it turned out, would not be insignificant. Following Sikhdar's discovery in 1852, it

would require the lives of twenty* Modern surveys using lasers and state-of-the-art Doppler

satellite transmissions have revised this measurement upward a mere 26 feet-to the currently

accepted altitude of 29,028 feet, or 8,848 meters. four men, the efforts of fifteen expeditions,

and the passage of 101 years before the summit of Everest would finally be attained. Its

proportions are too Among mountaineers and other connoisseurs of geologic formations is not

regarded as a particularly comely peak. I'm, Everest chunky, too broad of beam, too crudely

hewn. But what Everest lacks in architectural grace, it makes up for with sheer, overwhelming

mass. Demarcating the Nepal-Tibet border, towering more than 12,000 feet above the valleys at

its base, Everest looms as a three-sided pyramid of gleaming ice and dark, striated rock. The

first eight expeditions to Everest were British, all of which attempted the mountain from the

northern, Tibetan, side-not so much because it presented the most obvious weakness in the

peak's formidable defenses but rather because in 1921 the Tibetan government opened its long-

closed borders to foreigners, while Nepal remained resolutely off limits. The first Everesters

were obliged to trek 400 arduous miles from Darjeeling across the Tibetan plateau simply to

reach the foot of the mountain. Their knowledge of the deadly effects of extreme altitude was

scant, and their equipment was pathetically inadequate by modern standards. Yet in 1924 a

member of the third British expedition, Edward Felix Norton, reached an elevation of 28,126

feet-just 900 feet below the summit-before being defeated by exhaustion and snow blindness.

It was an astounding achievement that was probably not surpassed for twenty-nine years. I say

"probably" because of what transpired four days after Norton's summit assault. At first light on

June 8, two other members of the 1924 British team) George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine,

departed the highest camp for the top. Mallory, whose name is inextricably linked to Everest,

was the driving force behind the first three expeditions to the peak. While on a lantern-slide

lecture tour of the United States, it was he who so notoriously quipped, "Because it is there"

when an irritating newspaperman demanded to know why he wanted to climb Everest. In 1924

Mallory was thirty-eight, a married schoolteacher with three young children, he was the product

of upper-English society. He was also An idealist with decidedly romantic sensibilities. His

athletic thete a fa striking physical beauty had made him grace, social charm, and on Strachey

and the Bloomsbury crowd. While tentvorite of LYtt ions would read bound high on Everest,

Mallory and his comPan aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear As Mallory and Irvine

struggled slowly toward the summit of Now Everest on June 8, 1924, mist billowed across the

upper pyramid, preventing companions lower on the mountain from monitoring the two d

momentarily, and climbers' progress. At 12:50 pm the clouds parte and brief but clear glimpse of

Mallory teammate Noel Odell caught a five hours behind schedule Irvine high on the peak,

approximately

4C ly and expeditiously" toward the top.

but moving deliberate to their tent that night, however, The two climbers failed to return in.

\Whether one or and neither Mallory nor Irvine was ever seen aga fy swallowed by the both of

them reached the summit before being fiercely debated ever since. The mountain and into

legend has been balance of the evidence suggests not. Lacking tangible proof, they were not

credited with the first ascent, in any case. ssibility, Nepal opened its borders in 1949, after

centuries of inacce -me in tside world, and a year later the new Communist regi to the out

thereChina closed Tibet to foreigners. Those who would climb Everest ion to the South side of

the peak. in the spring of fore shifted their attent organized with the righteous zeal and over

1953 a large British team, paign, became the third expedition powering resources of a military

cam two and a half to attempt Everest from Nepal. On May 28, following ously into the months

of prodigious effort, a high camp was dug tenu g morning Edmund he followin Southeast Ridge at

27,900 feet. Early t skilled d Tenzing Notgay, a highly Hillary, a rangy New Zealander, an top

breathing bottled oxygen. Sherpa mountaineer, set out for the By 9:00 A.M. they were at the

South summit) gazing across the dizzyingly narrow ridge that led to the summit proper. Another

hour brought them to the foot of what Hillary described as "the most formidable-looking

problem on the ridge-a rock step some forty feet high.... The rock itself, smooth and almost

holdless, might have been an interesting Sunday afternoon problem to a group of expert

climbers in the Lake District, but here it was a barrier beyond our feeble strength to overcome."

With Tenzing nervously paying out rope from below, Hillary wedged himself into a cleft between

the rock buttress and a fin of vertical snow at its edge, then began to inch his way up what would

thereafter be known as the Hillary Step. The climbing was strenuous and sketchy, but Hillary

persisted until, as he would later write, I could finally reach over the top of the rock and drag

myself out of the crack on to a wide ledge. For a few moments I lay regaining my breath and for

the first time really felt the fierce determination that nothing now could stop us reaching the top.

I took a firm stance on the ledge and signaled to Tenzing to come on up. As I heaved hard on

the rope Tenzing wriggled his way up the crack and finally collapsed exhausted at the top like a

giant fish when it has just been hauled from the sea after a terrible struggle. Fighting exhaustion,

the two climbers continued up the undulating ridge above. Hillary wondered, rather dully,

whether we would have enough strength left to get through. I cut around the back of another

bump and saw that the ridge ahead dropped away and we could see far into Tibet. I looked up

and there above us was a rounded snow cone. A few whacks of the ice-axe, a few cautious steps,

and Tensing [sic] and I were on top. And thus, shortly before noon on May 29, 1953, did Hillary

and Tenzing become the first men to stand atop Mount Everest. Three days later, word of the

ascent reached Queen Elizabeth on the eve of her coronation, and the Times of London broke

the news on the morning of . June 2 in its early edition. The dispatch had been filed from

Everest via a coded radio message (to prevent competitors from scooping the Times) by a young

correspondent named James Morris who, twenty years later, having earned considerable

esteem as a writer, would famously change his gender to female and his Christian name to Jan.

As Morris wrote four decades after the momentous climb in Coronation Everest: The First

Ascent and the Scoop That Crowned the Queen, It is hard to imagine now the almost mystical

delight with which the coincidence of the two happenings [the coronation and the Everest

ascent] was greeted in Britain. Emerging at last from the austerity which had plagued them since

the second world war, but at the same time facing the loss of their great empire and the

inevitable decline of their power in the world, the British had half-convinced themselves that the

accession of the young Queen was a token of a fresh start-a new Elizabethan age, as the

newspapers like to call it. Coronation Day, June 2, 1953, was to be a day of symbolical hope and

rejoicing, in which all the British patriotic loyalties would find a supreme moment of expression:

and marvel of marvels, on that very day there arrived the news from distant places-from the

frontiers of the old Empire, in fact-that a British team of mountaineers ... had reached the

supreme remaining earthly objective of exploration and adventure, the top of the world. . . The

moment aroused a whole orchestra of rich emotions among the British-pride, patriotism,

nostalgia for the lost past of the war and derring do, hope for a rejuvenated future.... People of a

certain age remember vividly to this day the moment when, as they waited on a drizzly June

morning for the Coronation procession to pass by in London, they heard the magical news that

the summit of the world was, so to speak, theirs. Tenzing became a national hero throughout

India, Nepal, and Tibet, each Of which claimed him as one of their own. Knighted by the queen,

Sir Edmund Hillary saw his image reproduced on postage stamps, comic strips, books, movies,

magazine covers--overnight, the hatchet-faced beekeeper from Auckland had been transformed

into one of the most famous men on earth. Hillary and Tenzing climbed Everest a month before I

was conceived, so I didn't share in the collective sense of pride and wonder that swept the

world-an event that an older friend says was comparable, in its visceral impact, to the first

manned landing on the moon. A decade later, however, a subsequent ascent of the mountain

helped establish the trajectory of my life. On May 22, 1963, Tom Hornbein, a thirty-two-year-old

doctor from Missouri, and Willie Unsoeld, thirty-six, a professor of theology from Oregon,

reached the summit of Everest via the peak's daunting West Ridge, previously unclimbed. By

then the summit had already been achieved on four occasions, by eleven men, but the West

Ridge was considerably more difficult than either of the two previously established routes: the

South Col and Southeast Ridge or the North Col and Northeast Ridge. Hornbein's and

Unsoeld's ascent was-and continues to be-deservedly hailed as one of the great feats in the

annals of mountaineering. Late in the day on their summit push, the two Americans climbed a

stratum of steep, crumbly rock-the infamous Yellow Band. Surmounting this cliff demanded

tremendous strength and skill; nothing so technically challenging had ever been climbed at such

extreme altitude. Once on top of the Yellow Band, Hornbein and Unsoeld doubted they could

safely descend it. Their best hope for getting off the mountain alive, they concluded, was to go

over the top and down the well-established Southeast Ridge route, an extremely audacious plan,

given the late hour, the unknown terrain, and their rapidly diminishing supply of bottled oxygen.

in Hornbein and Unsoeld arrived on the summit at 6:15 Pm just as the sun was setting, and

were forced to spend the night in the open above 28,000 feet-at the time, the highest bivouac in

history. It was a cold night, but mercifully without wind. Although Unsoeld's toes froze and

would later be amputated, both men survived to tell their tale. I was nine years old at the time

and living in Corvallis, Oregon, where Unsoeld also made his home. He was a close friend of my

father's, and I sometimes played with the oldest Unsoeld childrenRegon, who was a year older

than me, and Devi, a year younger. A few months before Willie Unsoeld departed for Nepal, I

reached the summit of my first mountain-an unspectacular 9 ,000-foot volcano in the Cascade

Range that now sports a chairlift to the top-in the company of my dad, Willie, and Regon. Not

surprisingly, accounts of the 1963 epic on Everest resonated loud and long in my preadolescent

imagination. While my friends idolized John Glenn, Sandy Koufax, and Johnny Unitas, my own

heroes were Hornbein and Unsoeld. Secretly, for more than a decade it remained a burning

ambition. I dreamed of ascending Everest myself one day; By the time I was in my early twenties,

climbing had become the focus of my existence to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards

lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I

thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.

And climbing provided a sense of community as well. To become a climber was to join a self-

contained, rabidly idealistic society, largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world

at large. The culture of ascent was characterized by intense competition and undiluted

machismo, but for the most part, its constituents were concerned with impressing only one

another. Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than

how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal

equipment, admired more than so-called free soloists: visionaries who ascended in the boldest

style imaginable. Nobody was alone, without rope or hardware.

In those years I lived to climb, existing on five or six thousand dollars a year, working as a

carpenter and a commercial salmon fisherman just long enough to fund the next trip to the

Bugaboos or Tetons or Alaska Range. But at some point in my mid-twenties I abandoned my

boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest By then it had become fashionable among alpine

cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a slag heap"-a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or

aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a "serious" climber, which I desperately aspired to

be. I began to look down my nose at the world's highest mountain. Such snobbery was rooted in

the fact that by the early 1980s, s Everest' easiest line-via South Col and the Southeast Ridge-

had been climbed more than a hundred times. My cohorts and I referred to the Southeast Ridge

as the "Yak Route." Our contempt was only reinforced in 1985, when Dick Bass-a wealthy fifty-

five-year-old Texan with limited climbing experience-was ushered to the top of Everest by an

extraordinary young climber named David Breashears, an event that was accompanied by a

blizzard of uncritical media attention. Previously, Everest had by and large been the province of

elite mountaineers. In the words of Michael Kennedy, the editor of Climbing magazine, "To be

invited on an Everest expedition was an honor earned only after you served a long

apprenticeship on lower peaks, and to actually reach the summit elevated a climber to the upper

firIn s ament of mountaineering stardom." Bass' ascent changed all that. In bagging Everest, he

became the first person to climb all of the Seven Summits,* a feat that brought him worldwide

renown, spurred The highest peaks on each of the seven continents are: Everest, 29,028 feet

(Asia); Aconcagua, 22,834 feet (South America); McKinley (also known as Denali), 18,510 feet

(Europe); Vinson Massif America); Kilimanjaro, 19,340 feet (Africa); Elb , 20,320 feet (North feet

(Antarctica); Kosciusko, 7,316 feet (Australia). After Dick Bass climbed all seven, a Canadian

climber named Patrick Morrow argued that because the highest point in Oceania, the group of

lands that includes Australia, that of Carstensz Pyramid (16,535 felt) in the Indonesian pro is not

Kosciusko but rather the much more difficult sum.

peak Of which happen to be very demanding climbs, on each continent would be to climb

the second-highest peak on each continent, a couple concept has Pointed out that a

considerably more difficult challenge than ascending the highest -he, Morrow, was. More than

one critic of the Seven Summits first to bag the Seven Summits vince of Irian Barat, Bass wasn't

the

,k nd limbers to follow in his guided bootprints, a swarm of other we and rudely pulled

Everest into the postmodern era.

ty types like myself, Dick Bass was an insPi -To aging Walter Mit lamed in a thick East Texas

ration," Seaborn Beck Weathers exp pril. A forty-ninetwang during the trek to Everest Base

Camp last A allas pathologist, Beck was one of eight clients on Rob year-old D showed that

Everest was within Hall's 1996 guided expedition. "Bass you're reasonably the realm of possibility

for regular guys. Assuming fit and have some disposable income, I think the biggest obstacle is

probably taking time off from your job and leaving your family for two months." For a great many

climbers, the record shows, stealing time away from the daily grind has not been an

insurmountable obstacle, nor has the half decade, the traffic on all of the hefty outlay of cash.

Over the passes Everest, has multiplied at an aston the Seven Summits, but especially Ev ishing

rate. And to meet the demand, the number of commercial en f the Seven Summits, especially

terprises peddling guided ascents o Everest, has multiplied correspondingly. In the spring of

1996) thirty distinct expeditions were on the flanks of Everest, at least ten of them organized as

money-making ventures. The government of Nepal recognized that the throngs flocking 10 erms

of safety, aesthetics, and imEverest created serious problems in t palese pact to the

environment. While grappling with the issue, Ne ministers came up with a solution that seemed

to hold the dual promise of limiting the crowds while increasing the flow of hard currency into

the impoverished national coffers: raise the fee for climbing permits. In 1991 the Ministry of

Tourism charged $2,300 for a permit that allowed a team of any size to attempt Everest. In 1992

the fee was increased to $10,000 for a team of up to nine climbers, with another $1,200 to be

paid for each additional climber. But despite the higher fees, climbers continued to swarm to

Everest. In the spring of 1993, on the fortieth anniversary of the first ascent, a record fifteen

expeditions, comprising 294 climbers, attempted to scale the peak from the Nepalese side. That

autumn, the ministry raised the permit fee yet again-to a staggering $50,000 for as many as five

climbers, plus $10,000 for each additional climber, up to a maximum of seven. Additionally, the

government decreed that no more than four expeditions would be allowed on the Nepalese

flanks each season. What the Nepalese ministers didn't take into consideration, however, was

that China charged only $15,000 to allow a team of any size to climb the mountain from Tibet

and placed no limit on the number of expeditions each season. The flood of Everesters

therefore shifted from Nepal to Tibet, leaving hundreds of Sherpas out of work. The ensuing

hue and cry persuaded Nepal, in the spring of 1996, to abruptly cancel the four-expedition limit.

And while they were at it, the government ministers jacked up the permit fee once again-this

time to $70,000 for up to seven climbers, plus another $10,000 for each additional climber.

judging from the fact that sixteen of the thirty expeditions on Everest last spring were climbing

on the Nepalese side of the mountain, the high cost of obtaining a permit doesn't seem to have

been a significant deterrent. Even before the calamitous outcome of the 1996 premonsoon

climbing season, the proliferation of commercial expeditions over the past decade was a touchy

issue. Traditionalists were offended that the world's highest summit was being sold to rich

parvenus-some of whom, if denied the services of guides, would probably have difficulty making

it to the top of a peak as modest as Mount Rainier. Everest, the purists sniffed, had been

debased and profaned. Such critics also pointed out that, thanks to the commercialization of

Everest, the once hallowed peak has now even been dragged into the swamp of American

jurisprudence. Having paid princely sums to be escorted up Everest, some climbers have then

sued their guides when the summit eluded them. "Occasionally you'll get a client who thinks he's

bought a guaranteed ticket to the summit," laments Peter Athans, a highly respected guide who's

made eleven trips to Everest and reached the top four times. "Some people don't understand

that an Everest expedition can't be run like a Swiss train." Sadly, not every Everest lawsuit is

unwarranted. Inept or disreputable companies have on more than one occasion failed to deliver

crucial logistical support-oxygen, for instance-as promised. On some expeditions guides have

gone to the summit without any of their paying customers, prompting the bitter clients to

conclude that they were brought along simply to pick up the tab. In 1995, the leader of a

commercial expedition absconded with tens of thousands of dollars of his clients' money before

the trip even got off the ground. In March 1995 I received a call from an editor at

Outside

magazine proposing that I join a guided Everest expedition scheduled to depart five days hence

and write an article about the mushrooming commercialization of the mountain and the

attendant controversies. The magazine's intent was not that I climb the peak; the editors simply

wanted me to remain in base camp and report the story from the East Glacier, at the foot of the

Tibetan side of the mountain. I considered the offer seriously-I went so far as to book a flight

and get the required immunizations-and then bowed out at the last minute. Given the disdain I'd

expressed for Everest over the years, one might reasonably assume that I declined to go on

principle. In truth, the call from

Outside

had unexpectedly aroused a powerful, long-buried

desire. I said no to the assignment only because I thought it would be unbearably frustrating to

spend two months in the shadow of Everest without ascending higher than Base Camp. If I were

going to travel to the far side of the globe and spend eight weeks away from my wife and home, I

wanted an opportunity to climb the mountain. I asked Mark Bryant, the editor of

Outside

, if he

would consider postponing the assignment for twelve months (which would give me time to train

properly for the physical demands of the expedition). I also inquired if the magazine would be

willing to book me with one of the more reputable guide services-and cover the $65,000 fee-

thus giving me a shot at actually reaching the summit. I didn't really expect him to say yes to this

plan. I'd written more than sixty pieces for

Outside

over the previous fifteen years, and seldom

had the travel budget for any of these assignments exceeded two or three thousand dollars.

Bryant called back a day later after conferring with

Outside

's publisher. He said that the

magazine wasn't prepared to shell out $65,000 but that he and the other editors thought the

commercialization of Everest was an important story. If I was serious about trying to climb the

mountain, he insisted,

Outside

would figure out a way to make it happen. During the thirty-three

years I'd called myself a climber, I'd undertaken some difficult projects. In Alaska I'd put up a

hairy new route on the Mooses Tooth, and pulled off a solo ascent of the Devils Thumb that

involved spending three weeks alone on a remote ice cap. I'd done a number of fairly extreme

ice climbs in Canada and Colorado. Near the southern tip of South America, where the wind

sweeps the land like "the broom of God"-'Va escoba de Dios, " as the locals say-I'd scaled a

frightening, mile-high spike of vertical and overhanging granite called Cerro Torre; buffeted by

hundred-knot winds, plastered with frangible atmospheric time, it was once (though no longer)

thought to be the world's hardest mountain. But these escapades had occurred years earlier, in

some cases decades earlier, when I was in my twenties and thirties. I was forty-one now, well

past my climbing prime, with a graying beard, bad gums, and fifteen extra pounds around my

midriff. I was married to a woman I loved fiercely-and who loved me back. Having stumbled

upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my LIFE I was actually living above the poverty line.

My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up

to something like happiness. None of the climbs I'd done in the past, moreover, had taken me to

even moderately high altitude. Truth be told, I'd never been higher than 17,200 feet-not even as

high as Everest Base Camp. As an avid student of mountaineering history, I knew that Everest

had killed more than 130 people since the British first visited the mountain in 1921-approximately

one death for every four climbers who'd reached the summit-and that many of those who died

had been far stronger and possessed vastly more high-altitude experience than I. But boyhood

dreams die hard, I discovered, and good sense be damned. In late February 1996, Bryant called

to say that there was a place waiting for me on Rob Hall's upcoming Everest expedition. When

he asked if I was sure I wanted to go through with this, I said yes without even pausing to catch

my breath. Speaking abruptly I gave them a parable. I said, it's the planet Neptune I'm talking

about, just plain ordinary Neptune, not Paradise, because I don't happen to know about Paradise.

So you see this means you, nothing more, just you. Now there happens to be a big spot of rock I

said, up there, and I must warn you that people are pretty stupid up in Neptune, chiefly because

they each lived tied up in their own string. And some of them, whom I had wanted to mention in

particular, some of them had got themselves absolutely determined about that mountain. You

wouldn't believe it, I said, life or death, use or no use, these people had got the habit, and they

now spent their spare time and all their energies in chasing the clouds of their own glory up and

down all the steepest faces in the district. And one and all they came back uplifted. And well

they might, I said, for it was amusing that even in Neptune most of them made shift to chase

themselves pretty safely up the easierfaces. But anyhow there was uplift, and indeed it was

observable, both in the resolute set of their faces and in the gratification that shone in their eyes.

And as I had pointed out, this was in Neptune not Paradise, where, it may be, there perhaps is

nothing else to be done, John Menlove Edwards Letter from a Man two hours into Thai Air flight

311 from Bangkok to Kathmandu, I left my seat and walked to the rear of the airplane. Near the

bank of lavatories on the starboard side I crouched to peer through a small, waist-level window,

hoping to catch a glimpse of some mountains. I was not disappointed: there, raking the horizon,

stood the jagged incisors of the Himalaya. I stayed at the window for the rest of the flight,

spellbound, hunkered over a trash bag full of empty soda cans and half-eaten meals, my face

pressed against the cold Plexiglas. Immediately I recognized the huge, sprawling bulk of

Kanchenjunga, at 28,169 feet above sea level the third-highest mountain on earth. Fifteen

minutes later, Makalu, the world's fifth-highest peak, came into view-and then, finally, the

unmistakable profile of Everest itself. The ink-black wedge of the summit pyramid stood out in

stark relief, towering over the surrounding ridges. Thrust high into the jet stream, the mountain

ripped a visible gash in the 120-knot hurricane, sending forth a plume of ice crystals that trailed

to the east like a long silk scarf. As I gazed across the sky at this contrail, it occurred to me that

the top of Everest was precisely the same height as the pressurized jet bearing me through the

heavens. That I proposed to climb to the cruising altitude of an Airbus 300 jetliner struck me, at

that moment, as preposterous, or worse. My palms felt clammy Forty minutes later I was on the

ground in Kathmandu. As I walked into the airport lobby after clearing customs, a big-boned,

clean-shaven young man took note of my two huge duffels and approached. "Would you be Jon,

then?" he inquired in a lilting New Zealand accent, glancing at a sheet of photocopied passport

photos depitting Rob Hall's clients. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Andy Harris,

one of Hall's guides, come to deliver me to our hotel. Harris, who was thirty-one, said there was

supposed to be another client arriving on the same flight from Bangkok, a fifty-three-year-old

attorney from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, named Lou Kasischke. It ended up taking an hour for

Kasischke to locate his bags, so while we waited Andy and I compared notes on some hard

climbs we'd both survived in western Canada and discussed the merits of skiing versus

snowboarding. Andy's palpable hunger for climbing, his unalloyed enthusiasm for the mountains,

made me wistful for the period in my own life when climbing was the most important thing

imaginable, when I charted the course of my existence in terms of mountains I'd ascended and

those I hoped one day to ascend. just before Kasischke-a tall, athletic, silver-haired man with

patrician reserve-emerged from the airport customs queue, I asked Andy how many times he'd

been on Everest. "Actually," he confessed cheerfully, "this will be my first time, same as you. It

should be interesting to see how I do up there." Hall had booked us at the Garuda Hotel, a

friendly, funky establishment in the heart of Thamel, Kathmandu's frenetic tourist district, on a

narrow avenue choked with cycle rickshas and street hustlers. The Garuda has long been

popular with expeditions bound for the Himalaya, and its walls were covered with signed

photographs of famous alpinists who'd slept there over the years: Reinhold Messner, Peter

Habeler, Kitty Calhoun, John Roskelley, Jeff Lowe. Ascending the stairs to my room I passed a

large four-color poster titled "Himalayan Trilogy," depicting Everest, K2, and Lhotse-the planet's

highest, secondhighest, and fourth-highest mountains, respectively Superimposed against the

images of these peaks, the poster showed a grinning, bearded man in full alpine regalia. A

caption identified this climber as Rob Hall; the poster, intended to drum up business for Hall's

guiding company, Adventure Consultants, commemorated his rather impressive feat of

ascending all three peaks during two months in 1994. An hour later I met Hall in the flesh. He

stood six foot three or four and was skinny as a pole. There was something cherubic about his

face, yet he looked older than his thirty-five years-perhaps it was the sharply etched creases at

the corners of his eyes, or the air of authority he projected. He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt

and faded Levis patched on one knee with an embroidered yin-yang symbol. An unruly thatch of

brown hair corkscrewed across his forehead. His shrublike beard was in need of a trim.

Gregarious by nature, Hall proved to be a skillful raconteur with a caustic Kiwi wit. Launching

into a long story involving a French tourist, a Buddhist monk, and a particularly shaggy yak, Hall

delivered the punch line with an impish squint, paused a beat for effect, then threw his head

back in a booming, contagious laugh, unable to contain his delight in his own yarn. I liked him

immediately. Hall was born into a working-class Catholic family in Christchurch, New Zealand,

the youngest of nine children. Although he had a quick, scientific mind, at the age of fifteen he

dropped out of school after butting heads with an especially autocratic teacher, and in 1976 he

went to work for Alp Sports, a local manufacturer of climbing equipment. "He started out doing

odd jobs, working a sewing machine, things like that," remembers Bill Atkinson, now an

accomplished climber and guide, who also worked at Alp Sports at the time. "But because of

Rob's impressive organizational skills, which were apparent even when he was sixteen and

seventeen, he was soon running the entire production side of the company." Hall had for some

years been an avid hill walker; about the same time he went to work for Alp Sports, he took up

rock and ice climbing as well. He was a fast learner, says Atkinson, who became Hall's most

frequent climbing partner, "with the ability to soak up skills and attitudes from anybody." In 1980,

when Hall was nineteen, he joined an expedition that climbed the demanding North Ridge of

Ama Dablam, a 22,294-foot peak of incomparable beauty fifteen miles south of Everest. During

that trip, Hall's first to the Himalaya, he made a side excursion to Everest Base Camp and

resolved that one day he would climb the world's highest mountain. It required ten years and

three attempts, but in May 1990, Hall finally reached the summit of Everest as the leader of an

expedition that included Peter Hillary, the son of Sir Edmund. On the summit Hall and Hillary

made a radio transmission that was broadcast live throughout New Zealand, and at 29,028 feet

received congratulations from Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer. By this time Hall was a full-time

professional climber. Like most of his peers, he sought funding from corporate sponsors to pay

for his expensive Himalayan expeditions. And he was savvy enough to understand that the more

attention he got from the news media the easier it would be to coax corporations to open their

checkbooks. As it happened, he proved to be extremely. adept at getting his name into print

and his mug on the telly. "Yeah," Atkinson allows, "Rob always did have a bit of a flair for

publicity. In 1988, a guide from Auckland named Gary Ball became Hall's primary climbing

partner and closest friend. Ball reached the summit of Everest with Hall in 1990, and soon after

returning to New Zealand they concocted a scheme to climb the highest summits on each of the

seven continents, A la Dick Bass-but to raise the bar by doing all seven of them in seven

months.* With Everest, the most difficult of the septet, already taken care of, Hall and Ball

wangled backing from a big electrical utility, Power Build, and were on their way. On December

12, 1990, mere hours before their seven-month deadline was due to expire, they reached the

crest of the seventh summit-the Vinson Massif, at 16,067 feet the highest point in Antarctica-to

considerable fanfare throughout their homeland. Despite their success, Hall and Ball were

concerned about their long-term prospects in the professional climbing racket. "To continue

receiving sponsorship from companies," explains Atkinson, "a climber has to keep upping the

ante. The next climb has to be harder and more spectacular than the last. It becomes an ever-

tightening spiral; eventually you're not up to the challenge anymore. Rob and Gary understood

that sooner or later they wouldn't be up to performing at the cutting edge, or they'd have an

unlucky accident and get killed. So they decided to switch direction and get into high-altitude

guiding. When you're guiding you don't get to do the climbs you necessarily most want to do; the

challenge comes from getting clients up and down, which is a different sort of satisfaction. But

it's a more sustainable career than endlessly chasing after sponsorships. There's a limitless

supply of clients out there if you offer them a good product." During the "seven summits in seven

months" extravaganza, Hall and Ball formulated a plan to go into business together guiding

clients up the Seven Summits. Convinced that an untapped market of dreamers existed with

ample cash but insufficient experience to climb the world's great mountains on their own, Hall

and Ball launched an enterprise they christened Adventure Consultants. It took Bass four years

to ascend the Seven summits. Almost immediately, they racked up an impressive record, In May

1992 Hall and Ball led six clients to the summit of Everest. A year later they guided another

group of seven to the top on an afternoon when forty people reached the summit in a single day.

They came home from that expedition, however, to unanticipated public criticism from Sir

Edmund Hillary, who decried Hall's role in the growing commercialization of Everest. The

crowds of novices being escorted to the top for a fee, huffed Sir Edmund, were engendering

disrespect for the mountain." In New Zealand, Hillary is one of the most honored figures in the

nation; his craggy visage even stares out from the face of the five-dollar bill. It saddened and

embarrassed Hall to be publicly castigated by this demigod, this ur-chniber who had been one of

his childhood heroes. "Hillary is regarded as a living national treasure here in New Zealand," says

Atkinson. "What he says carries a lot of weight, and it must have really hurt to be criticized by

him. Rob wanted to make a public statement to defend himself, but he realized that going up

against such a venerated figure in the media was a no-win situation." Then, five months after the

Hillary brouhaha flared, Hall was rocked by an even greater blow: in October 1993, Gary Ball

died of cerebral edema-swelling of the brain brought on by high altitudeduring an attempt on

26,795-foot Dhaulagiri, the world's sixth-tallest mountain. Ball drew his last, labored breaths in

Hall's arms, lying comatose in a small tent high on the peak. The next day Hall buried his friend in

a crevasse. In a New Zealand television interview following the expedition, Hall somberly

described how he took their favorite climbing rope and lowered Ball's body into the depths of

the glacier. "A climbing rope is designed to sort of attach you together, and you never let go of

it," he said. "And I had to let it just sort of slip through me hands." "Rob was devastated when

Gary died," says Helen Wilton, who worked as Hall's Base Camp manager on Everest in 1993, '95,

and '96. "But he dealt with it very quietly. That was Rob's way-to get on with things." Hall

resolved to carry on alone with Adventure Consultants In his systematic fashion he continued to

refine the company's infrastructure and services-and continued to be extraordinarily successful

at escorting amateur climbers to the summits of big, remote mountains. Between 1990 and 1995,

Hall was responsible for putting thirty-nine climbers on the summit of Everest-three more

ascents than had been made in the first twenty years after Sir Edmund Hillary's inaugural climb.

With justification, Hall advertised that Adventure Consultants was "the world leader in Everest

Climbing, with more ascents than any other Organisation. The brochure he sent to prospective

clients declared, So, you have a thirst for adventure! Perhaps you dream of visiting seven

continents or standing on top of a tall mountain. Most of us never dare act on our dreams and

scarcely venture to share them or admit to great inner yearnings. Adventure Consultants

specializes in organising and guiding mountain climbing adventures. Skilled in the practicalities

of developing dreams into reality, we work with you to reach your goal. We will not drag you up

a mountain-you will have to work hard-but we guarantee to maximise the safety and success of

your adventure. For those who dare to face their dreams, the experience offers something

special beyond the power of words to describe. We invite you to climb your mountain with US.

By 1996 Hall was charging $65,000 a head to guide clients to the top of the world. By any

measure this is a lot of money-it equals the mortgage on my Seattle home-and the quoted price

did not include airfare to Nepal or personal equipment, No company' fee was higher-indeed,

some of his competitors charged a third as msuch. But thanks to Hall's phenomenal success rate

he had no trouble filling the roster for this, his eighth expedition to Everest. If you were hell-

bent on climbing the peak and could somehow come up with the dough, Adventure Consultants

was the obvious choice. On the morning of March 31, two days after arriving in Kathmandu, the

assembled members of the 1996 Adventure Consultants Everest Expedition walked across the

tarmac of Tribhuvan International Airport and climbed aboard a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter

operated by Asian Airlines. A dented relic of the Afghan war, it was as big as a school bus,

seated twenty-six passengers, and looked like it had been riveted together in somebody's

backyard. The flight engineer latched the door and handed out wads of cotton to stuff in our

ears, and the behemoth chopper lumbered into the air with a head-splitting roar. The floor was

piled high with duffels, backpacks, and cardboard boxes. jammed into jump seats around the

perimeter of the aircraft was the human cargo, facing inward, knees wedged against chests. The

deafening whine of the turbines made conversation out of the question. It wasn't a comfortable

ride, but nobody complained. In 1963, Tom Hornbein's expedition began the long trek to Everest

from Banepa, a dozen miles outside Kathmandu, and spent thirty-one days on the trail before

arriving at Base Camp. Like most modern Everesters, we'd elected to leapfrog over the majority

of those steep, dusty miles; the chopper was supposed to set us down in the distant village of

Lukla, 9,200 feet up in the Himalaya. Assuming we didn't crash enroute, the flight would trim

some three weeks from the span of Hornbein's trek. Glancing around the helicopter's capacious

interior, I tried to fix the names of my teammates in my memory. In addition to guides Rob Hall

and Andy Harris there was Helen Wilton, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of four, who was

returning for her third season as Base Camp manager. Caroline Mackenzie-an accomplished

climber and physician in her late twenties-was the expedition doctor and, like Helen, would be

going no higher than Base Camp. Lou Kasischke, the gentlemanly lawyer I'd met at the airport,

had climbed six of the Seven Summits-as had Yasuko Namba, forty-seven, a taciturn personnel

director who worked at the Tokyo branch of Federal Express. Beck Weathers, forty-nine, was a

garrulous pathologist from Dallas. Stuart Hutchison, thirty-four, attired in aRen and Stimpy T-

shirt, was a cerebral, somewhat wonkish Canadian cardiologist on leave from a research

fellowship. John Taske, at fifty-six the oldest member of our group, was an anesthesiologist from

Brisbane who'd taken up climbing after retiring from the Australian army. Frank Fischbeck,

fiftythree, a dapper, genteel publisher from Hong Kong, had attempted Everest three times with

one of Hall's competitors; in 1994 he'd gotten all the way to the South Summit, just 330 vertical

feet below the top. Doug Hansen, forty-six, was an American Postal worker who'd gone to

Everest with Hall in 1995 and, like Fischbeck, had reached the South Summit before turning back.

I wasn't sure what to make of my fellow clients. In outlook and experience they were nothing like

the hard-core climbers with whom I usually went into the mountains. But they seemed like nice,

decent folks, and there wasn't a certifiable asshole in the entire group-at least not one who was

showing his true colors at this early stage of the proceedings. Nevertheless, I didn't have much

in common with any of my teammates except Doug. A wiry, hard-partying man with a

prematurely weathered face that brought to mind an old football, he'd been a Postal worker for

more than twenty-seven years. He told me that he'd paid for the trip by working the night shift

and doing construction jobs by day. Because I'd earned my living as a carpenter for eight years

before becoming a writer-and because the tax bracket we shared set us conspicuously apart

from the other clients-I already felt comfortable around Doug in a way that I didn't with the

others. For the most part I attributed my growing unease to the fact that I'd never climbed as a

member of such a large group-a group of complete strangers, no less. Aside from one Alaska

trip I'd done twenty-one years earlier, all my previous expeditions had been undertaken with one

or two trusted friends, or alone. In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small

concern. One climber's actions can affect the welfare of the entire team. The consequences of a

poorly tied knot, a stumble, a dislodged rock, or some other careless deed are as likely to be felt

by the perpetrator's colleagues as the perpetrator. Hence it's not surprising that climbers are

typically wary of joining forces with those whose bona fides are un HOME known to them. But

trust in one's partners is a luxury denied those who sign on as clients on a guided ascent; one

must put one's faith in the guide instead. As the helicopter droned toward Lukla, I suspected

that each of my teammates hoped as fervently as I that Hall had been careful to weed out clients

of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another's

shortcomings. For those who didn't dally, our daily treks ended early in the after noon, but rarely

before the heat and aching feet forced us to ask each passing Sherpa, "How much farther to

camp?" The reply, we soon were to discover, was invariable: 'Only two mile more, Sah'b.....

Evenings were peaceful, smoke settling in the quiet air to soften the dusk, lights twinkling on the

ridge we would camp on tomorrow, clouds dimming the outline of our pass for the day after

Growing excitement lured my thoughts again and again to the West Ridge.... There was

loneliness, too, as the sun set, hut only rarely now did doubts return. Then Ifelt sinkingly as if my

whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to

total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only

to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind. Thomas F. Hornbein Everest:

The West Ridge rom Lukla the way to Everest led north through the crepuscular gorge of the

Dudh Kosi, an icy, boulder-choked river that churned with glacial runoff. We spent the first night

of our trek in the hamlet of Phakding, a collection of a half dozen homes and lodges crowded

onto a shelf of level ground on a slope above the river. The air took on a wintry sting as night fell,

and in the morning, as I headed up the trail, a glaze of frost sparkled from the rhododendron

leaves. But the Everest region lies at 28 degrees north latitude-just beyond the tropicsand as

soon as the sun rose high enough to penetrate the depths of the canyon the temperature soared.

By noon, after we'd crossed a wobbly footbridge suspended high over the river-the fourth river

crossing of the day-rivulets of sweat were dripping off my chin, and I peeled down to shorts and

a T-shirt. Beyond the bridge, the dirt path abandoned the banks of the Dudh Kosi and zigzagged

up the steep canyon wall, ascending through aromatic stands of pine. The spectacularly fluted

ice pinnacles of Thamserku and Kusum Kangru pierced the sky more than two vertical miles

above. It was magnificent country, as topographically imposing as any landscape on earth, but it

wasn't wilderness, and hadn't been for hundreds of years. Every scrap of arable land had been

terraced and planted with barley, bitter buckwheat, or potatoes. Strings of prayer flags were

strung across the hillsides, and ancient Buddhist chortens* and walls of exquisitely carved mani'

stones stood sentinel over even the highest passes. As I made my way up from the river, the

trail was clogged with trekkers, yak' trains, red-robed monks, and barefoot Sherpas straining

beneath back-wrenching loads of firewood and kerosene and soda pop. Ninety minutes above

the river, I crested a broad ridge, passed a matrix of rock-walled yak corrals, and abruptly found

myself in downtown Namche Bazaar, the social and commercial hub of Sherpa society. Situated

11,300 feet above sea level, Namche occupies a huge, tilting bowl proportioned like a giant

satellite television dish, midway up a precipitous Mountainside. More than a hundred buildings

nestled dramatically on the rocky slope, linked by a maze of narrow paths and catwalks. Near

the lower edge of town I located the Khumbu Lodge, pushed aside the blanket that functioned

as a front door, and found my teammates drinking lemon tea around a table in the corner. A

chorten is a religious monument, usually made of rock and often containing sacred relics; it is

also called a stupa. Mani stones are small, flat rocks that have been meticulously carved with

Sanskrit symbols denoting the Tibetan Buddhist invocation Om manipadme hum and are piled

along the middle of trails to form long, low mani walls. Buddhist protocol dictates that travelers

always pass mani walls on the left. Technically speaking, the great majority of the "yaks' one sees

in the Himalaya are actually dzopkyo-male crossbreeds of yaks and cattle--or dzom, female

crossbreeds. Additionally, female yaks, when purebred, are correctly termed naks. Most

Westerners, however, have a hard time telling any of these shaggy beasts apart and refer to all

of them as yaks. When I approached, Rob Hall introduced me to Mike Groom, the expedition's

third guide. A thirty -three-year-old Australian with carrot-colored hair and the lean build of a

marathon runner, Groom was a Brisbane plumber who worked as a guide only occasionally. In

1987, forced to spend a night in the open while descending from the 28,169-foot summit of

Kanchenjunga, he froze his feet and had to have all his toes amputated. This setback had not

put a damper on his Himalayan career, however: he'd gone on to climb K2, Lhotse, Clio Oyu,

Ama Dablam, and, in 1993, Everest without supplementary oxygen. An exceedingly calm,

circumspect man, Groom was pleasant company but seldom spoke unless spoken to and replied

to questions tersely, in a barely audible voice. Dinner conversation was dominated by the three

clients who were doctors-Stuart, John, and especially Beck, a pattern that would be repeated for

much of the expedition. Fortunately, both John and Beck were wickedly funny and had the

group in stitches. Beck, however, was in the habit of turning his monologues into scathing,

Limbaughesque rants against bed-wetting liberals, and at one point that evening I made the

mistake of disagreeing with him: in response to one of his comments I suggested that raising the

minimum wage seemed like a wise and necessary policy. Well informed and a very skilled

debater, Beck made hash out of my fumbling avowal, and I lacked the wherewithal to rebut him.

All I could do was to sit on my hands, tongue-tied and steaming. As he continued to hold forth in

his swampy, East Texas drawl about the numerous follies of the welfare state, I got up and left

the table to avoid humiliating myself further. When I returned to the dining room, I approached

the proprietress to ask for a beer. A small, graceful Sherpani, she was in the midst of taking an

order from a group of American trekkers. "We hungry," a ruddy-cheeked man announced to her

in overly loud pidgin, miming the act of eating. "Want eat po-ta-toes. Yak burger. Co-ca Co-la,

You have?" "Would you like to see the menu?" the Sherpani replied in clear, sparkling English

that carried a hint of a Canadian accent. 'Our selection is actually quite large. And I believe

there is still some freshly baked apple pie available, if that interests you, for dessert." The

American trekker, unable to comprehend that this brownskinned woman of the hills was

addressing him in perfectly enunciated King's English, continued to employ his comical pidgin

argot: "Men-u. Good, good. Yes, yes, we like see men-u." Sherpas remain an enigma to most

foreigners, who tend to regard them through a romantic scrim. People unfamiliar with the

demography of the Himalaya often assume that all Nepalese are Sherpas when in fact there are

no more than 20,000 Sherpas in all of Nepal, a nation the size of North Carolina that has some

20 million residents and more than fifty distinct ethnic groups. Sherpas are a mountain people,

devoutly Buddhist whose forebears migrated south from Tibet four or five centuries ago. There

are Sherpa villages scattered throughout the Himalaya of eastern Nepal, and sizable Sherpa

communities can be found in Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, but the heart of Sherpa country is the

Khumbu, a handful of valleys draining the southern slopes of Mount Everest-a small,

astonishingly rugged region completely devoid of roads, cars, or wheeled vehicles of any kind.

Farming is difficult in the high, cold, steep-walled valleys, so the traditional Sherpa economy

revolved around trading between Tibet and India, and herding yaks. Then, in 1921, the British

embarked on their first expedition to Everest, and their decision to engage Sherpas as helpers

sparked a transformation of Sherpa culture. Because the Kingdom of Nepal kept its borders

closed until 1949,".

the initial Everest reconnaissance, and the next eight expeditions to follow, were forced to

approach the mountain from the north, through Tibet, and never passed anywhere near the

Khumbu. But those first nine expeditions embarked for Tibet from Darjeeling, where many

Sherpas had emigrated, and where they had developed a reputation among the resident

colonialists for being hardworking, affable, and intelligent. Additionally, because most Sherpas

had lived for generations in villages situated between 9,000 and 14,000 feet, they were

physiologically adapted to the rigors of high altitude. Upon the recommendation of A. M. Kellas,

a Scottish physician who'd climbed and traveled extensively with Sherpas, the 1921 Everest

expedition hired a large corps of them as load bearers and camp helpers, a practice that's been

followed by all but a smattering of expeditions in the seventy-five years since. For better and

worse, over the past two decades the economy and culture of the Khumbu has become

increasingly and irrevocably tied to the seasonal influx of trekkers and climbers, some 15,000 of

whom visit the region annually. Sherpas who learn technical climbing skins and work high on the

peaks--especially those who have summitted Everest--enjoy great esteem in their communities.

Those who become climbing stars, alas, also stand a fair chance of losing their lives: ever since

1922, when seven Sherpas were killed in an avalanche during the second British expedition, a

disproportionate number of Sheras have died on Everest-fifty-three all told. Indeed, they

account for more than a third of all Everest fatalities. Despite the hazards, there is stiff

competition among Sherpas for the twelve to eighteen staff positions on the typical Everest

expedition. The most sought-after jobs are the half dozen openings for skilled climbing Sherpas,

who can expect to earn $1,400 to $2,500 for two months of hazardous work-attractive pay in a

nation mired in grinding poverty and with an annual per capita income of around $160. To handle

the growing traffic from Western climbers and trekkers, new lodges and teahouses are springing

up across the Khumbu region, but the new construction is especially evident in Namche Bazaar.

On the trail to Namche I passed countless porters headed up from the lowland forests, carrying

freshly cut wood beams that weighed in excess of one hundred pounds-crushing physical toil, for

which they were paid about three dollars a day. Longtime visitors to the Khumbu are saddened

by the boom in tourism and the change it has wrought on what early Western climbers regarded

as an earthly paradise, a real-life Shangri-La. Entire valleys have been denuded of trees to meet

the increased demand for firewood. Teens hanging out in Namche carrom parlors are more

likely to be wearing jeans and Chicago Bulls T-shirts than quaint traditional robes. Families are

apt to spend their evenings huddled around video players viewing the latest Schwarzenegger

opus. The transformation of the Khumbu culture is certainly not all for the best, but I didn't hear

many Sherpas bemoaning the changes. Hard currency from trekkers and climbers, as well as

grants from international relief organizations supported by trekkers and climbers, have funded

schools and medical clinics, reduced infant mortality, built footbridges, and brought

hydroelectric power to Nainche and other villages. It seems more than a little patronizing for

Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when LIFE in the Khumbu was so much

simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have

no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last

thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum. A strong

walker, pre-acclimatized to the altitude, could cover the distance from the Lukla airstrip to

Everest Base Camp in two or three long days. Because most of us had just arrived from sea

level, however, Hall was careful to keep us to a more indolent pace that gave our bodies time to

adapt to the increasingly thin air. Seldom did we walk more than three or four hours on any

given day. On several days, when Hall's itinerary called for additional acclimatization, we walked

nowhere at all. On April 3, after an acclimatization day in Namche, we resumed the trek toward

Base Camp. Twenty minutes beyond the village I rounded a bend and arrived at a breathtaking

overlook. Two thousand feet below, slicing a deep crease through the surrounding bedrock, the

Dudh Kosi appeared as a crooked strand of silver glinting from the shadows. Ten thousand feet

above, the huge backlit spike of Ama Dablam hovered over the head of the valley like an

apparition And seven thousand feet higher still, dwarfing Ama Dablain, was the icy thrust of

Everest itself, all but hidden behind Nuptse. As always seemed to be the case, a horizontal

plume of condensation streamed from the summit like frozen smoke, betraying the violence of

the jetstream winds. I stared at the peak for perhaps thirty minutes, trying to apprehend what it

would be like to be standing on that gale-swept vertex. Although I'd ascended hundreds of

mountains, Everest was so different from anything I'd previously climbed that my powers of

imagination were insufficient for the task. The summit looked so cold, so high, so impossibly far

away. I felt as though I might as well be on an expedition to the moon. As I turned away to

continue walking up the trail, my emotions oscillated between nervous anticipation and a nearly

overwhelming sense of dread. Late that afternoon I arrived at Tengboche,* the largest, most

important Buddhist monastery in the Khumbu. Chhongba Sherpa, a wry, thoughtful man who

had joined our expedition as Base Camp cook, offered to arrange a meeting with the rimpoche-

"the head lama of all Nepal," Chhongba explained, "a very holy man. just yesterday he has

finished a long period of silent meditation-for the past three months he has not spoken. We will

be his first visitors. This is most auspicious. Doug, Lou, and I each gave Chhongba one hundred

rupees (approximately two dollars) to buy ceremonial katas-white silk scarves to be presented to

the rirnpoche-and then we removed our shoes and Chhongba led us to a small, drafty chamber

behind the main temple. Seated cross-legged on a brocade pillow, wrapped in burgundy robes,

was a short, rotund man with a shiny pate. He looked very old and very tired. Chhongba bowed

reverently, spoke briefly to him in the Sherpa tongue, and indicated for us to come forward. The

rimpoche then blessed each of us in turn, placing the katas we had purchased around our necks

as he did so. Afterward he smiled beatifically and offered us tea. "This kata you should wear to

the top of Everest," t Chhongba instructed me in a solemn voice. "It will please God and keep

you from harm." Unlike Tibetan, to which it is closely related, Sherpa is not a written language, so

Westerners are forced to resort to phonetic renderings. As a consequence there is little

uniformity in the spelling of Sherpa words or names; Tengboche, for instance, is written variously

as Tengpoche or Thyangboche, and similar incongruities crop up in spelling most other Sherpa

words. AlthoughtheTibetannameforthepeakisjomolungmaandtheNepalinameisSagarmath , most

Sherpas seem to refer to the mountain as "Everest" in daily conversation--even when speaking

with other Sherpas. Unsure how to act in the company of a divine presence, this living

reincarnation of an ancient and illustrious lama, I was terrified of unwittingly giving offense or

committing some irredeemable faux pas. As I sipped sweet tea and fidgeted, his Holiness rooted

around in an adjacent cabinet, brought out a large, ornately decorated book, and handed it to

me. I wiped my dirty hands on my pants and opened it nervously. It was a photo album. The

rimpoche, it turned out, had recently traveled to America for the first time, and the book held

snapshots from this trip: his Holiness in Washington standing before the Lincoln Memorial and

the Air and Space Museum; his Holiness in California on the Santa Monica Pier, Grinning broadly,

he excitedly pointed out his two favorite photos in the entire album: his Holiness posing beside

Richard Gere, and another shot of him with Steven Seagal. The first six days of the trek went by

in an ambrosial blur. The trail took us past glades of juniper and dwarf birch, blue pine and

rhododendron thundering waterfalls, enchanting boulder gardens bur) been bung streams. The

Valkyrian skyline bristled with peaks that I'd reading about since I was a child. Because most of

our gear was carried by yaks and human porters, my own backpack held little more than a jacket,

a few candy bars, and my camera. Unburdened and unhurried, caught up in the simple joy of

walking in exotic country, I fell into a kind of trance-but the euphoria seldom lasted for long.

