The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  7

  Death and Survival

  Is there anything new to say about the disaster on Mount Everest in the spring of 1996? I doubt it. Many years from now, armchair pundits will still be arguing about exactly what happened during the storm that struck late on May 10, and even for those of us who were there at the time, essential questions about the tragedy will remain unanswered.

  That was the Everest season made famous, of course, by Jon Krakauer’s number one bestseller, Into Thin Air. Seventeen years later, Amazon lists no fewer than eleven books still in print about that chaotic spring. Besides Jon’s account, they include memoirs by the survivors Beck Weathers and Lene Gammelgaard, as well as Anatoli Boukreev’s ghost-written The Climb, essentially a point-by-point rebuttal of Jon’s critique of Anatoli as an irresponsible, glory-seeking guide. After Anatoli’s death on Annapurna in 1997, Above the Clouds, a collection of his writings translated from the Russian, was published. That book casts further light on his role in the catastrophe and furnishes a more articulate rejoinder to Jon’s charges than does The Climb.

  Also still in print are memoirs by Göran Kropp, the guy who bicycled to Everest from his native Sweden and tried to climb Everest solo, without accepting so much as a candy bar from anyone else on the mountain; Matt Dickinson, who was on the north side of Everest that spring, where other deaths occurred; and Jamling Norgay, who reached the summit with our IMAX team. Not only these, but a pair of accounts from members of the South African team (which Jon also criticizes in Into Thin Air)—a bland, self-serving narrative by Ian Woodall, the team leader, and a tell-all exposé by Ken Vernon, the unfortunate journalist assigned to the expedition.

  I confess I haven’t read most of these books, even though I was on Everest myself that spring. (Maybe because I was there!) It’s safe to say that no season in any year on any mountain in the world has ever generated so much written scrutiny. I suppose in that sense Everest ’96 has a kind of mythic status. It’s reminiscent, in a minor way, of all the ink that’s been spilled trying to untangle the JFK assassination.

  Everest ’96 even has its conspiracy theorists! Just last year, a book appeared by yet another climber who was on the mountain at the time, who has apparently spent the last fifteen years trying to dig up proof that the leaders of the three main expeditions—Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, and David Breashears—knew beforehand that the storm of May 11 was coming and failed to warn anyone else, thereby plunging others into desperate struggles for survival. I won’t dignify this preposterous book by mentioning its author or title here.

  Even the first ascent of Everest in 1953—arguably the most celebrated event in mountaineering history—produced only four books by expedition members. And those books, rather than quarreling with one another, rounded out the full story handsomely. Sir John Hunt wrote the official narrative, The Ascent of Everest. Hillary told his own version in High Adventure. Wilfrid Noyce’s South Col—a sadly neglected minor masterpiece—presents a deeply personal, philosophically reflective account of the climb by one of Britains’s finest mountaineers. And James Morris’s slender Coronation Everest details the brilliant logistical scheme by which he got word of the great success to the London Times at the very hour of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

  In No Shortcuts to the Top, I devoted a long chapter, called “Time to Say Good-bye,” to my own role on Everest in 1996. I won’t repeat that account here, and by 2013, there seems to be little hope of uncovering any crucial new details about all the turns of bad luck and the unfortunate decisions that cascaded into catastrophe that spring. Blaming others when people die on a mountain is not my cup of tea. (Even Jon Krakauer, who in a sense started the furor by writing such a compelling book, is fed up with the whole subject, and refuses to talk about Everest anymore in public.)

  What lastingly disturbs me about the 1996 controversy is the smug accusation voiced so often by folks who barely understand mountaineering or Everest that the whole disaster was caused by incompetent clients paying big bucks to get dragged to the summit. When I’m giving a talk about the 8,000-meter peaks, someone in the audience invariably raises that canard. It’s all I can do to grind my teeth, smile politely, then explain the actual reality of guiding on Everest.

  I recently reread my 1996 diary, however, and it prompted me to a few new ruminations about that terrible season. Those, perhaps, are worth sharing. And no matter how much time passes, I’ll never get the tragedy out of my head, for on Everest that year, in Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, I lost two of the climbing partners who were closest to me, with whom I’d performed some of my finest ascents.

