The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  And even as I lay in my tent through that long night of the storm, thinking of quitting, thinking of how I might say the words in telling Jenna and schoolkids around the world and others who were following my journey, I clung to the idea that defeat, if I really decided I couldn’t go on, would be better than not having tried at all. I thought of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous lines that I’d always loved, about the value of struggle—that the person who steps into the arena to try is victorious from the start, because, if success comes, he knows “the triumph of high achievement,” but if he falls short of his goal, he “fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

  Fear is different. It’s slippery and dark and uncertain, and that’s what I really wrestled with through that long and mostly sleepless night. Fear can freeze you in place or make you quit, or not start at all, for reasons that are real and rational or false and flimsy, and once they’ve wound their way inside you, twisting and coiling, it’s hard to tell the difference. I wasn’t sure if the fear that grew and gripped me after my near catastrophe with the tent was fear that I should listen to and respect—because continuing on had become genuinely more dangerous—or rather, fear that I should ignore—because it was simply a shadow, a product of exhaustion, shock, and loneliness.

  But then toward morning, a particularly vicious blast of wind hit the tent with a force that felt as if it could bend everything over sideways, and I thought of the place where the question of fear—when to listen and when to reject its clamoring call—was most clear in my life: Mount Everest, in a storm like this, in a tent like this, on a night that marked the beginning of what would be one of the most challenging and transformative weeks of my life.

  “Some things we cannot choose!” Pasang Bhote yelled in his musical, Nepalese-accented English as the wind howled outside. He was in his mid-thirties, short and intensely strong, with a huge smile and a sinewy mountain toughness that was in many ways as awesome as the Himalayan terrain in which he’d grown up. And now as he sat in the tent, hugging his knees and looking utterly calm, I tried to understand him and his strength and the hard-earned wisdom he’d gained in summiting Everest six times before. “There will be other days in this life to climb!” he said.

  It was May 2016. We were at twenty-six thousand feet on the mountain at Camp 4, above the oxygen-deprived line called the Death Zone—a bleak place of ice and snow on Everest’s shoulder, at the altitude of a commercial airliner’s flight path—and I was seeing in front of me what looked like the end of a dream. The great craggy black rock of the summit, much of it so steep and wind-scoured that even snow couldn’t stick, seemed close enough almost to touch and, at that moment, as distant as the moon.

  With Pasang Bhote as my Sherpa climbing partner, I’d reached this final camp before Everest’s summit, aiming to push on to the top of the world’s tallest mountain that night—an emotional and literal high point of my Explorers Grand Slam project. But then a huge windstorm had swept down onto us. We’d fought together for two hours just to get the tent up as the fabric whipped in our hands and we struggled to move in the extremely thin air, and now inside, the news had only gotten worse. I’d called down on the radio, and the base camp manager had said the winds were going to get more severe.

  “You need to abort, Colin!” she’d shouted through the roar of the storm. “The mountain is shut, and the winds up there will kill you if you go tonight.”

  Pasang Bhote’s stoic calm eluded me. I’d been climbing for 120 days by that moment, through four extraordinary and intense months of physical effort in trying to break the world record for the Explorers Grand Slam. I was thinned out, exhausted, and sleep deprived after climbing the tallest peaks in Antarctica, South America, Africa, Oceania, and Europe and crossing the last degree to the North and South Poles. Just getting here to twenty-six thousand feet on the mountain—higher than I’d ever been in my life—had required me to dig deeply into every reserve of strength and determination I could muster.

  And now, on the second-to-last of the project’s Seven Summits—just three thousand feet below the highest point in the world, with only Denali in Alaska left to climb after that—it was all unraveling. Going up to the summit was out of the question. Going down at night from here was equally dangerous. Camp 4, in the Death Zone, had a reputation of its own that I’d grown up reading about. The 1996 disaster that Jon Krakauer wrote about in Into Thin Air had mostly unfolded on the mountain around Camp 4, killing eight climbers. The human body literally begins dying at that altitude, consuming itself. Strong and fit climbers trapped there sometimes went to sleep and never woke. Pasang Bhote and I dug in and waited for morning, which felt to me as if it would never come.

  * * *

  AS WE CLIMBED OUT of the tent the next morning, I looked up instantly, without choice, as though there were only one thing in the universe to look at—Everest’s summit. Spindrift was blowing off the top with a long horizontal trail of white that told me immediately that the base camp manager’s warning the night before had probably saved our lives. It looked like the mountain was being scoured and scraped, or almost as though it were a volcano, spewing snow instead of lava or smoke. The windchill would be lethal up there even if you could climb up to experience it.

  There was only one choice: to retreat and head down to lower elevation. That was clear from the first glimpse. But it was bitter stuff, and I had to keep telling myself to focus on the dangers right there before me and remember that most accidents on Everest happened not when people were climbing up, but when they were heading down—exhausted, dispirited, or distracted in thinking of where they’d been, or might’ve been. They fell into the trap of believing the challenge was over and let their guard down.

  “The mountain says when it can be climbed,” Pasang Bhote said, looking over at me with a little shrug that morning, as though he could read my mind and the frustrated place I’d mentally traveled to.