Sooner or later I'd remember where I was headed, and the shadow Everest cast across my mind

would snap me back to attention We all trekked at our own pace, pausing often for refreshment

at trailside teahouses and to chat with passersby. I frequently found myself traveling in the

company of Doug Hansen, the postal worker, and Andy Harris, Rob Hall's laid-back junior guide.

Andy-called "Harold" by Rob and all his Kiwi friends-was a big, sturdy lad, built like an NFL

quarterback, with rugged good looks of the sort that earn men roles in cigarette advertisements.

During the antipodal winter he was employed as a much-in-demand helicopter-skiing guide.

Summers he worked for scientists conducting geologic research in Antarctica or escorted

climbers into New Zealand's Southern Alps. As we walked up the trail Andy spoke longingly of

the woman with whom he lived, a physician named Fiona McPherson. As we rested on a rock he

pulled a picture out of his pack to show me. She was tall, blond, athletic-looking. Andy said he

and Fiona were in the midst of building a house together in the hills outside of Queenstown.

Waxing ardent about the uncomplicated pleasures of sawing rafters and pounding nails, Andy

admitted that when Rob had first offered him this Everest job he'd been ambivalent about

accepting it: "It was quite hard to leave Fiona and the house, actually. We'd only just gotten the

roof on, yeah? But how can you turn down a chance to climb Everest? Especially when you have

an Opportunity to work alongside somebody like Rob Hall." Although Andy had never been to

Everest before, he was no stranger to the Himalaya. In 1985 he climbed a difficult 21,927 -foot

peak called Chobutse, about thirty miles west of Everest. And in the run the medical clinic fall of

1994 he spent four months helping Fiona in Pheriche, a gloomy, wind-battered hamlet 14,000

feet above sea level, where we stayed the nights of April 4 and 5. The clinic was funded by a

foundation called the Himalayan Rescue Association primarily to treat altitude-related illnesses

(although it also offered free treatment to the local Sherpas) and to educate trekkers about the

insidious hazards of ascending too high, too fast. it had been established in 1973 after four

members of a single Japanese trekking group succumbed to the altitude and died in the vicinity.

Prior to the clinic's existence, acute altitude illness killed approximately one or two out of every

500 trekkers who passed through Pheriche. Laura Ziemer-an upbeat American lawyer who, at

the time of our visit, was working at the four-room facility with her physician husband, Jim Litch,

and another young physician named Larry Silver-emphasized that this alarming death rate hadn't

been skewed upward by mountaineering accidents; the victims had been "just ordinary trekkers

who never ventured beyond the established trails.))

Now, thanks to the educational seminars and emergency care provided by the clinic's

volunteer staff, that mortality rate has been cut to less than one death per 30,000 trekkers.

Although idealistic Westerners like Ziemer who work at the Pheriche clinic receive no

remuneration and must even pay their own travel expenses to and from Nepal, it is a prestigious

posting that attracts highly qualified applicants from around the world. Caroline Mackenzie,

Hall's expedition doctor, had worked at the BRA Clinic with Fiona McPherson and Andy in the

autumn of 1994. In 1990, the year Hall first summitted Everest, the clinic was run by an

accomplished, self-confident physician from New Zealand named Jan Arnold. Hall met her as he

passed through Pheriche on his way to the mountain, and he was immediately smitten. "I asked

Jan to go out with me as soon as I got down from Everest," Hall reminisced during our first night

in the village. "For our first date I proposed going to Alaska and climbing Mount McKinley

together. And she said yes." They were married two years later. In 1993 Arnold climbed to the

summit of Everest with Hall; in 1994 and 1995 she traveled to Base Camp to work as the

expedition doctor. Arnold would have returned to the mountain again this year, except that she

was seven months pregnant with their first child. So the job went to Dr. Mackenzie. After dinner

on Thursday, our first night in Pheriche, Laura Ziemer and Jim Litch invited Hall, Harris, and

Helen Wilton, our Base Camp manager, over to the clinic to raise a glass and catch up on gossip.

Over the course of the evening, the conversation drifted to the inherent risks of climbing-and

guiding-Everest, and Litch remembers the discussion with chilling clarity: Hall, Harris, and Litch

were in complete agreement that sooner or later a major disaster involving a large number of

clients was "inevitable." But, said Litch-who had climbed Everest from Tibet the previous spring-

"Rob's feeling was that it wouldn't be him; he was just worried about 'having to save another

team's ass,' and that when the unavoidable calamity struck, he was 'sure it would occur on the

more dangerous north side' " of the peak-the Tibetan side. On Saturday, April 6, a few hours

above Pheriche, we arrived at the lower end of the Khurnbu Glacier, a twelve-mile tongue of ice

that flows down from the south flank of Everest and would serve as our highway-I hoped

mightily-to the summit. At 16,000 feet now, we'd left behind the last trace of green. Twenty

stone monuments stood in a somber row along the crest of the glacier's terminal moraine,

overlookg the mist-filled valley: memorials to climbers who had died on Everest, most of them

Sherpa. From this point forward our world would be a barren, monochromatic expanse of rock

and wind-blown ice. And despite our measured pace I had begun to feel the effects of the

altitude, which left me light-headed and constantly fighting for breath. The trail here remained

buried beneath a head-high winter snowpack in many places. As the snow softened in the

afternoon sun, the hoofs of our yaks punched through the frozen crust, and the beasts wallowed

to their bellies. The grumbling yak drivers thrashed their animals to force them onward and

threatened to turn around. Late in the day we reached a village called Lobuie, and there sought

refuge from the wind in a cramped, spectacularly filthy lodge. A collection of low, tumbledown

buildings huddled against the elements at the edge of the Khurnbu Glacier, Lobuie was a grim

place, crowded with Sherpas and climbers from a dozen different expeditions, German trekkers,

herds of emaciated yaks-all bound for Everest Base Camp, still a day's travel up the valley. The

bottleneck, Rob explained, was due to the unusually late and heavy snowpack, which until just

yesterday had kept any yaks at all from reaching Base Camp, The hamlet's half dozen lodges

were completely full. Tents were jammed side by side on the few patches of muddy earth not

covered with snow. Scores of Rai and Tamang porters from the low foothills dressed in thin rags

and flip-flops, they were working as load bearers for various expeditions-were bivouacked in

caves and under boulders on the surrounding slopes. The three or four stone toilets in the

village were literally overflowing with excrement. The latrines were so abhorrent that most

people, Nepalese and Westerners alike, evacuated their bowels outside on the open ground,

wherever the urge struck. Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible

not to walk in it. The river of snowmelt meandering through the center of the settlement was an

open sewer. The main room of the lodge where we stayed was furnished with wooden bunk

platforms for some thirty people. I found an unoccupied bunk on the upper level, shook as many

fleas and lice as possible from the soiled mattress, and spread out my sleeping bag. Against the

near wall was a small iron stove that supplied heat by burning dried yak dung. After sunset the

temperature dropped well below freezing, and porters flocked in from the cruel night to warm

themselves around the stove. Because dung burns poorly under the best of circumstances, and

especially so in the oxygen-depleted air of 16,200 feet, the lodge filled with dense, acrid smoke,

as if the exhaust from a diesel bus were being piped directly into the room. Twice during the

night, coughing uncontrollably, I had to flee outside for air. By morning my eyes were burning

and bloodshot, my nostrils were clogged with black soot, and I'd developed a dry, persistent

hack that would stay with me until the end of the expedition. Rob had intended for us to spend

just one day acclimatizing in Lobuje before traveling the final six or seven miles to Base Camp,

which our Sherpas had reached some days earlier in order to ready the site for our arrival and

begin establishing a route up the lower slopes of Everest itself. On the evening of April 7,

however a breathless runner arrived in Lobuie with a disturbing message from Base Camp:

Tenzing, a young Sherpa employed by Rob, had fallen 150 feet into a crevasses gaping crack in

the glacier. Four other Sherpas had hauled him out alive, but he was seriously injured, possibly

with a broken femur. Rob, ashen-faced, announced that he and Mike Groom would hurry to Base

Camp at dawn to coordinate Tenzing's rescue. "I regret to have to tell you this," he continued,

"but the rest of you will need to wait here in Lobuje with Harold until we get the situation under

control." Tenzing, we later learned, had been scouting the route above Camp One, climbing a

relatively gentle section of the Khumbu Glacier with four other Sherpas. The five men were

walking single file, which was smart, but they weren't using a rope-a serious violation of

mountaineering protocol. Tenzing was moving closely behind the other four, stepping exactly

where they had stepped, when he broke through a thin veneer of snow spanning a deep

crevasse. Before he even had time to yell, he dropped like a rock into the Cimmerian bowels of

the glacier, At 20,500 feet, the altitude was deemed too high for safe evacuation by helicopter-

the air was too insubstantial to provide much lift for a helicopter's rotors, making landing, taking

off, or merely hovering unreasonably hazardous-so he would have to be carried 3,000 vertical

feet to Base Camp down the Khumbu Icefall, some of the steepest, most treacherous ground on

the entire mountain. Getting Tenzing down alive would require a massive effort. Rob was always

especially concerned about the welfare of the Sherpas who worked for him. Before our group

departed Kathmandu, he had sat all of us down and given us an uncommonly stern lecture about

the need to show our Sherpa staff gratitude and proper respect. "The Sherpas we've hired are

the best in the business," he told us, "They work incredibly hard for not very much money by

Western standards. I want you all to remember we would have absolutely no chance of getting

to the summit of Everest without their help. I'm going to repeat that: Without the support of our

Sherpas none of us has any chance of climbing the mountain." In a subsequent conversation, Rob

confessed that in past years I he'd been critical of some expedition leaders for being carless with

their Sherpa staff. In 1995 a young Sherpa had died on Everest; Hall speculated that the

accident may have occurred because the Sherpa had been "allowed to climb high on the

mountain without proper training. I believe that it's the responsibility of those of us who run

these trips to prevent that sort of thing from happening." The previous year a guided American

expedition had hired a Sherpa named Kami Rita as a cook boy. Strong and ambitious, twenty-

one or twenty-two years old, he lobbied hard to be allowed to work on the upper mountain as a

climbing Sherpa. In appreciation for Kami's enthusiasm and dedication, some weeks later his

wish was granted-despite the fact that he had no climbing experience and had received no

formal training in proper techniques. From 22,000 feet to 25,000 feet the standard route

ascends a sheer, treacherous ice slope known as the Lhotse Face. As a safety measure,

expeditions always attach a series of ropes to this slope from bottom to top, and climbers are

supposed to protect themselves by Clipping a short safety tether to the fixed ropes as they

ascend. Kami, being young and cocky and inexperienced, didn't think it was really necessary to

clip into the rope. One afternoon as he was carrying a load up the Lhotse Face he lost his

purchase on the rock-hard ice and fell more than 2,000 feet to the bottom of the wall. My

teammate Frank Fischbeck had witnessed the whole episode. In 1995 he was making his third

attempt on Everest as a client of the American company that had hired Kami. Frank was

ascending the ropes on the upper Lhotse Face, he said in a troubled voice, "when I looked up

and saw a person tumbling down from above, falling head over heels. He was screaming as he

went past, and left a trail of blood. Some climbers rushed to where Karni came to rest at the

bottom of the face, but he had died from the extensive injuries he'd suffered on the way down.

His body was brought down to Base Camp, where, in the Buddhist tradition, his friends brought

meals to feed the corpse for three days. Then he was carried to a village near Tengboche and

cremated. As the body was consumed by flames, Kami's mother wailed inconsolably and struck

her head with a sharp rock. Kami was very much in Rob's mind at first light on April 8, when he

and Mike hurried toward Base Camp to try and get Tenzing off Everest alive. Passing through

the towering ice pinnacles of Phantom Alley we entered the rock-strewn valley floor at the

bottom of a huge amphitheater ... Here [the Icefall] turned sharply to flow southward as the

Khumhu Glacier We set up our Base Camp at 17,800 feet on the lateral moraine that formed the

outer edge of the turn. Huge boulders lent an air olf solidity to the place, but the rolling rubble

underfoot corrected the misimpression. All that one could see andjeel and hear-of Icefall,

moraine, avalanche, cold-was of a world not intended for human habitation. No waterflowed,

nothing grew-only destruction and decay.... This would be home for the next several months,

until the mountain was climbed. Thomas F. Hornbein Everest: The West Ridge n April 8, just

after dark, Andy's hand-held radio crackled to life outside the lodge in Lobuje. It was Rob, calling

from Base Camp, and he had good news. It had taken a team of thirty-five Sherpas from several

different expeditions the entire day, but they'd gotten Tenzing down. Strapping him to an

aluminum ladder, they managed to lower, drag, and carry him through the Icefall, and he was now

resting from the ordeal at Base Camp. If the weather held, a helicopter would arrive at sunrise

to fly him to a hospital in Kathmandu. With audible relief, Rob gave us the go-ahead to leave

Lobuje in the morning and proceed to Base Camp ourselves. We clients were also immensely

relieved that Tenzing was safe. And we were no less relieved to be getting out of Lobuje. John

and Lou had picked up some kind of virulent intestinal ailment from the unclean surroundings.

Helen, our Base Camp manager, had a grinding altitude-induced headache that wouldn't go away.

And my cough had worsened considerably after a second night in the smoke-filled lodge. For this,

our third night in the village, I decided to escape the noxious smudge by moving into a tent,

pitched just outside, that Rob and Mike had vacated when they went to Base Camp. Andy

elected to move in with me. At 2:00 A.M. I was awakened when he bolted into a sitting position

beside me and began to moan. "Yo, Harold," I inquired from my sleeping bag, "are you O.K.?" "I'm

not sure, actually. Something I ate for dinner doesn't seem to be sitting too well just now." A

moment later Andy desperately pawed the zippered door open and barely managed to thrust

his head and torso outside before vomiting. After the retching subsided, he hunkered

motionless on his hands and knees for several minutes half out of the tent. Then he sprang to his

feet, sprinted a few meters away, yanked his trousers down, and succumbed to a loud attack of

diarrhea. He spent the rest of the night out in the cold, violently discharging the contents of his

gastrointestinal tract. In the morning Andy was weak, dehydrated, and shivering violently. Helen

suggested he remain in Lobuje until he regained some strength, but Andy refused to consider it.

"There's no way in bloody hell I'm spending another night in this shit hole," he announced,

grimacing, with his head between his knees. "I'm going on to Base Camp today with the rest of

you. Even if I have to bloody crawl." By 4:00 A.M. we'd 'd packed up and gotten under way.

While the rest of the group moved briskly up the trail, Helen and I stayed behind to walk with

Andy, who had to exert a monumental effort just to put one foot in front of the other. Again and

again he would stop, hunch over his ski poles to collect himself for several minutes, then

summon the energy to struggle onward. The route climbed up and down the unsettled rocks of

the Khumbu Glacier's lateral moraine for several miles, then dropped down onto the glacier

itself. Cinders, coarse gravel, and granite boulders covered much of the ice, but every now and

then the trail would cross a patch of bare glacier-a translucent, frozen medium that glistened like

polished onyx. Meltwater sluiced furiously down innumerable surface and subterranean

channels, creating a ghostly harmonic rumble that resonated through the body of the glacier. In

midafternoon we reached a bizarre procession of freestanding ice pinnacles, the largest nearly

100 feet high, known as Phantom's Alley. Sculpted by the intense solar rays, glowing a

radioactive shadow, the towers reared like giant shark teeth out of the Surface of turquoise, -

who'd been over rounding rubble as far as the eye could see. Helen announced that we were

getting close to our destination. A couple of miles farther, the glacier made a sharp turn to the

east, we plodded to the crest of a long slope, and spread before us was a motley city of nylon

domes. More than three hundred tents, housing as many climbers and Sherpas from fourteen

expeditions, speckled the boulder-strewn ice. It took us twenty minutes to locate our compound

among the sprawling settlement. As we climbed the final rise, Rob strode down to greet us.

"Welcome to Everest Base Camp," he grinned. The altimeter on MY wristwatch read 17,600 feet.

The ad hoc village that would serve as our home for the next six weeks sat at the head of a

natural amphitheater delineated by forbidding mountain walls. The escarpments above camp

were draped with hanging glaciers, from which calved immense ice avalanches that thundered

down at all hours of the day and night. A quarter mile to the east, pinched between the Nuptse

WA and the West Shoulder of Everest, the Kbumbu Icefall spilled through a narrow gap in a

chaos of frozen shards. The amphitheater opened to the southwest, so it was flooded with

sunlight; on clear afternoons when there was no wind it was warm enough to sit comfortably

outside in a T-shirt. But the moment the sun dipped behind the -foot peak immediately west of

Base Camp-the temperature 23,507 conical summit Of Pumori-a Plummeted into the teens.

Retiring to my tent at night, I was serenaded by a madrigal of creaks and percussive cracks, a

reminder that I was lying on a moving river of ice. In striking contrast to the harshness of our

surroundings stood the myriad Creature comforts of the Adventure Consultants camp, home to

fourteen Westerners-the Sberpas referred to us collectively as r

,-and fourteen Sherpas. our mess tent) a cavmembers" or "sahibs the table, was furnished

with an enormous sto ernous canvas structure a stereo system, a library, and solar-powered

electric lights; an adiashower s tent housed a satellite phone and fax. A cent communication a

bucket filled with had been improvised from a rubber hose and water heated by the kitchen

staff. Fresh bread and vegetables arrived every few days on the backs of yaks. Continuing a Raj

-era tradition es , every morning Chhongba and his tablished by expeditions of yore cook boy,

Tending, came to each client's tent to serve us steaming mugs of Sherpa tea in our sleeping bags.

I had heard many stories about how Everest had been turned into a garbage dump by the ever-

increasing hordes, and commercial expeditions were reputed to be the primary culprits-

Although in the 1970s was indeed a big rubbish heap, in recent years it and'80s Base Camp o a

fairly tidy place-certainly the cleanest human had been turned mt ince leaving Namche Bazaar.

And the commercial settlement I'd seen s expeditions actually deserved much of the credit for

the cleanup. Bringing clients back to Everest year after year, the guides had a stake in this that

one-time visitors did not. As part of their expedition in 1990, Rob Hall and Gary Ball

spearheaded an effort that removed five tons of garbage from Base Camp. Hall and some of his

fellow guides also began working with government ministries in Kathmandu to formulate policies

that encouraged climbers to keep the mountain clean. By 1996, in addition to their permit fee,

expeditions were required to post a $4,000 bond that would be refunded only if a

predetermined amount of trash were carried back to Nainche and Kathmandu. Even the barrels

collecting the excrement from our toilets had to be removed and hauled away. Base Camp

bustled like an anthill. In a certain sense, Hall's Adventure Consultants compound served as the

seat of government for the entire Base Camp, because nobody on the mountain commanded

more respect than Hall. Whenever there was a problem-a labor dispute with the Sherpas, a

medical emergency, a climbing critical decision strategy-people trudged over to our mess tent to

seek Hall's advice. And he generously dispensed his accumulated wisdom to the very rivals who

were competing with him for clients, most notably Scott Fischer. Previously, Fischer had

successfully guided one 8,000-meter mountain:* 26,400-foot Broad Peak in the Karakoram

Range of Pakistan, in 1995. He'd also attempted Everest four times and reached the top once, in

1994, but not in the role of a guide. The spring of 1996 marked his first visit to the mountain as

the leader of a commercial expedition; like Hall, Fischer had eight clients in his group. His camp,

distinguished by a huge Starbucks Coffee promotional banner suspended from a house-size

block of granite, was situated just five minutes' walk down the glacier from ours. The sundry men

and women who make careers out of scaling the world's highest peaks constitute a small,

ingrown club. Fischer and Hall were business rivals, but as prominent members of the

highaltitude fraternity their paths frequently crossed, and on a certain level they considered

themselves friends. Fischer and Hall met in the 1980s in the Russian Pamir, and they

subsequently spent considerable time in each other's company in 1989 and 1994 on Everest.

They had firm plans to join forces and attempt Manaslu-a difficult 26,781-foot peak in central

Nepal-immediately after guiding their respective clients up Everest in 1996. The bond between

Fischer and Hall had been cemented back in 1992, when they had bumped into each other on K2,

the world's second-highest mountain. Hall was attempting the peak with his companion and

business partner, Gary Ball; Fischer was climbing with an elite American climber named Ed

Viesturs. On their way down from the summit in a howling storm, Fischer, Viesturs, and a third

American, Charlie Mace, encountered Hall struggling to cope with a barely conscious Ball, who

had been stricken with a life-threatening case of altitude sickness and was unable to move under

his own power. There are fourteen so-called 8,000-meter peaks: mountains that stand more

than 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) above sea level. Although it is a somewhat arbitrary designation,

mountaineers have always attached special prestige to ascents of 8,000-meter peaks. The first

person to climb all fourteen of them was Reinhold Messner, in 1986. To date, only four other

climbers have repeated the feat. Fischer, Viesturs, and Mace helped drag Ball down the

avalanche swept lower slopes of the mountain through the blizzard, saving his life. (A year later

Ball would die of a similar ailment on the slopes of Dhaulagiri.)

Fischer, forty, was a strapping, gregarious man with a blond pony tail and a surfeit of manic

energy. As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in ew Jersey, he had chanced upon a television

program Basking Ridge, about mountaineering and was enthralled. The next summer he traveled

to Wyoming and enrolled in an outward Bound-style wilderness course run by the National

Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). As soon as he graduated from high school he moved west

at found seasonal employment as a NOLS instructor, Climbing became the center of his cosmos,

and he never looked back. When fischer was eighteen and working at NOLS, he fell in love with

a student in his course named jean Price. They were married seven years later, settled in Seattle,

and had two children, Andy and Katie Rose (who were nine and five, respectively, when Scott

went to Everest in 1996). Price earned her commercial pilot's license and became a captain for

Alaska Airlines-a prestigious, well-paying career that allowed Fischer to climb full-time. Her

income also permitted Fischer to launch Mountain Madness in 1984.

mirrored

41 If the name of Hall's business, Adventure Consultants, Mountain Madness his

methodical, fastidious approach to climbing, style. By his was an even more accurate reflection

of Scott's personal early twenties, he had developed a reputation for a harrowing, damn the-

torpedoes approach to ascent. Throughout his climbing career, but especially during those early

years, he survived a number of frightening mishaps that by all rights should have killed him.

on at least two occasions while rock climbing-once in crashed into the ground Wyoming,

another time in from more than 80 feet up. While working as a junior instructor on a NOLS

course in the Wind River Range he plunged 70 feet, unroped, to the bottom of a crevasse on the

Dinwoody Glacier. Perhaps his occurred when he was a novice ice most infamous tumble,

though, ence, Fischer had decided to attempt the climber: despite his inexperi all' coveted first

ascent of a difficult frozen cascade called Bridal Veil Falls, in Utah's Provo Canyon. Racing two

expert climbers up the ice, Fischer lost his purchase 100 feet off the deck and Plummeted to the

ground. To the amazement of those who witnessed the incident, he picked ring himself up and

walked away with relatively minor injuries. Due to his long plunge to earth, however, the tubular

pick of an ice tool impaled enough his calf and came out the other side. Men he extracted the

hollow pick it removed a core sample of tissue, leaving a hole in his leg big enough to stick a

pencil through. Fischer saw no reason to waste his limited supply of cash on medical treatment

for such a minor injury, so he climbed for the next six months with an open, suppurating wound.

Fifteen years later he proudly showed me the permanent scar inflicted by that fall: a pair of

shiny, dime-size marks bracketing his Achilles tendon. "Scott would push himself beyond any

physical limitation recalls Don Peterson, a renowned American climber who met Fischer soon

after his slip from Bridal Veil Falls. Peterson became something of a mentor to Fischer and

climbed with him intermittently over the next two decades. "His will was astonishing. It didn't

matter how much pain he was in-he would ignore it and keep going. He wasn't the kind of guy

who would turn around because he had a sore foot. "Scott had this burning ambition to be a

great climber, to be one of the best in the world. I remember at the NOLS headquarters there

was a crude sort of gym. Scott would go into that room and regularly work out so hard that he

threw up. Regularly. One doesn't meet many people with that kind of drive." People were

drawn to Fischer's energy and generosity, his absence of guile, his almost childlike enthusiasm.

Raw and emotional, disinclined toward introspection, he had the kind of gregarious, magnetic

personality that instantly won him friends for life; hundreds of individuals-including some he'd

met just once or twice-considered him a bosom buddy. He was also strikingly handsome with a

bodybuilder's physique and the chiseled features of a movie star. Among those attracted to him

were not a few members of the opposite sex, and he wasn't immune to the attention. A man of

rampant appetites, Fischer smoked a lot of cannabis (although not while working) and drank

more than was healthy. A back room at the Mountain Madness office functioned as a sort of

secret clubhouse for Scott: after putting his kids to bed he liked to retire there with his pals to

pass around a pipe and look at slides of their brave deeds on the heights. During the 1980s

Fischer made a number of impressive ascents hid that earned him a modicum of local renown,

but celebrity in the world climbing community eluded him. Despite his concerted efforts, he was

unable to land a lucrative commercial sponsorship of the sort enjoyed by some of his more

famous peers. He worried that some of these top climbers didn't respect him. "Recognition was

important to Scott," says Jane Bromet) his publicist, confidante, and frequent climbing partner,

who accompanied the Mountain Madness expedition to Base Camp to file Internet reports for

Outside

Online. "He ached for it. He had a vulnerable side that most people didn't see; it really

bothered him that he wasn't more widely respected as a butt-kicking climber. He felt slighted,

and it hurt. By the time Fischer left for Nepal in the spring of 1996, he'd begun to garner more of

the recognition that he thought was his due. Much of it came in the wake of his 1994 ascent of

Everest, accomplished without supplemental oxygen. Christened the Sagarmatha Environmental

Expedition, Fischer's team removed 5,000 pounds of trash from the mountain-which was very

good for the landscape and turned out to be even better public relations. In January 1996,

Fischer led a high-profile fund-raising ascent of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, that

netted half a million dollars for the charity CARE. Thanks largely to the 1994 Everest clean-up

expedition and this latter charity climb, by the time Fischer left for Everest in 1996 he had been

featured prominently and often in the Seattle news media, and his climbing career was soaring.

journalists inevitably asked Fischer about the risks associated with the kind of climbing he

did and wondered how he reconciled it with being a husband and father. Fischer answered that

he now took far fewer chances than he had during his reckless youth-that he had become a

much more careful, more conservative climber. Shortly before leaving for Everest in 1996, he

told Seattle writer Bruce Barcott, "I believe 100 percent I'm coming back.... My wife believes 100

percent I'm coming back. She isn't concerned about me at all when I'm guiding When accidents

happen because I'm gonna make all the right choices, I think it's always human error. So that's

what I want to eliminate. I've had lots of climbing accidents in my youth. You come up with lots

of reasons, but ultimately it's human error." s assurances no career was Fischer' twithstanding,

his peripatetic alpine rough on his family. He was crazy about his kids, and when he was in

Seattle he was an unusually attentive father, but climbing regularly took him away from home for

months at a time. He'd been absent for seven of his son's nine birthdays. In fact, say his friends,

by the time he departed for Everest in 1996, Fischer's marriage had been seriously strained, a

situation that was exacerbated by his financial dependence on his wife. Like most of its rivals,

Mountain Madness was a fiscally marginal enterprise and had been since its inception: in 1995

Fischer took home only about $12,000. But things were finally starting to look more promising,

thanks to Fischer's growing celebrity and to the efforts of his business partner-cum-office

manager, Karen Dickinson, whose organizational skills and levelheadedness compensated for

Fischer's seat-of-the-pants, what-me-worry modus operandi. Taking note of Rob Hall's success in

guiding Everest-and the large fees he was able to command as a consequence-Fischer decided it

was time for him to enter the Everest market. If he could emulate Hall, it would quickly catapult

Mountain Madness to profitability. The money itself didn't seem terribly important to Fischer.

He cared little for material things, but he hungered for respect-from his family, from his peers,

from society at large-and he knew that in our culture money is the principal gauge of success. A

few weeks after Fischer returned victorious from Everest in 1994, I encountered him in Seattle. I

didn't know him well, but we had some friends in common and often ran into each other at the

crags or at climbers' parties. On this occasion he buttonholed me to talk about the guided

Everest expedition he was planning: I should come along, he cajoled, and write an article about

the climb for

Outside

. When I replied that it would be crazy for someone with my limited high-

altitude experience to attempt Everest, he said, "Hey, experience is overrated. It's not the

altitude that's important, it's your attitude, bro. You'll do fine. You've done some pretty sticky

climbs-stuff that's way harder than Everest. We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally

wired. These days, I'm telling you, we've built a yellow brick road to the summit. Scott had

piqued my interest-more, even, than he probably realized-and he was relentless. He talked up

Everest every time he saw me and repeatedly harangued Brad Wetzler, an editor at

Outside

about the idea. By January 1996, thanks in no small part to Fischer's concerted lobbying, the

magazine made a firm commitment to send me to Everest-probably, Wetzler indicated, as a

member of Fischer's expedition. In Scott's mind it was a done deal. A month before my

scheduled departure, however, I got a call from Wetzler saying there'd been a change in plans:

Rob Hall had offered the magazine a significantly better deal, so Wetzler proposed that I join the

Adventure Consultants expedition instead of Fischer's. I knew and liked Fischer, and I didn't

know much about Hall at that point, so I was initially reluctant. But after a trusted climbing

buddy confirmed Hall's sterling reputation, I enthusiastically agreed to go to Everest with

Adventure Consultants. One afternoon in Base Camp I asked Hall why he'd been so eager to

have me along. He candidly explained that it wasn't me he was actually interested in, or even the

publicity he hoped my article would generate, particularly. What was so enticing was the bounty

of valuable advertising he would reap from the deal he struck with

Outside

. Hall told me that

according to the terms of this arrangement, he'd agreed to accept only $10,000 of his usual fee

in cash; the balance would be bartered for expensive ad space in the magazine, which targeted

an upscale, adventurous, physically active audience-the core of his client base. And most

important, Hall said, "It' an American audience. Probably eighty or ninety percent of the potential

market for guided expeditions to Everest and the other Seven Summits is in the United States.

After this season, when my mate Scott has established himself as an Everest guide, he'll have a

great advantage over Adventure Consultants simply because he's based in America. To

compete with him we'll have to step up our advertising there significantly. In January, when

Fischer found out that Hall had won me away from his team, he was apoplectic. He called me

from Colorado, as upset as I'd ever heard him, to insist that he wasn't about to concede victory

to Hall. (Like Hall, Fischer didn't bother trying to hide the fact that it wasn't me he was

interested in, but rather the collateral publicity and advertising.) In the end, however, he was

unwilling to match Hall's offer to the magazine. When I arrived in Base Camp as a member of the

Adventure Consultants group, not Fischer' Mountain Madness expedition, Scott didn't appear to

hold a grudge. When I went down to his camp to visit he offered me a mug of coffee, put an arm

around my shoulder, and seemed genuinely happy to see me. Despite the many trappings of

civilization at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea

level. Walking to the mess tent at mealtime left me wheezing for several minutes. If I sat up too

quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. The deep, rasping cough I'd developed in Lobuie

worsened day by day. Sleep became elusive, a common symptom of minor altitude illness. Most

nights I'd wake up three or four times gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating. Cuts and

scrapes refused to heal. My appetite vanished and my digestive system, which required

abundant oxygen to metabolize food, failed to make use of much of what I forced myself to eat;

instead my body began consuming itself for sustenance. My arms and legs gradually began to

wither to sticklike proportions. Some of my teammates fared even worse than I in the meager air

and unhygenic environment. Andy, Mike, Caroline, Lou, Stuart, and John suffered attacks of

gastrointestinal distress that kept them racing to the latrine. Helen and Doug were plagued by

severe headaches. As Doug described it to me, "It feels like somebody's driven a nail between

my eyes." This was Doug's second shot at Everest with Hall. The year before, Rob had forced

him and three other clients to turn back just 330 feet below the top because the hour was late

and the summit ridge was buried beneath a mantle of deep, unstable snow. "The summit looked

sooooo close," Doug recalled with a painful laugh. "Believe me, there hasn't been a day since

that I haven't thought about it." He'd been talked into returning this year by Hall, who felt sorry

that Hansen had been denied the summit and had significantly discounted Hansen's fee to entice

him to give it another try. Among my fellow clients, Doug was the only one who'd climbed

extensively without relying on a professional guide; although he wasn't an elite mountaineer, his

fifteen years of experience made him fully capable of looking after himself on the heights. If

anyone was going to reach the summit from our expedition, I assumed it would be Doug: he was

strong, he was driven, and he had already been very high on Everest. Less than two months shy

of his forty-seventh birthday, divorced for seventeen years, Doug confided to me that he'd been

involved with a succession of women, each of whom eventually left him after growing tired of

competing with the mountains for his attention. A few weeks before leaving for Everest in 1996,

Doug had met another woman while visiting a friend in Tucson, and they'd fallen in love. For a

while they'd sent a flurry of faxes to each other, then several days passed without Doug hearing

from her. "Guess she got smart and blew me off, he sighed, looking despondent. "And she was

really nice, too. I really thought this one might be a keeper." Later that afternoon he approached

my tent waving a fresh fax in his hand. "Karen Marie says she's moving to the Seattle area! " he

blurted ecstatically. "Whoa! This could be serious. I better make the summit and get Everest out

of my system before she changes her mind." In addition to corresponding with the new woman in

his life, Doug filled his hours at Base Camp by writing countless postcards to the students of

Sunrise Elementary School, a public institution in Kent, Washington, that had sold T-shirts to

help fund his climb. He showed me many of the cards: "Some people have big dreams, some

people have small dreams," he penned to a girl named Vanessa, "Whatever you have, the

important thing is that you never stop dreaming. Doug spent even more time writing faxes to his

two grown kidsAngie, nineteen, and, Jaime, twenty-seven-whom he'd raised as a single father. He

bunked in the tent next to mine, and every time a fax would arrive from Angie he'd read it to me,

beaming. "Jeer," he would announce, "how do you suppose a screwup like me could have raised

such a great kid?" For my part, I wrote few postcards or faxes to anybody. Instead, I spent most

of my time in Base Camp brooding about how I'd perform higher on the mountain, especially in

the so-called Death Zone above

25,000 feet. I'd logged considerably more time on technical rock and ice than most of the

other clients and many of the guides. But technical expertise counted for next to nothing on

Everest, and I'd spent less time at high altitude than virtually every other climber present.

Indeed, here at Base Camp-the mere toe of Everest-I was already higher than I'd ever been in

my life. This didn't seem to worry Hall. After seven Everest expeditions, he explained, he'd fine-

tuned a remarkably effective acclimatization Plan that would enable us to adapt to the paucity of

oxygen in the atmosphere. (At Base Camp there was approximately half as much oxygen as at

sea level; at the summit only a third as much.) When confronted with an increase in altitude, the

human body adjusts in manifold ways, from increasing respiration, to changing the pH of the

blood, to radically boosting the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells-a conversion that

takes weeks to complete. Hall insisted, however, that after just three trips above Base Camp,

climbing 2,000 feet higher on the mountain each time, our bodies would adapt sufficiently to

permit safe passage to the 29,028-foot summit. "It's worked thirty-nine times so far, pal," Hall

assured me with a crooked grin when I confessed my doubts. "And a few of the blokes who've

surnmitted with me were nearly as pathetic as you. The more improbable the situation and the

greater the demands made on [the climher], the more sweetly the hloodflows later in

releasefrom all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness

and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante

of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It's a small scale

model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually he

recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period,

are deadly serious. A. Alvarez The Savage God: A Study of Suicide scending Everest is a long,

tedious process, more like a mammoth construction project than climbing as I'd previously

known it. Counting our Sherpa staff, there were twenty-six people on Hall's team, and keeping

everyone fed, sheltered, and in good health at 17,600 feet, a hundred miles by foot from the

nearest road head, was no mean feat. Hall, however, was a quartermaster nonpareil, and he

relished the challenge. At Base Camp detailing logistical minutiae: menus, spare parts, tools,

medicines, communications hard ware, load-hauling schedules, yak availability. A natural-born

engineer, Rob loved infrastructure, electronics, and gadgets of all kinds; he spent his spare time

endlessly tinkering with the solar electrical system or reading back issues of Popular Science. In

the tradition of George Leigh Mallory and most other Ever esters, Hall's strategy was to lay siege

to the mountain. Sherpas would progressively establish a series of four camps above Base

Camp--each approximately 2,000 feet higher than the last-by shuttling cumber some loads of

food, cooking fuel, and oxygen from encampment to encampment until the requisite materiel

had been fully stocked at 26,000 feet on the South Col. If all went according to Hall's grand plan,

our summit assault would be launched from this highest campCamp Four-a month hence. Even

though we clients wouldn't be asked to share in the load hauling, we would need to make

repeated forays above Base Camp before the summit push in order to acclimatize. Rob

announced that on April 13, acclimatization sorties would occur the first of these was a one-day

round-trip to Camp One, perched on the uppermost brow of the Khumbu Icefall, a vertical half

mile above. We spent the afternoon of April 12, my forty-second birthday, preparing our climbing

equipment. The camp resembled an expensive yard sale as we spread our gear among the

boulders to sort clothing, adjust harnesses, rig safety tethers, and fit crampons to our boots (a

crampon is a grid of two-inch steel spikes that is clamped to the sole of each boot for purchase

on ice). I was surprised and concerned to see Beck, Stuart, and Lou unpacking brand-new

mountaineering boots that, by their own admission, had scarcely been worn. I wondered if they

knew the chance they were taking by coming to Everest with untried footwear: two decades

earlier I'd gone on an expedition with new boots and had learned the hard way that heavy, rigid

mountaineering boots can cause debilitating foot injuries before they've been broken in. Stuart,

the young Canadian cardiologist, discovered that his crampons didn't even fit his new boots.

Fortunately, after applying his extensive tool kit and considerable ingenuity to the problem, Rob

managed to rivet together a special strap that made the crampons work. As I loaded my

backpack for the morrow, I learned that between the demands of their families and their high-

powered careers, few of my fellow clients had had the opportunity to go climbing more than

Ever since the first Everest attempts, most expeditions--commercial and noncommercial alike-

have relied on Sherpas to carry the majority of the loads on the mountain. But as clients on a

guided trip, we carried no loads at all beyond a small amount of personal gear, and in this regard

we differed significantly from noncommercial expeditions of yore.

once or twice in the previous year. Although everyone appeared to be in superb physical

shape, circumstances had forced them to do the bulk of their training on StairMasters and

treadmills rather than on actual peaks. This gave me pause. Physical conditioning is a crucial

component of mountaineering, but there are many other equally important elements, none of

which can be practiced in a gym. But maybe I'm just being a snob, I scolded myself. In any case,

it was obvious that all of my teammates were as excited as I was about the prospect of kicking

their crampons into a genuine mountain come the morning. Our route to the summit would

follow the Khumbu Glacier up the lower half of the mountain. From the bergschrund* at 23,000

feet that marked its upper end, this great river of ice flowed two and a half miles down a

relatively gentle valley called the Western Cum. As the glacier inched over humps and dips in

the Cum's underlying strata, it fractured into countless vertical fissures-crevasses. Some of

these crevasses were narrow enough to step across; others were eighty feet wide, several

hundred feet deep, and ran half a mile from end to end. The big ones were apt to be vexing

obstacles to our ascent, and when hidden beneath a crust of snow they would pose a serious

hazard, but the challenges presented by the crevasses in the Cum had proven over the years to

be predictable and manageable. The Icefall was a different story. No part of the South Col route

was feared more by climbers. At around 20,000 feet, where the glacier emerged from the lower

end of the Cum, it pitched abruptly over a precipitous dro . This was the infamous Khumbu

Icefall, the most technically demanding section on the entire route. The movement of the glacier

in the Icefall has been measured at between three and four feet a day. As it skids down the

steep, irregular terrain in fits and starts, the mass of ice splinters into a jumble of huge, tottering

blocks called seracs, some as large as office buildings. A bergschrund is a deep slit that

delineates a glacier's upper terminus; it forms a steep body of ice slides away from the steeper

wall immediately above, leaving a gap between glacier and rock. Because the climbing route

wove under, around, and between hundreds of these unstable towers, each trip through the

Icefall was a little like playing a round of Russian roulette: sooner or later, on any given day, you

knew a serac was going to fall over without warning, and you could only hope you weren't

beneath it when it toppled. Since 1963, when a teammate of Hornbein and Unsoeld's named

Jake Breitenbach was crushed by an avalanching serac to become the Icefall's first victim,

eighteen other climbers had died here. The previous winter, as he had done in winters past, Hall

had consulted with the leaders of all the expeditions planning to climb Everest in the spring, and

together they'd agreed on one team among them who would be responsible for establishing and

maintaining a route through the Icefall. For its trouble, the designated team was to be paid

$2,200 from each of the other expeditions on the mountain. In recent years this cooperative

approach had been met with wide, if not universal, acceptance, but it wasn't always so. The first

time one expedition thought to charge another to travel through the ice was in 1988, when a

lavishly funded American team announced that any expedition that intended to follow the route

they'd engineered up the Icefall would have to fork over $2,000. Some of the other teams on

the mountain that year, failing to understand that Everest was no longer merely a mountain but a

commodity as well, were incensed And the greatest hue and cry came from Rob Hall, who was

leading a small, impecunious New Zealand team. Hall carped that the Americans were "violating

the spirit of the hills" and practicing a shameful form of alpine extortion, but Jim Frush, the

unsentimental attorney who was the leader of the American group , remained unmoved. Hall

eventually agreed through clenched teeth to send Frush a check and was granted passage

through the Icefall. (Frush later reported that Hall never made good on his IOU.)

Within two years, however, Hall did an about-face and came to see the logic of treating the

Icefall as a toll road. Indeed, from 1993 through '95 he volunteered to put in the route and

collect the toll himself. In the spring of 1996 he elected not to assume responsibility for the

Icefall, but he was happy to pay the leader of a rival commercial * expeditions Scottish Everest

veteran named Mal Duff-to take over the job. Long before we'd even arrived at Base Camp, a

team of Sherpas employed by Duff had blazed a zigzag path through the seracs, stringing out

more than a mile of rope and installing some sixty aluminum ladders over the broken surface of

the glacier. The ladders belonged to an enterprising Sherpa from the village of Gorak Shep who

turned a nice profit by renting them out each season. So it came to pass that at 4:45 A.M. on

Saturday, April 13, I found myself at the foot of the fabled Icefall, strapping on my crampons in

the frigid predawn gloom. Crusty old alpinists who've survived a lifetime of close scrapes like to

counsel young professionals that staying alive hinges on listening carefully to one's inner voice.

Tales abound of one or another climber who decided to remain in his or her sleeping bag after

detecting some inauspicious vibe in the ether and thereby survived a catastrophe that wiped out

others who failed to heed the portents. I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to

subconscious cues. As I waited for Rob to lead the way, the ice underfoot emitted a series of

loud cracking noises, like small trees being snapped in two, and I felt myself wince with each pop

and rumble from the glacier's shifting depths. Problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken

Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my

climbing boots. I therefore did my damnedest to ignore my histrionic imagination and grimly

followed Rob into the eerie blue labyrinth, Although I'd never been in an icefall as frightening as

the Khumbu, I'd climbed many other icefalls. They typically have vertical or even overhanging

passages that demand considerable expertise with ice ax and crampons. There was certainly no

lack of steep ice in Although I use 'commercial to denote any expedition organized as a money-

making venture, not all commercial expeditions are guided. For instance, Mal Duff-who charged

his clients considerably less than the $65,000 fee requested by Hall and Fischer-provided

leadership and the essential infrastructure necessary to climb Everest (food, tents, bottled

oxygen, fixed ropes, Sherpa support staff, and so on) but did not Purport to act as a guide; the

climbers or' his team were assumed to be sufficiently skilled to get themselves safely up Everest

and back down again.

the Khumbu Icefall, but all of it had been rigged with ladders or ropes or both, rendering

the conventional tools and techniques of ice climbing largely superfluous. I soon learned that on

Everest not even the rope-the quintessential climber's accoutrement-was to be utilized in the

time-honored manner. Ordinarily, one climber is tied to one or two partners with a 150-foot

length of rope, making each person directly responsible for the life of the others; roping up in

this fashion is a serious and very intimate act. In the Icefall, though, expediency dictated that

each of us climb independently, without being physically connected to one another in any way.

Mal Duff's Sherpas had anchored a static line of rope that extended from the bottom of the

Icefall to its top. Attached to my waist was a three-foot-long safety tether with a carabiner, or

snap-link, attached to myself to a teammate at the distal end. Security was achieved not by

roping in my safety tether to the fixed line and sliding it up but rather by clipping in the rope as I

ascended. Climbing in this fashion, we would be able to move as quickly as possible through the

most dangerous parts of the Icefall, and we wouldn't have to entrust our lives to teammates

whose skill and experience were unknown. As it turned out, not once during the entire

expedition would I ever have reason to rope myself to another climber. If the Icefall required

few orthodox climbing techniques, it demanded a whole new repertoire of skills in their stead-

for instance, the ability to tiptoe in mountaineering boots and crampons across three wobbly

ladders lashed end to end, bridging a sphincter-clenching chasm. There were many such

crossings, and I never got used to them. At one point I was balanced on an unsteady ladder in

the predawn gloaming, stepping tenuously from one bent rung to the next, when the ice

supporting the ladder on either end began to quiver as if an earthquake had struck. A moment

later came an explosive roar and a large serac somewhere close above came crashing down. I

froze, my heart in my throat, but the avalanching ice passed fifty yards to the left, out of sight,

without doing any damage. After waiting a few minutes to regain my composure I resumed my

herky-jerky passage to the far side of the ladder. The glacier's continual and often violent state

of flux added an element of uncertainty to every ladder crossing. As the glacier moved,

crevasses would sometimes compress, buckling ladders like toothpicks; other times a crevasse

might expand, leaving a ladder dangling in the air, only tenuously supported, with neither end

mounted on solid ice. Anchors* securing the ladders and lines routinely melted out when the

afternoon sun warmed the surrounding ice and snow. Despite daily maintenance, there was a

very real danger that any given rope might Pull loose under body weight.

a surprising all But if the Icefall was strenuous and terrifying, it had lure as well. As dawn

washed the darkness from the sky, the shattered glacier was revealed to be a three-dimensional

landscape of phantasmal beauty. The temperature was six degrees Fahrenheit. My crampons

crunched reassuringly into the glacier's rind. Following the fixed line, I Meandered through a

vertical maze of crystalline blue stalagmites. Sheer rock buttresses seamed with ice pressed in

from both edges of the glacier, rising like the shoulders of a malevolent god. Absorbed by my

surroundings and the gravity of the labor, I lost myself in the unfettered pleasures of ascent, and

for an hour or two actually forgot to be afraid. Three-quarters of the way to Camp One, Hall

remarked at a rest stop that the Icefall was in better shape than he'd ever seen it: "The route's a

bloody freeway this season." But only slightly higher, at 19,000 feet, the ropes brought us to the

base of a gargantuan, perilously balanced serac. As massive as a twelve-story building, it loomed

over our heads, leaning 30 degrees past vertical. The route followed a natural catwalk that

angled sharply up the overhanging face: we would have to climb up and over the entire off-kilter

tower to escape its threatening tonnage. Safety, I understood, hinged on speed. I huffed toward

the relative security of the serac's crest with all the haste I could muster, but Three-foot long

aluminum stakes called pickets were used to anchor ropes and ladders to snow slopes; when the

terrain was hard glacial ice, 'ice screws' were employed: hollow, threaded tubes about ten inches

long that were twisted into the frozen glacier.

7 Q

since I wasn't acclimatized my fastest pace was no better than a crawl. Every four or five

steps I'd have to stop, lean against the rope, and suck desperately at the thin, bitter air, searing

my lungs in the process. I reached the top of the serac without it collapsing and flopped

breathless onto its flat summit, my heart pounding like a jackhammer. A little later, around 8:30

A.M.) I arrived at the top of the Icefall itself. The safety of Camp One, just beyond the last of

the seracs, didn't supply much peace of mind, however: I couldn't stop thinking about the

ominously tilted slab a short distance below, and the fact that I would have to pass beneath its

faltering bulk at least seven more times if I was going to make it to the summit of Everest.