  • • •

  After getting up three more 8,000ers in 1995—Makalu, Gasherbrum I, and Gasherbrum II—I was on a roll with my Endeavor 8000. Only six summits remained for me to round out the fourteen. They were Shishapangma, where I’d come within a hundred yards of the top in 1993, Manaslu, Broad Peak, Nanga Parbat, Dhaulagiri, and the one that would become my personal nemesis, Annapurna.

  That successful 1995 campaign engendered my plan to go back to Everest for the eighth time, in the spring of 1996. Guiding with Rob Hall again, I’d use Everest as a springboard to get acclimatized for a try at Manaslu. Another twofer, with Rob and Veikka Gustafsson as my Manaslu teammates. Rob would pay my guiding salary and the cost of travel to Nepal. Scott Fischer had also asked me to guide for him on Everest in 1996, but it seemed logical to stick with Rob.

  But there was another opportunity on the horizon. David Breashears, whom I’d first met on the north side of Everest in 1990, came to me with the kind of proposal that in the end I couldn’t turn down. MacGillivray Freeman Films had asked him to make an IMAX film of climbing Everest, all the way to the top. At first the project seemed absurd and impossible, if for no other reason than the sheer weight of the camera gear. But the idea got under his skin, and David accepted the challenge. When he asked me to come along as the official climbing leader of the expedition, and to serve in effect as one of the film’s on-camera “stars,” I couldn’t say no.

  When I told Rob about this new project, he graciously stepped aside, hiring other guides to replace me on his Adventure Consultants team. The technological challenge that intrigued David hooked me as well. And being put in charge of nearly all the equipment and logistics for this gigantic undertaking seemed a logical next step in my expedition career.

  Sweetening the deal was David’s acceptance of Paula as our base camp manager. In 1995, Paula had only been Helen Wilton’s assistant at base camp; this year, she’d run the show. In the midst of hectic preparations for the IMAX trip, Paula and I blocked off ten days in February to get married and spend our honeymoon in Mexico. (Scott Fischer, my partner from K2 in 1992, came along as our “official” wedding photographer.) Afterward, I joked that Everest would be our real, extended honeymoon, albeit a fairly rigorous one. I had no idea. . . .

  At base camp that March, for the first time I really felt that there were too many climbers on the mountain, nearly all of them aiming at the standard South Col route. Rob Hall was there with his biggest Adventure Consultants entourage ever—twenty-six souls, including assistant guides, Sherpas, clients (among them Krakauer, on assignment for Outside), and base camp personnel. Scott Fischer, leading his own Mountain Madness team, had a contingent of twenty-three. The veterans Todd Burleson and Pete Athans were leading four clients. There was a South African team of twenty-one, a Taiwanese team of five, a loose assortment of other climbers, and our own IMAX team of ten. Base camp became an international village inhabited by a diverse and colorful cast of citizens.

  It was inevitable that Rob and Scott would feel a keen rivalry to get the most clients up the mountain. Success one year was great for business the next. As for David Breashears, the mob posed a huge cinematic quandary. The IMAX film had to create the illusion that we were alone on the South Col route. The last thing we needed were “extras”—clients, Sherpas, guides from other teams—showing up in the corners of our film footage. Our job was
to stay out of the way of all the other teams, or else time our shots when nobody else was in sight.

  Very early on the expedition, I had a setback that shocked me. Planning to carry a load through the Khumbu Icefall on April 9, I came to a small depot where some of our team had cached our crampons at the foot of the icefall. But mine weren’t there—somebody had stolen them! It turned out that David Breashears’s crampons had been stolen too, as well as those of Robert Schauer, the very experienced Austrian climber who was part of our team. I registered my outrage in my diary: “Of all the places in the world, I would hope that my gear on Mt. Everest would be safe. Not anymore I guess. A very sad day in Everest’s history.”

  Later we had a base camp meeting of the leaders and sirdars of the various expeditions to discuss the problem of thievery. We never did find out who stole our crampons, so our Sherpas insisted that we lock our tent zippers as we pitched camps higher on the mountain. It seemed a sorry solution to the problem of keeping our gear intact, and I opposed the proposal, because I had always believed that in an emergency, climbers in trouble should help themselves to whatever they need in other teams’ tents. But the majority ruled, and we started to lock our tents. With that decision, we acknowledged that here and now on Everest, the age-old tradition of respect for one another among mountaineers, whether strangers or not, had been irredeemably violated.

