White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  At sea level, Beck might never have made such a promise, or kept it well past the time it had any meaning. Climbers talk about the habitual actions – putting on crampons in the dark, kicking up snow slopes, using ice axes – which keep them alive. But I suggest the reason client climbing is so dangerous – or potentially dangerous, unless a guide or Sherpa is assigned to each client – is that ordinary people who live ordinary (albeit high-status and well paid) lives do not develop the right mental habits for making decisions in adverse, i.e. hypoxic, conditions. Climbers who rely on themselves know that nothing is certain in the high mountains, that a promise is something one just can’t give. Every time a ‘fulfilment loop’ threatens to close, it should be forced open with a contingency plan.

  Fellow clients agreed to leave Beck to be looked after by the guides higher up the mountain. Guides who would be dead in forty-eight hours.

  Professional guiding has always had a place in Alpine climbing – and for people who just want to tell their friends they’ve climbed Mont Blanc or the Eiger, it works just fine. Every mountain in the Alps has a relatively easy route to the top – including the Eiger – and a guide can insist on taking a route that matches the skill of the client. The same is simply not true of Everest, or, indeed, any peaks over 8,000 metres (or 7,000 metres, for that matter). Weather and altitude make any high peak dangerous. With externally supplied oxygen, the risks of altitude are diminished somewhat. So that leaves weather as the final unalterable risk in the equation.

  High-altitude climbing is a weather game. Messner may have only three toes left after his many brushes with extreme cold, but he is still alive. An expert at moving fast when the weather is right, Messner is merciless about setting his own pace. If you can’t keep up with him, he’ll leave you behind – because he knows that going at the wrong pace is physically much more exhausting than it ought to be ‘on paper’, so to speak. He needs to move at an optimum pace, because when you move fast you are less likely to be caught out by the weather.

  Anatoli Boukreev had won national speed-climbing challenges in the old Soviet Union and it was known from the start that he would be climbing without oxygen. Would this slow him down? Perhaps a fraction. When he had climbed with experienced climbers wearing oxygen on another face of Everest the previous year, he had been overtaken. But this was not likely to happen on the south face of Everest with all the relatively inexperienced and elderly climbers he would be guiding to the top.

  While it is true that altitude problems can affect people of any age, high-altitude climbing is an athletic activity. It’s an endurance sport before anything else and the older you are, the more work you have to do to keep yourself fit. For someone who climbs professionally, perhaps that is not a problem; for an amateur who has another job, simply ‘getting into shape’ for Everest may not be enough if you are over forty.

  There have been many accounts of the 1996 disaster – which sticks in people’s imagination not just because, as I have mentioned, there were celebrity media reporters involved, nor because there was unspoken rivalry between the two main teams, led by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, both trying to make their names as the number one suppliers of high-altitude climbing experiences. A further reason was the ghoulish way it was repeated how climbers were left for dead and, finally, how one climber, left for dead not once but three times, finally stumbled into Camp 2 very much alive (though he would lose his nose, one arm and his fingers on the other hand to frostbite). But I suspect the real reason it became viral before viral was a term, is that Rob Hall, the most prominent leader, was able to make a final radio call to his pregnant wife a few hours before he died; it being painfully obvious to both that he was going to his death and would never see his daughter. In a heart-rending conversation, Hall and his wife agreed the name Sara for their unborn daughter. He then signed off by telling his wife ‘not to worry’. Rob Hall had earlier announced it was a ‘day to set records’. With excruciating irony, he was right: it was the highest number of climbers ever to perish in a single day, and the helicopter rescue of Beck Weathers was, at 5,800 metres, the highest ever successfully made. It was a tale of extraordinary dimensions, and many different viewpoints were taken after Jon Krakauer’s bestselling Into Thin Air appeared to present a definitive case.

  This turned out not to be. Which was not surprising, considering that the demands of authorship required Krakauer to find various people to blame for the mishap.

