White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  But he was still able to note the beauty of the world. It is worth quoting:

  Never before had I appreciated just how beautiful a small bird could appear. I’d never really taken in the majesty of a clear starry night. I had been so humbled that something as simple as a few hours of sunlight would fill me with warmth and gratitude.

  Meanwhile the search was getting closer, Joanne having narrowed it down to three locations, including a huge valley right in the area predicted by the Buddhist monk.

  James saw a helicopter flying over about three kilometres away. He blundered out into the clearing and waved his sleeping bag. The helicopter circled round. He could see the pilots looking straight ahead and talking. There was no way they could see him.

  He decided he would make one more attempt to walk out. His pack weighed only four kilos but it felt much heavier. As he approached the thick scrub and bush, he felt nauseous from the effort. He retched and vomited. When he coughed, his spittle was bright red. He ate snow and spat it out – red snow. Should he go on, or return? By now huge storm clouds were gathering. He had no choice but to return to the ledge.

  Whether to return or go on . . . I have always hated retracing my steps, and yet this is the single best way to avoid being lost. Cutting across to where you think the path might be is always very hit or miss. Some people have a natural sense of direction. I’ve been lost in the English hills with someone who has, and it’s quite a remarkable experience to see them work out and trek their way to safety. I have a very average sense of direction, easily disturbed when in unfamiliar surroundings. Like now. Though I had a plan to descend to the river, I really wanted to find a path. Rivers in the wild can often have non-existent banks and unless the water is low it’s almost impossible to ascend them.

  James had to make his own decision about staying or moving. He had now reached rock bottom. Instead of making a decision, he decided to stop eating snow or drinking the water it contained. He would dehydrate himself to death. He thought that although suicide was a sin, God would forgive him, given the extreme circumstances he was in.

  That night he drifted off and dreamed with incredible clarity that he was back in Brisbane with all his family and his fiancée. He thanked them all, especially his parents: ‘I went on to tell the crowd how fortunate I’d been, what a good life I’d had and how much I looked forward to the many years ahead. It was all so vivid, so tangible.’

  But when he awoke he was genuinely shocked to find he was still in this pitiful, cold and uninviting place. He felt anger with himself. He realised he’d been taking smug satisfaction in giving up. He realised he had a one in a million chance of being rescued and he’d given up on it.

  The following morning, he started eating snow again. ‘The taste of that first mouthful, the only snow I had eaten in two days, was like heaven.’ It relieved the pain of the cracks and ulcers that had developed in his mouth when he stopped drinking. Slowly he rehydrated himself with melting snow. He considered the dream to be an important lesson: never give up hope.

  What he didn’t know was that the helicopter had seen him.

  The following day the search team circled overhead and waved to James. After six weeks, he had been found – the only problem now was getting him to safety. The helicopter couldn’t land, so James realised he would have to survive for several more days until a ground party could get to him. He now had no strength to move. He had to urinate into a shampoo bottle, emptying it as far away as possible. Then he said his prayers and tried to sleep – except he heard someone answering him. From far off he heard voices calling – he had been found!

  A year on, he had recovered except for slight balance problems and periodic flickering episodes of double vision, but these were slowly improving. He’d resumed his studies and his karate, and he’d got married.

  The usual self-appointed ‘survival’ experts were sceptical that a man could exist on no food for forty-three days in a Himalayan winter. These reports hurt James and his sister, but he wrote, ‘What does it matter what others think when I have everything I could ever want?’

  In my own tiny adventure, I hoped I wasn’t looking at forty-two more days on a Sikkimese mountainside. I was still blundering around looking for the path. The terrain was increasingly horrendous – rocks, tangled undergrowth, boulders, steep drops and slippery leaves lying on earth – and it wasn’t snowing. Then I heard the tonk-tonk sound of yak bells. The path was behind me! Though it was only three metres away, I couldn’t see it, because the cobbled stone was deeper cut than the hillside and in shade. I waited until the long line of yaks and their masters passed. The yak men were friendly, but I could tell my enthusiastic greeting startled them. Little did they know that I had thought myself lost only a few minutes earlier.