  Besides Robert and me, our IMAX team consisted of three other climbers: Araceli Segarra, a Spanish mountaineer and part-time model; Jamling Norgay, the son of Tenzing Norgay, who made the first ascent with Hillary in 1953; and a Japanese climber named Sumiyo Tsuzuki. The multiethnic makeup of our party was essential to David’s conception of the film, and it wouldn’t hurt to boost sales in the international market. Early on, I assessed the strengths of our six climbers. David, Robert, and I, I was pretty confident, would be able to get to the summit, weather and snow conditions permitting. Araceli also had a strong chance—“very motivated, great attitude & strength,” I noted in my diary. About Jamling, I was less certain. “Nice guy,” I wrote, while wondering just how motivated he really was. His role in the IMAX narrative was to follow quite literally in his father’s footsteps. But I had no idea how well Jamling would perform up high, and in my diary I gave him only a fifty-fifty chance of getting to the top. Sumiyo was the weak link, as she’d already shown in the early stages of the expedition. “Not strong mentally or physically” was my blunt diary judgment.

  During the rest of April, we progressed slowly but steadily up the mountain. Everything was far more complicated, however, than on my previous expeditions, because David was filming constantly. We had to figure out which angles and which places on the mountain would best carry the narrative, then stop for hours to get the footage. Shooting with an IMAX camera and huge film magazines was an extraordinarily difficult job that David carried out brilliantly. Some days, especially overcast ones with leaden skies, were simply worthless for filmmaking.

  The added stress and toil of making the film, staying out of the other parties’ way, and yet establishing camps as we would on a normal expedition left me little time to reflect. My 1996 diary, not surprisingly, is skimpier than any of the ones I’d kept on my previous expeditions to 8,000ers. Still, there are episodes I recorded there that I’d all but forgotten in the years since ’96.

  To make a coherent IMAX film, David had to decide which of us “talent” to focus the filming on. That meant calculating who had the best chances of summitting. Robert Schauer, as David’s camera assistant, was never intended to be an on-screen personage, no matter how well he climbed. On April 22, I noted David’s thoughts: “He’s more concerned with [filming] Araceli & me and not really with Jamling and Sumiyo. He realizes their chances are slim, but Araceli & I have a greater chance at the top & that will make the movie.”

  My diary also reminds me of a macabre episode I never mentioned in Shortcuts. On April 23, somewhere above Camp II, “David told me of a body that we should deal with. I went over to it. It was 1/2 body—waist down. I grabbed its suspenders and dragged it for 10 min[utes] to a crevasse and dropped it in—rest in peace.” We could not even guess at the identity of this Everest victim. The mountain is not, as the press sometimes puts it, littered with dead bodies, but the chances are that sooner or later you’ll stumble upon one. Greg Child once took a photo of a corpse on Everest still attired in its down suit, from which a skeletal head stared at eternity. When Life published the photo full-page, both Greg and the magazine were pilloried. Yet all he was doing was recording the reality of Everest.

  The overcrowding on the mountain produced unseemly conflicts beyond the dispute over our stolen crampons. On April 23, I climbed up toward Camp III on the Lhotse Face, trailing some Sherpas from another expedition. We’d already cached our tents and gear at III, claiming sites for our camp. The slope there is quite steep, and finding a good campsite is difficult. With all the teams vying for spots at Camp III, people were racing up the hill to claim their places. But, as I wrote that day, “I had a sneaky suspicion that [the other team’s leader] had sent the Sherps to scam our tent spots. . . . I got to CIII at 9:30 and found the 2 Sherps trying a squeeze play—man did I give them an earful! . . . They didn’t argue cause they knew I was right.”

  On April 29, I headed up from Camp III, hoping to reach the South Col. Various Sherpas had already prepared the route and fixed ropes up to what would serve as all the teams’ Camp IV. But it was a cold and windy day, and, feeling my feet grow numb, I turned around at 25,000 feet, just above the Yellow Band. Even so, I felt great, acclimatizing without bottled oxygen as well as I ever had.

  On April 30, our whole team returned to base camp to recuperate. The plan was to rest there for a few days, then make our push for the summit. We all felt optimistic, since despite the burden of filming, we were right on schedule. Paula exuded confidence in our success, as she recognized the strength and competence that David and Robert brought to our party.