Climbers who snidely denigrate this as the Yak Route, I decided, had obviously never been

through the Khumbu Icefall. Before leaving the tents Rob had explained that we would turn

around at 10:00 A.M. sharp, even if some of us hadn't reached Camp One, in order to return to

Base Camp before the midday sun made the Icefall even more unstable. At the appointed hour

only Rob, Frank Fischbeck, John Taske, Doug Hansen, and I had arrived at Camp One; Yasuko

Namba, Stuart Hutchison, Beck Weathers, and Lou Kasischke, escorted by guides Mike Groom

and Andy Harris, were within 200 vertical feet of the camp when Rob got on the radio and

turned everybody around. For the first time we had seen one another actually climbing and

could better assess the strengths and weaknesses of the people on whom we would each

depend over the coming weeks. Doug and John-at fifty-six, the oldest person on the team-had

both looked solid. But Frank, the gentlemanly, quiet-spoken publisher from Hong Kong, was the

most impressive: demonstrating the savvy he'd acquired over three previous Everest expeditions,

he'd started out slowly but kept moving at the same steady pace; by the top of the Icefall he'd

quietly passed almost everyone, and he never even seemed to be breathing hard. In marked

contrast, Stuart-the youngest and seemingly strongest client on the whole team-had dashed out

of camp at the front of the group, soon exhausted himself, and by the top of the Icefall was in

visible agony at the back of the line. Lou, hampered by a leg muscle he'd injured on the first

morning of the trek to Base Camp, was slow but competent. Beck, and especially Yasuko, on the

other hand, had looked sketchy. Several times both Beck and Yasuko had appeared to be in

danger of falling off a ladder and plummeting into a crevasse, and Yasuko seemed to know next

to nothing about how to use crampons.* Andy, who revealed himself to be a gifted, extremely

patient teacher-and who, as the junior guide, had been assigned to climb with the slowest clients,

at the rear-spent the whole morning coaching her on basic ice-climbing techniques. Whatever

our group's various shortcomings, at the top of the Icefall Rob announced that he was quite

pleased with everyone's performance. "For your first time above Base Camp you've all done

remarkably well," he proclaimed like a proud father. "I think we've got a good strong bunch this

year." It took little more than an hour to descend back to Base Camp. By the time I removed my

crampons to walk the last hundred yards to the tents, the sun felt like it was boring a hole

through the crown of my skull. The full force of the headache struck a few minutes later, as I was

chatting with Helen and Chhongba in the mess tent. I'd never experienced anything like it:

crushing pain between my temples-pain so severe that it was accompanied by shuddering waves

of nausea and made it impossible for me to speak in coherent sentences. Fearing that I'd

suffered some sort of stroke, I staggered away in midconversation, retreated to my sleeping bag,

and pulled my hat over my eyes. The headache had the blinding intensity of a migraine, and I had

no idea what had caused it. I doubted that it was due to the altitude, because it didn't strike

until I'd returned to Base Camp. More likely it was a reaction to the fierce ultraviolet radiation

that had burned my retinas and baked my brain. Whatever had brought it on, the agony was

intense and unrelenting. For the next five hours I lay in my tent Although Yasuko had used

crampons previously during her climbs of Aconcagua, McKinley, Elbrus, and Vinson, none of

these ascents involved much, if any, true ice climbing: the terrain in eachcase consisted primarily

of relatively gentle slopes of snow and/or gravel-Ue scree.

trying to avoid sensory stimuli of any kind. If I opened my eyes, or even just moved them

from side to side behind closed eyelids, I received a withering joh of pain. At sunset, unable to

bear it any longer, I stumbled over to the medical tent to seek advice from Caroline, the

expedition doctor. She gave me a strong analgesic and told me to drink some water, but after a

few swallows I regurgitated the pills, the liquid, and the remnants of lunch. "Hmmm," mused

Caro, observing the vomitus splashed across my boots - "I guess we'll have to try something else."

I was instructed to dissolve a tiny pill under my tongue, which would keep me from vomiting, and

then swallow two codeine pills. An hour later the pain began to fade; nearly weeping with

gratitude I drifted into unconsciousness . I was dozing in my sleeping bag, watching the morning

sun cast shadows across the walls of my tent, when Helen Yelled, "Jon! Telephone! It's Linda!" I

yanked on a pair of sandals, sprinted the fifty yards to the communications tent, and grabbed the

handset as I fought to catch my breath. The entire satellite phone-and-fax apparatus wasn't

much larger than a laptop computer. Calls were expensive-about five dollars a minute-and they

didn't always go through, but the fact that my wife could dial a thirteen-digit number in Seattle

and speak to me on Mount Everest astounded me. Although the call was a great comfort, the

resignation in Linda's voice was unmistakable even from the far side of the globe. "I'm doing

fine," she assured me, "but I wish you were here." Eighteen days earlier she'd broken into tears

when she'd taken me to the plane to Nepal. "Driving home from the airport," she confessed, "I

couldn't stop crying. Saying good-bye to you was one of the saddest things I've ever done. I

guess I knew on some level that you might not be coming back, and it seemed like such a waste.

It seemed so fucking stupid and pointless." We'd been married for fifteen and a half years.

Within a week of first talking about taking the plunge, we'd visited a justice of the peace and

done the deed. I was twenty-six at the time and had recently decided to quit climbing and get

serious about life. When I first met Linda she had been a climber herself-and an exceptionally

gifted one-but she'd given it up after breaking an arm, injuring her back, and subsequently

making a cold appraisal of the inherent risks. Linda would never have considered asking me to

abandon the sport, but the announcement that I intended to quit had reinforced her decision to

marry me. I'd failed to appreciate the grip climbing had on my soul, however, or the purpose it

lent to my otherwise rudderless life. I didn't anticipate the void that would loom in its absence.

Within a year I sneaked my rope out of storage and was back on the rock. By 1984, when I went

to Switzerland to climb a notoriously dangerous alpine wall called the Eiger Nordwand, Linda

and I had advanced to within millimeters of splitting up, and my climbing layat the core of our

troubles. Our relationship remained rocky for two or three years after my failed attempt on the

Eiger, but the marriage somehow survived that rough patch. Linda came to accept my climbing:

she saw that it was a crucial (if perplexing) part of who I was. Mountaineering, she understood,

was an essential expression of some odd immutable aspect of MY personality that I could no

sooner alter than change the color of my eyes. Then, in the midst of this delicate

rapprochement,

Outside

magazine confirmed it was sending me to Everest. At first I pretended

that I'd be going as a journalist more than a climber-that I'd accepted the assignment because

the commercialization of Everest was an interesting subject and the money was pretty good. I

explained to Linda and anyone else who expressed skepticism about my Himalayan

qualifications that I didn't expect to ascend very high on the mountain. "I'll probably climb only a

little way above Base Camp," I insisted. "Just to get a taste of what high altitude is about." This

was bullshit, of course. Given the length of the trip and the time I'd have to spend training for it,

I stood to make a lot more money staying home and taking other writing jobs. I accepted the

assignment because I was in the grip of the Everest mystique. In truth, I wanted to climb the

mountain as badly as I'd ever wanted anything in my life. From the moment I agreed to go to

Nepal my intention was to ascend every bit as high as my unexceptional legs and lungs would

carry me. By the time Linda drove me to the airport she had long since seen through my

prevarications. She sensed the true dimensions of my desire, and it scared her. "If you get

killed," she argued with a mix of despair and anger, "it's not just you who'll pay the price. I'll have

to pay, too, you know, for the rest of my LIFE. Doesn't that matter to you?" "I'm not going to get

killed," I answered. "Don't be melodramatic. But there are men for whom the unattainable has a

special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions andfantasies are strong enough

to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination andfaith are their

strongest weapons. At best vuch men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad... Everest has

attracted its share of men like these. Their mountaineering experience variedfrom none at all to

very slight-certainly none of them had the kind of experience which would make an ascent Of

Everest a reasonable goal. Three things they all had in common:

faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance. Walt Unsworth Everest I grew up

with an ambition and determination without which I would have been a good deal happier I

thought a lot and developed the far-away look of a dreamer, for it was always the distant heights

which fascinated me and drew me to them in spirit. I was not sure what could be accomplished

by means of tenacity and little else, but the target was set high and each rebuff only saw me

more determined to see at least one major dream through to itsfulfillment. Earl Denman Alone

to Everest he slopes of Everest did not lack for dreamers in the spring of

1996; the credentials of many who'd come to climb the mountain were as thin as mine, or

thinner. When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the

formidable challenges of the world's highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as though half the

population at Base Camp was clinically delusional. But perhaps this shouldn't have come as a

surprise. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics,

and others with a shaky hold on reality. In March 1947, a poverty-stricken Canadian engineer

named Earl Denman arrived in Darjeeling and announced his intention to climb Everest, despite

the fact that he had little mountaineering experience and lacked official permission to enter

Tibet. Somehow he managed to convince two Sherpas to accompany him, Ang Dawa and

Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing-the same man who would later make the first ascent of Everest with

Hillary-had immigrated to Darjeeling from Nepal in 1933 as a seventeen-year-old, hoping to be

hired by an expedition departing for the peak that spring under the leadership of an eminent

British mountaineer named Eric Shipton. The eager young Sherpa wasn't chosen that year, but

he remained in India and was hired by Shipton for the 1935 British Everest expedition. By the

time he agreed to go with Denman in 1947, Tenzing had already been on the great mountain

three times. He later conceded that he knew all along Denman's plans were foolhardy, but

Tenzing, too, was powerless to resist the pull of Everest:

"Nothing made sense about it. First, we would probably not even get into Tibet. Second, if

we did get in we would probably be caught, and, as his guides, we, as well as Denman, would be

in serious trouble. Third, I did not for a moment believe that, even if we reached the mountain, a

party such as this would be able to climb it. Fourth, the attempt would be highly dangerous.

Fifth, Denman had the money neither to pay us well nor to guarantee a decent sum to our

dependents in case something happened to us. And so on and so on. Any man in his right mind

would have said no. But I couldn't say no. For in my heart I needed to go, and the pull of

Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth. Ang Dawa and I talked for a few minutes,

and then we made our decision. "Well," I told Den "man, we must try" As the small expedition

marched across Tibet toward Everest, the two Sherpas increasingly came to like and respect the

Canadian. Despite his inexperience, they admired his courage and physical strength. And

Denman, to his credit, was ultimately willing to acknowledge his shortcomings when they arrived

on the slopes of the mountain and reality stared him in the face. Pounded hard by a storm at

22,000 feet, Denman admitted defeat, and the three men turned around, returning safely to

Darjeeling just five weeks after they'd departed. An idealistic, melancholic Englishman named

Maurice Wilson had not been so fortunate when he'd attempted a similarly reckless as cent

thirteen years before Denman. Motivated by a misguided desire to help his fellow man, Wilson

had concluded that climbing Everest would be the perfect way to publicize his belief that the

myriad ills of humankind could be cured through a combination of fasting and faith in the powers

of God. He hatched a scheme to fly a small airplane to Tibet, crash -land it on the flanks of

Everest, and proceed to the summit from there. The fact that he knew absolutely nothing about

either mountaineering or flying didn't strike him as a major impediment. Wilson bought a fabric-

winged Gypsy Moth, christened it Ever Wrest, and learned the rudiments of flying. He next

spent five weeks tramping about the modest hills of Snowdonia and the English Lake District to

learn what he thought he needed to know about climbing. And then, in May 1933 he took off in

his tiny airplane and set a course for Everest by way of Cairo, Tehran, and India. By this time

Wilson had already received considerable coverage in the press. He flew to Purtabpore, India,

but having not received permission from the Nepalese government to fly over Nepal, he sold the

airplane for five hundred pounds and traveled overland to Darjeeling, where he learned that he

had been denied permission to enter Tibet. This didn't faze him, either: in March 1934 he hired

three Sherpas, disguised himself as a Buddhist monk, and, defying the authorities of the Raj,

surreptitiously trekked 300 miles through the forests of Sikkim and the sere Tibetan plateau. By

April 14 he was at the foot of Everest. Hiking up the rock-strewn ice of the East Rongbuk Glacier,

he initially made fair progress, but as his ignorance of glacier travel caught up to him, he

repeatedly lost his way and became frustrated and exhausted. Yet he refused to give up. By

mid-May he had reached the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier at 21,000 feet, where he

plundered a supply of food and equipment cached by Eric Shipton's unsuccessful 1933

expedition. From there Wilson started ascending the slopes leading up to the North Col, getting

as high as 22,700 feet before a vertical ice cliff proved too much for him and he was forced to

retreat back to the site of Shipton's cache. And still he wouldn't quit. On May 28 he wrote in his

diary, "This will be a last effort, and I feel successful," and then headed up the mountain one

more time. One year later, when Shipton returned to Everest, his expedition came across

Wilson's frozen body lying in the snow at the foot of the North Col. "After some discussion we

decided to bury him in a crevasse," wrote Charles Warren, one of the climbers who'd found the

corpse. "We all raised our hats at the time and I think that everyone was rather upset at the

business. I thought I had grown immune to the sight of the dead; but somehow or other, in the

circumstances, and because of the fact that he was, after all, doing much the same as ourselves,

his tragedy seemed to have been brought a little too near home for us." The recent proliferation

on the slopes of Everest of latter -day Wilsons and Dennians-marginally qualified dreamers like

some of my cohorts-is a phenomenon that has provoked strong criticism. But the question of

who belongs on Everest and who doesn't is more complicated than it might first appear. The

fact that a climber has paid a large sum of money to join a guided expedition does not, by itself

mean that he or she is unfit to be on the mountain. Indeed, at least two of the commercial

expeditions on Everest in the spring of 1996 included Himalayan veterans who would be

considered qualified by the most rigorous standards. As I waited at Camp One on April 13 for my

teammates to join me atop the Icefall, a pair of climbers from Scott Fischer's Mountain Madness

team strode past at an impressive clip. One was Klev Schoening, a thirty-eight-year-old Seattle

construction contractor and a former member of the U.S. Ski Team who, although exceptionally

strong, had little previous high-altitude experience. However, with him was his uncle, Pete

Schoening, a living Himalayan legend. Dressed in faded, threadbare GoreTex, a couple of months

shy of his sixty-ninth birthday, Pete was a gangly, slightly stooped man who had returned to the

high reaches of the Himalaya after a long absence. In 1958 he'd made history as the driving force

behind the first ascent of Hidden Peak, a 26,470-foot mountain in the Karakoram Range of

Pakistan-the highest first ascent ever achieved by American climbers. Pete was even more

famous, however, for playing a heroic role in an unsuccessful expedition to K2 in 1953, the same

year Hillary and Tenzing reached the peak of Everest. The eight-man expedition was pinned

down in a ferocious blizzard high on K2, waiting to make an assault on the summit, when a team

member named Art Gilkey developed thrombophlebitis, a lifethreatening altitude-induced blood

clot. Realizing that they would have to get Gilkey down immediately to have any hope of saving

him, Schoening and the others started lowering him down the mountain'

s steep Abruzzi Ridge as the storm raged. At 25,000 feet, a climber named George Bell

slipped and pulled four others off with him. Reflexively wrapping the rope around his shoulders

and ice ax, Schoening somehow managed to single-handedly hold on to Gilkey and

Simultaneously arrest the slide of the five falling climbers without being pulled off the mountain

himself. One of the more incredible feats in the annals of mountaineering, it was known forever

after simply as The Belay.*

Belay is a climbing terrn that denotes the act of securing a rope to safeguard one's

companions as they climb. And now Pete Schoening was being led up Everest by Fischer and his

two guides, Neal Beidleman and Anatoli Boukreev. When I asked Beidleman, a powerful climber

from Colorado) how it felt to be guiding a client of Schoening's stature, he quickly corrected me

with a self-deprecating laugh: "Somebody like me doesn't guide' Pete Schoening anywhere. I just

consider it a great honor to be on the same team as him." Schoening had signed on with Fischer's

Mountain Madness group not because he needed a guide to lead him up the peak but to avoid

the mammoth hassle of arranging for a permit, oxygen, tentage, provisions, Sherpa support, and

other logistical details. A few minutes after Pete and KJev Schoening climbed past enroute to

their own Camp One, their teammate Charlotte Fox appeared. Dynamic and statuesque, thirty-

eight years old, Fox was a ski patroller from Aspen, Colorado, who'd previously summitted two

8,000-meter peaks: Gasherbrum II in Pakistan, at 26,361 feet, and Everest's 26,748-foot neighbor,

Clio Oyu. Later still, I encountered a member of Mal Duff's commercial expedition, a twenty-

eight-year-old Finn named Veikka Gustafsson whose record of previous Hemalayan ascents

included Everest, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, and Lhotse. No client on Hall's team, by comparison, had

ever reached the summit of any 8,000-meter peak. If someone like Pete Schoening was the

equivalent of a major-league baseball star, my fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of

pretty decent small-town softball players who'd bribed their way into the World Series. Yes, at

the top of the Icefall Hall had called us "a good strong bunch." And we actually were strong,

perhaps, relative to groups of clients Hall had ushered up the mountain in past years. It was

clear to me, nevertheless, that none of us in Hall's group had a prayer of climbing Everest

without considerable assistance from Hall, his guides, and his Sherpas. On the other hand, our

group was far more competent than a number of the other teams on the mountain, There were

some climbers Of very dubious ability on a commercial expedition led by an Englishman with

undistinguished Himalayan credentials. But the least qualified people on Everest were not in

fact guided clients at all; rather, they were members of traditionally structured, noncommercial

expeditions. As I was heading back to Base Camp through the lower Icefall, I overtook a pair of

slower climbers outfitted with very strange looking clothing and equipment. It was apparent

almost immediately that they weren't very familiar with the standard tools and techniques of

glacier travel. The climber in back repeatedly snagged his crampons and stumbled. Waiting for

them to cross a yawning crevasse bridged by two rickety ladders spliced end to end, I was

shocked to see them go across together, almost in lockstep-a needlessly dangerous act. An

awkward attempt at conversation on the far side of the crevasse revealed that they were

members of a Taiwanese expedition. The reputations of the Taiwanese preceded them to

Everest. In the spring of 1995, the same team had traveled to Alaska to climb Mount McKinley as

a shakedown for the attempt on Everest in 1996. Nine climbers reached the summit, but seven of

them were caught by a storm on the descent, became disoriented, and spent a night in the open

at 19,400 feet, initiating a costly, hazardous rescue by the National Park Service. Responding to a

request by park rangers, Alex Lowe and Conrad Anker, two of the most skilled alpinists in the

United States, interrupted their own ascent and rushed up from 14,400 feet to aid the

Taiwanese climbers, who were by then barely alive. With great difficulty and considerable risk

to their own lives, Lowe and Anker each dragged a helpless Taiwanese from 19,400 feet down to

17,200 feet, at which point a helicopter was able to evacuate them from the mountain. All told,

five members of the Taiwanese team-two with severe frostbite and one already dead-were

plucked from McKinley by chopper. "Only one guy died," says Anker. "But if Alex and I hadn't

arrived right when we did, two others would have died, too. Earlier, we'd noticed the Taiwanese

group because they looked so incompetent. It wasn't any big surprise when they got into

trouble." The leader of the expedition, Gau Ming-Ho-a jovial freelance photographer who calls

himself "Makalu," after the striking Hemalayan peak of that name-was exhausted and frostbitten

and had to be assisted down the upper mountain by a pair of Alaskan guides. "As the Alaskans

brought him down," Anker reports, "Makalu was yelling 'Victory! victory! We made summit!" to

everyone they passed, as if the disaster hadn't even happened. Yeah, that Makalu dude struck

me as pretty weird." When the survivors of the McKinley debacle showed up on the south side

of Everest in 1996, Makalu Gau was again their leader. The presence of the Taiwanese on

Everest was a matter of grave concern to most of the other expeditions on the mountain. There

was a very real fear that the Taiwanese would suffer a calamity that would compel other

expeditions to come to their aid, risking further lives, to say nothing of jeopardizing the

opportunity for other climbers to reach the summit. But the Taiwanese were by no means the

only group that seemed egregiously unqualified. Camped beside us at Base Camp was a twenty-

five-year-old Norwegian climber named Petter ake a solo ascent of the Neby, who announced

his intention to in Southwest Face,* one of the peak's most dangerous and technically

demanding routes-despite the fact that his Himalayan experience Island Peak, a 20,274-foot was

limited to two ascents of neighboring bump on a subsidiary ridge of Lhotse involving nothing

more technical than vigorous walking. And then there were the South Africans. Sponsored by a

major newspaper, the Johannesburg Sunday Times, their team had inspired effusive national

pride and had received a personal blessing from President Nelson Mandela prior to their

departure. They were the first South African expedition ever to be granted a permit to climb

Everest, a mixed-race group that aspired to put the first black person on the summit. Their

leader was Ian Woodall, thirty-nine, a loquaCious, mouselike man who relished telling anecdotes

about his brave exploits as a military commando behind enemy lines during South Africa's long,

brutal conflict with Angola in the 1980s. Woodall had recruited three of South Africa's strongest

climbers Andy de Klerk, Andy Hackland, and to form the nucleus of his team: Although Neby's

expedition was bi Bedasa's olo" endeavor he had employed eighteen Sherpas to carry his loads,

fix ropes for him, establish his camps, and guide him up the mountain. Edmund February. The

biracial makeup of the team was of special significance to February, forty, a soft-spoken black

paleoecologist and a climber of international renown. "My parents named me after Sir Edmund

Hillary," he explains. "Climbing Everest had been a personal dream of mine ever since I was very

young. But even more significantly, I saw the expedition as a powerful symbol of a young nation

trying to unify itself and move toward democracy, trying to recover from its past. I grew up with

the yoke of apartheid around my neck in many ways, and I am extremely bitter about that. But

we are a new nation now. I firmly believe in the direction my country's taking. To show that we

in South Africa could climb Everest together, black and white on the top-that would be a great

thing." The entire nation rallied behind the expedition. "Woodall proposed the project at a really

fortuitous time," says de Klerk. "With the end of apartheid, South Africans were finally allowed

to travel wherever they wanted, and our sports teams could compete around the world. South

Africa had just won the Rugby World Cup. There was this national euphoria, a great upwelling of

pride, yeah? So when Woodall came along and proposed a South African Everest expedition,

everybody was in favor of it, and he was able to raise a lot of IR money-the equivalent of several

hundred thousand dollars in U.S. currency-without anybody asking a lot of questions." In addition

to himself, the three male climbers, and a British climber and photographer named Bruce Herrod,

Woodall wanted to include a woman on the expedition, so prior to leaving South Africa he

invited six female candidates on a physically grueling but technically undemanding ascent of

19,340-foot Kilimanjaro. At the conclusion of the two-week trial, Woodall announced that he'd

narrowed the field down to two finalists: Cathy O'Dowd, twenty-six, a white journalism instructor

with limited mountaineering experience whose father is the director of Anglo American, the

largest company in South Africa; and Deshun Deysel, twenty-five, a black physical-education

teacher with no previous climbing experience whatsoever who'd grown up in a segregated

township. Both women, said Woodall, would accompany the team to Base Camp and he would

choose one up Everest after evaluating their performance of them to continue during the trek.

amp, On April 1, during the second day of my journey to Base C was surprised to run into

February, Hackland, and de Klerk on the g out of the mountains, bound for ow Namche Bazaar,

walkin trail bel Kathmandu. De Klerk, a friend of mine, informed me that the three South African

climbers and Charlotte Noble, their team's doctor, had resigned from the expedition before

even getting to the base of the in. "Woodall, the leader, turned out to be a complete asshole,"

mounta trol freak. And you couldn't trust explained de Klerk. "A total con him-we never knew if

he was talking bullshit or telling the truth. We didn't want to put our lives in the hands of a guy

like that. So we left." Woodall had made claims to de Klerk and others that he'd in the Himalaya,

including ascents above 26,000 climbed extensively feet. In fact, the whole of Woodall's

Himalayan mountaineering experience consisted of reaching 21,300 feet as a paying client on a

commercial expedition to Annapurna led by Mal Duff in 1990. Additionally, before leaving for

Everest Woodall had boasted on the expedition's Internet website of a distinguished military

career in ks of the British army "to command which he'd risen through the ran connaissance Unit

that did much of the elite Long Range Mountain Re its training in the Himalayas." He'd told the

Sunday Times that he had ilitary Academy at Sandhurst, Enbeen an instructor at the Royal M

gland, as well. As it happens, there is no such thing as a Long Range Mountain Reconnaissance

Unit in the British army) and Woodall Sandhurst. Nor did he ever fight benever served as an

instructor at the British Angola. According to a spokesman for hind enemy lines in Woodall

served as a pay clerk. army, Woodall also lied about whom he'd listed on the Everest climbing

nistry of Tourism. From the beginpermit* issued by the Nepalese NE sel were on rung he'd said

that both Cathy O'Dowd and Deshun Dey only climbers listed on the official permit-at a cost of

slopoo a head-are allowed to ascend above Base Camp. This rule is strictly enforced, and

violators face prohibitive fines and expulsion from Nepal.

M THIN CR

the permit and that the final decision about which woman would be invited to join the

climbing team would be made at Base Camp. After leaving the expedition de Klerk discovered

that O'Dowd was listed on the permit, as well as Woodall's sixty-nine-year-old father and a

Frenchman named Tierry Renard (who'd paid Woodall $35,000 to join the South African team),

but Deshun Deysel-the only black member after the resignation of Ed February-was not. This

suggested to de Klerk that Woodall had never had any intention of letting Deysel climb the

mountain. Adding insult to injury, before leaving South Africa Woodall had cautioned de Klerk-

who is married to an American woman and has dual citizenship-that he would not be allowed on

the expedition unless he agreed to use his South African passport to enter Nepal. "He made a

big fuss about it," recalls de Merk, "because we were the first South African Everest expedition

and all that. But it turns out that Woodall doesn't hold a South African passport himself. He's

not even a South African citizen-the guy's a Brit, and he entered Nepal on his British passport."

Woodall's numerous deceits became an international scandal, reported on the front pages of

newspapers throughout the British Commonwealth. As the negative press filtered back to him,

the megalomaniacal leader turned a cold shoulder to the criticism and insulated his team as

much as possible from the other expeditions. He also banished Sunday Times reporter Ken

Vernon and photographer Richard Shorey from the expedition, even though Woodall had signed

a contract stipulating that in return for receiving financial backing from the newspaper, the two

journalists would be "allowed to accompany the expedition at all times," and that failure to honor

this stipulation "would because for breach of contract. The editor of the Sunday Times, Ken

Owen, was enroute to Base Camp with his wife at the time, midway through a trekking vacation

that had been arranged to coincide with the South African Everest expedition, and was being led

by Woodall's girlfriend, a young Frenchwoman named Alexandrine Gaudin. In Pheriche, Owen

learned that Woodall had given the boot to his reporter and photographer. Flabbergasted, he

sent a note to the expedition leader explaining that the newspaper had no intention of pulling

Vernon and Shorey from the story and that the journalists had been ordered to rejoin the

expedition. When Woodall received this message, he flew into a rage and rushed down to

Pheriche from Base Camp to have it out with Owen. According to Owen, during the ensuing

confrontation he asked Woodall point-blank if Deysel's name was on the permit. Woodall

replied, "That's none of your business." When Owen suggested that Deysel had been reduced to

"serving as a token black woman to give the team a spurious South Africanism," Woodall

threatened to kill both Owen and his wife. At one point the overwrought expedition leader

declared, "I'm going to rip your fucking head off and ram it up your arse." Shortly thereafter,

journalist Ken Vernon arrived at the South African Base Camp-an incident he first reported from

Rob Hall's satellite fax machine-only to be informed "by a grim-faced his. O'Dowd that I was 'not

welcome' at the camp." As Vernon later wrote in the Sunday Times:

I told her she had no right to bar me from a camp my newspaper had paid for. When

pressed further she said she was acting on "instructions" from Mr. Woodall. She said Shorey had

already been thrown out of the camp and I should follow as I would not be given food or shelter

there. My legs were still shaky from the walk and, before deciding whether to fight the edict or

leave, I asked for a cup of tea. "No way," came the reply. his. O'Dowd walked to the team's

Sherpa leader, Ang Dorje, and said audibly: "This is Ken Vernon, one of the told you about. He is

to be given no assistance whatsoever.

ones we Ang Dorje is a tough, nuggety rock of a man and we had already I looked at him

shared several glasses of Chang, the fiery local brew his credit, and in the best tradition of

sherpa hospitality and said, "Not even a cup of tea? To he looked at Ms. O'Dowd and said:

"Bullshit." He grabbed me by the arm, dragged me into the mess tent and served up a mug of

steaming tea and a plate of biscuits. Following what 01well described as his "blood-chilling

exchange" with Woodall in Pheriche, the editor was "persuaded ... that the atmosphere of the

expedition was deranged and that the Sunday Times staffers, Ken Vernon and Richard Shorey,

might be in danger of their lives." Owen therefore instructed Vernon and Shorey to return to

South Africa, and the newspaper published a statement declaring that it had rescinded its

sponsorship of the expedition. Because Woodall had already received the newspaper's money,

however, this act was purely symbolic and had almost no impact on his actions on the mountain.

Indeed, Woodall refused to relinquish leadership of the expedition or make any kind of

compromise, even after he received a letter from President Mandela appealing for reconciliation

as a matter of national interest. Woodall stubbornly insisted that the Everest climb would

proceed as planned, with him firmly at the helm. Back in Cape Town after the expedition fell

apart, February described his disappointment. "Maybe I was naive," he said in a halting voice

freighted with emotion. "But I hated growing up under apartheid. Climbing Everest with Andrew

and the others would have been a great symbol to show the old ways had broken down.

Woodall had no interest in the birth of a new South Africa. He took the dreams of the entire

nation and utilized them for his own selfish purposes. Deciding to leave the expedition was the

hardest decision of my life." With the departure of February, Hackland, and de Klerk, none of the

climbers remaining on the team (aside from the Frenchman Renard, who had joined the

expedition merely to be listed on the permit and who climbed independently from the others,

with his own Sherpas) had more than minimal alpine experience; at least two of them, says de

Merk, "didn't even know how to put their crampons on." The solo Norwegian, the Taiwanese, and

especially the South Africans were frequent topics of discussion in Hall's mess tent. "With so

many incompetent people on the mountain," Rob said with a frown one evening in late April, "I

think it's pretty unlikely that we'll get through this season without something bad happening up

high." I doubt if anyone would claim to enjoy life at high altitudes-enjoy, that is, in the ordinary

sense of the word. There is a certain grim satis faction to be derived from struggling upwards,

however slowly; but the bulk of one's time is necessarily spent in the extreme squalor of a high

camp, when even this solace is lacking. Smoking is impossible;

eating tends to make one vomit; the necessity of reducing weight to a bare minimum

forbids the importation of literature beyond that supplied by the labels on tins of food; sardine

oil, condensed milk and treacle spill themselves all over the place; except for the briefest

moments, during which one is not usually in a moodfor aesthetic enjoyment, there is nothing to

look at but the bleak confusion inside the tent and the scaly, bearded countenance of one's

companion-fortunately the noise of the wind usually drowns out his stuffy breathing;

worst of all is the feeling of complete helplessness and inability to deal with any emergency

that might arise. I used to try to console myself with the thought that a year ago I would have

been thrilled by the very idea of taking part in our present adventure, a prospect that had then

seemed like an impossible dream; but altitude has the same effect on the mind as upon the body,

one's intellect becomes dull and unresponsive, and my only desire was to finish the wretchedjoh

and to get down to a more reasonable clime. Eric Shipton Upon That Mountain just before dawn

on Tuesday, April 16, after resting for two days at Base Camp, we headed up into the Icefall to

begin our second acclimatization excursion. As I nervously threaded my way through the frozen,

groaning disorder, I noticed that my breathing wasn't quite as labored as it had been during our

first trip up the glacier; already my body was starting to adapt to the altitude. My dread of

getting crushed by a falling serac, however, was at least as great as before. I'd hoped that the

giant, overhanging tower at 19,000 feet-christened the Mousetrap by some wag on Fischer's

team-had toppled by now, but it was still precariously upright, leaning even farther over. Again I

redlined my cardiovascular output rushing to ascend from its threatening shadow, and again

dropped to my knees when I arrived on the serac's summit, gasping for air and trembling from

the excess of adrenaline fizzing through my veins. Unlike our first acclimatization sally, during

which we stayed at Camp One for less than an hour before returning to Base Camp, Rob

intended for us to spend Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Camp One and then continue up to

Camp Two for three additional nights before heading down. At 9:00 A.M when I reached the

Camp One site, Ang Dorje,* our climbing sirdart was excavating platforms for our tents in the

hardfrozen snow slope. Twenty-nine years old, he is a slender man with delicate features, a shy,

moody temperament, and astounding physical strength. While waiting for my teammates to

arrive, I picked up a spare shovel and started helping him dig. Within minutes I was exhausted

from the effort and had to sit down to rest, prompting a belly laugh from the Sherpa. "Are you

not feeling good, Jon?" he mocked. "This is only Camp One, six thousand meters. The air here is

still very thick." Ang Dorje hailed from Pangboche, an aggregation of stonewalled houses and

terraced potato fields clinging to a rugged hillside at 13,000 feet. His father is a respected

climbing Sherpa who taught He should not be confused with the Sherpa on the South African

team who has the same -like Pemba, Lhakpa, Ang Tshering, Ngawang, Dawa, Nima, and Pasang-is

name. Ang Dorje a very common Sherpa appellation; the fact that each of these names was

shared by two or more Sherpas on Everest in 1996 was a source of occasional confusion. The

sirdar is the head Sherpa. Hall's team had a Base Camp sirdar named AngTshering who was in

charge of all the Sherpas employed by the expedition; Ang Dorje, the climbing sirdar, answered

to Ang Tshering but supervised the climbing Sherpas while they were on the mountain above

Base Camp.

him the basics of mountaineering at an early age so that the boy would have marketable

skills. By the time Ang Dorje was in his teens, his father had gone blind from cataracts, and Ang

Dorje was pulled from school to earn money for the family. In 1984 he was working as a cook boy

for a group of Western trekkers when he caught the attention of a Canadian couple, Marion

Boyd and Graem Nelson. According to Boyd, "I was missing my kids, and as I grew to know Ang

Dorje he reminded me of my eldest son. Ang Dorje was bright, interested, keen to learn, and

conscientious almost to a fault. He was carrying a huge load and he had nose bleeds every day

at high altitude. I was intrigued." After seeking the approval of Ang Dorje's mother, Boyd and

Nelson started supporting the young Sherpa financially so that he could return to school. "I will

never forget his entry exam [to gain admission to the regional primary school in Khumjung, built

by Sir Edmund Hillary]. He was very small in stature and prepubescent. We were crammed into

a small room with the headmaster and four teachers. Ang Dorje stood in the middle with his

knees quaking as he tried to resurrect the bit of formal learning he had for this oral exam. We all

sweated blood ... but he was accepted with the proviso that he would have to sit with the little

kids in the first grades." Ang Dorje became an able student and achieved the equivalent of an

eighth-grade education before quitting to go back to work in the mountaineering and trekking

industry. Boyd and Nelson, who returned to the Khumbu several times, witnessed his

maturation. "With access for the first time to a good diet, he began to grow tall and strong,"

recalls Boyd. "He told us with great excitement when he learned to swim in a pool in Kathmandu.

At age twenty-five or so he learned to ride a bicycle and took a brief fancy to the music of

Madonna. We knew he was really grown up when he presented us with his first gift, a carefully

selected Tibetan carpet. He wanted to be a giver, not a taker." As Ang Dorje's reputation for

being a strong and resourceful climber spread among Western climbers, he was promoted to the

role of sirdar, and in 1992 he went to work for Rob Hall on Everest; by the launch of Hall's 1996

expedition, Ang Dorje had climbed the peak three times. With respect and obvious affection,

Hall referred to him as "my main man" and mentioned several times that he considered Ang

Dorje's role crucial to the success of our expedition. The sun was bright when the last of my

teammates pulled into Camp One, but by noon a scum of high cirrus had blown in from the

south; by three o'clock dense clouds swirled above the glacier and snow pelted the tents with a

furious clamor. It stormed through the night; in the morning when I crawled out of the shelter I

shared with Doug, more than a foot of fresh snow blanketed the glacier. Dozens of avalanches

rumbled down the steep walls above, but our camp was safely beyond their reach. At first light

on Thursday, April 18, by which time the sky had cleared, we gathered our belongings and

embarked for Camp Two, four miles and 1,700 vertical feet above. The route took us up the

gently sloping floor of the Western Cum, the highest box canyon on earth, a horseshoe-shaped

defile gouged from the heart of the Everest massif by the Khumbu Glacier. The 25,790-foot

ramparts of Nuptse defined the right wall of the Cum, Everest's massive Southwest Face formed

the left wall, and the broad frozen thrust of the Lhotse Face loomed above its head. The

temperature had been brutally cold when we set out from Camp one, turning my hands into stiff,

aching claws, but as the first of the sun's rays struck the glacier, the ice-spackled walls of the

Cum collected and amplified the radiant heat like a huge solar oven. Suddenly I was sweltering,

and I feared the onset of another migraineintensity headache like the one that had hammered

me at Base Camp, so I stripped down to my long underwear and stuffed a fistful of snow

beneath my baseball cap. For the next three hours I slogged steadily up the glacier, pausing only

to drink from my water bottle and replenish the snow supply in my hat as it melted into my

matted hair. At 21,000 feet, dizzy from the heat, I came upon a large object wrapped in blue

plastic sheeting beside the trail. It took my altitude-impaired gray matter a minute or two to

comprehend that the object was a human body. Shocked and disturbed, I stared at it for several

minutes. That night when I asked Rob about it he said he wasn't certain, but he thought the

victim was a Sherpa who'd died three years earlier. At 21,300 feet, Camp Two consisted of some

120 tents scattered across the bare rocks of the lateral moraine along the glacier's edge. The

altitude here manifested itself as a malicious force, making me Too feel as though I were afflicted

with a raging red-wine hangover.

miserable to eat or even read, for the next two days I mostly lay in my tent with my head in

my hands, trying to exert myself as little as possible. Feeling slightly better on Saturday, I

climbed a thousand feet above camp to get some exercise and accelerate my acclimatization,

and there, at the head of the Cum, fifty yards off the main track, I came upon another body in

the snow, or more accurately the lower half of a body. The style of the clothing and the vintage

leather boots suggested that the victim was European and that the corpse had lain on the

mountain at least ten or fifteen years. The first body had left me badly shaken for several hours;

the shock of encountering the second wore off almost immediately. Few of the climbers

trudging by had given either corpse more than a passing glance. It was as if there were an

unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren't real-as

if none of us dared to acknowled e what was at stake here. On Monday, April 22, a day after

returning from Camp Two to Base Camp, Andy Harris and I hiked over to the South African

compound to meet their team and try to gain some insight into why they had become such

pariahs. Fifteen minutes down the glacier from our tents, their camp was clustered atop a hump

of glacial debris. The national flags of Nepal and South Africa, along with banners from Kodak,

Apple Computer, and other sponsors, flew from a pair of tall aluminum flagpoles. Andy stuck his

head inside the door of their mess tent, flashed his most winning smile, and inquired, "FE, there.

Is anybody home?" It turned out that Ian Woodall, Cathy O'Dowd, and Bruce Herrod were in the

Icefall, making their way down from Camp Two, but Woodall's girlfriend, Alexandrine Gaudin,

was present, as was his brother, Philip. Also in the mess tent was an effervescent young woman

who introduced herself as Deshun Deysel and immediately invited Andy and me in for tea. The

three teammates seemed unconcerned by the reports of Ian's reprehensible behavior and

rumors redicting their expedition's imminent disintegration. "I went ice climbing for the first time

the other day," Deysel offered enthusiastically, gesturing toward a nearby serac where climbers

from several expeditions had been practicing their ice craft. "I thought it was quite exciting. I

hope to go up the Icefall in a few days." I'd intended to ask her about Ian's dishonesty and how

she felt when she learned she'd been left off the Everest permit, but she was so cheerful and

ingenuous that I didn't have the stomach for it. After chatting for twenty minutes Andy

extended an invitation to their whole team, including Ian, to come 'round our camp for a wee

snort" later that evening. I arrived back at our own camp to find Rob, Dr. Caroline Mackenzie,

and Scott Fischer's doctor, Ingrid Hunt, engaged in a tense radio conversation with someone

higher on the mountain. Earlier in the day, Fischer was descending from Camp Two to Base

Camp when he encountered one of his Sherpas, Ngawang Topche, sitting on the glacier 41 at

21,000 feet. A veteran thirty-eight-year-old climber from the Rolwaling Valley, gap-toothed and

sweet-natured, Ngawang had been hauling loads and performing other duties above Base Camp

for three days, but his Sherpa cohorts complained that he had been sitting around a lot and not

doing his share of the work. When Fischer questioned Ngawang, he admitted that he'd been

feeling weak, groggy, and short of breath for more than two days, so Fischer directed him to

descend to Base Camp immediately. But there is an element of machismo in the Sherpa culture

that makes many men extremely reluctant to acknowledge physical infirmities. Sherpas aren't

supposed to get altitude illness, especially those from Rolwaling, a region famous for its powerful

climbers. Those who do become sick and openly acknowledge it, moreover will often be

blacklisted from future employment on expeditions. Thus it came to pass that Ngawang ignored

Scott's instructions and, instead of going down, went up to Camp Two to spend the night. By the

time he arrived at the tents late that afternoon Ngawang was delirious, stumbling like a drunk,

and coughing up pink, bloodlaced froth: symptoms indicating an advanced case of High Altitude

Pulmonary Edema, or HAPE-a mysterious, potentially lethal illness typically brought on by

climbing too high, too fast in which the lungs fill with fluid.* The only real cure for HAPE is rapid

descent; if the victim remains at high altitude very long, death is the most likely outcome. Unlike

Hall, who insisted that our group stay together while climbing above Base Camp, under the close

watch of the guides, Fischer believed in giving his clients free rein to go up and down the

mountain independently during the acclimatization period. As a consequence, when it was

recognized that Ngawang was seriously ill at Camp Two, four of Fischer's clients were present-

Dale Kruse, Pete Schoening, KJev Schoening, and Tim Madsen-but no guides. Responsibility for

initiating Ngawang's rescue thus fell to KJev Schoening and Madsenthe latter a thirty-three-year-

old ski patrolman from Aspen, Colorado, who'd never been higher than 14,000 feet before this

expedition, which he had been persuaded to join by his girlfriend, Himalayan veteran Charlotte

Fox. When I walked into Hall's mess tent, Dr. Mackenzie was on the radio telling somebody at

Camp Two, "give Ngawang acetazolamide, dexamethasone, and ten milligrams of sublingual

nifedipine.... Yes, I know the risk. Give it to him anyway... I'm telling you, the danger that he will

die from HAPE before we can get him down is much, much greater than the danger that the

nifedipine will reduce his blood pressure to a dangerous level. Please, trust me on this! Just

give him the medication! Quickly!" None of the drugs seemed to help, however, nor did giving

Ngawang supplemental oxygen or placing him inside a Gamow BagThe root of the problem is

believed to be a paucity of oxygen, compounded by high pressure in the Pulmonary arteries,

causing the arteries to leak fluid into the lungs.

an inflatable plastic chamber about the size of a coffin in which the atmospheric pressure

is increased to simulate a lower altitude. With daylight waning, Schoening and Madsen therefore

began dragging Ngawang laboriously down the mountain, using the deflated Gamow Bag as a

makeshift toboggan, while guide Neal Beidleman and a team of Sherpas climbed as quickly as

they could from Base Camp to meet them. Beidleman reached Ngawang at sunset near the top

of the icefall and took over the rescue, allowing Schoening and Madsen to return to Camp Two

to continue their acclimatization. The sick Sherpa had so much fluid in his lungs, Beidleman

recalled that when he breathed it sounded like a straw slurping a milkshake from the bottom of a

glass. Halfway down the Icefall, Ngawang took off his oxygen mask and reached inside to clear

some snot from the intake valve. When he pulled his hand out I shined my headlamp on his

glove and it was totally red, soaked with blood he'd been coughing up into the mask. Then I

shined the light on his face and it was covered with blood, too. Ngawang's eyes met mine and I

could see how frightened he was," Beidleman continued. "Thinking fast, I lied and told him not to

worry, that the blood was from a cut on his lip. That calmed him a little, and we continued

down." To keep Ngawang from having to exert himself, which would have exacerbated his

edema, at several points during the descent, Beidleman picked up the ailing Sherpa and carried

him on his back. It was after midnight by the time they arrived in Base Camp. The next morning,

Tuesday, Fischer considered calling for a helicopter to evacuate Ngawang from Base Camp to

Kathmandu at an estimated cost of five to ten thousand dollars. But both Fischer and Dr. Hunt

were confident that the Sherpa's condition would improve rapidly now that he was 3,700 feet

lower than Camp Two-descending as little as 3,000 feet is typically enough to bring about

complete recovery from HA-PE. The upshot was that instead of being evacuated by air,

Ngawang was escorted down the valley on foot. Immediately below Base Camp, however, he

collapsed and had to be brought back up to the Mountain Madness encampment for treatment,

where his condition continued to worsen throughout the day. When Hunt at A I P tempted to

put him back in the Gamow Bag, Ngawang refused, arguing that he didn't have HAPE or any

other form of altitude sickness. A radio call went out to the American doctorJim Litch-an

eminence in the specialized field of high-altitude medicine who was staffing the Himalayan

Rescue Association clinic in Pheriche that spring-requesting that he hurry to Base Camp to assist

in Ngawang's treatment. Fischer, by this time, had embarked for Camp Two to bring down Tim

Madsen, who had exhausted himself while hauling Ngawang down the Western Cum and had

subsequently come down with a mild case of HAPE himself. In Fischer's absence, Hunt

consulted with the other doctors at Base Camp, but she was forced to make some critical

decisions on her own, and, as one of her fellow physicians observed, "Ingrid was in way over her

head. A nonclimber in her mid-twenties who'd just completed a residency in family practice,

Hunt had done extensive volunteer medical relief work in the foothills of eastern Nepal, but she

had no previous experience in high-altitude medicine. She'd met Fischer by chance some

months earlier in Kathmandu when he was finalizing his Everest permit, and he subsequently

invited her to accompany his upcoming Everest expedition in the dual roles of team physician

and Base Camp manager. Although she expressed some ambivalence about the invitation in a

letter to Fischer in January, Hunt ultimately accepted the unpaid job and arrived in Nepal at the

end of March, eager to contribute to the expedition's success. The demands of simultaneously

running Base Camp and meeting the medical needs of some twenty-five people proved to be

more than she'd bargained for, however. (By comparison, Rob Hall paid two highly experienced,

full-time staff members-team physician Caroline Mackenzie and Base Camp manager Helen

Wilton-to do what Flunt did alone, without pay.) Compounding her difficulties, moreover, Hunt

had trouble acclimatizing and suffered severe headaches and shortness of breath during most of

her stay at Base Camp. After Ngawang collapsed trying to walk down the valley Tuesday

'Orning and was brought back up to Base Camp, he was not put back On oxygen, even

though his condition continued to deteriorate, in part because he stubbornly kept insisting that

he wasn't sick. At seven o'clock that evening, Dr. Litch arrived after running up from Pheriche

and suggested rather emphatically that Hunt immediately start Ngawang on oxygen at maximal

flow and then call for a helicopter. By this time Ngawang was slipping in and out of

consciousness and was having extreme difficulty breathing. A helicopter evacuation was

requested for Wednesday morning, April 24, but clouds and snow squalls made a flight

impossible, so Ngawang was loaded into a basket and, under Hunt's care, carried down the

glacier to Pheriche on the backs of Sherpas. That afternoon Hall's furrowed brow betrayed his

concern. "Ngawang is in a bad way," he said. "He has one of the worst cases of pulmonary edema

I've ever seen. They should have flown him out yesterday when they had a chance. If it had

been one of Scott's clients who was this sick instead of a Sherpa, I don't think he would have

been treated so haphazardly. By the time they get Ngawang down to Pheriche it may be too late

to save him." When the sick Sherpa arrived at the HRA clinic on Wednesday evening after a

twelve-hour journey from Base Camp to Pheriche, his condition continued to worsen, despite

the fact that he was now at 14,000 feet (an elevation not substantially higher than the village

where he'd spent most of his life), compelling Hunt to put him inside the pressurized Gamow Bag

against his wishes. Unable to grasp the benefits of the inflatable chamber and terrified of it,

Ngawang asked that a Buddhist lama be summoned, and before consenting to being zipped into

its claustrophobic interior, he requested that prayer books be placed in the bag with him. For

the Gamow Bag to function properly an attendant has to continuously inject fresh air into the

chamber with a foot pump. By Wednesday night, Hunt was exhausted from caring for Ngawang

virtually nonstop for the previous forty-eight hours, so she turned over responsibility for

pumping the chamber to several of Ngawang's Sherpa friends. While she was dozing, one of

these Sherpas noticed through the bag's plastic window that Ngawang was frothing at the mouth

and had apparently stopped breathing. Awakened with this news, Hunt immediately tore open

the bag, commenced cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and summoned Dr. Larry Silver, one of the

volunteers working at the HRA clinic. After Silver inserted a tube down Ngawang's trachea and

began forcing air into his lungs with a rubber "ambu bag"-a manual Pump-Ngawang began

breathing again, but only after a period of at least four or five minutes when no oxygen was

reaching his brain. Two days later, on Friday, April 26, the weather finally improved enough to

permit a helicopter evacuation, and Ngawang was flown to a hospital in Kathmandu, but doctors

there announced that he'd suffered grave damage to his brain. Ngawang was now little more

than a vegetable. Over the weeks that followed he languished in the hospital, staring blankly at

the ceiling, arms curled tightly at his sides, muscles atrophying, his weight dropping below eighty

pounds. By midjune he would be dead, leaving behind a wife and four daughters in Rolwaling.

