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
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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 toOutside, 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.
TheOutside 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 theOutside 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 ofOutside, 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.
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 1938Upon 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
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, 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
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
- 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
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
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
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