There was silence. I could see they were all torn between their dreams and the reality of the situation.
“Who wants to give up and go home?”
No one raised a hand. No one wanted to give up and go home. Our expedition was still nine strong; nine determined individuals who wanted to reach the top of the world.
I nodded, relieved that I had support, and that I wasn’t the only one still wanting to summit.
I left the tent and looked out into the moonlit night across the wreckage of Base Camp. All this devastation, all this loss of life, and still I wanted to get to the top of that bloody mountain. Its draw was irresistible to me… I looked past the abandoned, half-destroyed tents, my eyes meandering slowly up the Khumbu Icefall. I picked out the grey rocks, vivid and contrasting against the brilliant white snow. It was a clear night; not a cloud in the sky. The summit seemed so near, so close, I could almost reach out and grab it. It was mine, that peak; I would make it there.
Was this summit fever?
I’d read about summit fever before, that dangerous state of mind where even the most experienced of climbers fails to notice adverse weather conditions, impassable mountain routes, even their own physical exhaustion. All they can see is that summit ahead of them. It becomes their entire world – and it consumes them.
Many, many experienced mountaineers have had their lives cut short because of that all-encompassing singular desire to reach their objective. I thought about Green Boots, up there alone on the mountainside, frozen in the same resting place for over a decade.
Green Boots is one of the many bodies climbers pass on their way to the summit – an unknown mountaineer who lost everything in his hunt for glory.
He’s called Green Boots because of the luminous coloured boots that he still wears. I’d seen pictures online. It looks as if the guy was just taking a break from his ascent and has fallen asleep. Apart from the layers of snow piling up on him, and his eerie stillness, there is nothing to suggest that he is actually dead. His orange jacket and his blue trousers are still intact; a few empty oxygen cylinders lie discarded next to him.
It looks as if he could get up at any moment, shake the snow off and continue on his way. Unfortunately, he never will. He remains a permanent memorial, a warning sign for would-be climbers. There is no way to remove his body; he was deep in the death zone, helicopters couldn’t fly that high and other climbers would die if they attempted something as foolish as carting the body down.
Everest was set to be the unknown man’s permanent tomb, with hundreds of people snapping pictures of his perfectly preserved body on their way to the summit he never reached.
It was a sad sight, but, in a warped kind of way I had been looking forward to seeing him.
He is only one of 200 bodies sharing that gargantuan tomb. They act as landmarks, way points on the route to the top.
The cave in which Green Boots permanently resides was also the final resting place of another – this time in a more controversial situation.
On the way up the Khumbu Valley, I had seen a memorial to a climber who had lost his life while climbing Everest. The valley was littered with memorials and dedication plaques to dead climbers, but I lingered by this one for longer than usual – it was a memorial to an experienced British climber, David Sharp.
In 2006, he attempted to scale Everest for the third time, determined not to be defeated again.
During his ascent, agonisingly close to the top, he ran into difficulties and ran out of energy. Each step must have been like wading through thick treacle; his feet would have felt like lumps of rock holding him down.
He got separated from the others in his group, but he was an experienced climber – they assumed he had bedded down for the night in one of the tents at the higher camps.
In a situation such as this, it is practically impossible to maintain coherent thought. The motivation to keep moving disappears; all you want to do is sit down. And once you do, you’ve had it. Your body becomes a cumbersome burden, dragging you down into sleep – into death.
Sharp stumbled, blind to logic, and finally stopped at Green Boots’ Cave. He collapsed and awaited his fate, knowing full well what he was doing.
That wasn’t, however, the end of the story.
Much like the injured man in the story of the Good Samaritan, dozens of climbers passed Sharp without stopping, without assisting him. Some tried, but were unable to help – there was nothing that could be done. To stop would have put them at risk of suffering the same fate. At the very least, it would have destroyed any chance they had of reaching the summit.
They all had limited oxygen in their tanks, and did not have the energy to lift or help this half-frozen man. They had to leave him to die.
It was suggested that many of the climbers who passed David Sharp mistook him for Green Boots and continued on their way. Sharp would have been too physically exhausted to cry out, to get their attention. He would have watched them through frozen eyes, knowing full well that they were his only chance of survival, yet powerless to stop them from continuing on their way and disappearing into the distance.
Mark Inglis was among those who passed David Sharp as he lay dying that day.
Inglis, a climber from New Zealand, was attempting to become the first double-amputee to reach the summit of the mountain.
They arrived at Green Boots’ Cave – 8,412 metres above sea level – at about one in the morning, coming across the huddled body of Sharp not far from Green Boots himself.
They unclipped their ropes, passed Sharp and clipped back on again. They believed him to be in a hypothermic coma – they believed he was essentially already dead.
Sharp’s eyes were frozen shut; his nose was turning a gruesome black with frostbite. There was very little chance that Inglis and his team could have done anything to help him. But Inglis was to receive a lot of criticism for his decision to carry on. In fact, whether he was aware of what he was doing or not – whether he knew that he was leaving a man to die so that he himself could stand on top of the world for a few precious minutes – was something very few people could ever really know or fully appreciate.