Oddly, most climbers on Everest knew less about Ngawang's plight than tens of thousands of

people who were nowhere near the mountain. The information warp was due to the Internet,

and to those of us at Base Camp it was nothing less than surreal. A teammate might call home

on a satellite phone, for instance, and learn what the South Africans were doing at Camp Two

from a spouse in New Zealand or Michigan who'd been surfing the World Wide Web. At least

five Internet sites were posting dispatches* from correspondents at Everest Base Camp. The

South African team maintained a website, as did Mal Duff's International Commercial Despite

considerable hoopla about "direct, interactive links between the slopes of Mount Everest and

the World Wide Web,' technological limitations prevented direct hookups from Base Camp to

the Internet. Instead, correspondents filed their reports by voice or fax via satilite Phone, and

those reports were typed into computers for dissemination on the Web by editors in New York,

Boston, and Seattle. E-mail was received in Kathmandu, printed out, and the hard copy was

transported by yak to Base Camp. Likewise, all photos that ran on the Web had first been sent

by yak and then air courier to New York for transmission. Internet chat sessions were done via

satellite phone and a typist in New York. Expedition. Nova, the PBS television show, produced

an elaborate and very informative website featuring daily updates from Liesl Clark and the

eminent Everest historian Audrey Salkeld, who were members of the MacGillivray Freeman

IMAX expedition. (Headed by the award-winning filmmaker and expert climber David

Breashears, who'd guided Dick Bass up Everest in 1985, the IMAX team was shooting a $5.5

million giant-screen movie about climbing the mountain.) Scott Fischer's expedition had no less

than two correspondents filing online dispatches for a pair of competing websites. Jane Bromet,

who phoned in daily reports for

Outside

Online,* was one of the correspondents on Fischer's

team, but she wasn't a client and didn't have permission to climb higher than Base Camp. The

other Internet correspondent on Fischer's expedition, however, was a client who intended to go

all the way to the summit and file daily dispatches for NBC Interactive Media enroute. Her

name was Sandy Hill Pittman, and nobody on the mountain cut a higher profile or generated as

much gossip. Pittman, a millionaire socialite-cum-climber, was back for her third attempt on

Everest. This year she was more determined than ever to reach the top and thereby complete

her much publicized crusade to climb the Seven Summits. In 1993 Pittman joined a guided

expedition attempting the South Col and Southeast Ridge route, and s he caused a minor stir by

showing up at Base Camp with her nine-year-old son Bo, along with a nanny to look after him.

Pittman experienced a number of problems, however, and reached only 24,000 feet before

turning around. She was back on Everest in 1994 after raising more than a quarter of a million

dollars from corporate sponsors to secure the talents of Several magazines and newspapers

have erroneously reported that I was a correspondent for

Outside

Online. The confusion

stemmed from the fact that Jane Bromet interviewed me at Base Camp and posted a transcript

of the interview on the

Outside

Online website. I was not, however, affiliated with

Outside

Online in any capacity. I had gone to Everest on assignment for

Outside

magazine, an

independent entity (based in Santa Fe, New Mexico) that works in loose partnership with

Outside

Online (based in the Seattle area) to publish a version of the magazine on the Internet.

But

Outside

magazine and

Outside

Online are autonomous to such a degree that I didn't even

know

Outside

Online had sent a correspondent to Everest until I arrived at Base Camp.

four of the finest alpinists in North America: Breashears (who was under contract to film

the expedition for NBC television), Steve Swenson, Barry Blanchard, and Alex Lowe. Lowe-

arguably the world's preeminent all-around climber-was hired to be Sandy's personal guide, a job

for which he was paid a substantial sum. In advance of Pittman, the four men strung ropes

partway up the Kangshung Face, an extremely difficult and hazardous wall on the Tibetan side of

the mountain. With a great deal of assistance from Lowe, Pittman ascended the fixed ropes to

22,000 feet, but once again she was forced to surrender her attempt before the summit; this

time the problem was dangerously unstable snow conditions that forced the whole team to

abandon the mountain. Until I bumped into her at Gorak Shep during the trek to Base Camp, I'd

never met Pittman face-to-face, although I'd been hearing about her for years. In 1992, Men's

Journal assigned me to write an article about riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle from New

York to San Francisco in the company of Jann Wenner-the legendary, exceedingly rich publisher

of Rolling Stone, Men's journal, and Us-and several of his wealthy friends, including Rocky Hill,

Pittman's brother and her husband, Bob Pittman, the co -founder of MTV. The ear-splitting,

chrome-encrusted Hog that Jann loaned me was a thrilling ride, and my high-rolling companions

were friendly enough. But I had precious little in common with any of them, and there was no

forgetting that I had been brought along as Jann's hired help. Over dinner Bob and Jann and

Rocky compared the various aircraft they owned (Jann recommended a Gulfstream IV the next

time I was in the market for a personal jet), discussed their country estates, and talked about

Sandy-who happened to be climbing Mount McKinley at the time. "Hey," Bob suggested when

he learned that I, too, was a climber, you and Sandy ought to get together and go climb a

mountain." Now, four years later, we were. At five foot eleven, Sandy Pittman stood two inches

taller than me. Her tomboyishly short hair looked expertly coiffed, even here at 17,000 feet.

Ebullient and direct, she'd grown up in northern California, where her father had introduced her

to camping, hiking, and skiing as a young girl. Delighting in the freedoms and pleasures of the

hills, she continued to dabble in outdoor pursuits through her college years and beyond,

although the frequency of her visits to the mountains diminished sharply after she moved to

New York in the mid 1970s in the aftermath of a failed first marriage. In Manhattan Pittman

worked variously as a buyer at Bonwit Teller, a merchandising editor at Mademoiselle, and a

beauty editor at a magazine called Bride's, then in 1979 married Bob Pittman. An indefatigable

seeker of public attention, Sandy made her name and picture regular fare in New York society

columns. She hobnobbed with Blaine Trump, Tom and Meredith Brokaw, Isaac Mizrahi, Martha

Stewart. In order to commute more efficiently between their opulent Connecticut manor and an

art-filled apartment on Central Park West staffed with uniformed servants, she and her husband

bought a helicopter and learned to fly it. In 1990 Sandy and Bob Pittman were featured on the

cover of New York magazine as "The Couple of the Minute." Soon thereafter Sandy began her

expensive, widely trumpeted campaign to become the first American woman to climb the Seven

Summits. The last-Everest-proved elusive, however, and in March 1994 Pittman lost the race to a

forty-seven-year-old Alaskan mountaineer and midwife named Dolly Lefever. She continued her

dogged pursuit of Everest just the same. As Beck Weathers observed one night at Base Camp,

"when Sandy goes to climb a mountain, she doesn't do it exactly like you and me." In 1993 Beck

had been in Antarctica making a guided ascent of Vinson Massif at the same time Pittman was

climbing the mountain with a different guided group, and he recalled with a chuckle that "she

brought this humongous duffel bag full of gourmet food that took about four people to even lift.

She also brought a portable television and video player so she could watch movies in her tent. I

mean, hey, you've got to hand it to Sandy: there aren't too many people who climb mountains in

that kind of high style." Beck reported that Pittman had generously shared the swag she'd

brought with the other climbers and that "she was pleasant and interesting to be around." For

her assault on Everest in 1996, Pittman once again assembled the sort of kit not commonly seen

in climbers' encampments. The day before departing for Nepal, in one of her first Web postings

for NBC Interactive Media, she gushed, All my Personal stuff is packed. . . . It looks like I'll have

as much computer and electronic equipment as I will have climbing gear. . . . Two IBM laptops, a

video camera, three 35mm cameras, one Kodak digital camera, two tape recorders, a CD-ROM

Player, a Printer, and enough (I hope) solar Panels and batteries to Power the whole project . . . .

wouldn't dream of leaving town without an ample Supply of Dean & DeLuca's Near East

blend and my espresso maker. since we ll be on Everest on Easter, I brought four wrapped

chocolate eggs. An Easter egg hunt at 18,000 feet? we'll see! That night, the society columnist

Billy Norwich hosted a farewell party for Pittman at Nell's in downtown Manhattan. The guest

list included Bianca Jagger and Calvin Klein. Fond of costumes, Sandy appeared wearing a high-

altitude climbing suit over her evening dress, complemented by mountaineering boots, crampons,

ice ax, and a bandolier of carabiners. Upon arrival in the Himalaya, Pittman appeared to adhere

as closely as possible to the proprieties of high society. During the trek to Base Camp, a young

Sherpa named Pemba rolled up her sleeping bag every morning and packed her rucksack for her.

When she reached the foot of Everest with the rest of Fischer's group in early April, her Pile of

luggage included stacks of press clippings about herself to hand out to the other denizens of

Base Camp. Within a few days Sherpa runners began to arrive on a regular basis with packages

for Pittman, shipped to Base Camp via DHL Worldwide Express; they included the latest issues

of Vogue, Vanity Fair, People, Allure. The Sherpas were fascinated by the lingerie ads and

thought the perfume scent-strips were a hoot. Scott Fischer's team was a congenial and cohesive

group; most of Pittman's teammates took her idiosyncrasies in stride and seemed to have little

trouble accepting her into their midst. "Sandy could be exhausting to be around, because she

needed to be the center of attention and was always yapping away about herself," remembers

Jane Bromet. "But she wasn't a negative person. She didn't bring down the mood of the group.

She was energetic and upbeat almost every day." Nevertheless several accomplished alpinists

not on her team regarded Pittman as a grandstanding dilettante. Following her unsuccessful

1994 attempt on Everest's Kangshung Face, a television commercial for Vaseline Intensive Care

(the expedition's primary sponsor) was loudly derided by knowledgeable mountaineers because

it advertised Pittman as a "world-class climber." But Pittman never overtly made such a claim

herself; indeed, she emphasized in an article for Men's Journal that she wanted Breashears,

Lowe, Swenson, and Blanchard "to understand that I didn't confuse my avid-hobbyist abilities

with their world- class skill." Her eminent companions on the 1994 attempt said nothing

disparaging about Pittman, at least not in public. After that expedition, in fact, Breashears

became a close friend of hers, and Swenson repeatedly defended Pittman against her critics.

"Look," Swenson had explained to me at a social gathering in Seattle shortly after they'd both

returned from Everest, "maybe Sandy's not a great climber, but on the Kangshung Face she

recognized her limitations. Yes, it's true that Alex and Barry and David and I did all the leading

and fixed all the ropes, but she contributed to the effort in her own way by having a positive

attitude, by raising money, and by dealing with the media." Pittman did not lack for detractors,

however. A great many people were offended by her ostentatious displays of wealth, and by the

shameless way she chased the limelight. As Joanne Kaufman reported in the Wall Street Journal,

Pittman was known in in certain elevated circles more as a social climber than mountain climber.

She and Mr. Pittman were habitues of all the correct soirees and benefits and staples of all the

right gossip columns. 'Many coattails were wrinkled by Sandy Pittman latching on to them," says

a former business associate of Mr. Pittman who insisted on anonymity. "She's interested in

publicity. If she had to do it anonymously I don't think she'd be climbing mountains. Fairly or

unfairly, to her derogators Pittman epitomized all that was reprehensible about Dick Bass's

Popularization of the Seven Summits and the ensuing debasement of the world's highest

mountain. But insulated by her money, a staff of paid attendants, and unwavering selfabsorption,

Pittman was heedless of the resentment and scorn she inspired in others; she remained as

oblivious as Jane Austen's Emma. L fl, We tell ourselves stories in order to live.... We lookfor the

sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder offive. We interpret what we

see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are

writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas' with which we

have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Joan Didion

The White Alhum was already awake at 4:00 A.M. when the alarm on my wristwatch began to

beep; I'd been awake most of the night, struggling for breath in the meager air. And now it was

time to commence the dreaded ritual of emerging from the warmth of my goose-down cocoon

into the withering cold of 21,300 feet. Two days earlier-on Friday, April 26-we'd humped all the

way from Base Camp to Camp Two in one long day to begin our third and final acclimatization

sortie in preparation for the summit push. This morning, according to Rob's grand plan, we

would climb from Camp Two to Camp Three and spend a night at 24,000 feet. Rob had told us

to be ready to leave at 4:45 sharp-forty-five minutes hence-which allowed barely enough time to

dress, force down a candy bar and some tea, and strap on my crampons. Shining my headlamp

on a dime-store thermometer clipped to the parka I'd been using as a pillow, I saw that the

temperature inside the cramped, twoperson tent was seven degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

"Doug!" I Yelled at the lump burrowed in the sleeping bag beside me. "Time to get rolling, Slick.

You awake over there?" "Awake?" he rasped in a weary voice. "What makes you think I ever

went to sleep? I feel like shit. I think something's wrong with my throat. Man, I'm getting' too old

for this stuff." During the night, our fetid exhalations had condensed on the tent fabric to form a

fragile, interior sheath of hoarfrost; as I sat up and began rooting around in the dark for my

clothing, it was impossible not to brush against the low nylon walls, and every time I did so it

instigated a blizzard inside the tent, covering everything with ice crystals. Shivering hard, I zipped

my body into three layers of fuzzy polypropylene pile underwear and an outer shell of windproof

nylon, then pulled my clunky plastic boots on. Yanking the laces tight made Imme wince in pain;

for the past two weeks the condition of my cracked, bleeding fingertips had been steadily

deteriorating in the cold air. I tramped out of camp by headlamp behind Rob and Frank, wending

between ice towers and piles of rock rubble to reach the main body of the glacier. For the next

two hours we ascended an incline pitched as gently as a beginner's ski slope, eventually arriving

at the bergschrund that delineated the Khumbu Glacier's upper end. Immediately above rose

the Lhotse Face, a vast, tilted sea of ice that gleamed like dirty chrome in the dawn's slanting

light. Snaking down the frozen expanse as if suspended from heaven, a single strand of nine-

millimeter rope beckoned like Jack's beanstalk. I picked up the bottom end of it, attached my

jumar* to the slightly frayed line, and began to climb. I'd been uncomfortably cold since leaving

camp, having underdressed in anticipation of the solar-oven effect that had occurred every

other morning when the sun hit the Western Cum. But on this morning the temperature was

held in check by a biting wind that gusted down from the upper mountain, creating a windchill

that dipped to perhaps forty below zero. I had an extra pile sweater and wind jacket in my

backpack, but to put it on I would first have to remove my gloves, while dangling from the fixed

rope. Worrying that I was likely to drop something, I decided to wait until I reached a part of the

face that was less steep, where I could stand in balance A jumar (also known as a mechanical

ascender) is a wallet-sized device that grips the rope by means of a metal cam. The cam allows

the jumar to slide upward without hindrance, but it pinches the rope securely when the device is

weighted. Essentially ratcheting himself upward, a climber thereby ascends the rope.

without hanging from the rope. So I continued climbing, and a, I did so I grew colder and

colder. The wind kicked up huge swirling waves of powder snow that washed down the mountain

like breaking surf, plastering my clothing with frost. A carapace of ice formed over MY goggles,

making it difficult to see. I began to lose feeling in my feet. My fingers turned to wood. It

seemed increasingly unsafe to keep going up in these conditions. I was at the head of the line, at

23,000 feet, fifteen minutes in front of guide Mike Groom; I decided to wait for him and talk

things over. But just before he reached me, Rob's voice barked over the radio Mike carried

inside his jacket, and he stopped climbing to answer the call. "Rob wants everybody to go down!"

he declared, shouting to make himself heard above the wind. "We're getting out of here! It was

noon by the time we arrived back at Camp Two and took stock of the damage. I was tired but

otherwise fine. John Taske, the Australian doctor, had some minor frostnip on the tips of his

fingers. Doug, on the other hand, had suffered some serious harm. When he removed his boots

he discovered incipient frostbite on several toes. On Everest in 1995 he'd frostbitten his feet

badly enough to lose some tissue from a big toe and permanently impair his circulation, making

him particularly susceptible to cold; now this additional frostbite would make him yet more

vulnerable to the cruel conditions of the upper mountain. Even worse, however, was the injury to

Doug's respiratory tract. Less than two weeks before departing for Nepal he had undergone

minor throat surgery, leaving his trachea in an extremely sensitive condition. This morning,

gasping lungfuls of caustic, snow-filled air, he had apparently frozen his larynx. "I'm fucked,"

Doug croaked in a barely audible whisper, looking crushed. "I can't even talk. The climb is over

for me." "Don't write yourself off just yet, Douglas," Rob offered. "Wait and see how you feel in a

couple of days. You're a tough bastard. I think you've still got a good shot at the top once you

recover." Unconvinced) Doug retreated to our tent and pulled his sleeping bag over his head. It

was rough seeing him so discouraged. He'd become a good friend, unstintingly sharing the

wisdom he'd gained during his failed attempt on the peak in 1995. Around my neck I wore a

Xistone-a sacred Buddhist amulet blessed by the lama from the Pangboche monastery-that

Doug had given me early on in the expedition. I wanted him to reach the summit almost as badly

as I wanted to reach it myself. An air of shock and mild depression hovered over the camp for

the remainder of the day. Even without unleashing the worst it could dish out, the mountain had

sent us scurrying for safety. And it wasn't just our team that was chastened and doubtful.

Morale seemed to be at a low ebb for several of the expeditions at Camp Two. The bad humor

was most apparent in the bickering that broke out between Hall and the leaders of the

Taiwanese and South African teams over sharing responsibility for stringing in ore than a mile o

rope that was needed to safeguard the route up the Lhotse Face. By late April, a line of ropes

had already been fixed between the head of the Cum and Camp Three, halfway up the face. To

complete the job, Hall, Fischer, Ian Woodall, Makalu Gau, and Todd Burleson (the American

leader of the Alpine Ascents guided expedition) had agreed that on April 26 one or two

members from each team would join forces and put ropes up the remainder of the face, the

passage between Camp Three and 26,000-foot Camp Four. But it hadn't happened as planned.

When Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri from Hall's team, guide Anatoli Boukreev from Fischer's

team, and one Sherpa from Burleson s team departed Camp Two on the morning of April 26, the

Sherpas who were supposed to join them from the South African and Taiwanese teams stayed in

their sleeping bags and refused to cooperate. That afternoon, when Hall arrived at Camp Two

and learned of this, he immediately made some radio calls to find out why the plan had broken

down. Karni Dorje Sherpa, the sirdar for the Taiwanese team, apologized profusely and

promised to make amends. But when Hall raised Woodall on the radio, the impenitent South

Africanexpedition leader responded with a barrage of obscenities and insults. "Let's keep it civil,

mate," Hall implored. "I thought we had an agreement." Woodall replied that his Sherpas stayed

in their tents only because nobody came around to wake them up and tell them their assistance

was needed. Hall shot back that Ang Dorje had in fact tried repeatedly to rouse them but they

had ignored his entreaties. At that point Woodall declared, "Either you're a bloody liar or your

Sherpa is." Then he threatened to send over a couple of Sherpas from his team to sort out" Ang

Dorje with their fists. Two days after this unpleasant exchange, the ill will between our team and

the South Africans remained high. And contributing to the sour mood at Camp Two were

disturbing snippets of news we received about Ngawang Topche's worsening condition. As he

continued to grow sicker and sicker even at low altitude, the doctors postulated that his illness

was perhaps not simple HAPE but rather HAPE complicated by tuberculosis or some other

preexisting Pulmonary condition. The Sherpas, however, had a different diagnosis: they believed

that one of the climbers on Fischer's team had angered Everest-Sagarmatha, goddess of the sky-

and the deity had taken her revenge on Ngawang. The climber in question had struck up a

relationship with a member of an expedition attempting Lhotse. Because privacy is nonexistent

in the tenementlike confines of Base Camp, the amorous assignations that took place in this

woman's tent were duly noted by other members of her team, especially the Sherpas, who sat

outside pointing and snickering during the encounters." EX] and [Y] are sauce-making, sauce-

making," they would giggle, miming the sex act by Pumping a finger into the open fist of the other

hand. But despite the Sherpas' laughter (to say nothing of their own notoriously libertine habits),

they fundamentally disapproved of sex between unmarried couples on the divine flanks of

Sagarmatha. Whenever the weather would turn nasty, one or another Sherpa was apt to Point

up at the clouds boiling heavenward and earnestly declare, "Somebody has been sauce-making.

Make bad luck. Now storm is coming. Sandy Pittman had noted this superstition in a diary entry

from her 1994 expedition posted on the Internet in 1996:

April 29, 1994 Everest Base camp (17,800 feet), The xangshung Face, Tibet a mail runner

had arrived that afternoon and a with letters from home for everyone girlie magazine which had

been sent by a carback home as a joke . . . .

climber buddy Half of the Sherpa had taken it to a tent for closer inspection, while the

others fretted over the disaster they were certain that any examination of it would bring. The

goddess Chomolungma, they claimed, doesn't tolerate lean-on her sacred .jiggy jiggy-anything

unc mountain. Buddhism as it is practiced in the high reaches of the Khumbu has a distinctly

animistic flavor: the Sherpas venerate a tangled melange of deities and spirits who are said to

inhabit the canyons, rivers, and per homage to this ensemble of peaks of the region. And paying

pro sure safe passage deities is considered crucially important to en through the treacherous

landscape. To appease Sagarmatha this year-as every year-the Sherpas had built more than a

dozen beautiful meticulously constructed stone chortens at Base Camp, one for each expedition.

The altar in our camp was A perfect cube five feet high, topped with a triumvirate of carefully

selected pointed stones, above which rose a ten-foot wooden pole crowned with an elegant

juniper bough. Five long chains of ially from the pole brightly colored prayer flags* were then

strung rad above our tents to protect the camp from harm. Every morning before dawn our

Base Camp sirdar-an avuncular, highly respected, forty Prayer flags are printed with holy

Buddhist invocations-most commonly om manipadm hum-which are dispatched to God with

each flap of the pennant. often prayer flags bear the red creatures in the Sherpa image of a

winged horse in addition to written prayers; horses are sac cosmology and are believed to carry

the prayers heavenward with special speed. The Sherpa term for prayer flag is lung ta, which

translates literally as "wind horse. something Sherpa named Ang Tshering-would light sprigs of

juniper incense and chant prayers at the chorten; before heading into the Icefall, Westerners

and Sherpas alike would walk past the altarkeeping it always on the right-and through the sweet

clouds of smoke to receive a blessing from Ang Tshering. But for all the attention paid to such

rituals, Buddhism as practiced by the Sherpas was a refreshingly supple and nondogmatic

religion. To stay in Sagarmatha's good graces, for instance, no team was permitted to enter the

Icefall for the first time without first undertaking an elaborate puja, or religious ceremony. But

when the frail, wizened lama slated to preside over the puja had been unable to make the trip

from his distant village on the appointed day, Ang Tshering declared that it would be O.K. for us

to climb through the Icefall after all, because Sagarmatha understood that we intended to

perform the puja very soon thereafter. There seemed to be a similarly lax attitude concerning

fornication on the slopes of Everest: even though they paid lip service to the prohibition, more

than a few Sherpas made exceptions for their own behavior-in 1996, a romance even blossomed

between a Sherpa and an American woman associated with the IMAX expedition. It therefore

seemed strange that the Sherpas would blame Ngawang's illness on the extramarital encounters

taking place in one of the Mountain Madness tents. But when I pointed out the inconsistency to

Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa-Fischer's twenty-three-year-old climbing sirdar-he insisted that the real

problem was not that one of Fischer's climbers had been "sauce-making" at Base Camp but

rather that she continued to sleep with her paramour high on the mountain. "Mount Everest is

God-for me, for everybody," Lopsang solemnly mused ten weeks after the expedition. "Just

husband and wife sleep together, is good. But when [XI and wife sleep together, is bad luck for

my team.... So I tell to Scott: Please Scott, you are leader. Please tell to [XI not to sleep with

boyfriend at Camp Two. Please. But Scott just laughs. The first day [XI and WI in tent, just after,

Ngawang Topche is sick at Camp Two. So he is dead now."

Ngawang was Lopsang's uncle; the two men had been very close, and Lopsang had been in

the rescue party that brought Ngawang down the Icefall on the night of April 22. Then, when

Ngawang stopped breathing in Pheriche and had to be evacuated to Kathmandu, Lopsang

rushed down from Base Camp (with Fischer's encouragement) in time to accompany his uncle on

the helicopter flight. His brief trip to Kathmandu and speedy trek back to Base Camp left him

quite fatigued and relatively poorly acclimatized-which didn't bode well for Fischer's team:

Fischer relied on him at least as much as Hall relied on his climbing sirdar, Ang Dorje. A number

of very accomplished Himalayan mountaineers were in attendance on the Nepalese side of

Everest in 1996-veterans such as Hall, Fischer, Breashears, Pete Schoening, Ang Dorje, Mike

Groom, and Robert Schauer, an Austrian on the IMAX team. But four luminaries stood out even

in this distinguished company-climbers who demonstrated such astonishing prowess above

26,000 feet that they were in a league of their own: Ed Viesturs, the American who was starring

in the IMAX film; Anatoli Boukreev, a guide from Kazakhstan working for Fischer; Ang Babu

Sherpa, who was employed by the South African expedition; and Lopsang. Gregarious and good-

looking, kind to a fault, Lopsang was exiremely cocky yet hugely appealing. He was raised in the

Rolwaling region, his parents' only child, and he neither smoked nor drank, which was unusual

among Sherpas. He sported a gold incisor and had an easy laugh. Though he was small-boned

and slight in stature, his flashy and extraordinary athletic gifts manner, appetite for hard work,

earned him renown as the Deion Sanders of the Khumbu. Fischer told opsang had the potential

to be "the second comme that he thought Ling of Reinhold Messner"-the famous Tyrolean

alpinist who is far and away the greatest Himalayan climber of all time. Lopsang first made a

splash in 1993, at the age of twenty, when he was hired to carry loads for a joint Indian-Nepalese

Everest team led by an Indian woman, Bachendri Pal, and largely composed of female climbers.

Being the youngest member of the expedition, Lopsang was initially relegated to a supporting

role) but his strength was so impressive that at the last minute he was assigned to a summit party,

and on May 16 he reached the top without supplemental oxygen. Five months after his Everest

climb Lopsang summitted Clio Oyu with a Japanese team. In the spring of 1994 he worked for

Fischer on the Sagarmatha Environmental Expedition and reached the top of Everest a second

time, again without bottled oxygen. The following September he was attempting the West Ridge

of Everest with a Norwegian team when he was hit by an avalanche; after tumbling 200 feet

down the mountain he somehow managed to arrest his fall with an ice

.P ax, thereby saving the lives of himself and two ropemates, but an uncle who wasn't tied

to the others, Mingma Norbu Sherpa, was swept to his death. Although the loss rocked Lopsang

hard, it didn't diminish his ardor for climbing.

s months In May 1995, he summitted Everest a third time without using gas, on this

occasion as an employee of Hall' expedition, and three later he climbed 26,400-foot Broad Peak,

in Pakistan, while working for Fischer. By the time Lopsang went to Everest with Fischer in 1996,

he'd only been climbing for three years, but in that span he'd participated in no fewer than ten

Himalayan expeditions and had established a reputation as a high-altitude mountaineer of the

highest caliber. Climbing together on Everest in 1994, Fischer and Lopsang grew to admire each

other immensely. Both men had boundless energy, irresistible charm, and a knack for making

women swoon. Regarding Fischer as a mentor and a role model, Lopsang even started wearing

his hair in a ponytail, as Fischer did. "Scott is very strong guy, I am very strong guy," Lopsang

explained to me with characteristic immodesty. "We make good team. Scott does not pay me as

well as Rob or Japanese, but I no need money; I am looking to future, and Scott is my future. He

tell to me, 'Lopsang, my strong Sherpa! I making you famous!'. . . I think Scott has many big plans

for me with Mountain Madness. [The American public had no inherent national sympathy for

mountain climbing, unlike the Alpine countries of Europe, or the British, who had invented the

sport. In those countries there was something akin to understanding, and though the man in the

street might on the whole consider it a reckless risk to life, he acknowledged that it was

something that had to be done. There was no such acceptance in America.

Walt Unsworth Everest

day after our first attempt to reach Camp Three was thwarted by wind and barbarous cold,

everybody on Hall's team except Doug (who stayed at Camp Two to let his injured larynx heal)

made another try. A thousand feet up the immense slant of the Lhotse Face, I ascended a faded

nylon rope that seemed to go on forever, and the higher I got, the more laggardly I moved. I slid

my jumar up the fixed line with a gloved hand, rested my weight on the device to draw two

burning, labored breaths; then I moved my left foot up and stamped the crampon into the ice,

desperately sucked in another two lungfuls of air; planted my right foot next to my left, inhaled

and exhaled from the bottom of my chest, inhaled and exhaled again; and slid the jumar up the

rope one more time. I'd been exerting myself at full bore for the past three hours, and I

expected to be at it for at least an hour a cluster of tents reputed to be perched somewhere on

the sheer face more before taking a rest. In this agonizing fashion I climbed toward above,

progressing in increments calibrated in inches. People who don't climb mountains-the great

majority of humankind, that is to say-tend to assume that the sport is a reckless, Dionysian

pursuit of ever escalating thrills. But the notion that climbers are merely adrenaline junkies

chasm a righteous fix is a fallacy, at least in the case of Everest. What I was doing up there had

almost nothing in common with bungee jumping or skydiving or riding a motorcycle at 120 miles

per hour. Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic

undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any

other mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily

about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and

suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a

state of grace.

r, less virtuous, motives Of course for some Everesters myriad other came into play, as well:

minor celebrity, career advancement, ego massage ordinary bragging rights, filthy lucre. But

such ignoble enticements were less a factor than many critics might presume. Indeed, what I

observed as the weeks went by forced me to substantially revise my presuppositions about

some of my teammates. Take Beck Weathers, for instance, who at that moment appeared as a

tiny red speck on the ice 500 feet below, near the end of a long queue of climbers. My first

impression of Beck had not been favorable: a back slapping Dallas pathologist with less-than-

mediocre mountaineerring skills, at first blush he came across as a rich Republican blowhard

looking to buy the summit of Everest for his trophy case. Yet the better I got to know him, the

more he earned my respect. Even though his inflexible new boots had chewed his feet into

hamburger, Beck kept hobbling upward, day in and day out, scarcely mentioning what must have

been horrific pain. He was tough, driven, stoic. And what I initially took to be arrogance was

looking more and more like exuberance. The man seemed to bear no ill will toward anybody in

the world (Hillary Clinton notwithstanding). Beck's cheer and limitless optimism were so winning

that, in spite of myself, I grew to like him a lot. The son of a career Air Force officer, Beck had

spent his childhood shuttling from one military base to another before landing in Wichita Falls to

attend college. He graduated from medical school, got married and had two children, settled

comfortably into a lucrative Dallas practice. Then, in 1986, pushing forty, he took a vacation in H

of A I Colorado, felt the siren song of the heights, and enrolled in a rudimentary mountaineering

course in Rocky Mountain National Park. It is not uncommon for doctors to be chronic

overachievers; Beck wasn't the first physician to go overboard with a new hobby. But climbing

was unlike golf or tennis or the various other pastimes that consumed his cronies. The demands

of mountaineering-the physical and emotional struggles, the very real hazards-made it more than

just a game. Climbing was like life itself, only it was cast in much sharper relief, and nothing had

ever hooked Beck to such a degree. His wife, Peach, became increasingly concerned about his

immersion and the way climbing robbed their family of his presence. She was less than pleased

when, not long after taking up the sport, Beck announced that he'd decided to have a go at the

Seven Summits. Selfish and grandiose though Beck's obsession may have been, it F i wasn't

frivolous. I began to recognize a similar seriousness of purpose in Lou Kasischke, the lawyer

from Bloomfield Hills; in Yasuko Namba, the quiet Japanese woman who ate noodles every

morning for breakfast; and in John Taske, the fifty-six-year-old anesthesiologist from Brisbane

who took up climbing after retiring from the army. 'When I left the military, I sort of lost my way,"

Taske bemoaned in a thick Aussie accent. He'd been a big deal in the army-a full-bird colonel in

the Special Air Service, Australia's equivalent of the Green Berets. Having served two tours in

Vietnam at the height of the war, he found himself woefully unprepared for the flat pitch of life

out of uniform. "I discovered that I couldn't really speak to civilians," he continued. "My marriage

fell apart. All I could see was this long dark tunnel closing in, ending in infirmity, old age, and

death. Then I started to climb, and the sport provided most of what had been missing for me in

civvy street-the challenge, the camaraderie, the sense Of mission." As my sympathy for Taske,

Weathers, and some of my other teammates mounted, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in my

role as a journalist. I had no qualms when it came to writing frankly about Hall, Fischer, or Sandy

Pittman, each of whom had been aggressively seeking media attention for years. But my fellow

clients were a different matter. When they signed up with Hall's expedition, none of them had

known that a reporter would be in their midst-scribbling constantly, quietly recording their

words and deeds in order to share their foibles with a potentially unsympathetic Public. After

the expedition was over, Weathers was interviewed for the television program Turning Point. In

a segment of the interview that wasn't included in the version edited for broadcast, ABC News

reporter Forrest Sawyer an asked Beck, "how'd you feel about a reporter being along?" Beck

replied, it added a lot of stress. I was always a little concerned with the idea-you know, this guy's

going to come back and write a story that's going to be read by a couple of million people. And, I

mean, it Is bad enough to go up there and make a fool of yourself if it's just you and the climbing

group, That somebody may have you written across the pages of some magazine as a buffoon

and a clown has got to play upon your psyche as to how you perform, how hard you'll push. And

I was concerned that it might drive people further than they wanted to go. And it might even for

the guides. I mean, they want to get people on top of the mountain because, once again, they're

going to be written about, and they're going to bejudged. A moment later Sawyer asked, "Did you

sense that having a reporter along put extra pressure on Rob Hall?" Beck answered, I can't

imagine it didn't, This is what [Rob] does for a living, and if one of his clients got injured, that's

the worst thing that can happen to a guide.... He certainly had a great season two years before

this in which they got everybody on top of the summit, which is extraordinary. And I actually

think that he thought that our group was strong enough that we could repeat that.... So I think

there is a push so that when you wind up again in the news, in the magazine, it's all reported

favorably It was late morning by the time I finally humped into Camp Three: a trio of small yellow

tents, halfway up the vertiginous sprawl of the Lhotse Face, jammed side by side onto a platform

that had been hewn from the icy slope by our Sherpas. When I arrived, Lhakpa Chhiri and Arita

were still hard at work on a platform for a fourth tent, so I took off my pack and helped them

chop. At 24,000 feet, I could manage only seven or eight blows of my ice ax before having to

pause for more than a minute to catch my breath. My contribution to the effort was negligible,

needless to say, and it took nearly an hour to complete the job. Our tiny camp, a hundred feet

above the tents of the other expeditions, was a spectacularly exposed perch. For weeks we'd

been toiling in what amounted to a canyon; now, for the first time on the expedition the vista

was primarily sky rather than earth. Herds of puffy cumulus raced beneath the sun, imprinting

the landscape with a shifting matrix of shadow and blinding light. Waiting for my teammates to

arrive, I sat with my feet hanging over the abyss, staring across the clouds, looking down on the

tops of 22,000-foot peaks that a month earlier had towered overhead. At long last, it seemed as

though I was really nearing the roof of the world. The summit, however, was still a vertical mile

above, wreathed in a nimbus of gale-borne condensation. But even as the upper mountain was

raked by winds in excess of a hundred miles per hour, the air at Camp Three barely stirred, and

as the afternoon wore on I began to feel increasingly woozy from the fierce solar radiation-at

least I hoped it was the heat that was making me stupid, and not the onset of cerebral edema.

High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) is less common than High Altitude Pulmonary Edema

(HAPE), but it tends to be even more Deadly. A baffling ailment, HACE occurs when fluid leaks

from oxygen-starved cerebral blood vessels, causing severe swelling of the brain, and it can

strike with little or no warning. As pressure builds inside the skull, motor and mental skills

deteriorate with alarming speed-typically in a few hours or less-and often without the victim

even noticing the change. The next step is coma, and then, unless the afflicted party is quickly

evacuated to lower altitude, death. HACE happened to be on my mind that afternoon because

just two days earlier a client of Fischer's named Dale Kruse, a forty-four, had come down with a

serious case of year-old dentist from Colorado Three. A longtime friend of Fischer's, Kruse was

it right here at Camp a strong, very experienced climber. On Apra 26 he'd climbed from two to

Camp Three, brewed some tea for himself and his team Camp T

"I fell right asleep," mates, and then lay down in his tent to take a nap. Kruse recalls, "and

ended up sleeping almost twenty-four hours, until about two pm. the following day. %,en

somebody finally woke me up to the others that my mind wasn't it immediately became apparent

working, although it wasn't apparent to me. Scott told me, 'We gotta get you down right away."

Kruse was having an incredibly difficult time simply trying to dress himself. He put his climbing

harness on inside out , threaded it through the fly of his wind suit, and failed to fasten the buckle;

fortunately, Fischer and Neal Beidleman noticed the screwup before Kruse started to descend.

"If he'd tried to rappel down the ropes like that," says Beidleman, "he would have immediately

popped out of his harness and fallen to the bottom of the Lhotse Face." "It was like I was very

drunk," Kruse recollects. "I couldn't walk without stumbling, and completely lost the ability to

think or speak. It was a really strange feeling. I'd have some word in my mind, but I couldn't

figure out how to bring it to my lips. So Scott and Neal had to get me dressed and make sure my

harness was on correctly, then Scott lowered me down the fixed ropes." By the time Kruse

arrived in Base Camp, he says, "it was still another three or four days before I could walk from

my tent to the mess tent without stumbling all over the place." When the evening sun slid behind

Pumori, the temperature at Camp Three plummeted more than fifty degrees, and as the air

chilled my head cleared: my anxiety about coming down with HACE proved to be unfounded, at

least for the time being. The next morning, after a miserable, sleepless night at 24,000 feet, we

descended to Camp Two) and a day later, on May 1, continued down to Base Camp to recoup

our strength for the summit push. Our acclimatization was now officially complete-and to my

pleasant surprise Hall's strategy appeared to be working: After three weeks on the mountain, I

found that the air at Base Camp seemed thick and rich and voluptuously saturated with oxygen

compared to the brutally thin atmosphere of the camps above. All was not well with my body,

however. I'd lost nearly twenty pounds of muscle mass, largely from my shoulders, back, and legs.

I'd also burned up virtually all my subcutaneous fat, making me vastly more sensitive to the cold.

My worst problem, though, was my chest: the dry hack I'd picked up weeks earlier in Lobuie had

gotten so bad that I'd torn some thoracic cartilage during an especially robust bout of coughing

at Camp Three. The coughing had continued unabated, and each hack felt like a stiff kick

between the ribs. Most of the other climbers in Base Camp were in similarly battered shape-it

was simply a fact of life on Everest. In five days those of us on Hall's and Fischer's teams would

be leaving Base Camp for the top. Hoping to stanch my decline, I resolved to rest, gobble

ibuprofen, and force down as many calories as possible in that time. From the beginning, Hall

had planned that May 10 would be our summit day. "Of the four times I've summitted," he

explained, "twice it was on the tenth of May. As the Sherpas would put it, the tenth is an

(auspicious' date for me." But there was also a more down-to-earth reason for selecting this date:

the annual ebb and flow of the monsoon made it likely that the most favorable weather of the

year would fall on or near May 10. For all of April, the jet stream had been trained on Everest like

a fire hose, blasting the summit pyramid with hurricane-force winds. Even on days when Base

Camp was perfectly calm and flooded with sunshine, an immense banner of wind-driven snow

flew from the summit. But in early May, we hoped, the approach of the monsoon from the Bay of

Bengal would force the jet stream north into Tibet. If this year was like past years between the

departure of the wind and the arrival of the monsoon storms we would be presented with a brief

window of clear, calm weather, during which a summit assault would be possible. Unfortunately,

the annual weather pattern was no secret, and every expedition had set their sights on the same

window of fair weather. Hoping to avoid dangerous gridlock on the summit ridge, Hall held a big

powwow with leaders of the other expeditions in Base Camp. It was determined that Geran

Kropp, a young Swede who had ridden a bicycle from Stockholm to Nepal, would make the first

attempt, alone, on May 3. Next would be a team from Montenegro. Then, on May 8 or 9, it would

be the turn of the IMAX expedition. Hall's team, it was decided, would share a summit date of

May 10 with Fischer's expedition. After nearly getting killed by a falling rock low on the

Southwest Face, Petter Neby, the solo Norwegian climber, was already gone: he'd quietly left

Base Camp one morning and returned to Scandinavia. A guided group led by Americans Todd

Burleson and Pete Athans, as well as Mal Duff's commercial team and another British

commercial team, all promised to steer clear of May 10, as did the Taiwanese. Ian Woodall,

however, declared that the South Africans would go to the top whenever they damn well

pleased, probably on May 10, and anyone who didn't like it could bugger off. Hall, ordinarily

extremely slow to rile, flew into a rage when he learned of Woodall's refusal to cooperate. "I

don't want to be anywhere near the upper mountain when those punters are up there," he

seethed. Well How much of the appeal of mountaineering lies in its simplification of

interpersonal relationships, its reduction of friendship to smooth interaction (like war), its

substitution of an Other (the mountain, the challenge) for the relationship itself? Behind a

mystique of adventure, toughness, footloose vagabondage-all much needed antidotes to our

culture's built-in comfort and convenience-may lie a kind of adolescent refusal to take seriously

aging, the frailty of others, interpersonal responsibility, weakness of all kinds, the slow and

unspectacular course of life itself...

[TIop climbers... can be deeply moved, in fact maudlin; but only for worthy martyred ex-

comrades. A certain coldness, strikingly similar in tone, emerges from the writings of Buhl, John

Harlin, Bonattl Bon ington, and Haston: the coldness of competence. Perhaps this is what

extreme climbing is about: to get to a point where, in Haston's words, "If anything goes wrong it

will be a fight to the end. If your training is good enough, survival is there; if not nature claims

itsforfeit."

David Roberts

"Patey Agonistes" Moments of Doubt e left Base Camp at 4:30 A.M. on May 6 to

commence our summit bid. The top of Everest, two vertical miles above, seemed so impossibly

distant that I tried to limit my thoughts to Camp Two, our destination for the day. By the time

the first sunlight struck the glacier was at 20,000 feet, in the maw of the Western Cum, grateful

that the Icefall was below me and that I would have to go through it only one more time, on the

final trip down. I had been plagued by heat in the Cum every time I'd traveled through it, and this

trip was no exception. Climbing with Andy Harris at the front of the group, I continually stuffed

snow under my hat and lungs would propel me, hoping to and moved as fast as my legs reach the

shade of the tents before succumbing to the solar radiation. d the sun beat down, my head

began to As the morning dragged on an und. My tongue swelled so much that it was difficult to

breathe noticed that it was becoming harder and through my mouth, and I no harder to think

clearly. Camp Two at 10:30 A.M. After I guzzled Andy and I dragged into urned. "it feels good to

at two liters of Gatorade my equilibrium ret red. He'd been last be on our way to the summit,

yeah?" Andy inqui laid low with various intestinal ailments for most of the expedition r blessed

with and was finally getting his strength back. A gifted tutor atch over the astonishing patience,

he'd usually been assigned to was was thrilled when Rob had t the back of the herd and slower

clients an point. As the junior guide turned him loose this morning to go out 0 verest, Andy on

Hall's team) and the only one who'd never been on E

I think we're was eager to prove himself to his seasoned colleagues.

bastard off," he confided in me with a actually gonna knock this big huge smile, staring up

at the summit.

ropp, the twenty-nine-year-old Swedish Later that day, Geran K amp, looking soloist,

passed Camp Two on his way down to Base C d. On October 16, 1995, he had left Stockholm on

a utterly worked unds of gear, intending to ustom-built bicycle loaded with 240 poof Everest

entravel round-trip from sea level in Sweden to the top tirely under his own power7 without

Sherpa support or bottled oxygen. it was an exceedingly ambitious goal, but Kropp had the pull

it off: he'd been on six previous Himalayan expeditions credentials to o Oyu, and K2. and had

made solo ascents of Broad Peak7 Ch was robbed by the 8,000-mile bike ride to Kathmandu, he

During th In Romanian schoolchildren and assaulted by a crowd in Pakistan.

broke a baseball bat over Kropp's (fortuIran, an irate motorcyclist of nately) helmeted head.

He'd nevertheless arrived intact at the foot Everest in early April with a film crew in tow, and

immediately began making acclimatization trips up the lower mountain. Then, on Wednesday,

May 1, he'd departed Base Camp for the top. " & Kropp reached his high camp at 26,000 feet on

the South Colon Thursday afternoon and left for the top the following morning just after

midnight. Everybody at Base Camp stayed close by their radios throughout the day, anxiously

awaiting word of his progress. Helen Wilton hung a sign in our mess tent that read, "Go, Gibran,

Go! For the first time in months almost no wind blasted the summit, but the snow on the upper

mountain was thigh deep, making for slow, exhausting progress. Kropp bulled his way

relentlessly upward through the drifts, however, and by two o'clock Thursday afternoon he'd

reached 28,700 feet, just below the South Summit. But even though the top was no more than

sixty minutes above, he decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend

safely if he climbed any higher. "To turn around that dose to the summit...... Hall mused with a

shake of his head on May 6 as Kropp plodded past Camp Two on his way down the mountain."

That showed incredibly good judgment on young Gibran's part. I'm impressed-considerably

more impressed, actually, than if he'd continued climbing and made the top." Over the previous

month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turn-

around time on our summit day-in our case it would probably be 1:00 Pm or 2:00 at the very

latest-and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. "With enough determination,

any bloody idiot can get up this hill, " Hall observed. "The trick is to get back down alive." Hall's

easygoing facade masked an intense desire to succeedwhich he defined in the fairly simple

terms of getting as many clients as possible to the summit. To ensure success, he paid

meticulous attention to detail: the health of the Sherpas, the efficiency of the solar-powered

electrical system, the sharpness of his clients' crampons. Hall loved being a guide, and it pained

him that some celebrated climbers-including but not limited to Sir Edmund Hillary-didn't

appreciate how difficult guiding was, or give the profession the respect he felt it deserved. Rob

decreed that Tuesday, May 7, would be a rest day, so we got up late and sat around Camp Two,

buzzing with nervous anticipation over the imminent summit assault. I fiddled with my crampons

and some other gear, then tried to read a Carl Hiaasen paperback but was so focused on the

climb that I kept scanning the same sentences over and over without the words registering.

Eventually I put the book down, snapped a few photos of Doug posing with a flag the Kent

schoolkids had asked him to carry up the peak, and pumped him for detailed information about

the difficulties of the summit pyramid, which he remembered well from the year before. "By the

time we get to the top," he frowned, "I guarantee that you're gonna be one hurtin'hombre." Doug

was hell-bent on joining him and the summit push, even though his throat was still bothering his

strength seemed to be at a low ebb. As he put it, "I've put too much of myself into this mountain

to quit now, without giving it everything I've got." Late that afternoon Fischer walked through our

camp with a clenched jaw, moving uncharacteristically slowly toward his own tents. He usually

managed to maintain a relentlessly upbeat attitude; one of his favorite utterances was, if you're

bumming out, you're not gonna get to the top, so as long as we're up here we might as well keep

moving." At the moment, however, Scott did not appear make a point of gro to be grooving in the

slightest; instead he looked anxious and extremely tired. Because he'd encouraged his clients to

move up and down the mountain independently during the acclimatization period, he ended up

having to make a number of hurried, unplanned excursions between Base Camp and the upper

camps when several clients experienced problems and needed to be escorted down. He'd

already made special trips to assist Tim Madsen, Pete Schoening, and Dale Kruse. And now, on

what should have been a badly needed day and a half of rest, Fischer had just been forced to

make a hasty round-trip from Camp Two to Base Camp and back to help his good friend Kruse

after he came down with what appeared to be a relapse of HACE. Fischer had arrived at Camp

Two around noon the previous day, just after Andy and me, having climbed from Base Camp well

ahead of his clients; he'd directed guide Anatoli Boukreev to bring up the rear, stay close to the

group, and keep an eye on everybody. But Boukreev ignored Fischer's instructions: instead of

climbing with the team, he slept late, took a shower, and departed Base Camp some five hours

behind the last of the clients. Thus, when Kruse collapsed at Boukreev was nowhere in the

20,000 feet with a splitting headache, vicinity, compelling Fischer and Beidleman to rush down

from Camp Two to handle the emergency as soon as word of Kruse's condition arrived via

climbers coming up the Western Cum. Not long after Fischer reached Kruse and began the

troublesome descent to Base Camp, they encountered Boukreev at the top of the Icefall,

ascending alone, and Fischer harshly reprimanded the guide for shirking his responsibilities.

"Yeah," Kruse remembers, "Scott laid into Told pretty good. He wanted to know why he was so

far behind everybody-why he wasn't climbing with the team. According to Kruse and other

clients of Fischers, tension between Fischer and Boukreev had been building throughout the

expedition. Fischer paid Boukreev $25,000-an unusually generous fee for guiding Everest (most

other guides on the mountain were paid $10,000 to $15,000; skilled climbing Sherpas received

only $1,400 to $2,500), and Boukreev' performances hvaedryn't been meeting his expectations

good technical climber, Ktartiuosnese. "Told was very strong and explains, "but he had poor

social skills. He didn't watch out for other people. He just wasn't a team player. Earlier, I'd told

Scott that I didn't want to have to climb with Told high on the mountain, because I doubted that

I'd be able to count on him when it really Mattered." The underlying problem was that

Boukreev's notion of his responsibilities differed substantially from Fischer' S. As a Russian,

Boukreev came from a tough, proud, hardscrabble climbing culture that did not believe in

coddling the weak. In Eastern Europe guides were trained to act more like Sherpas-hauling

loads, fixing ropes, establishing the route-and less like caretakers. Tan and blond, with

handsome Slavic features, Boukreev was one of the most accombers; in the world, with twenty

years of explished high-altitude dim.

ascents of Everest without perience in the Himalaya, including two supplemental oxygen.