  Back on the path, I raced to catch up with Mathias and Susanne. It was mostly downhill, with a few switchbacks – and about fifteen kilometres to Yoksum. After an hour I realised they must have been much further ahead than I thought, but when I reached Yoksum they weren’t there. An hour later they arrived. Somehow, in all my wandering, I must have overtaken them. We both had the same question for each other – Where were you? ‘I was lost,’ was all I could reply.

  18

  Beck is Back

  Do not start your worldly life too late; do not start your religious life too early.

  Bhutanese proverb

  Lost things, lost people. But nothing could compare with the 1996 expedition – the subject of many books and now a blockbusting movie that has grossed over $200 million – when several commercial expeditions made wrong decisions during a violent storm resulting in eight deaths in a day. There were twelve deaths on the mountain in all – the worst tragedy in Everest’s history until the sixteen deaths in 2014 and the eighteen deaths during the Nepal earthquake in 2015. But these later accidents had, it seems, less attributable human error and more sheer bad luck than the 1996 disaster.

  The movie, of course, gets it wrong. And the most important book, by Jon Krakauer, has been contested by many. Of course, being there (Krakauer was a client climber) and being implicated does not help objectivity. I decided to read everything available on the subject in order to discover what exactly happened that terrible day. But as I did, I became more and more fascinated by the most extraordinary survivor of the whole disaster – Beck Weathers.

  People have died on Everest, in large numbers. And people have survived – bivouacking like Doug Scott with no down suit or sleeping bag at 8,500 metres. But no one has been pronounced dead – not once but twice – and then risen again to tell the tale. No one except the amateur climber and doctor Beck Weathers.

  Surprisingly good views can be found on hotel roofs

  Uniquely in the history of climbing, a disaster occurred on Everest that rivals the story of Scott versus Amundsen. It was also a tragedy. What is tragedy? An unavoidable disaster? Or the disastrous unfolding of the faults embedded within a character, faults that might lie undetected without the application of immense pressure? In the case of Scott, it was the ambition to reach the South Pole that revealed his weaknesses as a planner and leader. In the case of Everest in 1996, it was a huge and devastating storm that compounded follies – follies generated by character defects.

  Put any man under enough pressure and he will crack. Or any woman. The trick in life is not to believe you’ll never crack, rather one should become very aware of situations when one is under pressure, the sort of pressure that distorts personality and causes judgement to fail.

  For those unfamiliar with the tale, it can be simply told. Two professional climbing teams with paid clients had agreed to summit Everest on 10 June. This was supposed to be a lucky day for one of the leaders, New Zealander Rob Hall. Though it had to be said, lucky was a relative term. The previous year, 1995, he had turned back a mere 180 metres below the top because he deemed there was not enough time to descend.

  So here he was, exactly a year later, but this time with a top writer on board, observing e
verything he was doing. Perhaps acknowledging the trust extended to him, Krakauer is far from harsh on dishing out the blame. He calls the storm ‘rogue’ (although both teams had weather forecast data which predicted the storm coming on 11 May), and he merely suggests the Sherpas could have been faster at fixing ropes. He also went a good way to ruining the reputation of top Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev by suggesting the ‘Rope Bullet’ should have stayed behind to help clients down the mountain rather than shooting off ahead. Whereas, by shooting off ahead, Boukreev was in a position to make hot drinks and launch several rescue missions that succeeded in saving many members of the party.

  Everest is easiest climbed by the route by which it first fell – the south-east ridge. But this is only the upper part of the climb. Everest stands on a 5,000-metre plateau which is the height at which base camp is situated. Despite its glamorous-sounding name, base camp is a flattened area of terminal moraine – gravel carried down by the Khumbu Glacier – and has the look of a rubbish-strewn quarry with bad sanitation and other problems for travellers. Tents and tarps cover the area that sits at the bottom of the famed ‘icefall’. Here the glacier rises up vertically in a mass of falling blocks – some bigger than houses – runnels, chasms, and corridors that climbers squeeze through on their upward journey to the flatter section of the glacier that winds up between the peaks of Everest and neighbouring Lhotse.