  “I know,” I said, zipping up my jacket. “I’m trying to accept that.”

  If yesterday had been my one shot and the mountain would allow nothing more, I thought as I turned back to look one more time—if I’d stepped into the arena Teddy Roosevelt wrote about and fallen short—I’d have to find a way to live with that. But there also seemed to me a big gap, almost a chasm, between fatalistic acceptance and Rooseveltian grit. Whether I could tell the difference, if and when I did get a second shot at the mountain, was the question.

  But as we descended the Lhotse face, inching our way slowly down the steep ice wall, and I focused on each footfall, dazzled by the astonishing beauty around me, I also knew that my clock was ticking loudly. It was getting later in the season day by day, the calendar was inching ever toward the June monsoon season, when moisture flowing up into the Himalayas can make for the most violent snowstorms of the year. And every boot step into the snow, going the wrong direction down the mountain, narrowed the range of possibilities. Typically, the mountain was only able to be summited during a very narrow window, at the most two weeks when weather conditions perfectly aligned.

  Everest was also now crowded with other climbers—most of whom, like me, had been dreaming of this mountain all their lives. They’d been acclimatizing for weeks, building up their tolerance for the altitude in staggered ascents and descents—going from base camp at 17,600 feet to the four higher camps and then back down in preparing for a push to the summit. A pent-up demand in the climbing community had made that year even more intense, because no one had made it to the summit via the Nepalese side of the mountain in two full seasons. A disastrous ice avalanche killed sixteen Sherpas in 2014, followed by Nepal’s worst earthquake in more than eighty years in 2015, which devastated the country and again shut down the mountain for climbing.

  Pasang Bhote and I had tried to beat that rush, climbing fast up the mountain and skipping Camp 3 entirely before being forced to head back down. But now we’d be faces in the crowd, stuck in
a pack of climbers if a second chance came at all.

  As we neared Camp 2 on our descent, at about twenty-one thousand feet, a thought and an image flashed before my eyes: dominoes.

  That was the word and the metaphor that Jenna had used when we’d been talking about the risks and unknowns, the potential points of failure and what we might do at those moments when, not if, they arose in the Explorers Grand Slam.

  “When one domino falls, everything changes down the line, and the best we can do is be ready with a new plan, a new adaptation,” she’d said one day in Portland as we were going through lists and logistics. For reasons that are cooked somewhere deep inside me, I’ve always resisted thinking like that, about what-ifs and worst cases. Listing things that could go wrong in pursuing a goal somehow makes it feel more likely that those things will go wrong. But Jenna’s idea was simpler—that every change, even if it looks like a setback, creates new options.

  Everything on Everest was now different. A domino had definitely fallen. I’d been weakened by the huge effort to get up to Camp 4. But I’d learned that coming back when you’re told you can’t—a second chance—can in fact happen, and that life’s blows and the recovery from those blows are paired phenomena. I thought of Pasang Bhote’s stoical, knee-hugging posture of stillness in the middle of the storm’s insanity. Maybe, I thought, the game wasn’t over. Things were still in motion. As Jenna had pointed out, they always are.

  * * *

  FOR THREE DAYS AT CAMP 2, with five-thousand-foot walls of ice and snow towering around me on three sides, I waited. In air so thin just walking around the camp required huge effort, I tried to find the calm of acceptance, while at the same time holding on to hope that a second attempt might be possible.

  I hadn’t given up, but I knew that I might soon need to accept defeat. The base camp manager had even said as much to me, in congratulating me on making it that far in the Explorers Grand Slam, with the suggestion that I was done and finished and that Everest wouldn’t give me a second chance. Her congratulations stung bitterly, sounding to me like the expressions of “good luck, kid” that I’d heard so many times in trying to find sponsors for this project.

  “I’m afraid time is running out,” I said to Pasang Bhote one day, staring up toward the mountain, which through most of those days was shrouded in clouds. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders in reply, conveying the tough realism that people born and raised in one of the world’s harshest climates understand from childhood.

  But on the third day of waiting, as I was inching closer to having to say the word “surrender,” I called the base camp manager on the radio just as the new weather forecast was coming in.

  “Hold on, Colin,” she said. I heard her talking to someone else for a minute, then she was back on the line.

  “There may be a window,” she said, then paused for a second. “The question, as always, is how long it holds, and this one seems as sketchy as ever. Could last a few days, or could slam back down—and when it does it’ll probably really suck up there again.”

  But it felt like a chance, and I scrambled back out looking for Pasang Bhote. If we were going to go back up, this was it.

  * * *

  CAMP 4 FELT RADICALLY DIFFERENT than it had five days earlier in that grim night in the tent. It was jammed with anxious, frustrated climbers, a sea of puffy jackets and oxygen tanks—people gasping and coughing and cursing when they tried to breathe even for a moment without supplemental oxygen, then taking a few breaths from their tanks and doing it all over again.

  But the weather window, at least for the moment, was holding. That meant that most of those two hundred–odd climbers would be heading up the mountain that night, proceeding through a narrow passage that led from the last camp. The route began with a steep climb up a snow slope, with precipitous drop-offs farther up. A fixed rope—put in place by an elite team of Sherpas each season to aid climbers on the route—ran up the center of the slope, and climbers would clip into it, one after the other in single file, climbing in darkness, aiming to get to the summit somewhere around dawn.