And in the course of his distinguished career he'd formulated a number of unorthodox, very

strongly held opinions about how the mountain should be ascended. He was quite outspoken in

his belief that it was a mistake for guides to pamper their clients. "If client cannot climb Everest

without big help from guide," Boukreev told me, "this client should not be on Everest. Otherwise

there can be big problems up high." But Boukreev's refusal or inability to play the role of a

conventional guide in the Western tradition exasperated Fischer, It also forced him and

Beidleman to shoulder a disproportionate share of the caretaker duties for their group, and by

the first week in May the effort had taken an unmistakable toll on Fischer's health. After arriving

in Base Camp with the ailing Kruse on the evening of May 6, Fischer made two satellite phone

calls to Seattle in which he complained bitterly to his business partner, Karen Dickinson) and to

his publicist, Jane Bromet,* about Boukreev's intransigence. Neither woman imagined that these

would be the last conversations they would ever have with Fischer. On May 8 both Hall's team

and Fischer's team departed Camp Two and commenced the grinding ascent of the ropes up the

Lhotse Face. Two thousand feet above the floor of the Western Cum, just below Camp Three, a

boulder the size of a small television came rocketing down from the cliffs above and smashed

into Andy Harris's chest. It knocked him off his feet, slammed the wind out of him, and left him

dangling from the fixed line in a state of shock for several minutes. Had he not been clipped in

with a jumar he would have certainly fallen to his death. Bromet had left Base Camp in mid-April

and returned to Seattle, whence she continued to file Internet dispatches about Fischer's

expedition for

Outside

Online; she relied on regular phone updates from Fischer as the primary

source for her reports. When he arrived at the tents, Andy looked badly rattled but claimed that

he wasn't injured. "I might be a bit stiff in the morning," he insisted, "but I think the bloody thing

didn't do much more than bruise me." Just before the rock nailed him he'd been hunched

forward with his head down; he happened to look up a moment before it struck, so that it merely

grazed his chin before hitting him in the sternum, but it had come sickeningly close to smashing

into his cranium. "If that rock had hit me in the head. . ." Andy speculated with a grimace as he

shed his pack, leaving the rest of the sentence unsaid. Because Camp Three was the only camp

on the entire mountain that we didn't share with the Sherpas (the ledge was too small to

accommodate tents for all of us), it meant that here we had to do our own cooking-which mostly

amounted to melting prodigious quantities of ice for drinking water. Due to the pronounced

dehydration that was an inevitable by-product of heavy breathing in such desiccated air, each of

us consumed more than a gallon of liquid every day. We therefore needed to produce

approximately a dozen gallons of water to meet the needs of eight clients and three guides. As

the first person to reach the tents on May 8, I inherited the job of ice chopper. For three hours,

as my companions trickled into camp and settled into their sleeping bags, I remained outside

hacking at the slope with the adze of my ice ax, filling plastic garbage bags with frozen shards

and distributing the ice to the tents for melting. At 24,000 feet it was fatiguing work. Every time

one of my teammates yelled, "Hey, Jon! You still out there? We could use some more ice over

here! " it gave me a fresh perspective on how much the Sherpas ordinarily did for us, and how

little we truly appreciated it. By late afternoon, as the sun eased toward the corrugated horizon

and the temperature began to plunge, everyone had pulled into camp except Lou Kasischke,

Frank Fischbeck, and Rob, who had volunteered to do the "sweep" and come up last. Around

4:30 Pm guide Mike Groom received a call from Rob on his walkie-talkie: Lou and Frank were

still a couple of hundred feet below the tents and moving extremely slowly; would Mike please

come down to assist them? Mike hurriedly put his crampons back on and disappeared down the

fixed ropes without complaint. Nearly an hour passed before he reappeared, just ahead of the

others. Lou, who was so tired he'd let Rob carry his pack, staggered muttering, "I'm finished. I'm

into camp looking pale and distraught finished. Completely out of gas." Frank showed up a few

minutes later appearing even more exhausted, although he'd refused to give his pack to Mike. It

was a shock to see these guys-both of whom had been climbing well lately-in such a state.

Frank's apparent deterioration came as a particular blow: I'd assumed from the beginning that if

any members of our team reached the top, Frank-who'd been high on the mountain three times

previously and seemed so savvy and strong-would be among them. As darkness enveloped the

camp, our guides handed out oxygen canisters regulators, and masks to everyone: for the

remainder of the climb we would be breathing compressed gas. Relying on bottled oxygen as an

aid to ascent is a practice that's sparked acrimonious debate ever since the British first took

experimental oxygen rigs to Everest in 1921. (Skeptical Sherpas promptly dubbed the unwieldy

canisters "English Air.") Initially, the foremost critic of bottled gas was George Leigh Mallory, who

protested that using it was "unsporting, and therefore un-British." But it soon be came apparent

that in the so-called Death Zone above 25,000 feet, without supplemental oxygen the body is

vastly more vulnerable to HAPE and HACE, hypothermia, frostbite, and a host of other mortal

perils. By 1924, when he returned for his third expedition to the mountain, Mallory had become

convinced that the summit would never be reached without gas, and he resigned himself to using

it. Experiments conducted in decompression chambers had by then demonstrated that a human

plucked from sea level and dropped on the summit of Everest, where the air holds only a third as

much oxygen, would lose consciousness within minutes and die soon thereafter, But a number of

idealistic mountaineers continued to insist that a gifted athlete blessed with rare physiological

attributes could, after a lengthy period of acclimatization, climb the peak without bottled oxygen.

Taking this line of reasoning to its logical extreme, the purists argued that using gas was

therefore cheating. In the 1970s, the famed Tyrolean alpinist Reinhold Messner emerged as the

leading proponent of gasless climbing, declaring that he would ascend Everest "by fair means" or

not at all. Shortly thereafter he and his longtime partner, the Austrian Peter Habeler, astounded

the world climbing community by making good on the boast: at 1:00 Pm.

on May 8, 1978, they ascended to the summit via the South Col and Southeast Ridge route

without using supplemental oxygen. It was hailed by climbers in some circles as the first true

ascent of Everest. Messner and Habeler's historic deed was not greeted with hosannas in all

quarters, however, especially among the Sherpas. Most of them simply refused to believe that

Westerners were capable of such an achievement, which had eluded even the strongest Sherpas.

Speculation was rampant that Messner and Habeler had sucked oxygen from miniature cylinders

hidden in their clothing. Tenzing Norgay and other eminent Sherpas signed a petition

demanding that the government of Nepal conduct an official inquiry of the purported ascent.

But the evidence verifying the oxygenless climb was irrefutable. Two years later Messner

silenced all doubters, moreover, by traveling to the Tibetan side of Everest and making another

ascent sans gas-this time entirely alone, without the support of Sherpas or anybody else. When

he reached the summit at 3:00 Pm. on August 20, 1980, climbing through thick clouds and falling

snow, Messner said, "I was in continual agony; I have never in my whole life been so tired." In

The Crystal Horizon, his book about the ascent, he describes struggling up the final meters to

the top: When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath.... I can

scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings,

there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few metres this too fizzles

out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let my self fall, just lie there. For an indefinite

time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again. Upon Messner's return to

civilization, his ascent was widely lauded as the greatest mountaineering feat of all time. After

Messner and Habeler proved that Everest could be climbed without gas, a cadre of ambitious

mountaineers agreed that it should be climbed without gas. Henceforth, if one aspired to be

considered a member of the Himalayan elite, eschewing bottled oxygen was mandatory. By 1996

some sixty men and women had reached the summit without it-five of whom didn't make it back

down alive. However grandiose some of our individual ambitions may have been, nobody on

Hall's team ever really considered going for the summit without bottled oxygen. Even Mike

Groom, who'd climbed Everest three years earlier without gas, explained to me that he intended

to use it this time around because he was working as a guide, and he knew from experience that

without bottled oxygen he would be so severely impaired-both mentally and physically-that he

would be unable to fulfill his professional duties. Like most veteran Everest guides, Groom

believed that although it was acceptable-and, indeed, aesthetically preferable-to do without

bottled oxygen when climbing on one's own, it would be extremely irresponsible to guide the

peak without using it. The state-of-the-art Russian-built oxygen system used by Hall consisted of

a stiff plastic oxygen mask of the sort worn by MiG fighter pilots during the Vietnam War,

connected via a rubber hose and a crude regulator to an orange steel and Kevlar gas canister.

(Smaller and much lighter than a scuba tank, each one weighed 6.6 pounds when full.) Although

we hadn't slept with oxygen during our previous stay at Camp Three, now that we had begun the

push to the summit Rob strongly urged us to breathe gas through the night. "Every minute you

remain at this altitude and above," he caution( your minds and bodies are deteriorating." Brain

cells were dying. Our blood was growing dangerously thick and sludgelike. Capillaries in our

retinas were spontaneously hemorrhaging. Even at rest, our hearts beat at a furious rate. Rob

promised that "bottled oxygen will slow the decline and help you sleep. I tried to heed Rob's

advice, but my latent claustrophobia prevailed. When I clamped the mask over my nose and

mouth I kept imagining that it was suffocating me, so after a miserable hour I took it off and

spent the rest of the night without gas, breathlessly flopping and fidgeting, checking my watch

every twenty minutes to see if it was time to get up yet. Dug into the slope a hundred feet below

our camp, in an equally precarious setting, were the tents of most of the other teams-including

Scott Fischer's group, the South Africans, and the Taiwanese. Early the next morning-Thursday,

May 9-as I was pulling on my boots for the ascent to Camp Four, Chen Yu-Nan, a thirty-six-year-

old steelworker from Taipei, crawled out of his tent to evacuate his bowels shod only in the

smooth-soled liners of his mountaineering boots-a serious lapse of judgment. As he squatted, he

lost his footing on the ice and went hurtling down the Lhotse Face. Incredibly, after falling only

70 feet he plunged headfirst in a crevasse, which arrested his tumble. Sherpas who had seen the

incident lowered a rope, quickly pulled him out of the slot, and assisted him back to his tent.

Although he was battered and badly frightened, he didn't seem seriously injured. At the time,

nobody on Hall's team, including me, was even aware that the mishap had occurred.

shortly thereafter, Makalu Gau and the rest of the Taiwanese team left Chen alone in a

tent to recover and departed for the South Col. Even though Gau had assured Rob and Scott

that he wouldn't attempt the summit on May 10, he'd apparently changed his mind and now

intended to go for the top the same day we did. That afternoon a Sherpa named Jangbu,

descending to Camp Two after hauling a load to the South Col, stopped at Camp Three to

monitor Chen's condition and found that the Taiwanese climber's symptoms had worsened

significantly: he was now disoriented and in great Pain. Deciding that he needed to be evacuated,

Jangbu recruited two other Sherpas and began escorting Chen down the Lhotse Face. Three

hundred feet from the bottom of the ice slope, Chen abru tly p keeled over and lost

consciousness. A moment later, down at Camp Two, David Breashears's radio crackled to life: it

was Jangbu, reporting in a panicked voice that Chen had stopped breathing. Breashears and his

IMAX teammate Ed Viesturs rushed up to see if they could revive him, but when they reached

Chen some forty minutes later they found no vital signs. That evening, after Gau arrived at the

South Col, Breashears called him on the radio." Makalu, Breashears told the Taiwanese leader,

"Chen has died." O. K " Gau replied." Thank you for the information." Then he assured his team

that Chen's death would in no way affect their plans to leave for the summit at midnight.

Breashears was flabbergasted. I had just closed his friend's eyes for him," he says with more than

a touch of anger. I had just dragged Chen's body down. And all Makalu could say was, 'O.K." I

don't know, I guess maybe it was a cultural thing. Maybe he thought the best way to honor

Chen's death was to continue to the summit." Over the preceding six weeks there had been

several serious accidents: Tenzing's fall into the crevasse before we even arrived at Base Camp;

Ngawang Topche's case of HAPE and subsequent deterioration; a young, apparently fit English

climber on Mal Duff's team named Ginger Fullen who'd had a serious heart attack near the top

of the Icefall; a Dane on Duff's team named Kim Sejberg who was struck by a falling serac in the

Icefall and broke several ribs. Until that moment , however, nobody had died. Chen's death cast

a pall over the mountain as rumors of the accident spread from tent to tent, but thirty-three

climbers would be departing for the summit in a few short hours, and the gloom was quickly

banished by nervous anticipation of what lay ahead. Most of us were simply wrapped too tightly

in the grip of summit fever to engage in thoughtful reflection about the death of someone in our

midst. There would be plenty of time for reflection later, we assumed, after we all had

summitted and got back down. I looked down. Descent was totally unappetizing.... Too much

labor, too many sleepless nights, and too many dreams had been invested to bring us this far We

couldn't come back for another try next weekend. To go down now, even if we could have, would

be descending to a future marked by one huge question: what might have been Thomas E

Hornbein Everest: The West Ridge rising lethargic and groggy after my sleepless night at Camp

Three, I was slow to dress, melt water, and get out of the tent on Thursday morning, May 9. By

the time I loaded my backpack and strapped on my crampons, most of the rest of Halls group

was already ascending the ropes toward Camp Four. Surprisingly, Lou Kasischke and Frank

Fischbeck were among them. Because of their ravaged state when they arrived in camp the

previous evening, I'd assumed that both men would decide to throw in the towel. "Good on ya,

mates," I exclaimed, borrowing a phrase from the antipodal contingent, impressed that my

cohorts had sucked it up and resolved to push on. As I rushed to join my teammates, I looked

down to see a queue of approximately fifty climbers from other expeditions moving up the

ropes, too; the first of them were now immediately below me. Not wanting to become entangled

in what was sure to be a massive traffic jam (which would prolong my exposure to the

intermittent fusillade of stones whizzing down the face from above, among other hazards), I

picked up my pace and resolved to move toward the head of the line. Because only a single rope

snaked up the Lhotse Face, however, it wasn't easy to pass slower climbers. Andy's encounter

with the falling rock was very much on my mind every time I unclipped from the line to move

around somebody even a small projectile would be enough to send me to the bottom of the face

if it struck while I was disengaged from the rope. Leapfrogging past others, moreover, was not

only nerve-racking but exhausting. Like an underpowered Yugo trying to pass a line of other

vehicles on a steep hill, I had to keep the accelerator jammed to the floor for a distressingly long

time to get around anybody, leaving me gasping SO hard that I worried I was going to puke into

my oxygen mask. Climbing with oxygen for the first time in my life, I took a while to get used to it.

Although the benefits of using gas at this altitude-24,000 feet-were genuine, they were hard to

discern immediately. As I fought to catch my breath after moving past three climbers, the mask

actually gave the illusion of asphyxiating me, so I tore it from my face-only to discover breathing

was even harder without it. By the time I surmounted the cliff of brittle, ocher-hued limestone

known as the Yellow Band, I had worked my way to the front of the queue and was able to settle

into a more comfortable pace. Moving slowly but steadily, I made a rising leftward traverse

across the top of the Lhotse Face, then ascended a prow of shattered black schist called the

Geneva Spur. I'd finally gotten the hang of breathing through my oxygen rig and had moved

more than an hour ahead of my nearest companion. Solitude was a rare commodity on Everest,

and I was grateful to be granted a bit of it on this day, in such a remarkable setting. At 25,900

feet, I paused on the crest of the Spur to drink some water and take in the view. The thin air had

a shimmering, crystalline quality that made even distant peaks seem close enough to touch.

Extravagantly illuminated by the midday sun, Everest's summit pyramid loomed through an

intermittent gauze of clouds. Squinting through my camera's telephoto lens at the upper

Southeast Ridge, I was surprised to see four antlike figures moving almost imperceptibly toward

the South Summit. I deduced that they must be climbers from the Montenegrin expedition; if

they succeeded they would be the first team to reach the top this year. It would also mean that

the rumors we'd been hearing of impossibly deep snow were unfounded-if they made the

summit, maybe we had a chance of making it, too. But the plume of snow now blowing from the

summit ridge was a bad sign: the Montenegrins were struggling upward through ferocious wind.

arrived on the South Colour launching pad for the summit as sau It, at 1:00 P.M. A forlorn

plateau of bulletproof ice and windswept boulders 26,000 feet above sea level, it occupies a

broad notch between the upper ramparts of Lhotse and Everest. Roughly rect angular in shape,

about four football fields long by two across, the Col's eastern margin drops 7,000 feet down

the Kangshung Face into Tibet; the other side plunges 4,000 feet to the Western Cum. just

back from the lip of this chasm, at the Col's westernmost edge, the tents of Camp Four squatted

on a patch of barren ground surrounded by more than a thousand discarded oxygen canisters.*

If there is a more desolate, inhospitable habitation anywhere on the planet, I hope never to see

it. As the jet stream encounters the Everest massif and is squeezed through the V-shaped

contours of the South Col, the wind accelerates to unimaginable velocities; it's not unusual for

the winds at the Col actually to be stronger than the winds that rip the summit. The nearly

constant hurricane blowing through the Col in early spring explains why it remains as naked rock

and ice even when deep snow blankets adjacent slopes: everything not frozen in place here has

been blasted into Tibet. When I walked into Camp Four, six Sherpas were struggling to erect

Hall's tents in a 50-knot tempest. Helping them Put up my shelterI anchored it to some

discarded oxygen canisters wedged beneath the largest rocks I could lift, then dove inside to

wait for my team mates and warm my icy hands. The spent oxygen bottles blighting the South

Col have been accumulating since the 1950s, but thanks to an ongoing litter-removal Program

instigated in 1994 by Scott Fischer's Sagar matha Environmental Expedition, there are fewer of

them up there now than there used to be. Much of the credit belongs to a member of that

expedition named Brent Bishop (the son of the late Barry Bishop, the eminent National

Geographic Photographer who summitted Everest in

1963), who initiated a highly successful incentive policy, funded by Nike, Inc whereby

Sherpas are paid a cash bonus for each oxygen bottle they bring down from the Col. Among the

companies guiding Everest, Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants, Scott Fischer's Mountain

Madness, and Todd Burleson's Alpine Ascents International have enthusiastically embraced

Bishop's program, resulting in the removal of more than eight hundred oxygen canisters from the

upper mountain from 1994 through 1996. The weather deteriorated as the afternoon wore on.

Lopsang jangbu, Fischer's sirdar, showed up bearing a back-wrenching eightypound load, some

thirty pounds of which consisted of a satellite telephone and its peripheral hardware: Sandy

Pittman was intending to file Internet dispatches from 26,000 feet. The last of my teammates

didn't arrive until 4:30 Pm and the final stragglers in Fischer's group came in in full flowers At

dark, the even later, by which time a serious storm was Montenegrins returned to the Col to

report that the summit had remained out of reach: they'd turned around below the Hillary Step.

Between the weather and the Montenegrins' defeat, it didn't augur well for our own summit

assault, scheduled to get under way in less than six hours. Everyone retreated to their nylon

shelters the modid their best to nap, but the machinement they reached the Col and gun rattle

of the flapping tents and anxiety over what was to come made sleep out the question for most

of us. Stuart Hutchison-the young Canadian cardiologist-and I were assigned to one tent; Rob,

Frank, Mike Groom, John Taske, and Yasuko Namba were in another; Lou, Beck Weathers, Andy

Harris, and Doug Hansen occupied a third. Lou and his tent-mates were dozing in their shelter

when an unfamiliar voice called from out of the gale, Let him in quickly or he's going to die out

here! " Lou unzipped the tent later a bearded man fell supine into his lap. It was door, and a

mom -year-old deputy leader of the Bruce Herrod, the amiable thirty-seven South African team,

and the sole remaining member of that expedition with real mountaineering credentials. "Bruce

was in real trouble," Lou remembers, "shivering uncontrollably, acting very spacey and irrational,

basically unable to do anything for himself. He was so hypothermic he could barely talk. - The

rest of his group was apparently somewhere on the Color on their way to the Col. But he didn't

know where, and he had no idea how to find his own tent, so we gave him something to drink and

tried to warm him up." so not doing well. "Doug didn't look good," Beck reDoug was all calls. "He

was complaining that he hadn't slept in a couple of days, hadn't eaten. But he was determined to

strap his gear on and climb when the time came. I was concerned, because I'd gotten to know

Doug well enough at that point to realize that he'd spent the entire previous year agonizing over

the fact that he'd gotten to within three hundred feet of the summit and had to turn around.

And I mean it had gnawed at him every single day. It was pretty clear that he was not going to be

denied a second time. Doug was going to keep climbing toward the top as long as he was still

able to breathe." There were more than fifty people camped on the Col that night, huddled in

shelters pitched side by side, yet an odd feeling of isolation hung in the air. The roar of the wind

made it impossible to communicate from one tent to the next. In this godforsaken place, I felt

disconnected from the climbers around me-emotionally, spiritually, physically-to a degree I

hadn't experienced on any previous expedition. We were a team in name only, I'd sadly come to

realize. Although in a few hours we would leave camp as a group, we would ascend as

individuals, linked to one another by neither rope nor any deep sense of loyalty. Each client was

in it for himself or herself, pretty much. And I was no different: I sincerely hoped Doug got to the

top, for instance, yet I would do everything in my power to keep pushing on if he turned around.

In another context this insight would have been depressing, but I was too preoccupied with the

weather to dwell on it. If the wind didn't abate-and soon-the summit would be out of the

question for all of us. Over the preceding week, Hall's Sherpas had stocked the Col with 363

pounds of bottled oxygen-55 cylinders. Although that sounds like a lot, it was only enough to

permit a single attempt for three guides, eight clients, and four Sherpas. And the meter was

running: even as we reclined in our tents, we were using up precious gas. If need be we could

turn off our oxygen and safely remain up here for perhaps twenty-four hours; after that, however,

we would need to either go up or go down. But mr'rabile visu, at 7:30 Pm. the gale abruptly

ceased. Herrod crawled out of Lou's tent and stumbled off to locate his teammates. The

temperature was well below zero, but there was almost no wind: excellent conditions for a

summit climb. Hall's instincts were uncanny: it appeared that he had timed our attempt perfectly.

'Jonno! Stuart! " he yelled from the tent next door. "Looks like we're on, lads. Be ready to rock

and roll at eleven-thirty! As we sipped tea and readied our gear for the climb, nobody said much.

All of us had suffered greatly to get to this moment. Like Doug, I had eaten little and slept not at

all since leaving Camp Two, two days earlier. Every time I coughed, the pain from my torn

thoracic cartilage felt like someone was jabbing a knife beneath my ribs, and brought tears to my

eyes. But if I wanted a crack at the summit, I knew that I had no choice but to ignore my

infirmities and climb. Twenty-five minutes before midnight, I strapped on my oxygen mask,

switched on my headlamp, and ascended into the darkness. There were fifteen of us in Hall's

group: three guides, a full complement of eight clients, and Sherpas Ang Dorje, Lhakpa Chhiri,

Ngawang Norbu, and Kami. Hall directed two other Sherpas-Arita and Chuldum-to remain at the

tents in support, ready to mobilize in the event of trouble. The Mountain Madness team-

composed of guides Fischer, Beidleman, and Boukreev; six Sherpas; and clients Charlotte Fox,

Tim Madsen, Klev Schoening, Sandy Pittman, Lene Gammelgaard, and Martin Adams-left the

South Col half an hour after us.* Lopsang had intended that only five Mountain Madness

Sherpas accompany the summit team, leaving two at the Col in support, but, he says, "Scott

opens his heart, tells to my Sherpas, 'All can go to summit." "' In the end, Lopsang went behind

Fischer's back and ordered one Sherpa, his cousin "Big" Pemba, to remain behind. "Pemba angry

to me," Lopsang acknowledged, "but I tell to him, 'You must stay, or will not give you job again."

So he stays at Camp Four." Missing from Fischer's summit party were clients Dale Kruse, who

had remained at Base Camp in the wake of his most recent bout with HACE, and Pete

Schoening, the fabled sixty-eight-year-old veteran, who'd elected to go no higher than Camp

Three after a cardiogram administered by Drs. Hutchison, Taske, and Mackenzie had indicated a

potentially serious anomaly in his heartbeat. Most of the climbing Sherpas on Everest in 1996

wanted an opportunity to reach the top. Their underlying motives were no less varied than the

motives of Western climbers, but at least part of the incentive was job security: as Lopsang

explained, 'After Sherpa climbs Everest, easy to find work. Everybody want to hire this Sherpa."

Leaving camp just after Fischer's team, Makalu Gau started up with two Sherpas-blatantly

ignoring his promise that no Taiwanese would make a summit attempt the same day we did. The

South Africans had intended to go for the top, too, but the grueling climb from Camp Three to

the Col had taken so much out of them that they didn't even emerge from their tents. All told,

thirty-three climbers departed for the summit in the middle of that night- Although we left the

Col as members of three distinct expeditions, our fates were already starting to intertwine-and

they would become more and more tightly bound with every meter we ascended. The night had

a cold, phantasmal beauty that intensified as we climbed. More stars than I had ever seen

smeared the frozen sky A gibbous moon rose above the shoulder of 27,824-foot Makalu, washing

the slope beneath my boots in ghostly light, obviating the need for a headlamp. Far to the

southeast, along the India-Nepal frontier, colossal thunderheads drifted over the malarial

swamps of the Terai, illuminating the heavens with surreal bursts of orange and blue lightning.

Within three hours of leaving the Col, Frank decided that something about the day just didn't

feel right. Stepping out of the queue, he turned around and descended to the tents. His fourth

attempt to climb Everest was over. Not long after that, Doug stepped aside as well. "He was a

little ahead of me at the time," recalls Lou. "All of a sudden he stepped out of line and just stood

there. When I moved up beside him, he told me he was cold and feeling bad and was heading

down." Then Rob, who was bringing up the rear, caught up to Doug, and a brief conversation

ensued. Nobody overheard the dialogue, so there is no way of knowing what was said, but the

upshot was that Doug got back in line and continued his ascent. The day before departing Base

Camp, Rob had sat the team down in the mess tent and given us a lecture about the importance

of obeying all his orders on summit day. "I will tolerate no dissension up there," he admonished,

staring pointedly at me. "My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal. If you don't like a

particular decision I make, I'd be happy to discuss it with you afterward, but not while we're on

the hill." The most obvious source of potential conflict was the likelihood that Rob might decide

to turn us around before the summit. But there was another matter he was particularly

concerned about. During the latter stages of the acclimatization period, he'd given us slightly

freer rein to climb at our own pace-for instance, Hall sometimes allowed me to travel two hours

or more out in front of the main group. He now stressed, however, that for the first half of the

summit day he wanted everybody to climb in close proximity. "Until we all reach the crest of the

Southeast Ridge," he pronounced, referring to a distinctive promontory at 27,600 feet known as

the Balcony, "everyone needs to stay within a hundred meters of each other. This is very

important. We will be climbing in the dark, and I want the guides to be able to keep close track

of you." Ascending through the predawn hours of May 10, those of us at the head of the pack

were thus compelled to repeatedly stop and wait in the bone-cracking cold for our slowest

members to catch up. On one occasion Mike Groom, sirdar Ang Dorje, and I sat on a

snowcovered ledge for more than forty-five minutes, shivering and pounding our hands and feet

to ward off frostbite, waiting for the others to arrive. But the squandered time was even more

excruciating to bear than the cold. At 3:45 A.M Mike announced that we'd gotten too far ahead

and needed to stop and wait yet again. Pressing my body against a shale outcrop, trying to

escape the subzero breeze now blowing from the west, I stared down the precipitous slope and

attempted to identify the climbers inching toward us in the moonlight. As they advanced, I could

see that some members of Fischer's group had caught up with our group: Hall's team, the

Mountain Madness team, and the Taiwanese were now jumbled into one long, intermittent

queue. And then something peculiar caught my eye. Sixty-five feet below, a tall figure in a bright

yellow down jacket and Pants was hitched to the back of a much smaller Sherpa by a three-foot

length of cord; the Sherpa, not wearing an oxygen mask, huffing loudly, was hauling his partner

up the slope like a horse pulling a plow. The odd pair was passing other people and making good

time, but the arrangements technique for assisting a weak or injured climber known as short-

roping-appeared to be hazardous and extremely uncomfortable for both parties. By and by, I

recognized the Sherpa as Fischer's flamboyant sirdar, Lo sang Jangbu, and the climber in yellow

as Sandy Pittman. Guide Neal Beidleman, who also observed Lopsang towing Pittman, recalls,

"As I came up from below, Lopsang was leaning into the slope, clinging to the rock like a spider)

supporting Sandy on a tight tether. It looked awkward and quite dangerous. I wasn't sure what

to make of it." Around 4:15 A.M Mike gave us the go-ahead to resume our ascent, and Ang Dorje

and I started climbing as fast as we could in order to warm ourselves. As the first hint of

daybreak brightened the eastern horizon, the rocky, terraced terrain we'd been ascending gave

way to a broad gully of unconsolidated snow. Taking turns breaking trail through the calf-deep

powder, Ang Dorje and I reached the crest of the Southeast Ridge at 5:30, just as the sun edged

into the sky. Three of the world's five highest peaks stood out in craggy relief against the pastel

dawn. My altimeter read 27,600 feet. Hall had made it very clear that I was to climb no higher

until the whole group had gathered at this balconylike roost, so I sat down on my pack to wait.

When Rob and Beck finally arrived at the back of the herd, I'd been sitting for more than ninety

minutes. As I waited, both Fischer's group and the Taiwanese team caught and passed me. I felt

frustrated about wasting so much time and peeved at falling behind everybody else. But I

understood Hall's rationale, so I kept a tight lid on my anger. During my thirty-four-year tenure as

a climber, I'd found that the most rewarding aspects of mountaineering derive from the sport's

emphasis on self-reliance, on making critical decisions and dealing with the consequences, on

personal responsibility. When you sign on as a client, I discovered, you are forced to give up all

of that, and more. For safety's sake, a responsible guide will always insist on calling the shots-he

or she simply can't afford to let each client make important decisions independently. Passivity on

the part of the clients had thus been encouraged throughout our expedition. Sherpas put in the

route, set up the camps, did the cooking, hauled all the loads. This conserved our energy and

vastly increased our chances of getting up Everest, but I found it hugely unsatisfying. I felt at

times as if I wasn't really climbing the mountain-that surrogates were doing it for me. Although I

had willingly accepted this role in order to climb Everest with Hall, I never got used to it. So I

was happy as hell when, at 7:10 A.M he arrived atop the Balcony and gave me the O.K. to

continue climbing. One of the first people I passed when I started moving again was Lopsang,

kneeling in the snow over a pile of vomit. Ordinarily, he was the strongest member of any group

he climbed with, even though As he proudly told me after the he never used supplemental

oxygen.

expedition, "Every mountain I climb, I go first, I fix line. In ninety-five on Everest with Rob

Hall I go first from Base Camp to summit, I fix all ropes." His position near the back of Fischer's

group on the morning of May 10, retching his guts out, seemed to indicate that something was

seriously amiss. The previous afternoon, Lopsang had exhausted himself carrying a satellite

phone for Pittman, in addition to the rest of his load, from Camp Three to Camp Four. When

Beidleman had seen Lopsang Three, he'd told shoulder his crippling eighty-pound burden at

Camp the Sherpa that it wasn't necessary to carry the phone to the South Col and suggested

that he leave it behind. "I don't want to carry relet had worked only phone," Lopsang later

admitted, in part because i marginally at Camp Three and it seemed even less likely to work in

the colder, harsher environment of Camp Four.* "But Scott told to me, 'If f The phone didn't

work at all at Camp Four. you don't carry, I will carry." So I take telephone, tie on outside of my

rucksack, carry to Camp Four... This makes me very tired." And now Lopsang had just towed

Pittman on a short-rope for five or six hours above the South Col, substantially compounding his

fatigue and preventing him from assuming his customary role in the lead, establishing the route.

Because his unexpected absence from the head of the line had a bearing on the day's outcome,

his decision to short-rope Pittman provoked criticism and bafflement after the fact. "I have no

idea why Lopsang was short-roping Sandy," says Beidle"He lost sight of what he was supposed to

be doing up there, man.

what the priorities were." For her part, Pittman didn't ask to be short-roped. As she left

Camp Four at the front of Fischer's group, Lopsang abruptly pulled her aside and girth-hitched a

hight of rope to the front of her climbing harness. Then, without consulting her, he capped the

other end to his own harness and began to pull. She maintains that Lopsang hauled her up the

slope very much against her wishes. Which begs a question: as a notoriously assertive New

Yorker (she was so adamantine that some Kiwis at Base Camp nicknamed her "Sandy Pit Bull")

why didn't she simply unfasten the three-foot tether connecting her to Lopsang, which would

have required nothing more than reaching up and unclipping a single carabiner? Pittman explains

that she didn't unclip herself from the Sherpa out of respect for his authority-as she put it, "I

didn't want to hurt Lopsang's feelings." She also said that although she didn't consult her watch,

her recollection was that he short-roped her for only "one to one and a half hours," not five to six

hours, as several other climbers observed, and Lopsang confirmed. For his part, when asked why

he short-roped Pittman, for whom he had openly expressed contempt on multiple occasions,

Lopsang gave conflicting accounts. He told Seattle attorney Peter Goldman Pittman and I

discussed these and other events during a seventy-minute phone conversation six months after

returning from Everest. Except to clarify certain points about the short-roping incident, she

requested that I not quote any part of that dialogue in this book, and I have honored that

request.

who had climbed Broad Peak with both Scott and Lopsang in 1995 and was one of Fischer's

oldest, most trusted friends-that in the darkness he had confused Pittman with the Danish client

Lene Gammelgaard and that he stopped towing her as soon as he realized his mistake at

daybreak. But in an extended, tape-recorded interview with me, Lopsang insisted rather

convincingly that he knew all along he was hauling Pittman and had decided to do it "because

Scott wants all members to go to summit, and I am thinking Sandy will be weakest member, I am

thinking she will be slow, so I will take her first." A perceptive young man, Lopsang was extremely

devoted to Fischer; the Sherpa understood how important it was to his friend and employer to

get Pittman to the summit. Indeed, one of the last times Fischer communicated with Jane

Bromet from Base Camp he mused, "If I can get Sandy to the summit, I'll bet she'll be on TV talk

shows. Do you think she will include me in her fame and fanfare? As Goldman explained,

"Lopsang was totally loyal to Scott. To me it's inconceivable that he would have short-roped

anybody unless he believed very strongly that Scott wanted him to do it." Whatever motivated

him, Lopsang's decision to tow a client didn't seem like a particularly serious mistake at the time.

But it would end up being one of many little things-a slow accrual, compounding steadily and

imperceptibly toward critical mass. Suffice it to say that [Everest] has the most steep ridges and

appalling precipices that I have ever seen, and that all the talk of an easy snow slope is a myth....

My darling, this is a thrilling business altogether, I can't tell you how it possesses me, and what a

prospect it is. And the beauty of it all! George Leigh Mallory, in a letter to his wife, June 28, 1921

Above the South Col, up in the Death Zone, survival is to no small degree a race against the

clock. Upon setting out from Camp Four on May 10, each client carried two 6.6-pound oxygen

bottles and would pick up a third bottle on the South Summit from a cache to be stocked by

Sherpas. At a conservative flow rate of two liters per minute, each bottle would last between

five and six hours. By 4:00 or 5:00 P.M everyone's gas would be gone. Depending on each

person's acclimatization and physiological makeup, we would still be able to function above the

South Col-but not well, and not for long. We would instantly become more vulnerable to HAPE,

HACE, hypothermia, impaired judgment, and frostbite. The risk of dying would skyrocket. Hall,

who had climbed Everest four times previously, understood as well as anybody the need to get

up and down quickly. Recognizing that the basic climbing skills of some of his clients were highly

susPect, Hall intended to rely on fixed lines to safeguard and expedite both our group and

Fischer's group over the most difficult ground. The fact that no expedition had been to the top

yet this year concerned him, therefore, because it meant that ropes had not been installed over

much of this terrain. Geran Kropp, the Swedish soloist, had ascended to within 350 vertical feet

of top on May 3, but he hadn't bothered to put in any ropes at all. The Montenegrins, who'd got

even higher, had installed some fixed line, but in their inexperience they'd used all they had in

the first 1,400 feet above the South Col, wasting it on relatively gentle slopes where it wasn't

really needed. Thus on the morning of our summit bid, the only ropes strung along the

precipitous serrations of the upper Southeast Ridge were a few ancient, tattered remnants from

past expeditions that emerged sporadically from the ice. Anticipating this possibility, before

leaving Base Camp Hall and Fischer convened a meeting of guides from both teams, during

which they agreed that each expedition would dispatch two Sherpas-including the climbing

sirdars, Ang Dorje and Lopsang-from Camp Four ninety minutes ahead of the main groups. This

would give the Sherpas time to install fixed lines on the most exposed sections of the upper

mountain before the clients arrived. "Rob made it very clear how important it was to do this,"

recalls Beidleman. "He wanted to avoid a time-consuming bottleneck at all costs." For some

unknown reason, however, no Sherpas left the South Col ahead of us on the night of May 9.

Perhaps the violent gale, which didn't stop blowing until 7:30 P.M prevented them from

mobilizing as early as they'd hoped. After the expedition Lopsang insisted that at the last minute

Hall and Fischer had simply scrapped the plan to fix ropes in advance of their clients, because

they'd received erroneous information that the Montenegrins had already completed the job as

high as the South Summit. But if Lopsang's assertion is correct, neither Beidleman, Groom, nor

Boukreev-the three surviving guides-were ever told of the altered scheme. And if the plan to fix

lines had been intentionally abandoned, there would have been no reason for Lopsang and Ang

Dorje to depart with the 300 feet of rope that each Slier a carried when they p set out from

Camp Four at the front of their respective teams. In any case, above 27,400 feet, no ropes had

been fixed ahead of time. When Ang Dorje and I first arrived on the Balcony at 5:30 A.M we

were more than an hour in front of the rest of Hall's group - At that point we could easily have

gone ahead to install the ropes. But Rob had explicitly forbidden me to go ahead, and Lopsang

was still far below, short-roping Pittman, so there was nobody to accompany Ang Dorje. Quiet

and Moody by nature, Ang Dorje seemed especially somber as we sat together watching the sun

come up. My attempts to engage him in conversation went nowhere. His ill humor, I figured, was

perhaps due to the abscessed tooth that had been causing him pain for the previous two weeks.

Or maybe he was brooding over the disturbing vision he'd had four days earlier: on their last

evening at Base Camp, he and some other Sherpas had celebrated the coming summit attempt

by drinking a large quantity of chhang-a thick, sweet beer brewed from rice and millet. The next

morning, severely hungover, he was extremely agitated; before ascending the Icefall he confided

to a friend that he'd seen ghosts in the night. An intensely spiritual young man, Ang Dorje was

not one to take such portents lightly. It was possible, though, that he was simply angry at

Lopsang, whom he regarded as a showboat. In 1995, Hall had employed both Lopsang and Ang

Dorje on his Everest expedition, and the two Sherpas had not worked well together. On summit

day that year, Hall's team had reached the South Summit late, around 1:30 Pm to find deep,

unstable snow blanketing the final stretch of the summit ridge. Hall sent a Kiwi guide Guy Cotter,

ahead with Lopsang, rather than Ang Dorje, to determine the feasibility of climbing higher-and

Ang Dorje, who was the sirdar on that climb, took it as an insult. A little later, when Lopsang had

climbed to the base of the Hillary Step, Hall decided to abort the summit attempt and signaled

Cotter and Lopsang to turn around. But Lopsang ignored the command, untied from Cotter,

and continued ascending to the summit alone. Hall had been angry about Lopsang's

insubordination, and Ang Dorje had shared his employer's displeasure. This year, even though

they were on different teams, Ang Dorje had again been asked to work with Lopsang on summit

day-and again Lopsang appeared to be acting squirrelly. Ang Dorje had been working well

beyond the call of duty for six long weeks. Now, apparently, he was tired of doing more than his

share. Looking sullen, he sat beside me in the snow, awaiting the arrival of Lopsang, and the

ropes were left unfixed. As a consequence, I ran smack into the first bottleneck ninety minutes

after moving beyond the Balcony, at 28,000 feet, where the intermingled teams encountered a

series of massive rock steps that required ropes for safe passage. Clients huddled restlessly at

the base of the rock for nearly an hour while Beidleman-taking over the duties of an absent

Lopsang-laboriously ran the rope out. Here, the impatience and technical inexperience of Hall's

client V Yasuko Namba nearly caused a disaster. An accomplished businesswoman employed by

Federal Express in Tokyo, Yasuko didn't fit the meek, deferential stereotype of a middle-aged

Japanese woman. At home, she'd told me with a laugh, her husband did all the cooking and

cleaning. Her quest for Everest had turned into a minor cause celebre in Japan. Previously on

the expedition she'd been a Slow, uncertain climber, but today, with the summit in her crosshairs,

she was energized as never before. "From the time we arrived at the South Col," says John

Taske, who'd shared a tent with her at Camp Four, " Yasuko was totally focused on the top-it was

almost like she was in a trance. Ever since leaving the Col she'd been pushing extremely hard,

jostling her way toward the front of the line. Now, as Beidleman clung precariously to the rock

100 feet above the clients, the overly eager Yasuko clamped her jumar to the dangling rope

before the guide had anchored his end of it. As she was about to put her full body weight on the

rope-which would have pulled Beidleman off-Mike Groom intervened in the nick of time and

gently scolded her for being so impatient. The traffic jam at the ropes grew with each arriving

climber, so those at the rear of the scrum fell farther and farther behind. By late morning, three

of Hall's clients-Stuart Hutchison, John Taske, and Lou Kasischke, climbing near the back with

Hall-were becoming quite worried about the lagging pace, Immediately in front of them was the

Taiwanese team, moving especially sluggishly. "They were climbing in a peculiar style, really

close together," says Hutchison," almost like slices in a loaf of bread, one behind the other, which

meant it was nearly impossible to pass them. We spent a lot of time waiting for them to move up

the ropes se Camp before our summit bid, Hall had contemplated two At Ba possible

turnaround times-either 1:00 P.M. or 2:00 Pm. He never deA declared which of these times we

were to abide by, however-which was curious, considering how much he'd talked about the

importance of designating a hard deadline and sticking to it no matter what. We were simply left

with a vaguely articulated understanding that Hall would withhold making a final decision until

summit day, after assessing the weather and other factors, and would then personally take

responsibility for turning everyone around at the proper hour. By midmorning on May 10, Hall

still hadn't announced what our turnaround time would actually be. Hutchison, conservative by

nature, was operating on the assumption that it would be 1:00 Pm. Around 11:00, Hall told

Hutchison and Taske that the top was still three hours away, and then he sprinted to try and get

past the Taiwanese. "It seemed increasingly unlikely that we would have any chance of

summitting before the one Pm. turnaround time," says Hutchison. A brief discussion ensued.

Kasischke was initially reluctant to concede defeat, but Taske and Hutchison were persuasive. At

11:3 0, the three men turned their backs on the summit and headed down, and Hall sent Sherpas

Kami and Lhakpa Chhiri down with them. Electing to descend must have been supremely

difficult for these three clients, as well as for Frank Fischbeck, who'd turned around hours earlier.

Mountaineering tends to draw men and women not easily deflected from their goals. By this late

stage in the expedition we had all been subjected to levels of misery and peril that would have

sent more balanced individuals packing for home long ago. To get this far one had to have an

uncommonly obdurate personality. Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to

ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard

signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest

climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if

You're too driven you're likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between

appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest

are littered with corpses. Taske, Hutchison, Kasischke, and Fischbeck had each spent as much as

$70,000 and endured weeks of agony to be granted this one shot at the summit. All were

ambitious men, unaccustomed to losing and even less to quitting. And yet, faced with a tough

decision, they were among the few who made the right choice that day. Above the rock step

where John, Stuart, and Lou turned around, the route angled steeply up-the fixed ropes ended.

From this point culminated ward along a graceful arEte of wind-compacted snow that in the

South Summit-where I arrived at 11:00 to find a second, even worse bottleneck. A little higher,

seemingly no more than a stone's throw away, was the vertical gash of the Hillary Step, and

slightly behind guides Andy Harris, Neal Beiyond that the summit itself. Rendered dumb with

awe and fatigue, I took some photos, then sat down wit Biedleman, and Anatoli Boukreev to wait

for the Sherpas to fix ropes along the spectacularly corniced summit ridge. I noticed that

Boukreev, like Lopsang, wasn't using supplemental oxygen. Although the Russian had summitted

Everest twice before without gas, and Lopsang thrice, I was surprised Fischer had given them

permission to guide the peak without it, which didn't seem to be in their clients' best interest. I

was also surprised to see that Boukreev didn't have a rily a guide would carry a pack con

backpack-custorna clothing, taming rope, first-aid supplies, crevasse-rescue gear, extra ist clients

in the event of an emerand other items necessary to ass gency. Boukreev was the first guide I'd

ever seen, on any mountain, ignore this convention. It turned out that he had departed Camp

Four carrying both a backpack and an oxygen bottle; he later told me that although he didn't

intend to use the gas, he wanted to have a bottle handy in the d he needed it higher on the peak.

event that "his power was low" an Upon reaching the Balcony, however, he jettisoned the

pack and gave his oxygen canister, mask, and regulator to Beidleman to carry for him. Because

Boukreev wasn't breathing supplemental oxygen, he had apparently decided to strip his load

down to the bare minimum to gain every possible advantage in the appallingly thin air. A 20-knot

breeze raked the ridge, blowing a plume of spindrift far over the Kangshung Face, but overhead

the sky was an achingly brilliant blue. Lounging in the sun at 28,700 feet inside my thick down

suit, gazing across the roof of the world in a hypoxic stupor, I completely lost track of time.

None of us paid much attention to the fact that Ang Dorje and Ngawang Norbu, another Sherpa

on Hall's team, were sitting beside us sharing a thermos of tea and seemed to be in no hurry to

go higher. Around 11:40, Beidleman eventually asked, "Hey, Ang Dorje, are you going to fix the

ropes, or what? " Ang Dorje's reply was a quick, unequivocal "No"-perhaps because none of

Fischer's Sherpas were there to share the work. Beidleman roused Harris and Boukreev and

strongly suggested that Growing alarmed at the crowd stacking up at the South Summit, the

three guides install the ropes themselves; hearing this, I quickly volunteered to help. Beidleman

pulled a 150-foot coil of rope from his pack, I grabbed another cod from Ang Dorje, and with

Boukreev and Harris we got under way at noon to fix lines up the summit ridge. But by then

another hour had already trickled away. Bottled oxygen does not make the top of Everest feel

like sea level. Climbing above the South Summit with my regulator delivering just under two

liters of oxygen per minute, I had to stop and draw three or four lungfuls of air after each

ponderous step. Then I'd take one more step and have to pause for another four heaving

breaths-and this was the fastest pace I could manage. Because the oxygen systems we were

using delivered a lean mix of compressed gas and ambient air, 29,000 feet with gas felt like

approximately 26,000 feet without gas. But the bottled oxygen conferred other benefits that

weren't so easily quantified. Climbing along the blade of the summit ridge, sucking gas into my

ragged lungs, I enjoyed a strange, unwarranted sense of calm. The world beyond the rubber

mask was stupendously vivid but seemed not quite real, as if a movie were being projected in

slow motion across the front of my goggles. I felt drugged, disengaged, thoroughly insulated

from external stimuli. I had to remind myself over and over that there was 7,000 feet of sky on

either side, that everything was at stake here, that I would pay for a single bungled step with my

life. Half an hour above the South Summit I arrived at the foot of the Hillary Step. One of the

most famous pitches in all of mountaineering, its forty feet of near-vertical rock and ice looked

daunting, but-as any serious climber would-I'd wanted very badly to take the "sharp end" of the

rope and lead the Step. It was clear, however, that Boukreev, Beidleman, and Harris all felt the

same way, and it was hypoxic delusion on my part to think that any of them was going to let a

client hog such a coveted lead. In the end, Boukreev-as senior guide and the only one of us who

had climbed Everest previously-claimed the honor; with Beidleman paying out the rope, he did a

masterful job of leading the pitch. But it was a slow process, and as he painstakingly ascended

toward the crest of the Step, I nervously studied my watch and wondered whether I might run

out of oxygen. My first canister had expired at 7:00 A.M. on the Balcony, after lasting about

seven hours. Using this as a benchmark, at the South Summit I'd calculated that my second

canister would expire around 2:00 Pm which I'd stupidly assumed would allow plenty of time to

reach the summit and return to the South Summit to retrieve my third oxygen bottle. But now it

was already after 1:00, and I was beginning to have serious doubts. At the top of the Step I

shared my concern with Beidleman and asked whether he minded if I hurried ahead to the

summit instead of pausing to help him string the last coil of rope along the ridge. "Go for it," he

graciously offered. "I'll take care of the rope." Plodding slowly up the last few steps to the

summit, I had the sensation of being underwater, of life moving at quarter speed. And then I

found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a

battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags

snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on,

the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against long odds,

after all, I had just attained a goal I'd coveted since childhood. But the summit was really only

the halfway point. Any impulse I might have felt toward self-congratulation was extinguished by

overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead. Recalling Not

only during the ascent but also during the descent my will-power is dulled. The longer I climb

the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself My attention

has diminished, my memwy is weakened. My mental fatigue is now greater than the bodily. It is

so pleasant to sit doing nothing-and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is-like

death through freezing-a pleasant one. Reinhold Messner The Crystal Horizon n my backpack

was a banner from

Outside

magazine, a small pennant emblazoned with a whimsical lizard that

Linda, my wife, had sewn, and some other mementos with which I'd intended to pose for a series

of triumphant photos. Cognizant of my dwindling oxygen reserves, however, I left everything in

my pack and stayed on top of the world just long enough to fire off four quick shots of Andy

Harris and Anatoli Boukreev posing in front of the summit survey marker. Then I turned to

descend. About twenty yards below the summit I passed Neal Beidleman and a client of

Fischer's named Martin Adams on their way up. After exchanging a high five with Neal, I grabbed

a handful of small stones from a wind-scoured patch of exposed shale, zipped the souvenirs into

the pocket of my down suit, and hastened down the ridge. A moment earlier I'd noticed that

wispy clouds now filled the valleys to the south, obscuring all but the highest peaks. Adams-a

small, Pugnacious Texan who'd gotten rich selling bonds during the boomIng 1980s-is an

experienced airplane pilot who'd spent many hours gazing down on the tops of clouds; later he

told me that he recognized these innocent-looking puffs of water vapor to be the crowns of

robust thunderheads immediately after reaching the top. "When you see

a thunderhead in an airplane," he explained, "your first reaction is to get the fuck out of

there. So that's what I did." But unlike Adams, I was unaccustomed to peering down at

cumulonimbus cells from 29,000 feet, and I therefore remained ignorant of the storm that was

even then bearing down. My concerns revolved round the diminishing supply of oxygen in my

tank.

instead a Fifteen minutes after leaving the summit I reached the top of the Hillary Step,

where I encountered a clot of climbers chuffing up the single strand of rope, and my descent

came to an enforced halt. As I waited for the crowd to pass, Andy arrived on his way down.