  To penetrate this moving mass of ice – shifting up to a metre a day sometimes – Sherpas rig a labyrinthine upward passage of fixed ropes and aluminium ladders, sometimes as many as three 3.5-metre sections lashed together to cross a seemingly bottomless crevasse. Down you look into the blue shimmering ice, which grows darker as your crampons stick and grate against the aluminium rungs. Some of the client climbers mocked Boukreev because he climbed the icefall in running spikes rather than boots and crampons, but this was a perfectly logical decision; the temperature was not high, and spiked shoes were several kilos lighter than boots.

  At the top of the icefall is Camp 1 (there are three more camps before the ‘high camp’ in the gap between Lhotse and Everest). Much of the initial part of the climb is up the south face of Lhotse, before traversing across on to Everest and up the south-east ridge to the top. For a period of six weeks, climbers yoyo between base camp and camps 1, 2 and 3. The idea is to slowly acclimatise to higher and higher altitudes. Given that they have only walked for a week before reaching base camp, this is a necessary requirement. Compare this to the six-week walk from Darjeeling that the original attempts on Everest required and you can understand the speculation that a longer period walking in, at a less crippling – indeed, liveable – altitude, is a better way to build fitness than being choppered in and then making so many forays up the mountain. Messner’s solo attempt on Everest saw him acclimatise by running 1,000 metres above and below his campsites on the walk in; the Crane brothers, too, in their celebrated 1983 running of all the main Himalayan passes, also ran comfortably up to basecamp level.

  Once acclimatised, the climbers wait for ‘a window in the weather’. Since Everest is so high it is plagued year-round by high winds caused by the jet stream. But just before the monsoon there is a gap – usually in May – and that is when people launch their summit attempts. In 1996, weather forecast information supplied by Denmark and the UK’s Met Office, and informally shared by a team making an IMAX Everest movie with Rob Hall and Scott Fischer (the other team leader), suggested that п May would be especially stormy. So 10 May was fixed upon for the summit.

  The elements of the story were compelling, ramped up by the presence of media personalities. Successful author Jon Krakauer was on one team, sponsored by the world’s number one outdoor magazine, Outside. On the opposing team was Sandy Pitman, a millionaire socialite and former fashion editor, reporting for NBC. From being a nerd’s game, climbing had suddenly become super sexy.

  But the presence of media reporters would be unnerving to the clients – the people who had paid up to $65,000 to be hauled up Everest by highly experienced professional guides. It would be much more unnerving than knowing that a book would be written after a ‘real’ expedition. Someone who pays a lot of money to get up a mountain they wouldn’t be able to climb on their own, must face up to their own shame. Though it is becoming more malleable, the original climbing community lived by the unstated rule that it’s OK for kids and those just starting out climbing to take a course or be guided up a peak, but after that you need to join a club and find like-minded climbers. The reason is obvious: climbing is a highly dangerous activity, and high-altitude climbing is one of the most dangerous sports around – it makes Formula One look like a race around a school playing field.

  Jon Krakauer described forty-nine-year-old Beck Weathers as ‘garrulous’. Weathers himself says that was just him wanting to be liked by the rest of the team. ‘If someone had thrown a Frisbee I’d have caught it with my teeth to please them,’ he wrote.

  Weathers was certainly fit enough for the epic ascent. He’d trained hard and had considerable snow – and ice-climbing experience. His resting pulse at base camp was ‘about 90’ whereas Jon Krakauer’s was 110, a source of some pride, perhaps; he was seven years older than the writer, after all.