David Sharp died on Everest that day, another skilled, successful climber to succumb to the brutality of the mountain.
Summit fever is a very real thing; it is a dangerous, potent killer, as deadly as the snow, the frostbite, the falling rocks. Diagnosing it is difficult, but rationalising with those suffering from it is almost impossible.
I asked myself again, was I suffering from summit fever? Was the lure of the mountain clouding my judgment?
No, this wasn’t the same. The opportunities were still there – we had all the kit required, the correct support, a willing team and clement weather. We weren’t mountain-crazy; we were making a logical, informed decision based on the evidence available to us.
The next morning, I decided to have a recce of EBC, to see how bad things were further afield. I had only seen the area immediately surrounding our camp. I’d had too much to do in our makeshift hospital tent to allow me to wander around EBC. I wanted to see how everything was, because this place was still going to be our home for the foreseeable future.
I grabbed my camera from my tent and headed out.
As I made my way through Base Camp, the true extent of the devastation became clear. The closer I drew to the area hit hardest by the avalanche, the fewer upright tents remained. Those still standing were the lucky ones that had been positioned behind immovable rocks or outcrops.
Even some of the larger rocks – weighing several tons – had moved. They’d been picked up and thrown through the air.
The glacier on which EBC was positioned was carrying some enormous boulders down the mountainside. So when the avalanche hit, many of these flew around, and if you were in the way…
At the time of the avalanche, there were three men sitting
chatting in one tent. One of these large rocks was picked up by the avalanche and blasted through the tent, straight through the guy in the middle. The other two were fine, but the one in the middle was killed outright. If the rock had gone just 30 centimetres either side of its actual course, one of the other two men would have been its victim instead.
I thought again how lucky I was to be alive It was pure luck which of us lived and which of us died: Russian roulette.
As I moved towards the Adventure Consultants camp, where the avalanche had hit the hardest, it looked more and more like a war zone. Tents lay flattened, with huge rocks over them, tent poles protruded like broken limbs. Miscellaneous items were scattered everywhere. I had to watch my step to avoid tripping over lost clothing and hiking equipment.
It was a looter’s paradise. There was expensive, specialised equipment everywhere; high-quality branded goods littered the floor – laptops, Kindles, solar panels, phones... It was like a patchwork quilt of overlapping experiences, a muddled mess of the lives of those caught up in that brutal moment.
I picked up a laptop, brushed off the snow and placed it on a rock. If the owner came back, he or she might have a better chance of finding it.
The Adventure Consultants camp itself was just a desolate area, covered in snow. There was one person wandering aimlessly around, digging here and there in the snow.
A red mess tent, with ‘Adventure Consultants’ printed on it in large letters, was a crumpled, smashed-up heap. How Angela and Katherine had managed to get out of it alive was anyone’s guess.
A huge rock, large enough to completely cover an entire tent, sat proudly in the centre of the campsite, having been carried and dumped there by the avalanche.
How lucky the majority of the team was to have been up at Camp 1. If they’d been here, they would be dead. Simple as that. Very few of them would have survived. I heard that one man had been blown 250 metres out of his tent, and smashed to pieces in the Icefall.
Even as it was, what a shock the AC group must have had, returning to EBC to find nothing left.
I started to dig around, pulling up ripped canvas, lost hiking boots, a huge array of personal belongings. Every time I thrust my glove-clad hand into the snow to pull something out, I had no idea what I would find… I feared pulling my hand out of the snow gripping another, colder, dead hand – that I would have to dig up the frozen corpse of someone just like me, a person who had wanted to achieve his or her lifelong dream…but had died in the process.
I kept digging – I didn’t find any bodies.
How many were there, though, underneath our feet? How many people hadn’t been found? How many had been tossed hundreds of metres from Base Camp, smashed to pieces in quiet, secluded areas?
Base Camp was a chaotic mess of a place, but the shouting, running and screaming of the previous day had been replaced by an eerie stillness, an odd silence. The few people who remained blundered around, dazed and confused, like zombies with no purpose.
No one really knew what to do, but we were trying to get our lives back on track as best we could.
I got my camera out. People had to see this; they had to understand what had happened, the level of the devastation up on Everest.
I started snapping some pictures of some of the affected areas. I felt guilty about it, but I wanted to be able to explain to people afterwards what it was like. Sometimes words aren’t good enough.
“It’s not a fucking tourist attraction,” came a voice from behind a rock.
I turned to face its owner; he looked up challengingly, his face set and serious.
“I know,” I said. “I just want to capture what it’s like here.”
“Fuck off and do it somewhere else.”
I think he must have been one of the camp business owners, and he sounded very angry, so I decided it was time to leave.
Elia, Donald’s photographer, had had a similar experience when trying to document the carnage. He had been trying to take some photographs and carry out some interviews. CNN had contacted him via his Sat-Phone and were very interested to get firsthand accounts. He had approached the wrong man, at the wrong time. He was reassuringly told that if he took another photograph, he would have his “fucking face smashed in”.