  Was it the weather? Was it the failure of the Sherpas to fix ropes between the southern summit and the Hillary Step? Was it the logjam caused by people waiting for oxygen and ropes to be fixed? Or was it simply a bad decision to not turn back?

  The high camp at 8,230 metres is where the climbers wait before launching their eighteen-hour assault on the summit. Twelve hours to the top and six back to the camp. They then descend to Camp 2 the next day and head down to base camp. Eighteen hours of oxygen were to be supplied to each climber, leaving zero room for a mistake. Since each canister of oxygen costs $700 to buy and transport up the mountain, there was some explanation for this parsimonious approach. Nevertheless, with no room for error should the journey take longer than planned (bad weather or soft snow might slow things down, along with queues at the natural bottlenecks such as the Hillary Step), then the team would be out of oxygen. For the likes of Boukreev, who climbed without oxygen, this would not be a problem. But most would be relying on supplemental oxygen from Camp 1 onwards.

  Oxygen mixes with the air to become an enhanced supply; the body, when suddenly deprived of this, reacts in a number of ways. For some it just slows right down, making effort supremely hard. But for some the result of a sudden drop in oxygen levels is to develop rapid altitude-sickness problems. The parallel problem is the reduction in blood circulation as the body closes off capillaries near the skin’s surface to maintain oxygen levels at the core. This results in frost damage – sometimes quite terrible damage, as in the case of Beck Weathers whose entire arm would become a single frozen lump of dead meat.

  At the high camp, then, the plan is to start early – ideally before midnight – climb towards the south-east ridge using head torches, to be in place for arrival at the top by 11 a.m.

  Naturally, there has to be a window for errors and hold-ups. Rob Hall told his climbers this would be 1 p.m. This was emphatically stated by Lou Kasischke, one of Hall’s clients. Scott Fischer, the second team leader, set no turnaround time, assuming that his clients would set their own – or, if in trouble, be turned back by the guides.

  Unfortunately, such laissez-faire management doesn’t work well at 8,230 metres. A feature of oxygen starvation is an increase in demented focus, monomania. You lose sight of other people, other goals. It is one reason that high places are synonymous with pilgrimage – as we have seen elsewhere – and so if an assistant guide tells you to turn back, when you’ve dropped $65,000 and a lot of effort to get there, you may refuse to obey them. You might listen to the boss, but both Hall and Fischer were leading from the back, focusing on helping those who were having trouble, rather than optimising the efforts of those at the front. This strategy works well on low-risk endeavours such as a school hike, where the object is for everyone to finish, but in a high-risk environment where instant decision-making is crucial, it is far more efficient to have the key decision-maker at the front.

  It is interesting to note that the other commercial team on the mountain at that time was run by Scotsman Henry Todd. He really did lead from behind – taking a Lord Hunt role down at the lower camps. But this meant he gave full responsibility to his climbers higher up, who were recruited for their ability to operate at high altitude rather than their wallets. All of Todd’s clients chose to turn back when they saw the way the weather was developing – but all of them had the experience to make this decision. Lou Kasischke reports that, though he and other clients expressed the desire to turn back at the high camp, Rob Hall overruled them – or rather, expressed himself thus: ‘We’re going.’ This con
vinced them to carry on when they shouldn’t (though in the end they turned back, unlike those who kept quiet, continued with Hall and lost their lives). Boukreev, who twice tried to get Fischer to turn back, was also overruled.

  By the time all the climbers were assembled at the last camp on the South Col, nestled in the dip between the side-by-side vastnesses of Lhotse and Everest, it was quite clear the weather was not settling down. But the date had been set and the teams stumbled into action between 11 and 12 p.m.

  Rob Hall and Scott Fischer knew absolutely that the Hillary Step, a twelve-metre rock climb, would be a bottleneck for climbers going to and leaving the summit. With only one set of fixed ropes, there would be single passage only, both up and down. People would have to wait their turn. Everest is a big place and thirty-four climbers – the number attempting to summit that day – would hardly look like a large number until they were all crammed into one place, waiting. The idea was to send Sherpas to fix ropes up the Hillary Step so people wouldn’t have to wait.