"Jon," he asked, "I don't seem to be getting enough air. Can you tell if the intake valve to my

mask is iced up?" A quick check revealed a fist-sized chunk of frozen drool blocking the rubber

valve that admitted ambient air into the mask from the atmosphere. I chipped it off with the pick

of my ice ax, then asked Andy to return the favor by turning off my regulator in order to

conserve my gas until the Step cleared. He mistakenly opened the valve instead of closing it,

however, and ten minutes later all my oxygen was gone. My cognitive functions, which had been

marginal before, instantly went into a nose dive. I felt like I'd been slipped an overdose of a

powerful sedative. I fuzzily remember Sandy Pittman climbing past as I waited, bound for the

summit, followed an indeterminate time later by Charlotte Fox and then Lopsang Jangbu.

Yasuko materialized next, just below my precarious stance, but was flummoxed by the last and

steepest portion of the Step. I watched helplessly for fifteen minutes as she struggled to haul

herself up the uppermost brow of rock, too exhausted to manage it. Finally Tim Madsen, who

was waiting impatiently directly below her, put his hands beneath her buttocks and pushed her

to the top. Rob Hall appeared not long after that. Disguising my rising panic, I thanked him for

getting me to the top of Everest. "Yes it's turned out to b a good expedition," he replied, then

mentioned that Stuart Frank Fischbeck, Beck Weathers, Lou Kasischke, turned back. Even in my

state of Hutchison, and John Taske had all hypoxic imbecility, it was obvious Hall was profoundly

disappointed that five of his eight clients had packed it in-a sentiment that I suspected was

heightened by the fact that Fischer's entire crew appeared to be plugging toward the summit. "I

only wish we could have gotten more clients to the top," Rob lamented before continuing on his

way. Soon thereafter, Adams and Boukreev arrived on their way down, stopping immediately

above me to wait for the traffic to clear. A minute later the overcrowding atop the Step

intensified further as Makalu Gau, Ang Dorje, and several other Sherpas came up the rope,

followed by Doug Hansen and Scott Fischer. Then, finally, the Hillary Step was clear-but only

after I'd spent more than an hour at 28,900 feet without supplemental oxygen. By that point,

entire sectors of my cerebral cortex seemed to have shut down altogether. Dizzy, fearing that I

would black out, I was frantic to reach the South Summit, where my third bottle was waiting. I

started tenuously down the fixed lines, stiff with dread. just below the step, Anatoli and Martin

scooted around me and hurried down. Exercising extreme caution, I continued descending the

tightrope of the ridge, but fifty feet above the oxygen cache the rope ended, and I balked at

going farther without gas. Over at the South Summit, I could see Andy Harris sorting through a

pile of orange oxygen bottles. "Yo, Harold! " I yelled, "Could you bring me a fresh bottle?"

"There's no oxygen here! " the guide shouted back. "These bottles are all empty! " This was

disturbing news. My brain screamed for oxygen. I didn't know what to do. just then, Mike

Groom caught up to me on his way down from the summit. Mike had climbed Everest in 1993

without gas, and he wasn't overly concerned about going without. He gave me his oxygen bottle,

and we quickly scrambled over to the South Summit. When we got there, an examination of the

oxygen cache immediately revealed that there were at least six full bottles. Andy, however,

refused to believe it. He kept insisting that they were all empty, and nothing Mike or I said could

convince him otherwise. The only way to know how much gas is in a canister is to attach it to

your regulator and read the gauge; presumably this is how Andy had checked the bottles at the

South Summit. After the expedition, Neal Beidleman pointed out that if Andy's regulator had

become fouled with ice, the gauge might have registered empty even though the canisters were

full, which would explain his bizarre obstinacy. And if his regulator was perhaps on the fritz and

not delivering oxygen to his mask, that would also explain Andy's apparent lack of lucidity. This

possibility-which now seems so self-evident-didn't occur to either Mike or me at the time,

however. In hindsight, Andy was acting irrationally and had plainly slipped well beyond routine

hypoxia, but I was so mentally impeded myself that it simply didn't register. My inability to

discern the obvious was exacerbated to some degree by the guide-client protocol. Andy and I

were very similar in terms of physical ability and technical expertise; had we been climbing

together in a nonguided situation as equal partners, it's inconceivable to me that I would have

neglected to recognize his plight. But on this expedition he had been cast in the role of

invincible guide, there to look after me and the other clients; we had been specifically

indoctrinated not to question our guides' judgment. The thought never entered my crippled

mind that Andy might in fact be in terrible straits-that a guide might urgently need help from me.

As Andy continued to assert that there were no full bottles at the South Summit, Mike looked at

me quizzically. I looked back and shrugged. Turning to Andy, I said, "No big deal, Harold. Much

ado about nothing." Then I grabbed a new oxygen canister, screwed it onto my regulator, and

headed down the mountain. Given what unfolded over the hours that followed the ease with

which I abdicated responsibility-my utter failure to consider that Andy might have been in

serious trouble-was a lapse that's likely to haunt me for the rest of my life. Around 3:30 Pm. I left

the South Summit ahead of Mike, Yasuko, and Andy, and almost immediately descended into a

dense layer of clouds. Light snow started to fall. I could scarcely tell where the mountain ended

and where the sky began in the flat, diminishing light; it would have been very easy to blunder off

the edge of the ridge and never be heard from again. And the conditions only worsened as I

moved down the peak. At the bottom of the rock steps on the Southeast Ridge I stopped with

Mike to wait for Yasuko, who has having difficulty negotiating the fixed ropes. He attempted to

call Rob on the radio, but Mike's transmitter was working only intermittently and he couldn't

raise anybody. With Mike looking after Yasuko, and both Rob and Andy accomPanying Doug

Hansen-the only other client still above us-i assumed the situation was under control. So as

Yasuko caught up to us, I asked Mike's permission to continue down alone. "Fine," he replied.

"Just don't walk off any cornices." About 4:45 P.M when I reached the Balcony -the promontory

at 27,600 feet on the Southeast Ridge where I'd sat watching the sunrise with Ang Dorje-I was

shocked to encounter Beck Weathers, standing alone in the snow, shivering violently. I'd

assumed that he'd descended to Camp Four hours earlier. "Beck! " I exclaimed, "what the fuck

are you still doing up here?" Years earlier, Beck had undergone a radial keratotomy* to correct

his vision. A side effect of the surgery, he discovered early in the Everest climb, was that the low

barometric Pressure that exists at high altitude caused his eyesight to fail. The higher he

climbed, the lower the barometric pressure fell, and the worse his vision became. The previous

afternoon as he was ascending from Camp Three to Camp Four, Beck later confessed to me,

"my vision had gotten so bad that I couldn't see more than a few feet. So I just tucked right

behind John Taske and when he'd lift a foot I'd place my foot right in his bootprint. Beck had

spoken openly of his vision problem earlier, but with the summit in reach he neglected to

mention its increasing severity to Rob or anyone else. His bad eyes notwithstanding, he was

climbing well and feeling stronger than he had since the beginning of the expedition, and, he

explained, "I didn't want to bail out prematurely." A radial keratotorny is a surgical procedure to

correct myopia in which a series of spokelike incisions are made from the outer edge of the

cornea toward its center, thereby flattering it. Climbing above the South Col. through the night,

Beck managed to keep up with the group by employing the same strategy he'd used the previous

afternoon-stepping in the footsteps of the person directly in front of him. But by the time he

reached the Balcony and the sun came up, he realized his vision was worse than ever. In

addition, he'd inadvertently rubbed some ice crystals into his eyes, lacerating both corneas

"At that point," Beck revealed, "one eye was completely blurred over, I could barely see out

of the other, and I'd lost all depth perception. I felt that I couldn't see well enough to climb

higher without being a danger to myself or a burden to someone else, so I told Rob what was

going on." "Sorry pal," Rob immediately announced, "you're going down. I'll send one of the

Sherpas down with you." But Beck wasn't quite ready to give up his summit hopes: "I explained

to Rob that I thought there was a pretty good chance my vision would improve once the sun got

higher and my pupils contracted. I said I wanted to wait a little while, and then boogie on up

after everybody else if I started seeing more clearly." Rob considered Beck's proposal, then

decreed, "O.K fair enough. I'll give you half an hour to find out. But I can't have you going down

to Camp Four on your own. If your vision isn't better in thirty minutes I want you to stay here so

I know exactly where you are until I come back from the summit, then we can go down together.

I'm very serious about this: either you go down right now, or you promise me you'll sit right here

until. I return." "So I crossed my heart and hoped to die," Beck told me goodnaturedly as we

stood in the blowing snow and waning light. "And I've kept my word. \"which is why I'm still

standing here." Shortly after noon, Stuart Hutchison, John Taske, and Lou Kasischke had gone

past on their way down with Lhakpa and Kami, but Weathers elected not to accompany them.

"The weather was still good," he explains, "and I saw no reason to break my promise to Rob at

that point." Now, however, it was getting dark and conditions were turning grim. "Come down

with me," I implored. "It will be at least another two or three hours before Rob shows up. I'll be

your eyes. I'll get you down, no problem." Beck was nearly persuaded to descend with me when

I made the mistake of mentioning that Mike Groom was on his way down with Yasuko, a few

minutes behind me. In a day of many istakes, this would turn out to be one of the larger ones.

"Thanks anyway," Beck said. "I think I'll. just wait for Mike. He's got a rope; he'll be able to short-

rope me down." "O.K Beck," I replied. "It's your call. I guess I'll see you in camp, then." Secretly, I

was relieved that I wouldn't have to deal with getting Beck down the problematic slopes to come,

most of which were not protected by fixed lines. Daylight was waning, the weather was

worsening, my reserves of strength were nearly gone. Yet I still didn't have any sense that

calamity was around the corner. Indeed, after talking with Beck I even took the time to find a

spent oxygen canister that I'd stashed in the snow on the way up some ten hours earlier.

Wanting to remove all my trash from the mountain, I stuffed it into my pack with my other two

bottles (one empty, one partially full) and then hurried toward the South Col, 1,600 feet below,

From the Balcony I descended a few hundred feet down a broad, gentle snow gully without

incident, but then things began to get sketchy. The route meandered through outcroPPings of

broken shale blanketed with six inches of fresh snow. Negotiating the puzzling, infirm terrain

demanded unceasing concentration, an all-but-impossible feat in my punch-drunk state. Because

the wind had erased the tracks of the climbers who'd gone down before me, I had difficulty

determining the correct route. In 1993, Mike Groom's partner-Lopsang Tshering Bhutia, a skilled

Himalayan climber who was a nephew of Tenzing Norgay's-had taken a wrong turn in this area

and fell to his death. Fighting to maintain a grip on reality, I started talking to myself out loud.

"Keep it together, keep it together, keep it together," I chanted over and over, mantra-like. "You

can't afford to fuck things up here. This is way serious Keep it together." I sat down to rest on a

broad, sloping ledge, but after a few minutes a deafening BOOM! frightened me back to my feet.

Enough new snow had accumulated that I feared a massive slab avalanche had released on the

slopes above, but when I spun around to look I saw nothing. Then there was another BOOM!,

accompanied by a flash that momentarily fit up the sky, and I realized I was hearing the crash of

thunder. In the morning, on the way up, I'd made a point of continually Studying the route on this

part of the mountain, frequently looking down to pick out landmarks that would be helpful on

the descent, compulsively memorizing the terrain: "Remember to turn left at the buttress that

looks like a ship's prow. Then follow that skinny line of snow until it curves sharply to the right."

This was something I'd trained myself to do many years earlier, a drill I forced myself to go

through every time I climbed, and on Everest it may have saved my life. By 6:00 Pm as the storm

escalated into a full-scale blizzard with driving snow and winds gusting in excess of 60 knots, I

came upon the rope that had been fixed by the Montenegrins on the snow slope 600 feet above

the Col. Sobered by the force of the rising tempest, I realized that I'd gotten down the trickiest

ground just in the nick of time. Wrapping the fixed line around my arms to rappel, I continued

down through the blizzard. Some minutes later I was overwhelmed by a disturbingly familiar

feeling of suffocation, and I realized that my oxygen had once again run out. Three hours earlier

when I'd attached my regulator to my third and last oxygen canister, I'd noticed that the gauge

indicated that the bottle was only half full. I'd figured that would be enough to get me most of

the way down, though, so I hadn't bothered exchanging it for a full one. And now the gas was

gone. I pulled the mask from my face, left it hanging around my neck, and pressed onward,

surprisingly unconcerned. However, without supplemental oxygen, I moved more slowly, and I

had to stop and rest more often. The literature of Everest is rife with accounts of hallucinatory

experiences attributable to hypoxia and fatigue. In 1933, the noted English climber Frank

Smythe observed "two curious looking objects A I R floating in the sky" directly above him at

27,000 feet: " [One] possessed what appeared to be squat underdeveloped wings, and the other

a protuberance suggestive of a beak. They hovered motionless but seemed slowly to pulsate."

In 1980, during his solo ascent, Reinhold Messner imagined that an invisible companion was

climbing beside him. Gradually, I became aware that my mind had gone haywire in a similar

fashion, and I observed my own slide from reality with a blend of fascination and horror. I was so

far beyond ordinary exhaustion that I experienced a queer detachment from my body, as if I

were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined that I was dressed in a green

cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a wind chill in excess of seventy

below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm. At 6:30, as the last of the daylight

seeped from the sky, I'd descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four. Only one obstacle

now stood between me and safety: a bulging incline of hard, glassy ice that I would have to

descend without a rope. Snow pellets borne by 70-knot gusts stung my face; any exposed flesh

was instantly frozen. The tents, no more than 650 horizontal feet away, were only intermittently

visible through the whiteout. There was no margin for error. Worried about making a critical

blunder, I sat down to marshal my energy before descending further. Once I was off my feet,

inertia took hold. It was so much easier to remain at rest than to summon the initiative to tackle

the dangerous ice slope; so I just sat there as the storm roared around me, letting my mind drift,

doing nothing for perhaps forty -five minutes. I'd tightened the drawstrings on my hood until only

a tiny opening remained around my eyes, and I was removing the useless, frozen oxygen mask

from beneath my chin when Andy Harris suddenly appeared out of the gloom beside me.

ShininR my headlam. in his direction, I reflexively recoiled when I saw the appalling condition of

his face. His cheeks were coated with an armor of frost, one eye was frozen shut, and he was

slurring his words badly. He looked in serious trouble. "Mich way to the tents?" Andy blurted,

frantic to reach shelter. I pointed in the direction of Camp Four, then warned him about the ice

just below us. "It's steeper than it looks! " I yelled, straining to make myself heard over the

tempest. "Maybe I should go down first and get a rope from camp-" As I was in mid-sentence,

Andy abruptly turned away and moved over the lip of the ice slope, leaving me sitting there

dumbfounded. Scooting on his butt, he started down the steepest part of the in"Andy," I shouted

after him, "it's crazy to try it like that! You're dine.

going to blow it for sure! " He yelled something back, but his words were carried off by the

screaming wind. A second later he lost his purchase, flipped ass over teakettle, and was

suddenly rocketing headfirst down the ice. Two hundred feet below, I could just make out

Andy's motionless form slumped at the foot of the incline. I was sure he'd broken at least a leg,

maybe his neck. But then, incredibly, he stood up, waved that he was O.K and started lurching

toward Camp Four, which, at the MCIment was in plain sight, 500 feet beyond. I could see the

shadowy forms of three or four people standing outside the tents; their headlamps flickered

through curtains of blowing snow. I watched Harris walk toward them across the flats, a distance

he covered in less than ten minutes. When the clouds closed in a moment later, cutting off my

view, he was within sixty feet of the tents, maybe closer. I didn't see him again after that, but I

was certain that he'd reached the security of camp, where Chuldum and Arita would doubtless

be waiting with hot tea. Sitting out in the storm, with the ice bulge still standing between me and

the tents, I felt a pang of envy. I was angry that my guide hadn't waited for me. My backpack

held little more than three empty oxygen canisters and a pint of frozen lemonade; it probably

weighed no more than sixteen or eighteen pounds. But I was tired, and worried about getting

down the incline without breaking a leg, so I tossed the pack over the edge and hoped it would

come to rest where I could retrieve it. Then I stood up and started down the ice, which was as

smooth and hard as the surface of a bowling ball. Fifteen minutes of dicey, fatiguing crampon

work brought me safely to the bottom of the incline, where I easily located my pack, and another

ten minutes after that I was in camp myself. I lunged into my tent with my crampons still on,

zipped the door tight, and sprawled across the frost-covered floor too tired to even sit upright.

For the first time I had a sense of how wasted I really was: I was more exhausted than I'd ever

been in my life. But I was safe. Andy was safe. The others would be coming into camp soon.

We'd fucking done it. We'd climbed Everest. It had been a little sketchy there for a while, but in

the end everything had turned out great. It would be many hours before I learned that

everything had not in fact turned out great-that nineteen men and women were stranded up on

the mountain by the storm, caught in a desperate struggle for their lives. There are many shades

in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face

of facts a sinister violence of intention-that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind

and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming

at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that

means to tear out of him his hope and fear, the pain of his fatigue and the longing for rest: which

means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that

is priceless and necessary-the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the

whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Neal Beidleman reached the summit at 1:25 Pm. with client Martin Adams. When they got

there, Andy Harris and Anatob Boukreev were already on top; I had departed eight minutes

earlier. Assuming that the rest of his team would be appearing shortly, Beidleman snapped some

photos, bantered with Boukreev, and sat down to wait. At 1:45, client Klev Schoening ascended

the final rise, pulled out a photo of his wife and children, and commenced a tearful celebration

of his arrival on top of the world. From the summit, a bump in the ridge blocks one's view of the

rest of the route, and by 2:00-the designated turnaround time-there was still no sign of Fischer

or any other clients. Beidleman began to grow concerned about the lateness of the hour. Thirty-

six years old, an aerospace engineer by training, he was a quiet, thoughtful, extremely

conscientious guide who was well liked by most members of his team and Hall's. Beidleman was

also one of the strongest climbers on the mountain. Two years earlier he and Boukreev-whom

he considered a good friend-had climbed 27,824-foot Makalu together in near-record time,

without supplemental oxygen or Sherpa support. He first met Fischer and Hall on the slopes of

K2 in 1992, where his competence and easygoing demeanor left a favorable impression on both

men. But because Beidleman's highaltitude experience was relatively limited (Makalu was his

only major Himalayan summit), his station in the Mountain Madness chain command was below

Fischer and Boukreev. And his pay reflected his junior status: he'd agreed to guide Everest for

$10,000, compared to the $25,000 Fischer paid Boukreev. Beidleman, sensitive by nature, was

quite conscious of his place in the expedition pecking order. "I was definitely considered the

third guide," he acknowledged after the expedition, so I tried not to be too pushy. As a

consequence, I didn't always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it."

Beidleman said that according to Fischer's loosely formulated plan for the summit day, Lopsang

Jangbu was supposed to be at the front of the line, carrying a radio and two coils of rope to

install ahead of the clients; Boukreev and Beidleman-neither of whom was given a radio-were to

be "in the middle or near the front, depending on how the clients were moving; and Scott,

carrying a second radio, was going to be 'sweep." At Rob's suggestion, we'd decided to enforce a

two o'clock turnaround time: anybody who wasn't within spitting distance of the summit by two

Pm. had to turn around and go down. "It was supposed to be Scott's job to turn clients around,"

Beidleman explained. "We'd talked about it. I'd told him that as the third guide I didn't feel

comfortable telling clients who'd paid sixty-five thousand dollars that they had to go down. So

Scott agreed that would be his responsibility. But for whatever reason, it didn't happen." In fact,

the only people to reach the summit before 2:00 P.M. were Boukreev, Harris, Beidleman, Adams,

Schoening, and me; if Fischer and Hall had been true to their prearranged rules, everyone else

would have turned back before the top. Despite Beidleman's growing anxiety about the

advancing clock, he didn't have a radio, so there was no way to discuss the situation with Fischer.

Lopsang-who did have a radio-was still somewhere out of sight below. Early that morning, when

Beidleman had encountered Lopsang on the Balcony, vomiting between his knees into the snow,

he'd taken the Sherpa's two coils of rope to fix on the steep rock steps above. As he now

laments, however, "It didn't even occur to me to grab his radio, too." sitting on the The upshot,

Beidleman recalled, is that "I ended up summit for a very long time, looking at my watch and

waiting for Scott to show, thinking about heading down-but every time I stood up to leave,

another one of our clients would roll over the crest of the ridge, slightly and I'd sit back down to

wait for them." Tim Madsen, and Lene Sandy Pittman appeared over the final rise about 2:10,

ahead of Charlotte Fox, Lopsang Jangbu, Gainmelgaard. But Pittman was moving very slowly,

and shortly below the summit she abruptly dropped to her knees in the snow. When Lopsang

came to her assistance he discovered that her third oxygen canister had run out. Early in the

morning, when he'd started short-roping Pittman, he'd also cranked her oxygen flow as high as it

would go-four liters per minute-and consequently she'd used up all her gas relatively quickly.

Fortunately, Lopsang-who wasn't using oxygen himself-was carrying a spare oxygen canister in

his pack. He attached Pittman's mask and regulator to the fresh bottle, and then they ascended

the last few meters to the top and joined the celebration in progress. Rob Hall, Mike Groom, and

Yasuko Namba reached the summit around this time, too, and Hall radioed Helen Wilton at Base

Camp to give her the good news. "Rob said it was cold and windy up there,"

WfltonrecaUed,"buthesoundedgood.Hesaid,'Dougisjustcom g in UP over the horizon; right after

that I'll be heading down.... if YOU don't hear from me again, it means everything's fine." " Wilton

notified the Adventure Consultants office in New Zealand, and a flurry of faxes went out to

friends and families around the world, announcing the expedition's triumphant culmination. But

Doug Hansen wasn't just below the summit at that point, as Hall believed, nor was Fischer. it

would in fact be 3:40 before Fischer reached the top, and Hansen wouldn't get there until after

4:00 P.M. The previous afternoon-Thursday, May 9-when all of us had't reached the climbed

from Camp Three to Camp Four, Fischer hadn tents on the South Col until after 5:00 Pm and he

was visibly tired when he'd finally gotten there, although he did his best to disguise his fatigue

from his clients "That evening," recalled his tent-mate Charlotte Fox, "I couldn't tell that Scott

might have been sick. He was acting like Mr. Gung Ho, getting everyone psyched up like a

football coach before the big game." In truth Fischer was exhausted from the physical and

mental d extraordinary strain of the preceding weeks. Although he possessed erves , and by the

reserves of energy, he'd been profligate with those res time he got to Camp Four they were

nearly depleted. "Scott strong person," Boukreev acknowledged after summit attempt is tired,

has many problems, spend lots of power.

r the expedition, "but before Worry, worry, worry, worry. Scott nervous, but he keep

inside." Fischer hid the fact from everyone as well, that he may have been clinically ill during the

summit attempt. In 1984, during an expedition to Nepal's Annapur terious disease that had

degenerated into a chronic on.

na Massif, he'd been stricken with a mysOver the years he'd consulted numerous doctors

and undergone liver conditi batteries of medical tests but a definitive diagnosis was never

forthcoming. Fischer simply referred to his affliction as a "liver cyst," told few people about it,

and tried to pretend that it was nothing to worry about. "Whatever it was," says Jane Bromet,

one of the handful of intimates who knew about the ailment, "it produced malaria-like symptoms,

even though it wasn't malaria. He would break into these intense sweating spells and get the

shakes. The spells would lay him low, but they would only last for ten or fifteen minutes and

then pass.

& I A I In Seattle he'd get the attacks maybe once a week or so, but when he was stressed

they'd occur more frequently. At Base Camp he was getting them more often every other day,

sometimes every day." If Fischer suffered such attacks at Camp Four or above, he never

mentioned it. Fox reported that soon after he crawled into their tent Thursday evening, "Scott

conked out and slept really hard for about two hours." When he woke up at 10:00 P.M. he was

slow getting ready and he remained in camp long after the last of his clients, guides, and Sherpas

departed for the summit. It's unclear when Fischer actually left Camp Four; perhaps as late as

1:00 A.M. on Friday, May 10. He dragged far behind everyone else through most of the summit

day, and he didn't arrive at the South Summit until around 1:00 P.M. I first saw him at about 2:45,

on my way down from the top, while I waited on the Hillary Step with Andy Harris for the crowd

to clear out. Fischer was the last climber up the rope, and he looked extremely wasted. After we

exchanged pleasantries, he spoke briefly with Martin Adams and Anatoli Boukreev, who were

standing just above Harris through his oxygen mask, trying to affect a jocular tone.

and me, waiting to descend the Step. "Hey, Martin," Fischer bantered think you can

summit Mount Everest?" "Hey, Scott," Adams replied, sounding annoyed that Fischer hadn't

offered any congratulations, "I just did." Next Fischer had a few words with Boukreev. As Adams

remembered the conversation, Boukreev told Fischer, "I am going down with Martin." Then

Fischer plodded slowly on toward the summit, while body discussed Fischer's exhausted

appearance. It didn't occur t - NoN Harris, Boukreev, Adams, and I turned to rappel down the

Step of us that he might be in trouble. At 3:10 Friday afternoon Fischer still hadn't arrived on top,

says Beidleman, adding, "I decided it was time to get the hell out of there, even though Scott

hadn't showed up yet." He gathered up Pittman, Gammelgaard, Fox, and Madsen and started

leading them down the

"Do you o any summit ridge. Twenty minutes later, just above the Hillary Step, they ran

into Fischer. "I didn't really say anything to him," Beidleman recalls. "He just sort of raised his

hand. He looked like he was having a hard time but he was Scott, so I wasn't particularly worried.

I figured he'd tag the summit and catch up to us pretty quick to help bring the clients down."

Beidleman's primary concern at the time was Pittman: "Everybody was pretty messed up by that

point, but Sanmdy looked especially shaky. I thought that if I didn't keep real close tabs on her,

there was a good chance she'd peel right off the ridge. So I made sure she was clipped into the

fixed line, and in the places where there was no rope I grabbed her harness from behind and

kept a tight hold on her until she could clip into the next section of rope. She was so out of it

that I'm not sure she even knew I was there." A short distance below the South Summit, as the

climbers descended into thick clouds and falling snow, Pittman collapsed again and asked Fox to

give her an injection of a powerful steroid called dexamethasone. "Dex," as it is known, can

temporarily negate the deleterious effects of altitude; each member of Fischer's team carried

repared syringe of the drug in a plastic toothbrush case inside a prep his or her down suit, where

it wouldn't freeze, for emergencies. "I'll pulled aside Sandy's pants a little," Fox recalls, "and

jammed the needle into her hip, right through her long underwear and everything." Beidleman,

who had lingered at the South Summit to inventory oxygen, arrived on the scene to see Fox

plunging the syringe into Pittman, stretched out face down on the snow. "When I came over the

rise and saw Sandy lying there, with Charlotte standing over her waving a hypodermic needle, I

thought, 'Oh fuck, this looks bad." So I asked Sandy what was going on, and when she tried to

answer all that came out of her mouth was a bunch of garbled babble." Extremely concerned,

Beidleman ordered Gammelgaard to exchange her full oxygen canister with Pittman's nearly

empty one, made sure her regulator was turned to full flow, then grabbed the semicomatose

Pittman by her harness and started dragging her down the steep snow of the Southeast Ridge.

"Once I got her sliding, " he explains, "I'd let go and glissade down in front of her. Every fifty

meters I'd stop, wrap my hands around the fixed rope, and brace myself to arrest her slide with a

body block. The first time Sandy came barreling into me, the points of her crampons sliced

through my down suit. Feathers went flying everywhere." To everyone's relief, after about

twenty minutes the injection and extra oxygen revived Pittman and she was able to resume the

descent under her own power. Around 5:00 P.M as Beidleman accompanied his clients down the

ridge, Mike Groom and Yasuko Namba were arriving at the Balcony some 500 feet below them.

From this promontory at 27,600 feet, the route veers sharply off the ridge to the south toward

Camp Four. When Groom looked in the other direction, however-down the north side of the

ridge-through the billowing snow and faltering light he noticed a lone climber badly off route: it

was Martin Adams, who'd become disoriented in the storm and mistakenly started to descend

the Kangshung Face into Tibet. As soon as Adams saw Groom and Namba above him, he realized

his mistake and climbed slowly back toward the Balcony. "Martin was out of it by the time he got

back up to Yasuko and me," Groom recalls. "His oxygen mask was off and his face was encrusted

in snow. He asked, Which way to the tents?" " Groom pointed, and Adams immediately started

down the correct side of the ridge, following the trail I'd blazed perhaps ten minutes earlier.

"While Groom was waiting for Adams to climb back up to the ridge, he sent Namba down ahead

and busied himself trying to find a camera case he'd left on the way up. As he was looking

around, for the first time he noticed another person on the Balcony with him. "Because he was

sort of camouflaged in the snow, I took him to be one of Fischers group, and I ignored him. Then

this person was standing in front of me saying, 'Hi, Mike,' and I realized it was Beck." Groom, just

as surprised to see Beck as I had been, got out his rope and began short-roping the Texan down

toward the South Col. "Beck was so hopelessly blind," Groom reports, "that every ten meters

he'd take a step into thin air and I'd have to catch him with the rope. I was worried he was going

to Pull me off many times. It was bloody nerve-racking. I had to make sure I had a good ice-ax

belay and that an my points were clean and sticking into something solid at all times - " One by

one, following the tracks I'd made fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, Beidleman and the

remainder of Fischer's clients filed down through the worsening blizzard. Adams was behind me,

ahead of the others; then came Namba, Groom and Weathers, Schoening and Gammelgaard,

Beidleman, and finally Pittman, Fox, and Madsen. Five hundred feet above the South Col, where

the steep shale gave way to a gentler slope of snow, Namba's oxygen ran out, and the diminutive

Japanese woman sat down, refusing to move. When I tried to take her oxygen mask off so she

could breathe more easily," says Groom, "she'd insist on putting it right back on. No amount of

persuasion could convince her that she was out of oxygen, that the mask was actually suffocating

her. By now, Beck had weakened to the point where he wasn't able to walk on his own, and I had

to support him on my shoulder. Fortunately, right about then Neal caught up to us." Beidleman,

seeing that Groom had his hands full with Weathers, started dragging Namba down toward

Camp Four, even though she wasn't on Fischer's team.

it was now about 6:45 Pm. and almost completely dark. Beidleman, Groom, their clients,

and two Sherpas from Fischer's team who had belatedly materialized out of the mist-Tashi

Tshering and Ngawang Dorje-had coalesced into a single group. Although they were moving

slowly, they had descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four. At that moment I was just

arriving at the tents-probably no more than fifteen minutes in front of the first members of

Beidleman's group. But in that brief span the storm abruptly metastasized into a full-blown

hurricane, and the visibility dropped to less than twenty feet. Beidleman led his group on an

indirect route that looped far to the east, wanting to avoid the dangerous ice pitch where the

slope was much less steep, and around 7:30 they safely reached the broad, gently rolling

expanse of the South Col. By then, however, only three out or four people had headlamps with

batteries that hadn't run down, and everyone was on the brink of physical collapse. Fox was

increasingly relying on Madsen for assistance. Weathers and Namba were unable to walk

without being supported by Groom and Beidleman, respectively. Beidleman knew they were on

the eastern, Tibetan side of the Col and that the tents lay somewhere to the west. But to move

in that direction it was necessary to walk directly upwind into the teeth of the storm. Wind-

whipped granules of ice and snow struck the climbers' faces with violent force, lacerating their

eyes and making it impossible to see where they were going. "It was so difficult and painful,"

Schoening explains, t(that there was an inevitable tendency to bear off the wind, to keep angling

away from it to the left, and that's how we went wrong. At times you couldn't even see your own

feet, it was blowing so hard, he continues. "I was worried somebody would sit down or get

separated from the group and we'd never see them again. But once we got to the flats of the

Col we started following the Sherpas, and I figured they knew where camp was. Then they

suddenly stopped and doubled back, and it quickly became obvious they didn't have any idea

where we were. At that point I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. That's when I first

knew we were in trouble." For the next two hours, Beidleman, Groom, the two Sherpas, and the

seven clients staggered blindly around in the storm, growing ever more exhausted and

hypothermic, hoping to blunder across the camp. Once they came across a couple of discarded

oxygen bottles, suggesting that the tents were near, but the climbers couldn't locate them. "It

was total chaos," says Beidleman. "People are wandering all over the place; I'm yelling at

everyone, trying to get them to follow a single leader. Finally, probably around ten o'clock, I

walked over this little rise, and it felt like I was standing on the edge of the earth. I could sense a

huge void just beyond. The group had unwittingly strayed to the easternmost edge of the Colat

the lip of a 7,000-foot drop down the Kangshung Face. They were at the same elevation as

Camp Four, just 1,000 horizontal feet from safety,* but, says Beidleman, "I knew that if we kept

wandering in the storm, pretty soon we were going to lose somebody. I was exhausted from

dragging Yasuko. Charlotte and Sandy were barely able to stand. So I screamed at everyone to

huddle up right there and wait for a break in the storm." Beidleman and Schoening searched for

a protected place to escape the wind, but there was nowhere to hide. Everyone's oxygen had

long since run out, making the group more vulnerable to the windchill, which exceeded a

hundred below zero. In the lee of a boulder no larger than a dishwasher, the climbers hunkered

in a pathetic row on a patch of gale-scoured ice. "By then the cold had about finished me Off")

says Charlotte Fox. "My eyes were frozen. I didn't see how we were going to get out of it alive.

The cold was so painful, I didn't think I could endure it anymore. I just curled up in a ball and

hoped death would come quickly." "We tried to keep warm by pummeling each other," Weathers

remembers. "Someone yelled at us to keep moving our arms and legs. Sandy was hysterical; she

kept yelling over and over, 'I don't want to die! I don't want to die!" But nobody else was saying

a whole lot." Three hundred yards to the west I was shivering uncontrollably in my tent-even

though I was zipped into my sleeping bag, and wearing my down suit and every other stitch of

clothing I had. The gale threatened to blow the tent apart. Every time the door was opened, the

shelter would fill with blowing spindrift, so everything inside was covered with an inch-thick layer

of snow. Oblivious to the tragedy unfolding outside in the storm, I drifted in and out of

consciousness, delirious from exhaustion, dehydration, and the cumulative effects of oxygen

depletion. Although a strong climber might require three hours to ascend 1,000 vertical feet, in

this case the distance was over more or less flat terrain, which the group would have been able

to cover in perhaps fifteen minutes had they known where the tents were. At some point early in

the evening, Stuart Hutchison, my tentmate, came in, shook me hard, and asked if I would go

outside with him to bang on pots and shine lights into the sky in the hope of guiding the lost

climbers in, but I was too weak and incoherent to respond. Hutchison-who had gotten back to

camp at 2:00 P.M. and was thus considerably less debilitated than me-then tried to rouse clients

and Sherpas from the other tents. Everybody was too cold or too exhausted. So Hutchison went

out into the storm alone. He left our tent six times that night to look for the missing climbers, but

the blizzard was so fierce that he never dared to venture more than a few yards beyond the

margin of camp. "The winds were ballistically strong," he emphasizes. "The blowing spindrift felt

like a sandblaster or something. I could only go out for fifteen minutes at a time before I became

too cold and had to return to the tent." Out among the climbers hunkered on the eastern edge

of the Col, Bedelman willed himself to say alert for a sign that the storm might be blowing itself

out. just before midnight, his vigilance was rewarded when he suddenly noticed a few stars

overhead and shouted to the others to look. The wind was still whipping up a furious ground-

level blizzard at the surface, but far above, the sky had begun to clear, revealing the hulking

silhouettes of Everest and Lhotse. From these reference points, KJev Schoening thought he'd

figured out where the group was in relation to Camp Four. After a shouting match with

Beidleman, he convinced the guide that he knew the way to the tents. Beidleman tried to coax

everyone to their feet and get them moving in the direction indicated by Schoening, but Pittman,

Fox, Weathers, and Namba were too feeble to walk. By then it was obvious to the guide that if

somebody from the group didn't make it to the tents and summon a rescue party, they were all

going to die. So Beidleman assembled those who were ambulatory, and then he, Schoening,

Gammelgaard, Groom, and the two Sherpas stumbled off into the storm to get help, leaving

behind the four incapacitated clients with Tim Madsen. Reluctant to abandon his girlfriend, Fox,

Madsen selflessly volunteered to stay and look after everybody until help arrived. Twenty

minutes later, Beidleman's contingent limped into camp, where they had an emotional reunion

with a very worried Anatoli Boukreev. Schoening and Beidleman, barely able to speak, told the

Russian where to find the five clients who'd remained behind out in the elements and then

collapsed in their respective tents, utterly spent. Boukreev had come down to the South Col

hours in front of anyone else in Fischer's team. Indeed, by 5:00 Pm while his teammates were

still struggling down through the clouds at 28,000 feet, Boukreev was already in his tent resting

and drinking tea. Experienced guides would later question his decision to descend so far ahead

of his clients--extremely unorthodox behavior for a guide. One of the clients from that group

has nothing but contempt for Boukreev, insisting that when it mattered most, the guide "cut and

ran." Anatoli had left the summit around 2:00 Pm. and quickly became entangled in the traffic

jam at the Hillary Step. As soon as the mob dispersed he moved very rapidly down the

Southeast Ridge without waiting for any clients-despite telling Fischer atop the Step that he

would be going down with Martin Adams. Boukreev thereby arrived at Camp Four well before

the brunt of the storm. After the expedition, when I asked Anatoli why he had hurried down

ahead of his group, he handed me the transcript of an interview he'd given a few days previously

to Men's journal through a Russian interpreter. Boukreev told me that he'd read the transcript

and confirmed its accuracy. Reading it on the spot, I quickly came to a series of questions about

the descent, to which he had replied: I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour... It is very cold,

naturally, it takes your strength.... My position was that I would not be good if I stood around

freezing, waiting. I would be more useful if I returned to Camp Four in order to be able to take

oxygen up to the returning climbers or to go up to help them if some became weak during the

descent.... If you are immobile at that altitude you lose strength in the cold, and then you are

unable to do anything. Boukreev's susceptibility to the cold was doubtless greatly exacerbated

by the fact that he wasn't using supplemental oxygen; in the absence of gas he simply couldn't

stop to wait for slow clients on the summit ridge without courting frostbite and hypothermia.

For whatever reason, he raced down ahead of the group-which in fact had been his pattern

throughout the entire expedition, as Fischer's final letters and phone calls from Base Camp to

Seattle made clear. When I questioned him about the wisdom of leaving his clients on the

summit ridge, Anatoli insisted that it was for the good of the team: "It is much better for me to

warm myself at South Col, be ready to carry up oxygen if clients run out." Indeed, shortly after

dark, after Beidleman's group failed to return and the storm had risen to hurricane intensity,

Boukreev realized they must be in trouble and made a courageous attempt to bring oxygen to

them. But his stratagem had a serious flaw: because neither he nor Beidleman had a radio,

Anatoli had no way of knowing the true nature of the missing climbers' predicament, or even

where on the huge expanse of the upper mountain they might be. Around 7:30 P.M Boukreev

left Camp Four to search for the group, regardless. By then, he recalled, Visibility was maybe a

meter. It disappeared altogether. I had a lamp, and I began to use oxygen to speed up my

ascent. I was carrying three bottles. I tried to go faster, but visibility was gone.... it is like being

without eyes, without being able to see, it was impossible to see. That is very dangerous,

because one can fall into a crevasse, one can fall toward the southern side of Lhotse, 3,000

meters straight down. I tried to go up, it was dark, I could not find the fixed line. Some six

hundred feet above the Col, Boukreev recognized the futility of his effort and returned to the

tents, but, he admits, he very nearly became lost himself. In any case, it was just as well that he

abandoned this rescue effort, because at that point his teammates were no longer on the peak

above, where Boukreev had been headed-by the time he gave up his search, Beidleman's group

was actually wandering around on the Col six hundred feet below the Russian. When he arrived

back at Camp Four around 9:00 Pm Boukreev was worried about the nineteen climbers who

were missing, but because he had no idea where they might be, there was nothing he could do

except bide his time. Then, at 12:45 A.M Beidleman, Groom, Schoening, and Gammelgaard

hobbled into camp. "Klev and Neal had lost all power and could barely talk," Boukreev recalls.

"They told me Charlotte, Sandy, and Tim need help, Sandy is close to dying. Then they give me

general location where to find them." Upon hearing the climbers arrive, Stuart Hutchison went

out to assist Groom. "I got Mike into his tent," Hutchison recalled, "and saw that he was really,

really exhausted. He was able to communicate clearly, but it required an agonal effort, like a

dying man's last words. 'You have to get some Sherpas,' he told me. 'Send them out for Beck

and Yasuko." And then he pointed toward the Kangshung side of the Col." Hutchison's efforts to

organize a rescue team proved fruitless, however. Chuldurn and Arita-Sherpas on Hall's team

who hadn't accompanied the summit party and were waiting in reserve at Camp Four specifically

for such an emergency-had been incapacitated with carbon monoxide poisoning from cooking in

a poorly ventilated tent; Chuldurn was actually vomiting blood. And the other four Sherpas on

our team were too cold and debilitated from having gone to the summit. After the expedition, I

asked Hutchison why, once he learned the whereabouts of the missing climbers, he didn't

attempt to wake Frank Fischbeck, Lou Kasischke, or John Taske-or make a second attempt to

wake me-in order to request our help with the rescue effort it was so obvious that all of you

were completely exhausted that I didn't even consider asking. You were so far past the point of

ordinary fatigue that I thought if you attempted to help with a rescue you were Only going to

make the situation worse-that You would get out there and have to be rescued yourself." The

upshot was that Stuart went out into the storm alone, but once again he turned around at the

edge of camp when he became worried that he wouldn't be able to find his way back if he went

farther. At the same time, Boukreev was also trying to organize a rescue team, but he didn't

contact Hutchison or come to my tent, so the efforts of Hutchison and Boukreev remained

uncoordinated, and I never learned of either rescue plan. In the end Boukreev discovered, like

Hutchison, that everybody he managed to rouse was too sick or exhausted or frightened to help.

So the Russian resolved to bring back the group on his own. Bravely plunging into the maw of

the hurricane, he searched the Col for nearly an hour but was unable to find anybody. Boukreev

didn't give up. He returned to camp, obtained a more detailed set of directions from Beidleman

and Schoening, then went out into the storm again. This time he saw the faint glow of Madsen's

fading headlamp and was thereby able to locate the missing climbers. "They were lying on the ice,

without movement," says Boukreev. "They could not talk." Madsen was still conscious and largely

able to take care of himself, but Pittman, Fox, and Weathers were utterly helpless, and Namba

appeared to be dead. After Beidleman and the others had set out from the huddle to get help,

Madsen had gathered together the climbers who remained and hectored everybody to keep

moving in order to stay warm. "I sat Yasuko down in Beck's lap," Madsen recalls, "but he was

pretty unresponsive by that time, and Yasuko wasn't moving at all. A little later I saw that she'd

laid down flat on her back, with snow blowing into her hood. Somehow she'd lost a glove-her

right hand was bare, and her fingers were curled up so tightly you couldn't straighten them. It

looked like they were pretty much frozen to the bone. "I assumed she was dead," Madsen

continues. "But then a while later she suddenly moved, and it freaked me out: she sort of arched

her neck slightly, as if she was trying to sit up, and her right arm came up, then that was it.

Yasuko lay back down and never moved again." As soon as Boukreev found the group, it became

obvious to him that he could bring only one climber in at a time. He was carrying an oxygen

bottle, which he and Madsen hooked up to Pittman's mask. Then Boukreev indicated to Madsen

that he'd be back as soon as posg Fox back toward the tents. "After they left," sible and started

helpin as crumpled in a fetal position, not moving a says Madsen, "Beck w whole lot, and Sandy

was curled up in my lap, not moving much, either. I screamed at her, 'Hey, keep wiggling your

hands! Let me see your hands!" And when she sits up and pulls her hands out, I see she doesn't

have any [mittens] on-that they were dangling from her wrists. "So I'm trying to shove her hands

back into her [mittens] when all of a sudden Beck mumbles, 'Hey, I've got this all figured out."

Then he kind of rolls a little distance away, crouches on a big rock, and stands up facing the wind

with his arms stretched out to either side. A second later a gust comes up and just blows him

over backward into the night, beyond the beam of my headlamp. And that was the last I saw of

him. "Told came back a little bit after that and grabbed Sandy, so I just packed up my stuff and

started waddling after them, trying to follow Told's and Sandy's headlamps. By then I assumed

Yasuko was dead and Beck was a lost cause." When they finally reached camp it was 4:30 A.M

and the sky was starting to brighten above the eastern horizon. Upon hearing from Madsen that

Yasuko hadn't made it, Beidleman broke down in his tent and wept for forty-five minutes. I also

_&soma, I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in

control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm,

someone who claims A to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is afool and a liar. To

understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven.... I fro admire the authority of

being on one's knees in nt of the event.

Harold Brodkey

'Manipulations" tuart Hutchison finally managed to shake me awake at 6:00 A.M. on May 11.

"Andy's not in his tent," he told me somberly, "and he doesn't seem to be in any of the other tents,

either. I don't think he ever made it in." "Harold's missing? " I asked. "No way. I saw him walk to

the edge of camp with my own eyes." Shocked and confused, I pulled on my boots and rushed

out to look for Harris. The wind was still fierce-strong enough to knock me down several times-

but it was a bright, clear dawn, and the visibility was perfect. I searched the entire western half

of the Col for more than an hour, peering behind boulders and poking under shredded, long-

abandoned tents, but found no trace of Harris. Adrenaline surged through my veins. Tears

welled in my eyes, instantly freezing my eyelids shut. How could Andy be gone? It couldn't be

so. I went to the place where Harris had slid down the ice just above the Col, and then

methodically retraced the route he'd followed toward camp, which followed a broad, almost flat,

ice gully. At the point where I last saw him when the clouds descended, a sharp left turn would

have taken Harris forty or fifty feet up a rocky rise to the tents. I realized, however, that if he

hadn't turned left but instead continued straight down the gully-which would have been easy to

do in the whiteout even if one wasn't exhausted and stupid with altitude sickness-he would have

quickly come to the westernmost edge of the Col. Below, the steep gray ice of the Lhotse Face

dropped 4,000 vertical feet to the floor of the Western Cum. Standing there, afraid to move

any closer to the edge, I noticed a single set of faint crampon tracks leading past me toward the

abyss. Those tracks, I feared, were Andy Harris's. After getting into camp the previous evening,

I'd told Hutchison that I'd seen Harris arrive safely at the tents. Hutchison had radioed this news

to Base Camp, and from there it was passed along via satellite phone to the woman with whom

Harris shared his life in New Zealand, Fiona McPherson. She'd been overcome with relief when

she learned that Harris was safe at Camp Four. Now, however, Hall's wife back in Christchurch,

Jan Arnold, would have to do the unthinkable: call McPherson back to inform her there had

been a horrible mistake-that Andy was in fact missing and presumed dead. Imagining this phone

conversation, and my role in the events leading up to it, I fell to my knees with dry heaves,

retching over and over as the icy wind blasted against my back. After spending sixty minutes

searching in vain for Andy, I returned just in time to overhear a radio call between Base Camp

and to my tent Rob Hall; he was up on the summit ridge, I learned, calling down for help.

Hutchison then told me that Beck and Yasuko were dead and that Scott Fischer was missing

somewhere on the peak above. Shortly after that, the batteries to our radio died, cutting us off

from the rest of the mountain. Alarmed that they had lost contact with us, members of the

IMAX team at Camp Two called the South African team, whose tents on the Col were a only few

yards away from ours. David Breashears-the IMAX leader, and a climber I had known for twenty

years-reports, "We knew the South Africans had a powerful radio and that it was working, so we

got one of their team members at Camp Two to call up to Woodall on the South Col and say,

'Look, this is an emergency. People are dying up there. We need to be able to communicate

with the survivors in Hall's team to coordinate a rescue. Please lend your radio to Jon Krakauer."

And Woodall said no. It was very clear what was at stake, but they wouldn't give up their radio

Immediately after the expedition, when I was researching my article for

Outside

magazine, I

interviewed as many of the people on Hall's and Fischer's summit teams as possible-I spoke with

most of them several times. But Martin Adams, distrustful of reporters, kept a low profile in the

aftermath of the tragedy and eluded my repeated attempts to interview him until after the

Outside

piece went to press. When I eventually reached Adams by phone in mid-July and he

Consented to talk, I began by asking him to recount everything he remembered about the

summit push. One of the stronger clients that day, he'd remained near the front of the pack and

was either just ahead of me or just behind me for much of the climb. Because he possessed

what seemed to be an unusually reliable memory, I was particularly interested to hear how his

version of the events jibed with my own. Very late in the afternoon, when Adams headed down

from the Balcony at 27,600 feet, he said that I was still visible, perhaps fifteen minutes ahead of

him, but that I was descending faster than he was and soon moved out of sight. "And the next

time I saw you" he said, "it was almost dark and you were crossing the flats of the South Col,

about a hundred feet from the tents. I recognized that it was you from your bright red down

suit." Shortly after that, Adams descended to a flat bench just above the steep ice incline that

had given me so much trouble, and fell into a small crevasse . He managed to extricate himself,

then fell into another, deeper, crevasse. "Lying in that crevasse, I was thinking, "This may be it." "

he mused. "It took awhile, but eventually I managed to climb out of that one, too. \When I got

out, my face was covered with snow, which quickly turned to ice. Then I saw somebody sitting

on the ice off to the left, wearing a headlamp, so I walked over in that direction. It wasn't

pitchblack yet, but it was dark enough that I couldn't see the tents anymore. "So I got to this

fucker and said, 'Hey, where are the tents?" and the guy, whoever he was, pointed the way. So I

said, 'Yeah, that's what I thought." Then the guy said something like, 'Be careful. The ice here is

steeper than it looks. Maybe we should go down and get a rope and some ice screws." I thought,

'Fuck that. I'm out of here." So I took two or three steps, tripped, and slid down the ice on my

chest, headfirst. As I was sliding, somehow the pick of my ice ax caught something and swung me

around, then I came to a stop at the bottom. I got up, Stumbled to the tent, and that's about the

size of it." As Adams described his encounter with the anonymous climber, and then sliding down

the ice, my mouth went dry and the hairs on the back of my neck suddenly bristled. "Martin," I

asked when he'd finish do you Think that could have been me you ran into out there?" talking,

"Fuck, no!" he laughed. "I don't know who it was, but it definitely wasn't you." But then I told him

about my encounter with Andy Harris and the chilling series of coincidences: I had bumped into

Harris about the same time Adams had encountered the cipher, and in about the same place.