The tension in the air at Base Camp was now palpable. There was a lot of anger, resentment and silent rage, particularly from those who ran the expeditions. This was their livelihood. They hadn’t just lost an expensive downing jacket or a pair of summit boots; they’d lost their entire business and livelihood. I later found out that one of the expedition leaders had also lost his house in Kathmandu.
Many of the expeditions struggle to get insurance for the expensive equipment necessary to reach the summit, because of the very high risk of damage or destruction. They take a risk, purchasing the equipment in the hope that nothing major will happen, and that they can make back the money from the expedition members of film crews.
But now, something major had happened, and these people had just lost hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of specialist equipment.
They would also still have to cart all their wrecked equipment back down the mountain. The Nepalese government has a policy in which everything is weighed before being allowed up to EBC, and a deposit paid, then it is all weighed again on the way back down, in order to ensure that no rubbish is left behind at the end of the season. In a normal situation, this is a great initiative, intended to prevent EBC from becoming a rubbish tip again, as it had been in the old days, littered with discarded tents, oxygen bottles, food waste, etc. But I felt sorry for the expedition companies having to trawl through the desolation to find all their belongings.
I left AC’s camp. I felt I had overstayed my welcome.
I walked back past the crude, improvised helipad – helicopters continued to zigzag overhead. Next to the stones that made up the landing area, there was a line of blue tarpaulin and tied-up canvas tents. At first, I couldn’t quite figure out what they were, these bundles of haphazardly tied material, sitting next to the helipad.
A helicopter flew close overhead, whipping up a gale as it came in to land.
The tarpaulin nearest to me flapped in the wind, uncovering the horror that was hidden inside. I jumped back in shock.
The pale, ghostly body of a man lay unmoving inside, his half-frozen hair ruffled by the draught from the helicopter. I stopped walking, stunned by the sudden realisation of what was in those packages.
Two days ago, this man was just like me – here for the expedition of a lifetime. But now he was wrapped in a broken piece of tarpaulin, his eyes frozen closed forever. And here I was, standing next to him, unscathed, unhurt. Why him and not me? I saw our roles reversed, pictured myself in his canvas grave, as he stood above me looking down at my lifeless body…
Two men picked up the corpse, carried it up into the helicopter and loaded it in. They ducked away from the blades as it took off.
I watched the helicopter rise into the air, dip its nose and head in the direction of Kathmandu. The body in the tarpaulin was being carried off to his loved ones wherever his home was. Others remained, wrapped up on the floor near the helipad, quietly waiting in line for their lifts.
I made my way back to my camp, trying my best to shake off what I had seen, and remain positive. A positive attitude was key. If I didn’t maintain a positive outlook, I knew I’d be scrambling to get on the next helicopter out of here.
It was a harsh reality, but we were all just trying to get on with our lives. The reality was we still had a job to do to survive in that desolate environment, so it was not helpful to dwell on what we couldn’t change.
I wanted desperately to contact my family again – my girls, dad, brother and Vicky – to let them know how I was getting on. I had managed to talk to them briefly on the Sat-Phone the night before, but it wasn’t really enough.
The
only way to get any sort of communication out without a Sat-Phone was to trek down to Gorak Shep, but the chaos down the Khumbu Valley basically ruled that out as an option at this point.
We’d heard that a lot of the villages in the Khumbu Valley – Pheriche, Namche Bazaar, Gorak Shep – had all been destroyed, the poorly constructed buildings collapsing under the pressures of the earthquake.
Even if I managed to get down the valley, where was I going to go? What was I going to do? It was better to stay put, and wait for normality to return. We had eight weeks’ worth of food and infinite amounts of fresh water from the snow, we were in good shape – the best thing to do was to stay at EBC.
That evening, Bill knocked up a meal, and we all squeezed into the one mess tent to eat. It was a surreal occasion – all of us eating as if nothing had changed. We were all wedged in next to each other, all wearing our thick downing jackets to keep us warm.
Angelica, our doctor, announced to us that she had got engaged just before the disaster. Her boyfriend was also camped at Base Camp, working and living with another expedition.
He had found a plastic ring on the way up the Khumbu Valley and had hatched a plan to propose to her at Base Camp. In light of the avalanche, they’d decided to delay the announcement until everything had calmed down a little. The whole thing can’t have felt like a particularly good omen for them.
But naturally, we decided to celebrate, so we made a table for them to eat at – silver service at 5,400m. We used pillowcases to make posh napkins and put some plastic flowers in a jar in front of them. It was the best we could do, given the situation, but it made the moment feel more special, and it also gave us something to focus on, to take our minds off the events of the last 36 hours.
We put some of the silk well-wishing scarves around their necks – it seemed appropriate to use this local good-luck custom.
It was an odd occasion – so much cheerful conversation and well-wishing for these two as they embarked on their lives together, when we’d just experienced how easily lives could be ripped apart in the blink of an eye. Twenty-four hours earlier, we’d all been in hell on earth, and now, here we were, singing, cheering and clapping, celebrating this lovely moment. It felt surreal. Deep sorrow and deep happiness were all mixed up together.
Aftershock: One Man's Quest and the Quake on Everest Page 15