  But Weathers made two rookie errors before the climb started. He brought untested boots with him and he had his eyes lasered, a radial keratotomy, in order to cure his short sight. He’d assumed that boots of the same brand, style and size would be functionally identical (I’ve made the same assumption and been caught out the same way, albeit in the much humbler circumstances of walking the British Columbian plateau). Manufacturers actually change lasts and tiny aspects of similar products all the time, just as perfume makers change the smell of a classic scent, but they keep quiet about it to preserve the ‘brand’ appeal. To take unused boots on to the world’s highest mountain smacks of the kind of faith in others you need when you’re working in an environment like a hospital where everything is highly controlled. If you were too self-reliant in such a place, you’d never get anything done, you’d spend so much time checking up on every nurse and subordinate. Beck Weathers was a successful pathologist but he had neglected to learn some basic mountain survival lessons. The boots rubbed his shins and gave him ulcers, which, at altitude, did not heal. He simply ‘sucked it up’, as he put it. But an open sore on your body is a source of stress, a drain on the immune system.

  The second source of stress was far more pertinent: the eye operation didn’t work at altitude. Doctors are so used to sceptical patients that they are often gullible when it comes to treatment for themselves – well-informed of all the options, maybe, but over-optimistic about the benefits of medical intervention. There was evidence in 1996 that lasering the eyes weakened the cornea so much it could explode if exposed to the high G forces that a fighter pilot might experience. The low pressure environment at 8,000 metres or more would simulate to some extent the effect of an external G force. Pressure on the inside would overwhelm the lower outside pressure and distort the eyeball. This is what happened to Beck. He began to go blind on the route from High Camp to the summit.

  As all short-sighted people know, when the sun is bright your pupil contracts and your eyesight improves. Beck waited some way below the south summit for the sun to rise higher and for this improvement to occur. He was told by Rob Hall to wait there for thirty minutes. If his condition didn’t improve, he was not to climb on. ‘If you cannot see in thirty minutes, I don’t want you climbing.’

  Rob Hall and Beck were 450 metres below the summit. It was 7.30 a.m. It was not unreasonable for Hall to expect to summit at 11 a.m. as planned and be back with Beck at 12 or 1 p.m. If there were hold-ups, there was always the turnaround time of 1 p.m., meaning a return to Beck by 2 or 3 p.m.

  Either way, Beck was being asked to wait with no protection, no tent or bivvy or hot drinks for five to seven hours at 8,400 metres. It was an insane suggestion. In risk-management terms, Rob Hall had just created a ‘fulfilment loop�
�: X requires Y to move to safety. Instead of X and Y having individual risk factors, they were now connected, so it was X times Y – multiplying the risk potential by a huge amount.

  Any form of central control multiplies risk, unless there is a Plan C for when Plan B screws up. Because Beck worked within the high-trust and high-functioning environment of a hospital, he simply obeyed the orders of his boss, Rob Hall. Just as it didn’t pay to question his superiors at work, he didn’t have the mental habit of questioning Hall’s judgement. He never asked himself, What if Hall is held up? What if I’m stuck here?

  It’s obvious that both Beck and Hall assumed that Beck would get better and climb to the top, albeit later than everyone else.

  But Hall made Beck promise to wait for him. Such a promise should never have been extracted. Beck had complete faith in Hall and waited, declining offers to help him back down. He waited until noon, when the first people to turn around started descending past him. This group offered the now very cold Beck a chance to come down with them. He’d been standing still for four and a half hours. They told him they were turning back because of the logjam at the south summit, caused by delays in fixing ropes and organising oxygen supplies. The descending climbers knew that a 1 p.m. turnaround was now impossible. And Beck knew that Hall was at the back, so the likelihood of him appearing in the next two hours was very slim.

  He should have gone down and saved himself. But as Beck said, ‘I promised Hall I would stay put. . .’

  Never give a promise you cannot keep, especially on a mountain. If Hall didn’t turn up, then the implication was that he should wait there until he died – which was clearly absurd.

  Of course it’s easy to make judgements when you’re warm and cosy at sea level. At 8,400 metres, hypoxia is a very real risk. And not altogether obvious. With less oxygen to the brain, one can become over-optimistic, over-focused, slightly euphoric – a condition known as HAS: High Altitude Stupid.