  Hall and Fischer agreed this and Fischer delegated the task to his sirdar, or head Sherpa, who told him that the Yugoslav climbers had already fixed ropes all the way to the top, a stretch between the south summit and the Hillary Step and up the Hillary Step itself. This absolved the Sherpas from making an earlier start at 10 p.m. They left with everyone else in Fischer’s team.

  But at the south summit, the queue of climbers stalled. Some had been waiting an hour for ropes to be fixed across an area that many climbed without fixed ropes (it was not very steep; however the wind was rising so that probably made people more nervous). Everyone was waiting for Rob Hall to make a decision – but he was down the mountain, helping the straggler Doug Hansen to come up. Hansen had already turned back once, but then changed his mind and was coming up again.

  In addition to waiting for ropes to be fixed, people were waiting for Sherpas to bring up supplies of oxygen. It was obvious to some that this build-up would extend to the Hillary Step, so they turned back. Given that it was now past midday and they were still not on the summit – nor would they be by the 1 p.m. turnaround time – this was the moment Rob Hall should have done what he did at almost exactly the same time on exactly the same day one year earlier. But on 10 May 1995 there was no embedded author who would write up his ascent in a bestselling magazine. There was no TV reporter who had global media contacts. There was no precedent of having turned back a year earlier. In short, there was a lot less pressure.

  So Hall did not turn back; neither did Fischer. Many of their clients therefore followed their example.

  People lined up to ascend and descend the roped sections – eventually fixed quite quickly by Boukreev, once it was obvious no one else was going to do it. Some, like Krakauer, were in the lead, while others, like Doug Hansen, a US postal worker, were at the back. Rushing back down the mountain and making use of extra oxygen, Krakauer only just made it to the tents at the higher camp. And he was exhausted. Visibility was getting less and less as the wind rose and spindrift flew everywhere. As night began to fall, Rob Hall and Hansen (who was now in a very poor state) were left with no choice but to bivouac at the south summit. Hansen slipped into unconsciousness and Hall made, the next day, his last radio communication to his wife in New Zealand.

  The other leader, Scott Fischer, was also exhausted and would, despite a rescue attempt, die before he could leave Everest. Japanese climber Yasuko Namba would drop and be left for dead, along with Beck Weathers.

  In Jon Krakauer’s account, it is obvious he is trying to do the ‘right thing’ and stick up for Rob Hall and everything that Rob Hall stood for – not least because there was a very real possibility of legal action against Hall’s company and the other companies involved. The IMAX feature – made by the team who’d supplied their weather data to Hall – went on to gross over $100 million. Naturally the film-makers wanted to play down any kind of involvement, however tangential, in the disaster; those box-office takings might be very attractive to speculative ambulance chasing lawyers.

  Then there was the culpability of Hall himself. Since he had set a turnaround time which he had stuck to in the past and survived because of it, but had failed to observe this time – then focusing on this error of judgement would show just how at fault he was. Lou Kasischke, an expert on risk assessment who owed his survival to turning back, was adamant in his account of the accident that everything that happened prior to the failure to turn back was somewhat irrelevant to the assessment of who was at fault. Yes, they had weather reports that showed the window was not perfect; yes, the Sherpas failed to start early and lay fixed rope; yes, the guide climbers showed little initiative in beating the roadblock at the southern summit; yes, oxygen supplies were inadequate . . . but if everyone had turned back at 1 p.m., no one would have been killed.

  Beck Weathers and Krakauer claim the turnaround time was 2 p.m. Kasischke is adamant it was 1 p.m. By the time of the first press conferences, 2 p.m. was being bandied around – yet this could not have been accurate because it meant summiting fifteen hours into eighteen hours’ worth of oxygen. It would be impossible to return before running out, which would result in all the corollary problems involved in oxygen starvation at altitude. But the 2 p.m. figure made the 4 p.m. summit time for Rob Hall and his later clients look acceptable.