Much of the dialogue that transpired between Harris and me was eerily similar to the dialogue

between Adams and the cipher. And then Adams had slid headfirst down the ice in much the

same manner I remembered seeing Harris slide. After talking for a few minutes more, Adams was

convinced: "So that was you I talked to out there on the ice," he stated, astounded,

acknowledging that he must have been mistaken when he saw me crossing the flats of the South

Col just before dark. "And that was me you talked to. Which means it wasn't Andy Harris at all.

Wow. Dude, I'd say you've got some explaining to do." I was stunned. For two months I'd been

telling people that Harris had walked off the edge of the South Col to his death, when he hadn't

done that at all. My error had greatly and unnecessarily compounded the pain of Fiona

McPherson; Andy's parents, Ron and Mary Harris; his brother, David Harris; and his many friends.

Andy was a large man, over six feet tall and 200 pounds, who spoke with a sharp Kiwi lilt; Martin

was at least six inches shorter, weighed maybe 130 pounds, and spoke in a thick Texas drawl.

How had I made such an egregious mistake? Was I really so debilitated that I had stared into the

face of a near stranger and mistaken him for a friend with whom I'd spent the previous six weeks?

And if Andy had never arrived at Camp Four after reaching the summit, what in the name of God

had happened to him? [Our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather,

which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause. I do not think human beings ever came

through such a month as we have come through, and we should have got through in spite of the

weather hut for the sickening of a second companion, Captain Oates, and a shortage of fuel in

our depots for which I cannot account, and finally, hut for the storm which has fallen on us within

11 miles of the depot at which we hoped to secure our final supplies. Surely misfortune could

scarcely have exceeded this last blow... We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come

out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, hut bow to the will of Providence,

determined still to do our best to the last.... Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the

hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of

every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

Robert Falcon Scott, in "Message to the Public,"

penned just prior to his death in Antarctica on March 29, 1912, from Scott's Last Expedition

Scott Fischer ascended to the summit around 3:40 on the afternoon of May 10 to find his

devoted friend and sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu, waiting for him. The Sherpa pulled his radio from

inside his down jacket, made contact with Ingrid Hunt at Base Camp, then handed the walkie-

talkie to Fischer. "We all made it," Fischer told Hunt, 11,400 feet below. "God, I'm tired." A few

minutes later Makalu Gau arrived with two Sherpas. Rob Hall was there, too, waiting impatiently

for as a rising tide of cloud lapped ominously at V, Doug Hansen to appear the summit ridge.

According to Lopsang, during the fifeen or twenty minutes Fischer spent on the summit, he

complained repeatedly that he wasn't feeling well-something the congenitally stoic guide almost

never did. "Scott tell to me, I am too tired. I am sick, also, need medicine for stomach,` the

Sherpa recalls. "I gave him tea, but he drank just a little bit, just half cup. So I tell to him, 'Scott,

please, we go fast down." So we come down then." Fischer started down first, about 3:55.

Lopsang reports that although Scott had used supplemental oxygen during the entire ascent and

his third canister was more than three-quarters full when he left the summit, for some reason he

took his mask off and stopped using it. Shortly after Fischer left the top, Gau and his Sherpas

departed as well, and finally Lopsang headed down-leaving Hall alone on the summit awaiting

Hansen. A moment after Lopsang started down, about 4:00, Hansen at last appeared, toughing

it out, moving painfully slowly over the last bump on the ridge. As soon as he saw Hansen, Hall

hurried down to meet him. Hall's obligatory turn-around time had come and gone a full two hours

earlier. Given the guide's conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues

have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. Why, they wondered,

didn't he turn Hansen around much lower on the mountain, as soon as it became obvious that

the American climber was running late? Exactly one year earlier, Hall had turned Hansen around

on the South Summit at 2:30 P.M and to be denied so close to the top was a crushing

disappointment to Hansen. He told me several times that he'd returned to Everest in 1996

largely as a result of Hall's advo T cacy-he said Rob had called him from New Zealand "a dozen

times" urging him to give it another shot-and this time Doug was absolutely determined to bag

the top. "I want to get this thing done and out of my life," he'd told me three days earlier at

Camp Two. "I don't want to have to come back here. I'm getting too old for this shit." It doesn't

seem far-fetched to speculate that because Hall had talked Hansen into coming back to Everest,

it would have been especially hard for him to deny Hansen the summit a second time. "It's very

difficult to turn someone around high on the mountain," cautions Guy Cotter, a New Zealand

guide who summitted Everest with Hall in 1992 and was guiding the peak for him in 1995 when

Hansen made his first attempt. "If a client sees that the summit is close and they're dead-set on

getting there, they're going to laugh in your face and keep going up." As the veteran American

guide Peter Lev told Climbing magazine after the disastrous events on Everest, "We think that

people pay us to make good decisions, but what people really pay for is to get to the top. In any

case, Hall did not turn Hansen around at 2:00 Pm.-or, for that matter, at 4:00, when he met his

client just below the top. Instead, according to Lopsang, Hall placed Hansen's arm around his

neck and assisted the weary client up the final forty feet to the summit. They stayed only a

minute or two, then turned to begin the long descent. When Lopsang saw that Hansen was

faltering, he held up his own descent long enough to make sure Doug and Rob made it safely

across a dangerously corniced area just below the top. Then, eager to catch Fischer, who was by

now more than thirty minutes ahead of him, the Sherpa continued down the ridge, leaving

Hansen and Hall at the top of the Hillary Step.

just after Lopsang disappeared down the Step, Hansen apparently ran Out of oxygen and

foundered. He'd expended every last bit of his strength to reach the summit-and now there was

nothing left in reserve for the descent. "Pretty much the same thing happened to Doug in '95, "

says Ed Viesturs, who, like Cotter, was guiding the peak for Hall that year. "He was fine during

the ascent, but as soon as he started down he lost it mentally and physically; he turned into a

zombie, like he'd used everything up. At 4:30 P.M and again at 4:41, Hall got on the radio to say

that he and Hansen were in trouble high on the summit ridge and urgently needed oxygen. Two

full bottles were waiting for them at the South Summit; if Hall had known this he could have

retrieved the gas fairly quickly and then climbed back up to give Hansen a fresh tank. But Andy

Harris, still at the oxygen cache, in-the throes of his hypoxic dementia, overheard these radio

calls and broke in to tell Hall-incorrectly, just as he'd told Mike Groom and me-that all the bottles

at the South Summit were empty. Groom heard the conversation between Harris and Hall on his

radio as he was descending the Southeast Ridge with Yasuko Namba, just above the Balcony.

He tried to call Hall to correct the misinformation and let him know that there were in fact full

oxygen canisters waiting for him at the South Summit, but, Groom explains, "my radio was

malfunctioning. I was able to receive most calls, but my outgoing calls could rarely be heard by

anyone. On the couple of occasions that my calls were being picked up by Rob, and I tried to

tell him where the full cylinders were, I was immediately interrupted by Andy, transmitting to say

there was no gas at the South Summit." Unsure whether there was oxygen waiting for him, Hall

decided that the best course of action was to remain with Hansen and try to bring the nearly

helpless client down without gas. But when they got to the top of the Hillary Step, Hall couldn't

get Hansen down the 40-foot vertical drop, and their progress ground to a halt Shortly before

5:00, Groom finally managed to get through to Hall and communicate that there actually was

oxygen at the South Summit. Fifteen minutes later, Lopsang arrived at the South Summit on his

way down from the top and encountered Harris.* At this point, according to Lopsang, Harris

must have finally understood that at least two of the oxygen canisters stashed there were full,

because he pleaded with the Sherpa to help him carry the life-sustaining gas up to Hall and

Hansen on the Hillary Step. "Andy says he will pay me five hundred dollars to bring oxygen to

Rob and Doug," Lopsang recalls. It wasn't until I interviewed Lopsang in Seattle on July 25, 1996,

that I learned he had seen Harris on the evening of May 10. Although I'd spoken briefly with

Lopsang several times previously, I'd never thought to ask whether he'd encountered Harris on

the South Summit, because at that point I was still certain I'd seen Harris at the South Col, 3,000

feet below the South Summit, at 6:30 Pm. Moreover, Guy Cotter had asked Lopsang if he'd

seen Harris, and for some reason-perhaps a simple misunderstanding of the question-on that

occasion Lopsang said no. "But I am supposed to take care of just my group. I have to take care

of Scott. So I say to Andy, no, I go fast down." A t 5:30, as Lopsang left the South Summit to

resume his descent, he turned to see Harris-who must have been severely debilitated, if N his

condition when I'd seen him on the South Summit two hours earlier was any indication-plodding

slowly up the summit ridge to assist Hall and Hansen. It was an act of heroism that would cost

Harris his life. A few hundred feet below, Scott Fischer was struggling down the Southeast Ridge,

growing weaker and weaker. Upon reaching the top of the rock steps at 28,400 feet, he was

confronted with a series of short but troublesome rappers that angled along the ridge. Too

exhausted to cope with the complexities of the roe work, Fischer slid p p directly down an

adjacent snow slope on his butt. This was easier than following the fixed lines, but once he was

below the level of the rock steps it meant that he had to make a laborious 330-foot rising

traverse through knee-deep snow to regain the route. Tim Madsen, descending with Beidleman's

group, happened to glance up from the Balcony around 5:20 and saw Fischer as he began the

traverse. "He looked really tired , Madsen remembers. "He'd take ten steps, then sit and rest,

take a couple more steps, rest again. He was moving real slow. But I could see Lopsang above

him, coming down the ridge, and I figured, shoot, with Lopsang there to look after him, Scott

would be O.K. According to Lopsang, the Sherpa caught up with Fischer about 6:00 Pm just

above the Balcony: "Scott is not using oxygen, so I put mask on him. He says, 'I am very sick, too

sick to go down. I am going to jump." He is saying many times, acting like crazy man, so I tie him

on rope, quickly, otherwise he is jumping down into Tibet." Securing Fischer with a 75-foot length

of rope, Lopsang persuaded his friend not to jump and then got him moving slowly toward the

South Col. "The storm is very bad now," Lopsang recalls. "BOOM! BOOM! Two times like sound

of gun, there is big thunder. Two times Very loud, very scared." lightning hit very close near me

and Scott, v Three hundred feet below the Balcony, the gentle snow gully they'd been gingerly

descending gave way to outcroppings of loose, steep shale, and Fischer was unable to handle

the challenging terrain in his ailing condition. "Scott cannot walk now, I have big problem," says

Lopsang. "I try to carry, but I am also very tired. Scott is big body, all; I cannot carry him. He tell

to me, 'Lopsang, you go down. I am very ssick. You go down." I tell to him. 'No, I stay together

here with you. About 8:00 Pm Lopsang was huddling with Fischer on a snowcovered ledge when

Makalu Gau and his two Sherpas appeared out of the howling blizzard. Gau was nearly as

debilitated as Fischer and was likewise unable to descend the difficult bands of shale, so his

Sherpas sat the Taiwanese climber beside Lopsang and Fischer and then continued down

without him. "I stay with Scott and Makalu one hour, maybe longer, " says Lopsang. "I am very

cold, very tired. Scott tell to me, 'You go down, send up Anatoli." So I say, 'O.K I go down, I send

quick Sherpa up and Anatoh." Then I make good place for Scott and go down." Lopsang left

Fischer and Gau on a ledge 1,200 feet abov the South Col and fought his way down through the

storm. Unable to see, he got far off route toward the west, ended up below the level of the Col

before he realized his error, and was forced to climb back up the northern margin of the Lhotse

Face* to locate Camp Four. Around midnight, nevertheless, he made it to safety. "I go to

Anatoli tent," reported Lopsang. "I tell to Anatoli, 'Please, you go up, Scott is very sick, he cannot

walk. Then I go to my tent, just fall asleep, sleep like dead person." Early the next morning while

searching the Col for Andy Harris, I came across Lopsang's faint crampon tracks in the ice

leading up from the lip of the Lhotse Face, and mistakenly believed they were Harris's tracks

headed down the face-which is why I thought Harris had walked off the edge of the Col. Guy

Cotter, a longtime friend of both Hall's and Harris's, happened to be a few miles from Everest

Base Camp on the afternoon of May 10, where he was guiding an expedition on Pumori, and had

been monitoring Hall's radio transmissions throughout the day. At 2:15 Pm. he talked to Hall on

the summit, and everything sounded fine. At 4:30 and 4:41, however, Hall called down to say

that Doug was out of oxygen and unable to move, and Cotter became very alarmed. At 4:53 he

got on the radio and strongly urged Hall to descend to the South Summit. "The call was mostly

to convince him to come down and get some gas," says Cotter, "because we knew he wasn't

going to be able to do anything for Doug without it. Rob said he could get himself down o. K but

not with Doug." But forty minutes later, Hall was still with Hansen atop the Hillary Step, going

nowhere. During radio calls from Hall at 5:36, and again at 5:57, Cotter implored his mate to

leave Hansen and come down alone. "I know I sound like the bastard for telling Rob to abandon

his client," confessed Cotter, "but by then it was obvious that leaving Doug was his only choice."

Hall, however, wouldn't consider going down without Hansen. There was no further word from

Hall until the middle of the night. At 2:46 A.M Cotter woke up in his tent below Pumori to hear a

long, broken transmission, probably unintended: Hall had been wearing a remote microphone

clipped to the shoulder strap of his backpack, which was occasionally keyed on by mistake. In

this instance, says Cotter, "I suspect Rob didn't even know he was transmitting. I could hear

someone yelling-it might have been Rob, but I couldn't be sure because the wind was so loud in

the background. But he was saying something like, 'Keep moving! Keep going!" presumably to

Doug, urging him on." If this was indeed the case, it meant that in the wee hours of the morning

Hall and Hansen-perhaps accompanied by Harris-were still struggling from the Hillary Step

toward the South Summit through the gale. And if so, it also meant that it had taken them more

than ten hours to move down a stretch of ridge that was typically covcred by descending

climbers in less than half an hour. Of course, this is highly speculative. all that is certain is that

Hall called down at 5:57 Pm. At that point, he and Hansen were still on the Step; and at 4:43 on

the morning of May 11, when he next spoke to Base Camp, he had descended to the South

Summit. And at that point neither Hansen nor Harris was with him. In a series of transmissions

over the next two hours, Rob sounded disturbingly confused and irrational. During the call at

4:43 A.M he told Caroline Mackenzie, our Base Camp doctor, that his legs no longer worked, and

that he was "too clumsy to move." In a ragged, barely audible voice, Rob croaked, "Harold was

with me last night, but he doesn't seem to be with me now. He was very weak." Then, obviously

befuddled, he asked, "Was Harold with me? Can you tell me that?" By this point Hall had

possession of two full oxygen canisters, but the valves on his mask were so choked with ice that

he couldn't get the gas to flow. He indicated, however, that he was attempting to deice the

oxygen rig, "which," says Cotter, "made us all feel a little better. It was the first positive thing we'd

heard." At 5:00 A.M Base Camp patched through a call on the satellite telephone to Jan Arnold,

Hall's wife, in Christchurch, New Zealand. She had climbed to the summit of Everest with Hall in

1993, and she entertained no illusions about the gravity of her husband's predicament. "My heart

really sank when I heard his voice," she recalls. He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded

like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I'd been up there; I knew what it

could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from

the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, "You might as well be on the moon." At 5:31, Hall took

four milligrams of oral dexamethasone and indicated he was still trying to clear his oxygen mask

of ice. Talking to Base Camp, he asked repeatedly about the condition of Makalu Gau, I'd

already reported with absolute certainty that I'd seen Harris on the South Colat 6:30 P.M May 10.

When Hall said that Harris was with him up on the South summit-3,000 feet higher than where I

said I'd seen him-most people, thanks to my error, wrongly assumed that Hall's statements were

merely the incoherent ramblings of an exhausted, severely hypoxic man. Fischer, Beck Weathers,

Yasuko Namba, and his other clients. He seemed most concerned about Andy Harris and kept

inquiring about his whereabouts. Cotter says they tried to steer the discussion away from Harris,

who in all likelihood was dead, "because we didn't want Rob to have another reason for staying

up there. At one point Ed Viesturs jumped on the radio from Camp Two and fibbed, 'Don't

worry about Andy; he's down here with us." A little later, Mackenzie asked Rob how Hansen was

doing. "Doug," Hall replied, "is gone." That was all he said, and it was the last mention he ever

made of Hansen. On May 23, when David Breashears and Ed Viesturs reached the summit, they

would find no sign of Hansen's body; they did, however, find an ice ax planted about fifty vertical

feet above the South Summit, along a very exposed section of ridge where the fixed ropes came

to an end. It's quite possible that Hall and/or Harris managed to get Hansen down the ropes to

this point, only to have him lose his footing and fall 7,000 feet down the sheer Southwest Face,

leaving his ice ax jammed into the ridge where he slipped. But this, too, is merely conjecture.

What might have happened to Harris remains even harder to discern. Between Lopsang's

testimony, Hall's radio calls, and the fact that another ice ax found on the South Summit was

Positively identified as Andy's, we can be reasonably sure he was at the South Summit with Hall

on the night of May 10. Beyond that, however, virtually nothing is known about how the young

guide met his end. At 6:00 A.M Cotter asked Hall if the sun had reached him yet. "Almost," Rob

replied-which was good, because he'd mentioned a moment earlier that he was shaking

uncontrollably in the awful cold. In conjunction with his earlier revelation that he was no longer

able to walk, this had been very upsetting news to the people listening down below.

Nevertheless, it was remarkable that Hall was even alive after Spending a night without shelter

or oxygen at 28,700 feet in hurricaneforce winds and windchill of one hundred degrees below

zero. During this same radio call, Hall asked after Harris yet again: "Did anyone see Harold last

night except meself? " Some three hours later Rob was still obsessing over Andy's whereabouts.

At 8:43 A.m. he mused over the radio, "Some of Andy's gear is still here. I thought he must have

gone ahead in the nighttime. Listen, can you account for him or not?" Wilton attempted to

dodge the question, but Rob persisted in his line of inquiry: "O.K. I mean his ice ax is here and his

jacket and things." "Rob," Viesturs replied from Camp Two, "if you can put the jacket on, just use

it. Keep going down and worry only about yourself. Everybody else is taking care of other

people. just get yourself down. After struggling for four hours to deice his mask, Hall finally got it

to work, and by 9:00 A.m. he was breathing supplemental oxygen for the first time; by then he'd

spent more than sixteen hours above 28,700 feet without gas. Thousands of feet below, his

friends stepped up their efforts to cajole him to start down. "Rob, this is Helen at Base Camp,"

Wilton importuned, sounding as if she was on the brink of tears, "You think about that little baby

of yours. You're going to see its face in a couple of months, so keep on going." Several times

Hall announced he was preparing to descend, and at one point we were sure he'd finally left the

South Summit. At Camp Four, Lhakpa Chhiri and I shivered in the wind outside the tents,

peering up at a tiny speck moving slowly down the upper Southeast Ridge. Convinced that it

was Rob, coming down at last, Lhakpa and I slapped each other on the back and cheered him on.

But an hour later my optimism was rudely extinguished when I noticed that the speck was still in

the same place: it was actually nothing but a rock-just another altitude-induced hallucination. In

truth, Rob had never even left the South Summit. Around 9:30 A.M Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri

left Camp Four and started climbing toward the South Summit with a thermos of hot tea and two

extra canisters of oxygen, intending to rescue Hall. They faced an exceedingly formidable task.

As astounding and courageous as Boukreev's rescue of Sandy Pittman and Charlotte Fox had

been the night before, it paled in comparison to what the two Sherpas were proposing to do

now: Pittman and Fox had been a twenty-minute walk from the tents over relatively flat ground;

Hall was 3,000 vertical feet above Camp Four-an exhausting eight- or nine-hour climb in the

best of circumstances. And these were surely not the best of circumstances. The wind was

blowing in excess of 40 knots. Both Ang Dorje and Lhakpa were cold and wasted from climbing

to the summit and back just the day before. If they did somehow manage to reach Hall,

moreover, it would be late afternoon before they got there, leaving only one or two hours of

daylight in which to begin the even more difficult ordeal of bringing him down. Yet their loyalty

to Hall was such that the two men ignored the overwhelming odds and set out toward the South

Summit as fast as they could climb. Shortly thereafter, two Sherpas from the Mountain Madness

team-Tashi Tshering and Ngawang Sya Kya (a small, trim man, graysing at the temples, who is

Lopsang' father)-and one Sherpa from the Taiwanese team headed up to bring down Scott

Fischer and Makalu Gau Twelve hundred feet above the South Col the trio of Sherpas found the

incapacitated climbers on the ledge where Lopsang had left them. Although they tried to give

Fischer oxygen, he was unresponsive. Scott was still breathing, barely, but his eyes were fixed in

their sockets, and his teeth were tightly clenched. Concluding that he was beyond hope, they

left him on the ledge and started descending with Gau who, after receiving hot tea and oxygen,

and with considerable assistance from the three Sherpas, was able to move down to the tents on

a short-rope under his own power. The day had started out sunny and clear, but the wind

remained fierce, and by late morning the upper mountain was wrapped in thick clouds. Down at

Camp Two the IMAX team reported that the wind over the summit sounded like a squadron of

747s, even from 7,000 feet below. Meanwhile, high on the Southeast Ridge, Ang Dorje and

Lhakpa Chhiri pressed on resolutely through the intensifying storm toward Hall. At 3:00 Pm

however, still 700 feet below the South Summit, the wind and subzero cold proved to be too

much for them, and the Sherpas could go no higher. It was a valiant effort, but it had failed-and

as they turned around to descend, Hall's chances for survival. all but vanished. Throughout the

day on May 11, his friends and teammates incessantly begged him to make an effort to come

down under his own power. Several times Hall announced that he was preparing to descend,

only to change his mind and remain immobile at the South Summit. At 3:20 P.M Cotter-who by

now had walked over from his own camp beneath Pumori to the Everest Base Camp-scolded

over the radio, "Rob, get moving down the ridge." Sounding annoyed, Hall fired back Look, if I

thought I could manage the knots on the fixed ropes with me frostbitten hands, I would have

gone down six hours ago, pal. just send a couple of the boys up with a big thermos of something

hot-then I'll be fine." "Thing is, mate, the lads who went up today encountered some high winds

and had to turn around," Cotter replied, trying to convey as delicately as possible that the

rescue attempt had been abandoned, "so we think your best shot is to move lower." "I can last

another night here if you send up a couple of boys with some Sherpa tea, first thing in the

morning, no later than nine-thirty or ten," Rob answered. "You're a tough man, Big Guy," said

Cotter, his voice quavering. "We'll send some boys up to you in the morning." At 6:20 Pm Cotter

contacted Hall to tell him that Jan Arnold was on the satellite phone from Christchurch and was

waiting to be patched through. "Give me a minute," Rob said. "Me mouth's dry. I want to eat a

bit of snow before I talk to her." A little later he came back on and rasped in a Slow, horribly

distorted voice, "Hi, my sweetheart. I hope you're tucked up in a nice warm bed. How are you

doing? " "I can't tell you how much I'm thinking about you! " Arnold replied. "You sound so much

better than I expected.... Are you warm, my darling?" "In the context of the altitude, the setting,

I'm reasonably comfortable," Hall answered, doing his best not to alarm her. "How are your feet?"

"I haven't taken me boots off to check, but I think I may have a bit of frostbite...... "I In looking

forward to making you completely better when you come home," said Arnold. "I just know you're

going to be rescued. Don't feel that you're alone. I'm sending all my positive energy your way!))

Before signing off, Hall told his wife, "I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't

worry too much." These would be the last words anyone would hear him speak. Attempts to

make radio contact with Hall later that night and the next day went unanswered. Twelve days

later, when Breashears and Viesturs climbed over the South Summit on their way to the top,

they found Hall lying on his right side in a shallow ice hollow, his upper body buried beneath a

drift of snow. Everest was the embodiment of the physical forces of the world. Against it he had

to pit the spirit of man. He could see the joy in the faces of his comrades if he succeeded. He

could imagine the thrill his success would cause among all fellow-mountaineers; the credit it

would bring to England; the interest all over the world; the name it would bring him; the enduring

satisfaction to himseo' that he had made his life worthwhile.... Perhaps he never exactly

formulated it, yet in his mind must have been present the idea of "all or nothing." Of the two

alternatives, to turn back a third time, or to die, the latter was for Mallory probably the easier

The agony of the first would be more than he as a man, as a mountaineer, and as an artist, could

endure. Sir Francis Younghusband The Epic of Mount Everest, 1926

At 4:00 P.M. on May 10, around the same time a hurting Doug Hansen arrived on the

summit supported by Rob Hall's shoulder, three climbers from the northern Indian province of

Ladakh radioed down to their expedition leader that they, too, were on top of Everest. Members

of a thirty-nine-person expedition organized by the Indo Tibetan Border Police, Tsewang Smanla,

Tsewang PaIjor, and Dorje Morup had ascended from the Tibetan side of the peak via the North

east Ridge-the route on which George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine had so famously

disappeared in 1924. Leaving their high camp at 27,230 feet as a party of six, the Ladakhis did not

get away from their tents until 5:45 A.M.* By midafternoon, still more than a thousand vertical

feet below the top, they To avoid confusion, all times quoted in this chapter have been

converted to Nepal time, even though the events I describe occurred in Tibet. Clocks in Tibet

are set to reflect the Beijing time zone, which is two hours and fifteen minutes ahead of the

Nepal time zone e.g 6:OOA.M. in Nepal is 8:15 in Tibet. L I P .1 q were engulfed by the same

storm clouds that we encountered on the other side of the mountain. Three members of the

team threw in the towel and went down at around 2:00 Pm but Smanla, PaIjor, and Morup

pushed onward despite the deteriorating weather. "They were overcome by summit fever,"

explained Harbhajan Singh, one of the three who turned around. The other three reached what

they believed to be the summit at 4:00 Pm by which time the clouds had become so thick that

visibility was reduced to no more than 100 feet. They radioed their Base Camp on the Rongbuk

Glacier to say they were on top, whereupon the leader of the expedition, Mohindor Singh,

placed a satellite telephone call to New Delhi and proudly reported the triumph to Prime

Minister Narashima Rao. Celebrating their success, the summit team left an offering of prayer

flags, katas, and climbing pitons on what appeared to be the highest point, and then descended

into the fast-rising blizzard. In truth, the Ladakhis were at 28,550 feet when they turned around,

about two hours below the actual summit, which at that time still jutted above the highest clouds.

The fact that they unwittingly stopped some 500 feet short of their goal explains why they didn't

see Hansen, Hall, or Lopsang on top, and vice versa. Later, shortly after dark, climbers lower on

the Northeast Ridge reported seeing two headlamps in the vicinity of 28,300 feet, just above a

notoriously problematic cliff known as the Second Step, but none of the three Ladakhis made it

back to their tents that night, nor did they make further radio contact. At 1:45 the next morning,

May 11-around the same time Anatoli Boukreev was frantically searching the South Col for Sandy

Pittman, Charlotte Fox, and Tim Madsen-two Japanese climbers, accompanied by three Sherpas,

set out for the summit from the same high camp on the Northeast Ridge that the Ladakhis had

used, despite the very high winds buffeting the peak. At 6:00 A.M as they skirted a steep rock

promontory called the First Step, twenty-one-year-old Eisuke Shigekawa and thirty-six-year-old

Hiroshi Hanada were taken aback to see one of the Ladakhi climbers, probably Paljor, lying in

the snow, horribly frostbitten but still alive after a night without shelter or oxygen, moaning

unintelligibly. Not wanting to jeopardize their ascent by stopping to assist him, the Japanese

team continued climbing toward the summit. At 7:15 A.M. they arrived at the base of the Second

Step, a deadvertical prow of crumbling schist that is usually ascended by means of an aluminum

ladder that had been lashed to the cliff by a Chinese team in 1975. To the dismay of the

Japanese climbers, however, the ladder was falling apart and had become partially detached

from the rock, so ninety minutes of strenuous climbing were required to surmount this 20-foot

cliff. Just beyond the top of the Second Step they came upon the other two Ladakhis, Smanla

and Morup. According to an article in the Financial Times written by the British journalist

Richard Cowper, who interviewed Hanada and Shigekawa at 21,000 feet immediately after their

ascent, one of the Ladakhis was "apparently close to death, the other crouching in the snow. No

words were passed. No water, food or oxygen exchanged hands. The Japanese moved on and

160 feet farther along they rested and changed oxygen cylinders." Hanada told Cowper, "We

didn't know them. No, we didn't give them any water. We didn't talk to them. They had severe

high-altitude sickness. They looked as if they were dangerous. Shigekawa explained, `We were

too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality." Turning

their backs on Smanla and Morup, the Japanese team resumed their ascent, passed the prayer

flags and pitons left by the Ladakhis at 28,550 feet, and-in an astonishing display of

tenacityreached the summit at 11:45 A.M. in a screaming gale. Rob Hall was at that moment

huddled on the South Summit, fighting for his life, a half hour's climb below them along the

Southeast Ridge. During their return down the Northeast Ridge to their high camp, the Japanese

again came across Smanla and Morup above the Second Step. At this time Morup appeared to

be dead; Smanla, though still alive, was hopelessly tangled in a fixed line. Pasang Kami, a Sherpa

on the Japanese team, freed Smanla from the rope, then continued down the ridge. As they

descended past the First Step-where on the way up they had climbed past Paljor, crumpled and

raving in the snowthe Japanese party now saw no sign of the third Ladakhi. Seven days later the

Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition launched another summit attempt. Departing their high

camp at 1: 15 on the morning of May 17, two Ladakhis and three Sherpas soon came upon the

frozen bodies of their teammates. They reported that one of the men, in his death throes, had

torn off most of his clothing before finally succumbing to the elements. Smanla, Morup, and

Paljor were left on the mountain where they had fallen, and the five climbers continued to the

top of Everest, which they reached at 7:40 A.M

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall

apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The hlood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

William Butler Yeats

"The Second Coming of hell I wobbled back to Camp Four around 7:30 Saturday morning,

May 11, the actuality of what had happened-of what was still happening-began to sink in with

paralyzing force. I was physically and emotionally wrecked after having just spent an hour

scouring the South Col for Andy Harris; the search had left me convinced that he was dead.

Radio calls my teammate Stuart Hutchison had been monitoring from Rob Hall on the South

Summit made clear that our leader was in desperate straits and that Doug Hansen was dead.

Members of Scott Fischer's team who'd spent most of the night lost on the Col reported that

Yasuko Namba and Beck Weathers were dead. And Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau were

believed to be dead or very near death, 1,200 feet above the tents. Confronted with this tally,

my mind balked and retreated into a weird, almost robotic state of detachment. I felt

emotionally anesthetized yet hyperaware, as if I had fled into a bunker deep inside my skull and

was peering out at the wreckage around me through a narrow, armored slit. As I gazed numbly

at the sky, it seemed to have turned a preternaturally pale shade of blue, bleached of all but the

faintest remnant of color. The jagged horizon was limned with a coronalike glow that flickered

and pulsed before my eyes. I wondered if I had begun the downward spiral into the nightmarish

territory of the mad. Al After a night at 26,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, I was even

weaker and more exhausted than I had been the previous evening after coming down from the

summit. Unless we somehow acquired some more gas or descended to a lower camp, I knew

that my teammates and I would continue to deteriorate rapidly. The fast-track acclimatization

schedule followed by Hall and most other modern Everesters is remarkably efficient: it allows

climbers to embark for the summit after spending a relatively brief four-week period above

17,000 feet-including just a single overnight acclimatization excursion to 24,000 feet.* Yet this

strategy is predicated on the assumption that everyone will have a continuous supply of bottled

oxygen above 24,000 feet. When that ceases to be the case, all bets are off. Searching out the

rest of our crew, I found Frank Fischbeck and Lou Kasischke lying in a nearby tent. Lou was

delirious and snowblind, completely without sight, unable to do anything for himself, muttering

incoherently. Frank looked as if he were in a severe state of shock, but he was doing his best to

take care of Lou. John Taske was in another tent with Mike Groom; both men appeared to be

asleep or unconscious. As rickety and feeble as I felt, it was obvious that everyone else except

Stuart Hutchison was faring even worse. As I went from tent to tent I tried to locate some

oxygen, but all the canisters I found were empty. The ongoing hypoxia, coupled with my

profound fatigue, exacerbated the sense of chaos and despair. Thanks to the relentless din of

nylon flapping in the wind, it was impossible to communicate from tent to tent. The batteries in

our one remaining radio were nearly depleted. An atmosphere of terminal entropy pervaded

the camp, heightened by the fact that our team which for the preceding six weeks had been

encouraged to rely * In 1996, Rob Hall's team spent just eight nights at Camp Two (21,300 feet)

or higher before setting out for the summit from Base Camp, which is a pretty typical

acclimatization period nowadays. Prior to 1990, climbers commonly spent considerably more

time at Camp Two or higher-including at least one acclimatization sortie to 26,000 feet-before

embarking for the top. Although the value of acclimatizing as high as 26,000 feet is debatable

(the deleterious effects of spending extra time at such extreme altitude may well offset the

benefits), there is little question that extending the current eight- or nine-night acclimatization

period at 21,000 to 24,000 feet would provide a greater margin of safety. thoroughly on our

guides-was now suddenly and utterly without leadership: Rob and Andy were gone, and although

Groom was present, the ordeal of the previous night had taken a terrible toll on him. Seriously

frostbitten, lying insensate in his tent, at least for the time being he was unable even to speak.

With all our guides hors de combat, Hutchison stepped up to fill the leadership vacuum. A high-

strung, self-serious young man from the upper crust of English-speaking Montreal society, he was

a brilliant medical researcher who went on a big mountaineering expedition every two or three

years but otherwise had little time for climbing. As the crisis mounted at Camp Four, he did his

best to rise to the occasion. While I tried to recover from my fruitless search for Harris,

Hutchison organized a team of four Sherpas to locate the bodies of Weathers and Namba, who

had been left on the far side of the Col when Anatoli Boukreev brought in Charlotte Fox, Sandy

Pittman, and Tim Madsen. The Sherpa search party, headed by Lhakpa Chhiri, departed ahead

of Hutchison, who was so exhausted and befuddled that he'd forgotten to put his boots on and

had tried to leave camp in his light, smooth-soled liners. Only when Lhakpa pointed out the

blunder did Hutchison return for his boots. Following Boukreev's directions, the Sherpas quickly

found the two bodies on a slope of gray ice freckled with boulders near the lip of the Kangshung

Face. Extremely superstitious about the dead, as many Sherpas are, they halted 60 or 70 feet

away and waited for Hutchison. "Both bodies were partially buried," Hutchison recalls. "Their

backpacks were maybe 100 feet away, uphill from them. Their faces and torsos were covered

with snow; only their hands and feet were sticking out. The wind was just screaming across the

Col." The first body he came to turned out to be Namba, but Hutchison couldn't discern who it

was until he knelt in the gale and chipped a three-inchthick carapace of ice from her face.

Stunned, he discovered that she was still breathing. Both her gloves were gone, and her bare

hands appeared to be frozen solid. Her eyes were dilated. The skin on her face was the color of

white porcelain. "It was terrible," Hutchison recalls. "I was overwhelmed. She was very near

death. I didn't know what to do." He turned his attention to Beck, who lay twenty feet away.

Beck's head was also caked with a thick armor of frost. Balls of ice the size of grapes were

matted to his hair and eyelids. After clearing the frozen detritus from Beck's face, Hutchison

discovered that the Texan was still alive, too: "Beck was mumbling something, I think, but I

couldn't tell what he was trying to say. His right glove was missing and he had terrible frostbite. I

tried to get him to sit up but he couldn't. He was as close to death as a person could be and still

be breathing." Horribly shaken, Hutchison went over to the Sherpas and asked Lhakpa's advice.

Lhakpa, an Everest veteran respected by Sherpas and sahibs alike for his mountain savvy, urged

Hutchison to leave Beck and Yasuko where they lay. Even if they survived long enough to be

dragged they would certainly die before they could be carried back to Camp Four, and

attempting a rescue would jeopardize the lives of the other climbers on the Col, most of who

were going to have enough trouble getting themselves down safely. Hutchison decided that

Lhakpa was right-there was only one choice, however difficult: let nature take its inevitable

course with Beck and Yasuko, and save the group's resources for those who could actually be

helped. It was a classic act of triage. When Hutchison returned to camp he was on the verge of

tears and looked like a ghost. At his urging we roused Taske and Groom and then crowded into

their tent to discuss what to do about Beck and Yasuko. The conversation that ensued was

anguished and halting. We avoided making eye contact. After five minutes, however, all four of

us concurred: Hutchison's decision to leave Beck and Yasuko where they lay was the proper

course of action. We also debated heading down to Camp Two that afternoon, but Taske was

insistent that we not descend from the Col while Hall was marooned on the South Summit. "I

won't even consider leaving without him," he pronounced. It was a moot point, regardless:

Kasischke and Groom were in such bad shape that going anywhere was out of the question for

the time being. "By then I was very worried that we were headed for a repeat of what happened

on K2 in 1986," says Hutchison. On July 4 of that year, seven Himalayan veterans-including the

legendary Austrian bergsteiger Kurt Diemberger-set out for the summit of the world's second-

highest mountain. Six of the seven reached the top, but during the descent a severe storm

struck the upper slopes of K2, pinning the climbers in their high camp at 26,250 feet. As the

blizzard continued without letup for five days, they grew weaker and weaker. When the storm

finally broke, only Diemberger and one other person made it down alive. Saturday morning, as

we discussed what to do about Namba and Weathers and whether to descend, Neal Beidleman

was mustering Fischer's team from their tents and hectoring them to start down from the Col.

"Everyone was so messed up from the night before that it was really hard getting our group up

and out of the tents-I practically had to punch some people to get them to put their boots on,"

he says. "But I was adamant that we leave immediately. In my view, staying at twenty-six

thousand feet longer than absolutely necessary is asking for trouble. I could see that rescue

efforts were under way for Scott and Rob, so I turned my full attention to getting our clients off

the Col and down to a lower camp. While Boukreev remained behind at Camp Four to wait for

Fischer, Beidleman herded his group slowly down from the ColAt 25,000 feet he paused to give

Pittman another injection of dexamethasone, and then everyone stopped for a long time at

Camp Three to rest and rehydrate. "When I saw those guys," says David Breashears, who was at

Camp Three when Beidleman's crew arrived, "I was astounded. They looked like they'd been

through a five-month war. Sandy started to break down-she was crying, 'It was terrible! I just

gave up and lay down to die!" all of them appeared to be in severe shock." just before dark, the

last of Beidleman's group was working their way down the steep ice of the lower Lhotse Face,

when, 500 feet from the bottom of the fixed ropes, they were met by some Sherpas from a

Nepali cleanup expedition who'd come up to assist them. As they resumed their descent, a

volley of grapefruit-sized stones came whizzing down from the upper mountain and one of them

struck a Sherpa on the back of the head. "The rock just creamed him," says Beidleman, who

observed the incident from a short distance above. "It was sickening," Klev Schoening recalls. "It

sounded like he'd been hit with a baseball bat." The force of the blow chipped a divot as large as

a silver dollar from the Sherpa's skull, knocked him unconscious, and sent him into

cardiopulmonary arrest. As he flopped over and started sliding down the rope, Schoening

jumped in front of him and managed to halt his fall. But a moment later, as Schoening cradled

the Sherpa in his arms, a second rock came down and smashed into the Sherpa; once again the

man took the impact squarely on the back of his head. Despite this second blow, after a few

minutes the stricken man gasped violently and began breathing again. Beidleman managed to

lower him to the bottom of the Lhotse Face, where a dozen of the Sherpa's teammates met

them and carried the injured man to Camp Two. At that point, says Beidleman, "KJev and I just

stared at each other in disbelief. It was like, 'What's going on here? What have we done to make

this mountain so angry?" Throughout April and early May, Rob Hall had expressed his concern

that one or more of the less competent teams might blunder into a bad jam, compelling our

group to rescue them, thereby ruining our summit bid. Now, ironically, it was Hall's expedition

that was in grave trouble, and other teams were in the position of having to come to our aid.

Without rancor, three such groups-Todd Burleson's Alpine Ascents International expedition,

David Breashears's IMAX expedition, and Mal Duff's commercial expedition-immediately

postponed their own summit plans in order to assist the stricken climbers. The day before-Friday,

May 10-while we in Hall's and Fischer's teams were climbing from Camp Four toward the top, the

Alpine Ascents International expedition headed by Burleson and Pete Athans was arriving at

Camp Three. On Saturday morning, as soon as they learned of the disaster that was unfolding

above, Burleson and Athans left their clients at 24,000 feet in care of their third guide, Jim

Williams, and rushed up to the South Col to help. Breashears, Ed Viesturs, and the rest of the

IMAX team happened to be in Camp Two at that time; Breashears immediately suspended

filming in order to direct all of his expedition's resources toward the rescue effort. First, he

relayed a message to me that some spare batteries were stashed in one of the IMAX tents on

the Col; by midafternoon I'd found them, allowing Hall's team to re-establish radio contact with

the lower camps, Then Breashears offered his expedition's Supply of oxygen-fifty canisters that

had been laboriously carried to 26,000 feet-to the ailing climbers and would-be rescuers on the

Col. Even though this threatened to put his $5.5 million film project in jeopardy, he made the

crucial gas available without hesitation. Athans and Burleson arrived at Camp Four in

midmorning, immediately began distributing IMAX gas bottles to those of us starved for oxygen,

then waited to see what came of the Sherpas' efforts to rescue Hall, Fischer, and Gau. At 4:35

P.M Burleson was standing outside the tents when he noticed someone walking slowly toward

camp with a peculiar, stiff-kneed gait. "Hey, Pete," he called to Athans. "Check this out.

Somebody's coming into camp." The person's bare right hand, naked to the frigid wind and

grotesquely frostbitten, was outstretched in a kind of odd, frozen salute. Whoever it was

reminded Athans of a mummy in a low-budget horror film. As the mummy lurched into camp,

Burleson realized that it was none other than Beck Weathers, somehow risen from the dead. The

previous night, huddling with Groom, Beidleman, Namba, and the other members of that group,

Weathers had felt himself "growing colder and colder. I'd lost my right glove. My face was

freezing. My hands were freezing. I felt myself growing really numb and then it got really hard to

stay focused, and finally I just sort of slid off into oblivion. Through the rest of the night and most

of the following day, Beck lay out on the ice, exposed to the merciless wind, cataleptic and

barely alive. He has no recollection of Boukreev coming for Pittman, Fox, and Madsen. Nor

does he remember Hutchison finding him in the morning and chipping the ice from his face. He

remained comatose for more than twelve hours. Then, late Saturday afternoon, for some

unknowable reason a light went on in the reptilian core of Beck's inanimate brain and he floated

back to consciousness. "Initially I thought I was in a dream," Weathers recalls. "When I first came

to, I thought I was laying in bed. I didn't feel cold or uncomfortable. I sort of rolled onto my side,

got my eyes open, and there was my right hand staring me in the face. Then I saw how badly

frozen it was, and that helped bring me around to reality. Finally I woke up enough to recognize

that I was in deep shit and the cavalry wasn't coming so I better do something about it myself."

Although Beck was blind in his right eye and able to focus his left only in a radius of three or four

feet, he started walking directly into the wind, deducing correctly that camp lay in that direction.

immediately. Had he been mistaken, he would have stumbled down the Kangshung Face, the

edge of which lay just thirty feet in the opposite direction. About ninety minutes later he

encountered "some unnaturally smooth, bluish-looking rocks," which turned out to be the tents

of Camp Four. Hutchison and I were in our tent monitoring a radio call from Rob Hall on the

South Summit when Burleson came rushing in. "Doctor!" he yelled from just outside the door,

"Grab your stuff. We need you bad! Beck just walked in and he's exhausted and in bad shape!"

Struck dumb by Becks miraculous resurrection, Hutchison crawled outside to answer the call.

Burleson placed Beck in an unoccupied tent, with several hot-water bottles, bundled him into

two sleeping bags and put an oxygen mask over his face. "At that point," Hutchison confesses,

"none of us thought Beck was going to survive the night. I could barely detect his carotid pulse,

which is the last pulse you lose before you die. He was critically ill. And even if he did live until

morning, I couldn't imagine how we were going to get him down By now the three Sherpas who

had gone up to rescue Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau were back in camp after bringing down

Gau; they'd left Fischer on a ledge at 27,200 feet after concluding that he was beyond saving.

Having just seen Beck walk into camp after being given up for dead, however, Anatoli Boukreev

was unwilling to write Fischer off. At 5:00 Pm as the storm intensified, the Russian headed up

alone to attempt to save him. "I find Scott at seven o'clock, maybe it is seven-thirty or eight," says

Boukreev. "By then it is dark. Storm is very strong. His oxygen mask is around face, but bottle is

empty. He is not wearing mittens; hands completely bare. Down suit is unzipped, pulled off his

shoulder, one arm is outside clothing. There is nothing I can do. Scott is dead." With a heavy

heart, Boukreev lashed Fischer's backpack across his face as a shroud and left him on the ledge

where he lay. Then he collected Scott's camera, ice ax, and favorite pocketknife-which

Beidleman would later give to Scott's nine-year-old son in Seattle-and descended into the

tempest. The gale that struck on Saturday evening was even more powerful than the one that

had lashed the Col the night before. By the time Boukreev made it back down to Camp Four

the visibility was down to a few yards, and he almost failed to find the tents. Breathing bottled

oxygen (thanks to the IMAX team) for the first time in thirty hours, I fell into a tortured, fitful

sleep despite the racket produced by the furiously flapping tent. Shortly after midnight, I was in

the midst of a nightmare about Andy-he was falling down the Lhotse Face trailing a rope,

demanding to know why I hadn't held onto the other end-when Hutchison shook me awake.

"Jon," he shouted above the roar of the storm, "I'm concerned about the tent. Do you think it's

going to be O.K.? As I struggled groggily up from the depths of my troubled reverie like a

drowning man rising to the ocean's surface, it took me a minute to notice why Stuart was so

worried: the wind had flattened half our shelter, which rocked violently with each successive

gust. Several of the poles were badly bent, and my headlamp revealed that two of the main

seams were in imminent danger of being ripped asunder. Flurries of fine snow particles filled

the air inside the tent, blanketing everything with frost. The wind was blowing harder than

anything I'd ever experienced anywhere, even on the Patagonian Ice Cap, a place reputed to be

the windiest on the planet. If the tent disintegrated before morning, we would be in grave

trouble. Stuart and I gathered up our boots and all our clothing and then positioned ourselves on

the windward side of the shelter. Bracing our backs and shoulders against the damaged poles,

for the next three hours we leaned into the hurricane, despite our surpassing fatigue, holding up

the battered nylon dome as if our lives depended on it. I kept imagining Rob up on the South

Summit at 28,700 feet, his oxygen gone, exposed to the full savagery of this storm with no

shelter whatsoever-but it was so disturbing that I tried not to think about it.

just before dawn on Sunday, May 12, Stuart's oxygen ran out.