  Despite the occasional friction between teams, we’d worked out an amicable arrangement. Rob had a feeling that May 10 was his lucky Everest summit day—that date had worked for him in the past. Now he and Scott decided to join forces, with their teams going for the summit together. In theory, that may have sounded like strength in numbers and psychological support. But privately, I questioned the plan. With so many people clambering up the summit ridge on the same day, a bottleneck would become inevitable. Thus our IMAX team decided to head out before Rob’s and Scott’s, claiming the first shot at the summit, so that we could film in relative isolation. Our plan was to head back up the mountain on May 5, hoping to go to the summit on May 8.

  None of us had any premonition of the disaster that was about to unfold.

  • • •

  Preoccupied with planning for the summit and filming the whole way up, I didn’t make a single entry in my diary between April 30 and May 5. I was determined to try Everest again without supplemental oxygen. That, in fact, had been part of the IMAX plan, as David and the producers felt that such an effort would add color to our story. I was more than happy to climb once more without the burden of carrying oxygen bottles or the nuisance of wearing a claustrophobic mask.

  On May 5, our IMAX team left base camp at 5:45 in the morning. I arrived at Camp II in the Western Cwm at 10:45. Taking only five hours to climb 3,700 feet, from 17,800 to 21,500, proved to me that I was in great shape. Robert, David, and Araceli got to camp an hour later. Sumiyo and Jamling didn’t arrive for another several hours. David initially hinted at going on to Camp III on the Lhotse Face the next day, but changed his mind, declaring May 6 a rest day. “Okay,” I wrote in my diary, “I don’t care either way. Sum & Jam would be blown away if we went tomorrow. A day of hangin’ is fine by me.”

  On May 7, we all reached Camp III, as the weather steadily improved. I was psyched for the summit push, but Sumiyo was hurting, getting to camp a full three hours after I arrived. “She’ll probably have to go on O’s to get to C[amp] IV,”
I observed in my diary.

  During the night, however, the wind picked up. At 5:30 a.m. on May 8, as we roused ourselves to climb to the South Col, the wind was howling high on Everest, with a giant plume of snow streaming from the summit. David, Robert, and I held a council to decide what to do. Since we’d get only one shot at making a film, we thought the odds were too long to risk a summit attempt in high winds and cold. The weather felt unsettled, and we all knew that most years a calm period came sometime in May, so we decided to wait for better conditions. “Bummer to go down,” I wrote, “but it was the only reasonable option.” On May 8, we descended to Camp II. On the way, we passed all the other teams, including Rob’s, Scott’s, the Taiwanese, and the South Africans, heading up. It was frustrating to see them confidently climbing toward their own summit pushes, but we were pretty sure we’d made the right decision. There’s always a temptation to follow the crowd, out of a nagging fear that they know something you don’t, but in the end, one’s instincts are the best guide. We’d rest a day at Camp II, then, if the weather held, go back up the mountain, hoping to push from the South Col to the top on May 12, two days after all the others had made their attempts.

  Well, the rest is mythic history—or at least the next four days on Everest are. The whole world seems to know how the various parties set out from the South Col early on May 10. How twenty-three members of Rob’s and Scott’s teams (including Sherpas) reached the summit, as well as a single Taiwanese, “Makalu” Gao Ming-Ho. How others turned back, or were “parked,” like Beck Weathers, partway up, ordered to wait for his team leader to escort him down the mountain. How the weather deteriorated in the afternoon as a sudden, violent storm swept in. How the descent turned into chaos. How “the Huddle,” as David later called it, formed in the night only a few hundred yards from the South Col tents, as a group of clients and a single guide got lost in the whiteout, and how Anatoli Boukreev went out in the storm and brought all but two in to safety. How Beck Weathers, given up for dead, roused himself in a last-ditch effort and stumbled back to Camp IV. How Scott, who must have been suffering from some kind of edema, pushed himself to the summit, the last of his team to top out, but never made it back to the South Col. How Rob, who was too determined to get Doug Hansen to the top, waited too long and died near the South Summit, not before having his poignant good-bye conversation via patched-through radio to his pregnant wife, Jan Arnold, in New Zealand. How the rest of us rallied to save the lives of the most severely frostbitten, including Beck Weathers and Makalu Gao.