  It wasn’t, though. Add in the fact that Hall actually waited a further hour and a half for one client to summit, and you have the makings of a disaster in that one decision alone.

  Hall knew that if he went two years without getting anyone on top of Everest, while Scott Fischer managed to get his team on top, then he’d look pretty silly asking $65,000 a head in 1997

  In fact, Hall was wrong-headed about the whole thing. He didn’t realise that turning back was one reason many amateur climbers chose his outfit. He was considered safe. Turning back was the best advert he could have for people who wanted the kudos of standing on the world’s highest peak without the risk of dying. Hall had become suckered into the internecine world of high-altitude guiding while losing sight of the bigger picture. It was a classic case of attempting to please his immediate circle of colleagues and competitors rather than the clients he relied on for money. Of course a guide would look askance if told to turn back – his capability was way higher than a client’s – but that wasn’t the point. Commercial guiding was about living to tell the tale, not dying and looking a hero.

  Beck Weathers remained alone, somewhere below the south summit, until 5 p.m. Four hours past turnaround time. Jon Krakauer descended past him and offered to help him back to the high camp, but Weathers gamely refused, noting a certain relief in Krakauer at this. Krakauer told him Rob Hall was at least three hours away. Half an hour later, more people descended. Finally, cold and tired, Weathers realised he had to save himself. He’d been standing or sitting for ten hours and the sun would soon go down. He knew that his eyes would cease to function properly once the light dimmed. When guide Mike Groom offered to ‘tight-rope’ him back, he accepted.

  By now it was 6 p.m. and the wind was rising. Thanks to another small error of judgement, Beck Weathers was wearing the wrong crampons – technical ice crampons that balled up in soft snow – causing him to slide and lose his footing as they descended. Visibility got worse and worse as the wind rose, but they managed to get down to the South Col. Now all that remained was to traverse across to the tents. It should have taken less than an hour. But at that moment, in Beck’s words, the storm ‘detonated’. Visibility was close to zero – it was ‘like being lost in a bottle of milk’. And it rapidly became very cold.

  The group was lost and by some kind of instinct stopped a mere 7.5 metres from the sheer drop of the Kangshung face. Rather than face another close call, they huddled together close to the ground. The winds were terrific, so high that when Beck removed a mitt it was whipped out of his hand. He was so sure he would be blown away if he delved into his pack for a spare pair, he didn’t dare try. This would result in the loss of his
lower arm.

  Miraculously, the clouds parted for a few minutes and the Plough was visible. One client, Klev Schoening, used this to deduce where the tents should be. He and two others set off and found the camp. With the remaining climbers too exhausted to go back, it fell to Anatoli Boukreev to go out three times with tea and oxygen to find the desperate huddled group. He brought back all of them except Beck Weathers and Yasuko Namba, both of whom he thought were beyond saving.

  But Weathers was alive. And in the morning he had the great misfortune to be checked up on by another client who was also a doctor: cardiologist Stuart Hutchinson. Hutchinson claimed he had never seen someone so close to death and still breathing. And since medical orthodoxy is that you never recover from a hypothermic coma, it was considered safer to leave him rather than endanger others by carrying him down to the tents. The Sherpas have a rather convenient superstition that touching the dead or near dead is bad luck – so the hard work would have had to be done by the suffering clients still standing, and the hard choice was made to leave Beck Weathers.

  Base camp had already called Weathers’ family in Texas to inform them of his death. At that very instant (he later discovered), something flickered into life deep within the brain of the dying man. He saw his family with absolute clarity, ‘in vivid focus, as if they might at any moment speak to me’. He knew then that if he didn’t stand he would stay in this spot for eternity. Somehow, he got to his feet and managed to stagger over to the tents.

  But his troubles were not over by a long chalk. Though he was led into Scott Fischer’s tent, he was left again to die. He spent the entire day and night in the tent, drifting in and out of consciousness.