'Without it I could feel myself becoming really cold and hypothermic, " he says. "I began to

lose feeling in my hands and feet. I worried that I was slipping over the edge, that I might not be

able to get down from the Col. And I worried that if I didn't get down that morning, I might never

get down." Giving Stuart my oxygen bottle, I rooted around until I found another one with some

gas left in it, and then we both began packing for the descent. When I ventured outside, I saw

that at least one of the unoccupied tents had blown completely off the Col. Then I noticed Ang

Dorje, standing alone in the appalling wind, sobbing inconsolably over the loss of Rob. After the

expedition, when I told his Canadian friend Marion Boyd about his grief, she explained that "Ang

Dorje sees his role on this earth as keeping people safe-he and I have talked about it a lot. It's

all-important for him in terms of his religion, and preparing for the next go-around in life.* Even

though Rob was the Devout Buddhists believe in sonam-an accounting of righteous deeds that,

when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever

this world of pain and suffering. expedition leader, Ang Dorje would see it as his responsibility to

ensure the safety of Rob and Doug Hansen and the others. So when they died, he couldn't help

but blame himself." Worried that Ang Dorje was so distraught that he might refuse to go down,

Hutchison beseeched him to descend from the Col immediately. Then, at 8:30 A.M.-believing

that by now Rob, Andy, Doug, Scott, Yasuko, and Beck were all surely dead-a badly frostbitten

Mike Groom forced himself out of his tent, gamely assembled Hutchison, Taske, Fischbeck, and

Kasischke, and started leading them down the mountain. In the absence of any other guides, I

volunteered to fill that role and bring up the rear. As our despondent group filed slowly away

from Camp Four toward the Geneva Spur, I braced myself to make one last visit to Beck, whom I

assumed had died in the night. I located his tent, which had been blasted flat by the hurricane,

and saw that both doors were wide open. When I peered inside, however, I was shocked to

discover that Beck was still alive. He was lying on his back across the floor of the collapsed

shelter, shivering convulsively. His face was hideously swollen; splotches of deep, ink-black

frostbite covered his nose and cheeks. The storm had blown both sleeping bags from his body,

leaving him exposed to the subzero wind, and with his frozen hands he'd been powerless to pull

the bags back over himself or zip the tent closed. "Jesus fucking Christ! " he wailed when he saw

me, his features twisted into a rictus of agony and desperation. "What's a guy have to do to get a

little help around here! " He'd been screaming for help for two or three hours, but the storm had

smothered his cries. Beck had awakened in the middle of the night to find that "the storm had

collapsed the tent and was blowing it apart. The wind was pressing the tent wall so hard against

my face that I couldn't breathe. It would let up for a second, then come slamming back down into

my face and chest, knocking the wind out of me. On top of everything else, my right arm was

swelling up, and I had this stupid wristwatch on, so as my arm got bigger and bigger, the watch

got tighter and tighter until it was cutting off most of the blood supply to my hand. But with my

hands messed up so badly, there was no way I could get the damn thing off. I yelled for help, but

nobody came. It was one hell of a long night. Man, I was glad to see your face when you stuck

your head inside the door." Upon first finding Beck in the tent, I was so shocked by his hideous

condition-and by the unforgivable way that we'd let him down yet again-I nearly broke into tears.

"Everything's going to be O.K" I lied, choking back my sobs as I pulled the sleeping bags over him,

zipped the tent doors shut, and tried to re-erect the damaged shelter. "Don't worry, pal.

Everything's under control now." As soon as I made Beck as comfortable as possible, I got on the

radio to Dr. Mackenzie at Base Camp. "Caroline!" I begged in a hysterical voice. "What should I

do about Beck? He's still alive, but I don't think he can survive much longer. He's in really bad

shape! "Try to remain calm, Jon," she replied. You need to go down with Mike and the rest of

the group. Where are Pete and Todd? Ask them to look after Beck, then start down." Frantic, I

roused Athans and Burleson, who immediately rushed over to Beck's tent with a canteen of hot

tea. As I hurried out of camp to rejoin my teammates, Athans was getting ready to inject four

milligrams of dexamethasone into the dying Texan's thigh. These were praiseworthy gestures,

but it was hard to imagine that they would do him much good. The one great advantage which

inexperience confers on the would-be mountaineer is that he is not bogged down by tradition or

precedence. To him, all things appear simple, and he chooses straightforward solutions to the

problems he faces. Often, of course, it defeats the success he is seeking, and sometimes it has

tragic results, but the man himself doesn't know this when he sets out on his adventure. Maurice

Wilson, Earl Denman, Klavs Becker-Larsen-none of them knew much about mountain climbing or

they would not have set out on their hopeless quests, yet, untrammelled by techniques,

determination carried them a long way. Walt Unsworth Everest ifteen minutes after leaving the

South Colon Sunday morning, May 12, I caught up to my teammates as they were descending

from the crest of the Geneva Spur. It was a pathetic sight: we were all so debilitated that it took

the group an incredibly long time just to descend the few hundred feet to the snow slope

immediately below. The most wrenching thing, however, was our shrunken size: three days

earlier, when we had ascended this terrain we'd numbered eleven; now there were only six of us.

Stuart Hutchison, at the back of the pack, was still atop the Spur when I reached him, preparing

to rappel down the fixed lines. I noticed that he wasn't wearing his goggles. Even though it was

a cloudy day, the vicious ultraviolet radiation at this altitude would render him snow-blind very

quickly. "Stuart! " I yelled over the wind, pointing at my eyes. "Your goggles!" "Oh yeah," he

replied in a weary voice. "Thanks for reminding me. Hey, as long as you're here, would you mind

checking my harness? I'm so tired that I'm not thinking clearly any more. I'd appreciate it if you'd

keep an eye on me." Examining his harness, I saw immediately that the buckle was only half-

fastened. Had he clipped into the rope with his safety tether it would have opened under his

body weight and sent him tumbling down the Lhotse Face. When I pointed this out, he said,

"Yeah, that's what I thought, but my hands were too cold to do it right." Yanking off my gloves in

the bitter wind, I hurriedly cinched the harness tightly around his waist and sent him down the

Spur after the others. As he clipped his safety tether onto the fixed rope he tossed his ice ax

down, then left it lying on the rocks as he embarked on the first rappel. "Stuart! " I shouted.

"Your ax! "I'm too tired to carry it," he shouted back. "Just leave it there." I was so knackered

myself that I didn't argue with him. I left the ax where it lay, clipped the rope, and followed

Stuart down the steep flank of the Geneva Spur. An hour later we arrived atop the Yellow Band,

and a bottleneck ensued as each climber cautiously descended the vertical limestone cliff. As I

waited at the back of the queue, several of Scott Fischer's Sherpas caught up to us. Lopsang

Jangbu, half-crazed with grief and exhaustion, was among them. Placing a hand on his shoulder, I

told him that I was sorry about Scott. Lopsang pounded his chest and tearfully blurted, "I am

very bad luck, very bad luck. Scott is dead; it is my fault. I am very bad luck. It is my fault. I am

very bad luck." I dragged my haggard ass into Camp Two around 1:30 Pm. Although by any

rational standard I was still at high altitude-21,300 feet-this place felt manifestly different from

the South Col. The murderous wind had completely abated. Instead of shivering and worrying

about frostbite, I was now sweating heavily beneath a scorching sun. No longer did it seem as

though I were clinging to survival by a fraying thread. Our mess tent, I saw, had been

transformed into a makeshift field hospital, staffed by Henrik Jessen Hansen, a Danish physician

on Mal Duff's team, and Ken Kamler, an American client and physician on Todd Burleson's

expedition. At 3:00 Pm as I was drinking a cup of tea, six Sherpas hustled a dazed-looking

Makalu Gau into the tent and the doctors sprang into action. They immediately laid him down,

removed his clothing, and stuck an IV tube into his arm. Examining his frozen hands and feet,

which had a dull whitish sheen like a dirty bathroom sink, Kamler observed grimly, "This is the

worst frostbite I've ever seen." When he asked Gau if he could photograph his limbs for the

medical record, the Taiwanese climber consented with a broad smile; like a soldier displaying

battle wounds, he seemed almost proud of the gruesome injuries he'd sustained. Ninety minutes

later, the doctors were still working on Makalu when David Breashears's voice barked over the

radio: "We're on our way down with Beck. We'll have him to Camp Two by dark." A long beat

passed before I realized that Breashears wasn't talking about hauling a body off the mountain; he

and his companions were bringing Beck down alive. I couldn't believe it. When I'd left him on

the South Col seven hours earlier, I was terrified that he wasn't going to survive through the

morning. Given up for dead yet again, Beck had simply refused to succumb. Later I learned from

Pete Athans that shortly after he had injected Beck with dexamethasone, the Texan

experienced an astonishing recovery. "Around ten-thirty we got him dressed, put his harness on,

and discovered that he was actually able to stand up and walk. We were all pretty amazed."

They started descending from the Col with Athans directly in front of Beck, telling him where to

place his feet. With Beck draping an arm over Athans's shoulders and Burleson grasping the

Texan's climbing harness tightly from behind, they shuffled carefully down the mountain. "At

times we had to help him pretty substantially, " says Athans, "but really, he moved surprisingly

well." At 25,000 feet, arriving above the limestone cliffs of the Yellow Band, they were met by

Ed Viesturs and Robert Schauer, who efficiently lowered Beck down the steep rock. At Camp

Three they were assisted by Breashears, Jim Williams, Veikka Gustafsson, and Araceli Segarra;

the eight healthy climbers actually brought the severely crippled Beck down the Lhotse Face in

considerably less time than my teammates and I had managed to descend earlier that morning.

When I heard that Beck was on his way down, I made my way to my tent, wearily pulled on my

mountaineering boots, and started plodding up to meet the rescue party, expecting to

encounter them on the lower reaches of the Lhotse Face. just twenty minutes above Camp Two,

however, I was amazed to run into the entire crew. Although he was being assisted with a short-

rope, Beck was moving under his own power. Breashears and company hustled him down the

glacier at such a fast pace that in my own woeful state, I could barely keep up with them. Beck

was placed beside Gau in the hospital tent, and the physicians began stripping off his clothing.

"My God! " Dr. Kamler exclaimed when he saw Beck's right hand. "His frostbite is even worse

than Makalu's." Three hours later, when I crawled into my sleeping bag, the doctors were still

gingerly thawing Beck's frozen limbs in a pot of lukewarm water, working by the glow of their

headlamps. The next morning-Monday, May 13-I left the tents at first light and walked two and a

half miles through the deep cleft of the Western Cum to the lip of the Icefall. There, acting on

instructions radioed up from Guy Cotter at Base Camp, I scouted for a level area that could

serve as a helicopter landing pad. Over the preceding days, Cotter had been doggedly working

the satellite phone to arrange a helicopter evacuation from the lower end of the Cum, so that

Beck wouldn't have to descend the treacherous ropes and ladders of the Icefall, which would

have been difficult and very hazardous with such severely injured hands. Helicopters had

landed in the Cum previously, in 1973, when an Italian expedition used a pair of them to ferry

loads from Base Camp. It was nevertheless extremely dangerous flying, at the limit of the

aircraft's range, and one of the Italian machines had crashed on the glacier. In the twenty-three

years since, nobody had attempted to land above the Icefall again. Cotter was persistent,

however, and thanks to his efforts the American Embassy persuaded the Nepalese army to

attempt a helicopter rescue in the Cum. Around 8:00 Monday morning, as I searched in vain for

an acceptable helipad among the jumbled seracs at the lip of the Icefall, Cotter's voice crackled

over my radio: "The helicopter's on the way, Jon. He should be there any minute. You better

find a place for him to land pretty quickly." Hoping to find level terrain higher on the glacier, I

promptly ran into Beck being short-roped down the Cum by Athans, Burleson, Gustafsson,

Breashears, Viesturs, and the rest of the IMAX crew. Breashears, who had worked around many

helicopters during the course of a long and distinguished film career, immediately found a

landing pad bordered by two gaping crevasses at 19,860 feet. I tied a silk kata to a bamboo wand

to serve as a wind indicator, while Breashears-using a bottle of red Kool-Aid as dye-marked a

giant X in the snow at the center of the landing zone. A few minutes later Makalu Gall appeared,

having been dragged down the glacier on a piece of plastic by a half-dozen Sherpas. A moment

after that we heard the THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCK of a helicopter's rotors thrashing

furiously at the thin air. Piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri of the Nepalese

army, the olive-drab B2 Squirrel helicopter-stripped of all unnecessary fuel and equipment-made

two passes, but on each occasion aborted at the last moment. On Madan's third attempt)

however, he settled the Squirrel shakily onto the glacier with its tail hanging over a bottomless

crevasse. Keeping the rotors revving at full power, never taking his eyes off the control panel,

Madan raised single finger, indicating that he could take only one passenger; at this altitude, any

additional weight might cause him to crash while taking off. Because Gau's frostbitten feet had

been thawed at Camp Two, he could no longer walk or even stand, so Breashears, Athans, and I

agreed that the Taiwanese climber should be the one to go. "Sorry," I yelled to Beck above the

scream of the chopper's turbines. "Maybe he'll be able to make a second flight." Beck nodded

philosophically. We hoisted Gau into the rear of the helicopter, and the machine labored

tentatively into the air. As soon as Madan's skids lifted from PU the glacier, he nosed the aircraft

forward, dropped like a stone over the lip of the Icefall, and disappeared into the shadows. A

dense silence now filled the Cum. Thirty minutes later we were standing around the landing zone,

discussing how to get Beck down, when a faint THWOCK-THWOCKTHWOCK-THWOCK

sounded from the valley below. Slowly the noise grew louder and louder, and finally the small

green helicopter popped into view. Madan flew a short distance up the Cum before bringing the

aircraft around, so that its snout pointed downhill. Then, without hesitation, he set the Squirrel

down once more on the Kool-Aid crosshatch, and Breashears and Athans hustled Beck aboard.

A few seconds later the helicopter was airborne, flitting past the West Shoulder of Everest like a

freakish metal dragonfly. An hour later Beck and Makalu Gau were receiving treatment in a

Kathmandu hospital. After the rescue team dispersed, I sat in the snow for a long while by myself,

staring at my boots, endeavoring to get a grip on what had happened over the preceding

seventy-two hours. How could things have gone so haywire? How could Andy and Rob and

Scott and Doug and Yasuko really be dead? But try as I might, no answers were forthcoming.

The magnitude of this calamity was so far beyond anything I'd ever imagined that my brain simply

shorted out and went dark. Abandoning my hope of comprehending what had transpired, I

shouldered my backpack and headed down into the frozen witchery of the Icefall nervous as a

cat, for one last trip through the maze of decaying seracs. I shall inevitably be askedfor a word of

mature judgement on the expedition of a kind that was impossible when we were all up close to

it... On the one hand, Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without

the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than

was all in the day's work of polar exploration. On the other hand, our expedition, running

appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown,

commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to

find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice. To ignore such a

contrast would be ridiculous: to write a book without accounting for it a waste of time. Apsley

Cherry-Garrard The Worst journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed

1912 expedition to the South Pole rriving at the bottom of the Khumbu Icefall on Monday

morning, May 13, I came down the final slope to find Ang Tshering, Guy Cotter, and Caroline

Mackenzie waiting for me at the edge of the glacier. Guy handed me a beer, Caroline gave me a

hug, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the ice with my face in my hands and tears

streaking my cheeks, weeping like I hadn't wept since I was a small boy. Safe now, the crushing

strain of the preceding days lifted from my shoulders, I cried for my lost companions, I cried

because I was grateful to be alive, I cried because I felt terrible for having survived while others

had died. On Tuesday afternoon, Neal Beidleman presided over a memorial service at the

Mountain Madness encampment. Lopsang Jangbu's father, Ngawang Sya Kya-an ordained lama-

burned juniper incense and chanted Buddhist scripture beneath a metallic gray sky. Neal said a

few words, Guy spoke, Anatoli Boukreev mourned the loss of Scott Fischer. I got up and

stammered out some memories of Doug Hansen. Pete Schoening tried to raise everyone's spirits

by urging us to look forward, not back. But when the service ended and we all dispersed to our

tents, a funereal gloom hung over Base Camp. Early the next morning, a helicopter arrived to

evacuate Charlotte Fox and Mike Groom, both of whom had frostbitten feet that needed

immediate medical attention. John Taske, who was a doctor, flew out as well to treat Charlotte

and Mike enroute. Then, shortly before noon, while Helen Wilton and Guy Cotter stayed behind

to oversee the dismantling of the Adventure Consultants compound, Lou Kasischke, Stuart

Hutchison, Frank Fischbeck, Caroline, and I walked out of Base Camp, bound for home. On

Thursday, May 16, we were helicoptered from Pheriche to the village of Syangboche, just above

Namche Bazaar. As we walked across the dirt landing strip to await a second flight into

Kathmandu, Stuart, Caroline, and I were approached by three ashen-faced Japanese men. The

first said that his name was Muneo Nukita-he was an accomplished Himalayan climber who'd

twice reached the top of Everestand then politely explained that he was acting as a guide and an

interpreter for the other two, whom he introduced as Yasuko Namba's husband, Kenichi Namba,

and her brother. Over the next forty-five minutes they asked many questions, few of which I

could answer. By then Yasuko's death had become headline news across Japan. Indeed, on May

12-less than twenty-four hours after she perished on the South Cola helicopter had touched

down in the middle of Base Camp, and two Japanese journalists had hopped out wearing oxygen

masks. Accosting the first person they saw-an American climber named Scott Darsney-they had

demanded information about Yasuko. Now, four days later, Nukita warned us that a similarly

predacious swarm of print and television reporters lay in wait for us in Kathmandu. Late that

afternoon we jammed aboard a gigantic Mi-17 helicopter and lifted off through a gap in the

clouds. An hour later the chopper set down at Tribhuvan International Airport, and we stepped

out the door into a thicket of microphones and television cameras. As a journalist, I found it

edifying to experience things from the other side of the fence. The throng of reporters, mostly

Japanese, wanted a neatly scripted version of the calamity, replete with villains and heroes. But

the chaos and suffering I'd witnessed were not easily reduced to sound bites. After twenty

minutes of grilling on the tarmac, I was rescued by David Schensted, the consul from the

American Embassy, who delivered me to the Garuda Hotel. More difficult interviews followed-by

other reporters, and then by a gauntlet of scowling officials at the Ministry of Tourism. Friday

evening, wandering through the alleys of Kathmandu's Tharnel district, I sought refuge from a

deepening depression. I handed a scrawny Nepalese boy a fistful of rupees and received a tiny,

papercovered packet in return, emblazoned with a snarling tiger. Unwrapping it back in my hotel

room, I crumbled the contents across a leaf of cigarette paper. The pale green buds were sticky

with resin and redolent of rotting fruit. I rolled a joint, smoked it down to nothing, rolled a

second fatty, and smoked nearly half of that one, too, before the room began to spin and I

stubbed it out. I lay naked across the bed and listened to the sounds of the night drift through

the open window. The jingle of ricksha bells blended with car horns, the come-ons of street

peddlers, a woman's laughter, music from a nearby bar. Flat on my back, too high to move, I

closed my eyes and let the glutinous premonsoon heat cover me like a balm; I felt as though I

were melting into the mattress. A procession of intricately etched pinwheels and big-nosed

cartoon figures floated across the backs of my eyelids in neon hues. As I turned my head to the

side, my ear brushed against a wet spot; tears, I realized, were running down my face and soaking

the sheets. I felt a gurgling, swelling bubble of hurt and shame roll up my spine from somewhere

deep inside. Erupting out of my nose and mouth in a flood of snot, the first sob was followed by

another, then another and another. On May 19 I flew back to the States, carrying two duffels of

Doug Hansen's belongings to return to the people who loved him. At the Seattle airport I was

met by his children, Angie and Jaime; his girlfriend, Karen Marie; and other friends and family

members. I felt stupid and utterly impotent when confronted by their tears. Breathing thick

marine air that carried the scent of a minus tide, I marveled at the fecundity of the Seattle spring,

appreciating its damp, mossy charms as never before. Slowly, tentatively, Linda and I began the

process of becoming reacquainted. The twenty-five pounds I'd shed in Nepal came back with a

vengeance. The ordinary pleasures of life at home--eating breakfast with my wife, watching the

sun go down over Puget Sound, being able to get up in the middle of the night and walk barefoot

to a warm bathroom-generated flashes of joy that bordered on rapture. But such moments were

tempered by the long penumbra cast by Everest, which seemed to recede little with the passage

of time. Stewing over my culpability, I put off calling Andy Harris's partner, Fiona McPherson,

and Rob Hall's wife, Jan Arnold, for such a long time that they finally phoned me from New

Zealand. When the call came, I was able to say nothing to diminish Fiona's anger or

bewilderment. Durin my conversation with Jan, she spent more time comforting me than vice

versa. I'd always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit. I accepted that danger

was an essential component of the game-without it, climbing would be little different from a

hundred other trifling diversions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to

steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly

believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them. Until I visited the

Himalaya, however, I'd never actually seen death at close range. Hell, before I went to Everest,

I'd never even been to a funeral. Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept,

an idea to ponder in the abstract. Sooner or later the divestiture of such a privileged innocence

was inevitable, but when it finally happened the shock was magnified by the sheer superfluity of

the carnage: all told, Everest killed twelve men and women in the spring of 1996, the worst single-

season death toll since climbers first set foot on the peak seventy-five years ago. Of the six

climbers on Hall's expedition who reached the summit, only Mike Groom and I made it back

down: four teammates with whom I'd laughed and vomited and held long, intimate conversations

lost their lives. My actions-or failure to act-played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris. And

while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a

tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my

psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-

reproach. Eventually I spoke of my lingering disquietude to Klev Schoening, whose home was not

far from mine. Klev said that he, too, felt awful about the loss of so many lives, but unlike me, he

had no "survivor's guilt. " He explained, "Out on the Col that night, I used up everything I had

trying to save myself and the people with me. By the time we made it back to the tents I had

absolutely nothing left. I'd frostbitten one cornea and was practically blind. I was hypothermic,

delirious, and shivering uncontrollably. It was terrible losing Yasuko, but I've make peace with

myself over it, because I know in my heart that there was nothing more I could have done to save

her. You shouldn't be so hard on yourself. It was a bad storm. In the condition you were in at

the time, what could you have possibly done for her?" Perhaps nothing, I concurred. But in

contrast to Schoening, I'll never be sure. And the enviable peace of which he speaks eludes me.

With so many marginally qualified climbers flocking to Everest these days, a lot of people believe

that a tragedy of this magnitude was overdue. But nobody imagined that an expedition led by

Rob Hall would be at the center of it. Hall ran the tightest, safest operation on the mountain, bar

none. A compulsively methodical man, he had elaborate systems in place that were supposed to

prevent such a catastrophe. So what happened? How can it be explained, not only to loved

ones left behind, but to a censorious public? Hubris probably had something to do with it. Hall

had become so adept at running climbers of all abilities up and down Everest that he got a little

cocky, perhaps. He'd bragged on more than one occasion that he could get almost any

reasonably fit person to the summit, and his record seemed to support this. He'd also

demonstrated a remarkable ability to prevail over adversity. In 1995, for instance, Hall and his

guides not only had to cope with Hansen's problems high on the peak, but they also had to deal

with the complete collapse of another client named Chantal Mauduit, a celebrated French

alpinist, who was making her seventh stab at Everest without oxygen, Mauduit passed out stone

cold at 28,700 feet and had to be dragged and carried all the way down from the South Summit

to the South Col "like a sack of spuds," as Guy Cotter put it. After everybody came out of that

summit attempt alive, Hall may well have thought there was little he couldn't handle. Before this

year, however, Hall had had uncommonly good luck with the weather, and it might have skewed

his judgment. Season after season," confirmed David Breashears, who has been on more than a

dozen Himalayan expeditions and has himself climbed Everest three times, "Rob had brilliant

weather on summit day. He'd never been caught by a storm high on the mountain." In fact, the

gale of May 10, though violent, was nothing extraordinary; it was a fairly typical Everest squall. If

it had hit two hours later, it's likely that nobody would have died. Conversely, if it had arrived

even one hour earlier, the storm could easily have killed eighteen or twenty climbers-me among

them. Certainly time had as much to do with the tragedy as the weather, and ignoring the clock

can't be passed off as an act of God. Delays at the fixed lines were foreseeable and eminently

preventable. Predetermined turnaround times were egregiously ignored. Extending the turn-

around times may have been influenced to some degree by the rivalry between Fischer and Hall.

Fischer had never guided Everest before 1996. From a business standpoint, there was

tremendous pressure on him to be successful. He was exceedingly motivated to get clients to

the summit, especially a celebrity client like Sandy Hill Pittman. Likewise, having failed to get

anybody to the top in 1995, it would have been bad for Hall's business if he failed again in 1996-

especially if Fischer succeeded. Scott had a charismatic personality, and that charisma had been

aggressively marketed by Jane Bromet. Fischer was trying very hard to eat Hall's lunch, and Rob

knew it. Under the circumstances, the prospect of turning his clients around while his rival's

clients were pushing toward the summit may have been sufficiently distasteful to cloud Hall's

judgment. It can't be stressed strongly enough, moreover, that Hall, Fischer, and the rest of us

were forced to make such critical decisions while severely impaired with hypoxia. In pondering

how this disaster could have occurred, it is imperative to remember that lucid thought is all but

impossible at 29,000 feet. Wisdom comes easily after the fact. Shocked by the toll in human life,

critics have been quick to suggest policies and procedures to ensure that the catastrophes of

this season won't be repeated. It has been proposed, for example, that a guide-to-client ratio of

one to one be established as the standard on Everest-i.e each client would climb with his or her

own personal guide and remain roped to that guide at all times. Perhaps the simplest way to

reduce future carnage would be to ban bottled oxygen except for emergency medical use. A

few reckless souls might perish trying to reach the summit without gas, but the great bulk of

marginally competent climbers would be forced to turn back by their own physical limitations

before they ascended high enough to get into serious trouble. And a no-gas regulation would

have the corollary benefit of automatically reducing trash and crowding because considerably

fewer people would attempt Everest if they knew supplemental oxygen was not an option. But

guiding Everest is a very loosely regulated business, administered by byzantine Third World

bureaucracies spectacularly illequipped to assess qualifications of guides or clients. Moreover,

the two nations that control access to the peak-Nepal and China-are staggeringly poor.

Desperate for hard currency, the governments of both countries have a vested interest in issuing

as many expensive climbing permits as the market will support, and both are unlikely to enact

any policies that significantly limit their revenues. Analyzing what went wrong on Everest is a

useful enough enterPrise; it might conceivably prevent some deaths down the road. But to

believe that dissecting the tragic events of 1996 in minute detail win actually reduce the future

death rate in any meaningful way is wishful hinking. The urge to catalog the myriad blunders in

order to "learn from the mistakes" is for the most part an exercise in denial and selfdeception. If

you can convince yourself that Rob Hall died because he made a string of stupid errors and that

you are too clever to repeat those same errors, it makes it easier for you to attempt Everest in

the face of some rather compelling evidence that doing so is injudicious. in fact, the murderous

outcome of 1996 was in many ways simply business as usual, Although a record number of

people died in the spring climbing season on Everest, the 12 fatalities amounted to only 3

percent of the 398 climbers who ascended higher than Base Campwhich is actually slightly

below the historical fatality rate of 3.3 percent. Or here's another way to look at it: between 1921

and May 1996, 144 people died and the peak was climbed some 630 times-a ratio Of one in four.

Last spring, 12 climbers died and 84 reached the summit-a ratio of one in seven. Compared to

these historical standards, 1996 was actually a safer-than-average year. Truth be told, climbing

Everest has always been an extraordinarily dangerous undertaking and doubtless always win be,

whether the people involved are Himalayan neophytes being guided up the peak or world-class

mountaineers climbing with their peers. It is worth noting that before the mountain claimed the

lives of Hall and Fischer, it had already wiped out a whole corps of elite climbers, including Peter

Boardman, Joe Tasker, Marty Hoey, Jake Breitenbach, Mick Burke, Michel Parmentier, Roger

Marshall, Ray Genet, and George Leigh Mallory. In the case of the guided ilk, it rapidly became

clear to me in 1996 that few of the clients on the peak (myself included) truly appreciated the

gravity of the risks we faced-the thinness of the margin by which human life is sustained above

25,000 feet. Walter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when things go wrong

up in the Death Zone-and sooner or later they always do-the strongest guides in the world may

be powerless to save a client's life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest

guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives. Four of my

teammates died not so much because Rob Hall's systems were faulty-indeed, nobody's were

better-but because on Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance. In the

midst of all the postmortem ratiocination, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that climbing

mountains will never be a safe, predictable, rule-bound enterprise. This is an activity that

idealizes risktaking; the sport's most celebrated figures have always been those who stick their

necks out the farthest and manage to get away with it. Climbers, as a species, are simply not

distinguished by an excess of Prudence. And that holds especially true for Everest climbers:

when presented with a chance to reach the planet's highest summit, history shows, people are

surprisingly quick to abandon good judgment. "Eventually," warns Tom Hornbein, thirty-three

years after his ascent of the West Ridge, "what happened on Everest this season is certain to

happen again." For evidence that few lessons were learned from the mistakes of May 10, one

need look no farther than what happened on Everest in the weeks that immediately followed.

On May 17, two days after Hall's team quit Base Camp, over on the Tibetan side of the mountain

an Austrian named Reinhard Wlasich and a Hungarian teammate, climbing without supplemental

oxygen, ascended to the high camp at 27,230 feet on the Northeast Ridge, where they occupied

a tent abandoned by the ill-fated Ladakhi expedition. The following morning Wlasich

complained that he felt ill and then lost consciousness; a Norwegian doctor who happened to be

present determined that the Austrian was suffering from both pulmonary and cerebral edema.

Although the doctor administered oxygen and medication, by midnight Wlasich was dead.

Meanwhile, over on the Nepalese side of Everest, David Breashears's IMAX expedition

regrouped and considered their options. Since $5.5 million dollars had been invested in their film

project, they had a big incentive to remain on the mountain and undertake a summit attempt.

With Breashears, Ed Viesturs, and Robert Schauer, they were without question the strongest,

most competent team on the mountain. And despite giving away half of their supply of oxygen

to assist rescuers and climbers in need, they were subsequently able to scrounge enough gas

from expeditions leaving the mountain to replace most of what they'd lost. Paula Barton Viesturs,

Ed's wife, had been monitoring the radio as Base Camp manager for the IMAX crew when

disaster struck on May 10. A friend of both Hall's and Fischer's, she was devastated; Paula

assumed that after such a horrifying tragedy the IMAX team would automatically fold up their

tents and go home. Then she overheard a radio call between Breashears and another climber, in

which the IMAX leader nonchalantly declared that the team intended to take a short break at

Base Camp and then go for the summit. "After all that had happened, I couldn't believe they'd

really go back up there," Paula admits. "When I heard the radio call, I just lost it She was so upset

that she left Base Camp and walked down to Tengboche for five days to collect herself. On

Wednesday, May 22, the IMAX team arrived on the South Col in perfect weather, and set out for

the top that night. Ed Viesturs, who had the starring role in the film, reached the summit at 11:00

Thursday morning, without using supplemental oxygen.* Breashears arrived twenty minutes later,

followed by Araceli Segarra, Robert Schauer, and Jamling Norgay Sherpa-the son of the first

ascender, Tenzing Norgay, and the ninth member of the Norgay clan to climb the peak. All told,

sixteen climbers summitted that day, including the Swede who'd ridden his bike to Nepal from

Stockholm, Geran Kropp, and Ang Rita Sherpa, whose ascent marked his tenth visit to the top of

Everest. On the way up, Viesturs had climbed past the frozen bodies of Fischer and Hall. "Both

jean [Fischer's wife] and Jan [Hall's wife] had asked me to bring some personal effects back for

them," Viesturs says sheepishly. "I knew Scott wore his wedding ring around his neck, and I

wanted to bring it down to Jeannie, but I couldn't force myself to go digging around his body. I

just didn't have it in me." Instead of collecting any keepsakes, Viesturs sat down next to Fischer

during the descent and spent a few minutes alone with him. "Hey, Scott, how you doing?" Ed

sadly inquired of his friend. "What happened, man?" On Friday afternoon, May 24, as the IMAX

team was descending from Camp Four to Camp Two, they encountered what remained of the

South African Team-Ian Woodall, Cathy O'Dowd, Bruce Herrod, and three Sherpas-at the

Yellow Band, on their way to the South Col to make their own summit attempt. "Bruce looked

strong, his face looked good," recalls Breashears. "He shook my hand really hard, congratulated

us, said he felt great. Half an hour behind him were Ian and Cathy, collapsed over their ice axes,

looking like hell-really out of it. "I made a point of spending a little time with them," Breashears

continues. "I knew they were very inexperienced, so I said, 'Please be careful. You saw what

happened up here earlier this month. Remems her that getting to the summit is the easy part; it'

getting back down that's hard." Viesturs had previously ascended Everest in 1990 and '91 without

gas. In 1994 he climed it a third time, with Rob Hall; on that ascent he used bottled oxygen

because he was guiding the peak and thought it would be irresponsible to do so without it, The

South Africans set out for the summit that night. O'Dowd and Woodall left the tents twenty

minutes after midnight with Sherpas Pemba Tending, Ang Dorje,* and Jangbu carrying oxygen

for them. Herrod seems to have left camp within minutes of the main group, but he fell farther

and farther behind as the ascent dragged on. On Saturday, May 25, at 9:50 A.M Woodall called

Patrick Conroy, the Base Camp radio operator, to report that he was on the summit with Pemba

and that O'Dowd would be on top in fifteen minutes with Ang Dorje and Jangbu. Woodall said

that Herrod, who wasn't carrying a radio, was some unknown distance below. Herrod, whom I'd

met several times on the mountain, was an amiable thirty-seven-year-old of bearish build.

Although he had no previous high-altitude experience, he was a competent mountaineer who'd

spent eighteen months in the frigid wastes of Antarctica working as a geophysicist-he was far

and away the most accomplished climber remaining on the South African team. Since 1988 he'd

been working hard to make a go of it as a freelance photographer, and he hoped reaching the

summit of Everest would give his career a needed boost. When Woodall and O'Dowd were on

the summit, as it turned out, Herrod was still far below, struggling up the Southeast Ridge by

himself at a dangerously slow pace. Around 12:30 Pm. he passed Woodall, O'Dowd, and the

three Sherpas on their way down. Ang Dorje gave Herrod a radio and described where an

oxygen bottle had been stashed for him, then Herrod continued alone toward the top. He didn't

reach the summit until just after 5:00 Pm seven hours after the others, by which time Woodall

and O'Dowd were already back in their tent at the South Col. Coincidentally, at the same

moment Herrod radioed down to Base Camp to report that he was on top, his girlfriend, Sue

Thompson, happened to call Conroy on the Base Camp satellite phone from her London home.

"When Patrick told me that Bruce was on the sum A reminder: the Sherpa named Ang Dooe on

the South African team is not the same person as the Sherpa named Ang Dorje on Rob Hall's

team. mit," Thompson recalls, "I said, 'Fuck! He can't be on the summit this late-it's five-fifteen! I

don't like this." A moment later Conroy patched Thompson's phone call through to Herrod on

top of Everest. "Bruce sounded compos mentis," she says. "He was aware that he'd taken a long

time to get there, but he sounded as normal as one can sound at that altitude, having taken his

oxygen mask off to speak. He didn't even seem particularly breathless." Nevertheless, it had

taken Herrod seventeen hours to climb from the South Col to the summit. Although there was

little wind, clouds now enveloped the upper mountain, and darkness was fast approaching.

Completely alone on the roof of the world, extremely fatigued, he must have been out of oxygen,

or nearly out. "That he was up there that late, with nobody else around, was crazy," says his

former teammate, Andy de Merk. "It's absolutely boggling." Herrod had been up on the South

Col from the evening of May 9 through May 12. He'd felt the ferocity of that storm, heard the

desperate radio calls for help, seen Beck Weathers crippled with horrible frostbite. Early on

during his ascent of May 25, Herrod climbed right past the corpse of Scott Fischer, and several

hours later at the South Summit he would have had to step over Rob Hall's lifeless legs.

Apparently, the bodies made little impression on Herrod, however, for despite his lagging pace

and the lateness of the hour he pressed onward to the top. There was no further radio

transmission from Herrod after his 5:15 call from the summit. "We sat waiting for him at Camp

Four with the radio on, " O'Dowd explained in an interview published in the Johannesburg Mail &

Guardian. "We were terribly tired and eventually fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning

at about 5:00 A.M and he hadn't radioed, I realised we had lost him." Bruce Herrod is now

presumed dead, the twelfth casualty of the season. Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the

songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants

that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wildpigs and

birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will

rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through

this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves andfolds of the ground. We will

come to the water's edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says,

THis is THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT-B. TRAVEN.... Charles

Bowden Blood Orchid

Several people who were on Everest last May have told me they've managed to move

beyond the tragedy. In mid-November I received a letter from Lou Kasischke in which he wrote,

It took a few months in my case for the positive aspects to begin to develop. But they have.

Everest was the worst experience in my LIFE. But that was then. Now is now. I'm focusing on

the positive. I learned some important things about life, others, and myself. I feel I now have a

clearer perspective on life. I see things today I never saw before. Lou had just returned from

spending a weekend with Beck Weathers in Dallas. Following his helicopter evacuation from the

Western Cum, Beck had his right arm amputated halfway below the elbow. all four fingers and

the thumb on his left hand were removed. His nose was amputated and reconstructed with

tissue from his ear and forehead. Lou mused that visiting Beck was both sad and triumphant. It

hurts to see Beck like this: rebuilt nose, facial scars, disabled for life, Beck wondering if he can

practice medicine again, and the like. But it was also remarkable to see how a man can accept all

this and be ready to move on in life. He is conquering this. He will be victorious. Beck had only

nice things to say about everyone. Beck doesn't play the blame game. You may not have shared

political views with Beck, but you would share my pride in seeing how he has handled this.

Somehow, some day, this will net out in a positive way for Beck. I'm heartened that Beck, Lou,

and others are apparently able to look at the positive side of the experience-and envious.

Perhaps after more time has passed I, too, will be able to recognize some greater good that's

resulted from so much suffering, but right now I can't. As I write these words, half a year has

passed since I returned from Nepal, and on any given day during those six months, no more than

two or three hours have gone by in which Everest hasn't monopolized my thoughts. Not even in

sleep is there respite: imagery from the climb and its aftermath continues to permeate my

dreams. After my article about the expedition was published in the September issue of

Outside

the magazine received an unusually large volume of mail about the piece. Much of the

correspondence offered support and sympathy for those of us who had returned, but there was

also an abundance of scathingly critical letters. For example, a lawyer from Florida admonished,

All I can say is that I agree with Mr. Krakauer when he said, "My actions-or failure to act-played a

direct role in the death of Andy Harris." I also agree with him when he says, "[He was] a mere

350 yards [away], lying inside a tent, doing absolutely nothing...... I don't know how he can live

with himself. Some of the angriest letters-and by far the most disturbing to readcame from

relatives of the deceased. Scott Fischer's sister, Lisa FischerLuckenbach, wrote, Based on your

written word, YOU certainly seem now to have the uncanny ability to know precisely what was

going on in the minds and hearts of every individual on the expedition. Now that YOU are home,

alive and well, you have judged the judgments of others, analyzed their intentions, behaviors,

personalities and motivations. You have commented on what SHOULD have been done by the

leaders, the Sherpas, the clients, and have made arrogant accusations of their wrongdoing. All

according to Jon Krakauer, who after sensing the doom brewing, scrambled back to his tent for

his own safety and survival.... Perhaps catch a glimpse of what you are doing by seeming to

KNOW EVERYTHING. You have already been wrong with your SPECULATION of what

happened to Andy Harris causing much grief and anguish to his family and friends. And now you

have repudiated the character of Lopsang with your "tattle tale" accounts of him. What I am

reading is YOUR OWN ego frantically struggling to make sense out of what happened. No

amount of your analyzing, criticizing, judging, or hypothesizing will bring the peace you are

looking for. There are no answers. No one is at fault. No one is to blame. Everyone was doing

their best at the given time under the given circumstances. No one intended harm for one

another. No one wanted to die, This latter missive was especially upsetting because I received it

soon after learning that the list of victims had grown to include Lopsang Jangbu. In August, after

the retreat of the monsoon from the high Himalaya, Lopsang had returned to Everest to guide a

Japanese client up the South Col and Southeast Ridge route. On September 25, as they were

ascending from Camp Three to Camp Four to launch their summit assault, a slab avalanche

engulfed Lopsang, another Sherpa, and a French climber just below the Geneva Spur and swept

them down the Lhotse Face to their deaths. Lopsang left behind a young wife and a two-month-

old baby in Kathmandu. There has been other bad news as well. On May 17, after resting for just

two days at Base Camp after coming down from Everest, Anatoli Boukreev climbed alone to the

summit of Lhotse. "I am tired," he told me, "but I go for Scott." Continuing his quest to ascend all

fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks, in September Boukreev traveled to Tibet and

climbed both Clio Oyu and 26,291-foot Shisha Pangma. But in mid-November, during a visit to

his home in Kazakhstan, a bus he was riding in crashed. The driver was killed and Anatoli

received severe head injuries, including grave and possibly permanent damage to one of his eyes.

On October 14, 1996, the following message was posted on the Internet as part of a South

African discussion forum about Everest:

I am a Sherpa orphan. My father was killed in the Khumbu Icefall while load-ferrying for an

expedition in the late sixties. My mother died just below Pheriche when her heart gave out

under the weight of the load she was carrying for another expedition in 1970. Three of my

siblings died from various causes, my sister and I were sent to foster homes in Europe and the

U.S. I never have gone back to my homeland because I feel it is cursed. My ancestors arrived in

the Solo-Khumbu region fleeing from persecution in the lowlands. There they found sanctuary in

the shadow of 'Sagarmathaji,l 'mother goddess of the earth In return they were expected to

protect that goddesses's sanctuary from outsiders. But my people went the other way. They

helped outsiders find their way into the sanctuary and violate every limb of her body by standing

on top of her, crowing in victory, and dirtying and polluting her bosom. Some of them have had

to sacrifice themselves, others escaped through the skin of their teeth, or offered other lives in

lieu . . . . So I believe that even the Sherpas are to blame for the tragedy of 1996 on 'Sagarmatha.1

I have no regrets of not going back, for I know the people of the area are doomed, and so are

those rich, arrogant outsiders who feel they can conquer the world. Remember the Titanic. Even

the unsinkable sank, and what are foolish mortals like Weathers, Pittman, Fischer , Lopsang,

Tenzing, Messner, Bonington in the face of the mother Goddess.- As such I have vowed never to

return home and be art of p that sacrilege. Everest seems to have poisoned many lives.

Relationships have foundered. The wife of one of the victims has been hospitalized for

depression. When I last spoke to a certain teammate, his life had been thrown into turmoil. He

reported that the strain of coping with the expedition's aftereffects was threatening to wreck his

marriage. He couldn't concentrate at work, he said, and he had received taunts and insults from

strangers. Upon her return to Manhattan, Sandy Pittman found that she'd become a lightning rod

for a great deal of public anger over what had happened on Everest. Vanity Fair magazine

published a withering article about her in its August 1996 issue. A camera crew from the tabloid

television program Hard Copy ambushed her outside her apartment. The writer Christopher

Buckley used Pittman's high-altitude tribulations as the punchline of a joke on the back page of

The New Yorker By autumn, things had gotten so bad that she confessed tearfully to a friend

that her son was being ridiculed and ostracized by classmates at his exclusive private school.

The blistering intensity of the collective wrath over Everest-and the fact that so much of that

wrath was directed at her-took Pittman completely by surprise and left her reeling. For Neal

Beidleman's part, he helped save the lives of five clients by guiding them down the mountain, yet

he remains haunted by a death he was unable to prevent, of a client who wasn't on his team and

thus wasn't even officially his responsibility. I chatted with Beidleman after we'd both re-

acclimated to our home turf, and he recalled what it felt like to be out on the South Col,

huddling with his group in the awful wind, trying desperately to keep everyone alive. "As soon as

the sky cleared enough to give us an idea where camp was," he recounted, "it was like, 'Hey, this

break in the storm may not last long, so let's GO!" I was screaming at everyone to get moving,

but it became clear that some people didn't have enough strength to walk, or even stand.

"People were crying. I heard someone yell, 'Don't let me die here!" It was obvious that it was now

or never. I tried to get Yasuko on her feet. She grabbed my arm, but she was too weak to get up

past her knees. I started walking, and dragged her for a step or two, then her grip loosened and

she fell away. I had to keep going. Somebody had to make it to the tents and get help or

everybody was going to die." Beidleman paused. "But I can't help thinking about Yasuko," he said

when he resumed, his voice hushed. "She was so little. I can still feel her fingers sliding across

my biceps, and then letting go. I never even turned to look back."

Author’s Note

My article in

Outside

angered several of the people I wrote about, and hurt the friends and

relatives of some Everest victims. I sincerely regret this-I did not set out to harm anyone. My

intent in the magazine piece, and to an even greater degree in this book, was to tell what

happened on the mountain as accurately and honestly as possible, and to do it in a sensitive,

respectful manner. I believe quite strongly that this story needed to be told. Obviously, not

everyone feels this way, and I apologize to those who feel wounded by my words. Additionally, I

would like to express my profound condolences to Fiona McPherson, Ron Harris, Mary Harris,

David Harris, Jan Arnold, Sarah Arnold, Eddie Hall, Millie Hall, Jaime Hansen, Angie Hansen, Bud

Hansen, Tom Hansen, Steve Hansen, Diane Hansen, Karen Marie Rochel, Kenichi Namba, jean

Price, Andy Fischer-Price, Katie Rose Fischer-Price, Gene Fischer, Shirley Fischer, Lisa

FischerLuckenbach, Rhonda Fischer Salerno, Sue Thompson, and Ngawang Sya Kya Sherpa. In

assembling this book I received invaluable assistance from many people, but Linda Mariam

Moore and David S. Roberts deserve special mention. Not only was their expert advice crucial

to this volume, but without their support and encouragement I would never have attempted the

dubious business of writing for a living, or stuck with it over the years. I am very grateful to my

matchless editors at Villard Books/Random House, David Rosenthal and Ruth Fecych. Thanks,

as well, to Adam Rothberg, Annik LaFarge, Dan Rembert, Diana Frost, Kirsten Raymond, Jennifer

Webb, Melissa Milsten, Dennis Ambrose, Bonnie Thompson, Brian McLendon, Beth Thomas,

Caroline Cunningham, Dianne Russell, Katie Mehan, and Suzanne Wickham. Randy Rackliff

created the remarkable woodcuts. This book originated as an assignment from

Outside

magazine.

Special gratitude is owed to Mark Bryant, who has edited my work with uncommon intelligence

and sensitivity for some fifteen years now, and Larry Burke, who has been publishing my work

even longer. Also contributing to my Everest piece were Brad Wetzler, John Alderman, Katie

Arnold, John Tayman, Sue Casey, Greg Cliburn, Hampton Sides, Amanda Stuermer, Lorien

Warner, Sue Smith, Cricket Lengyel, Lolly Merrell, Stephanie Gregory, Laura Hohnhold Adam

Horowitz, John Galvin, Adam Hicks, Elizabeth Rand, Chris Czmyrid, Scott Parmalee, Kim

Gattone, and Scott Mathews. I'm indebted to John Ware, my superb agent. Thanks, also, to

David Schensted and Peter Bodde of the American Embassy in Kathmandu, Lisa Choegyal of

Tiger Mountain, and Deepak Lama of Wilderness Experience Trekking for their assistance in the

wake of the tragedy. For providing inspiration, hospitality, friendship, information, and sage

advice, I'm grateful to Tom Hornbein, Bill Atkinson, Madeleine David, Steve Gipe, Don Peterson,

Martha Kongsgaard, Peter Goldman, Rebecca Roe, Keith Mark Johnson, Jim Clash, Muneo

Nukita, Helen Trueman, Steve Swenson, Conrad Anker, Alex Lowe, Colin Grissom, Kitty Calhoun,

Peter Hackett, David Shlim, Brownie Schoene, Michael Chessler, Marion Boyd, Graem Nelson,

Stephen P. Martin, Jane Tranel, Ed Ward, Sharon Roberts, Matt Hale, Roman Dial, Peggy Dial,

Steve Rottler, David Trione, Deborah Shaw, Nick Miller, Dan Cauthorn, Greg Collum, Dave

Jones, Fran Kaul, Dielle Havlis, Lee Joseph, Pat Joseph, Pierret Vogt, Paul Vogt, David

Quammen, Tim Cahill, Paul Theroux, Charles Bowden Alison Lewis, Barbara Detering, Lisa

Anderheggen-Led, Helen Forbes, and Heidi Baye. I was aided by the efforts of fellow writers and

journalists Elizabeth Hawley, Michael Kennedy, Walt Unsworth, Sue Park, Dile Seitz, Keith

McMillan, Ken Owen, Ken Vernon, Mike Loewe, Keith James, David Beresford, Greg Child,

Bruce Barcott, Peter Potterfield, Stan Armington, Jennet Conant, Richard Cowper, Brian

Blessed, Jeff Smoot, Patrick Morrow, John Colmey, Meenakshi Ganguly, Jennifer Mattos, Simon

Robinson, David Van Biema, Jerry Adler, Rod Nordland, Tony Clifton, Patricia Roberts, David

Gates, Susan Miller, Peter Wilkinson, Claudia Glenn Dowling, Steve Kroft, Joanne Kaufman,

Howie Masters, Forrest Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Audrey Salkeld, Liesl Clark, Jeff Herr, Jim Curran,

Alex Heard, and Lisa Chase.

Selected Bibliography

Armington, Stan. Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya. Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet, 1994. Bass,

Dick, and Frank Wells with Rick Ridgeway. Seven Summits. New York: Warner Books, 1986.

Baume, Louis C. Sivalaya: Explorations of the 8,000-Metre Peaks of the Himalaya.

Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1979.

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The Worst journey in the World. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989.

Dyrenfurth, G. 0. To the Third Pole. London: Werner Laurie, 1955.

Fisher, James F Sherpas: Reflections on Change in Himalayan Nepal. Berkeley: University

of California, 1990. Holzel, Tom, and Audrey Salkeld. The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine. New

York: Henry Holt, 1986. Hornbein, Thomas F Everest: The West Ridge. San Francisco: The Sierra

Club, 1966.

Hunt, John. The Ascent of Everest. Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1993.

Long, Jeff. The Ascent. New York: William Morrow, 1992. Messner, Reinhold. The Crystal

Horizon: Everest-the First Solo Ascent. Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1989. Morris, Jan.

Coronation Everest: The First Ascent and the Scoop That Crowned the Queen. London:

Boxtree, 1993.

Roberts, David. Moments of Doubt. Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1986.

Shipton, Eric. The Six Mountain- Travel Books. Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1985.

Unsworth, Wait. Everest. London: GraftonBooks, 1991.

About the Author

JON KRAKAUER is a contributing editor of

Outside

magazine and the author of

Eiger Dreams:

Ventures Among Men and Mountains

and the acclaimed

Into the Wild

. His writing also appears

Smithsonian

National Geographic

Playboy

Rolling Stone

, and

Architectural Digest

. He lives

in Seattle.