  But the updated forecast said that winds were likely to pick up through the night, which meant that a slow-moving fixed rope line could be, that night, one of the most dangerous places on the mountain, if not the earth. If the window slammed as that line was creeping up, there might be no way to stay warm as the line trudged on. And although Pasang Bhote and I were climbing independently, not a part of a big guided group, being in the line would still mean that any inexperienced or unprepared climber ahead of me—the weak link in the chain—would affect everyone.

  Frostbite from being locked in place, unable to heat my body with forward motion, was one of the scariest things I could imagine—claustrophobia and cold in combination—and my fears were rippling like an electric current when I finally got through to Jenna that evening. She answered, but before I could even speak I had a severe coughing fit, trying to catch my breath.

  “Baby, put your oxygen mask back on. Take a breath. I’ll still be here,” Jenna said. She waited as I got my breathing back under control.

  “You okay?” she finally asked.

  “I’m really scared, Jenna,” I said, staring out at the sea of jostling climbers swirling around me. “I think people might die up on the mountain tonight. There will definitely be a lot of frostbite, at least. And if the winds really come back like they were a few days ago when we had to turn around, but instead we’re up on the summit…”

  There was a long silence, as I bit my lip and pictured the horror of being caught up there, exposed in those winds. Then a coughing fit grabbed me again, which turned into a choking spasm.

  “You still there?” Jenna said when I got through it.

  “Yeah,” I gasped, keeping my words short. “The rib.”

  “You think it’s cracked?” she said.

  “I think so,” I replied.

  I pressed a hand onto my left side, feeling a sharp twinge in my chest, and seeing all over again in my mind the brutal coughing fit that had hit me on the way up after Pasang Bhote and I had been forced to stop overnight at Camp 3. The coughing started as I was shoveling snow from around our tent, which was precariously perched on the Lhotse Face, a five-thousand-foot wall of ice and snow. One particular spasm left me gasping, clutching the sudden sharp pain on my side, barely able to move when it was over.

  Jenna was silent for a few seconds and I could hear her breathing, loving the sound of it. I heard in it the breathing of Portland—wonderful, oxygen-rich, sea-level Portland.

  “I know the rib is painful, but people are going to summit tonight and there’s no reason you can’t be one of them,” she said. She paused for a second. “Do me a favor, go inside your body and your mind and listen, Colin. Face your fears.”

  I tried to breathe, to think of what I did or didn’t have inside, and how clearly I’d be able to judge one way or another. And I knew the astonishing reserve of strength—the power and confidence and will that it had taken for Jenna to say those words—“no reason you can’t be one of them.” She hadn’t urged me to be safe and take no chances, to go down the mountain and home to her, but rather, to see what was inside me and trust it was the stuff I needed.

  “Go out there and achieve your dreams, Colin. I know you can do this,” she finally said.

  * * *

  AT ABOUT 11 P.M., when I climbed out of my tent to begin, the long line of climbers had already formed. They looked like a chain gang, trudging slowly up the mountain, roped together in the subzero cold, the beams of their headlamps all uniformly tilted down toward their feet. I could barely make out the silhouette of the mountain at all, only the flickering line of lights, snaking up like a jagged scar.

  But after Pasang Bhote and I clipped to the rope and joined them, I almost immediately began wondering whether being in the line really made sense on a night like that, when a killing wind might roar back at any time. Being clipped in meant you were far less likely to fall off t
he mountain, but it also meant that you were trapped, able to go no faster than the slowest person ahead. Unclipping and going outside the line meant risking a possibly fatal fall, but on the other hand it was a better chance to get ahead on the mountain, stay warm, and fend off frostbite before the weather turned.

  The uncertainty and risk of unclipping through that section meant that it was rarely done, and too risky for guided teams. But as scary as it felt, it finally also came to seem like the lesser of the two evils. We’d be moving, I thought, and movement—from my earliest memories of life—had always seemed more natural to me than standing still.

  I glanced at Pasang Bhote and he nodded that he was ready, too, and without another word we both unclipped and stepped over to the right of the line. I looked down at the carabiner in my gloved hand that I’d just opened up in disconnecting from the line. My headlamp illuminated its rounded steel curves, and it felt heavy and solid, and for the briefest of seconds I had second thoughts, but Pasang Bhote was already moving, and I heard Jenna’s voice in my head as well. Go deep, she’d said. Listen to your body. Calm mind, steady feet.

  We went forward like that for hours through the night, slowly trudging up the steep slope unroped. It seemed, and was, incredibly slow—every step requiring a pause to suck in two or three breaths before taking another step. And every breath sent a stab of pain into my injured rib as well.

  But the roped line of climbers to our left was moving even more slowly, and as we began passing people, I felt more assurance that what we were doing, risky as it was, was the right choice. Pasang Bhote and I were climbing much faster than the roped climbers, our muscles moving harder, creating more heat, and yet the bitter cold was still reaching up inside to grab me. Life on the rope line, I thought, had to be even colder.