by Lincoln Hall
I thrust out my hand. “Hi, Mark, I’m Lincoln. Remember, I interviewed you about this climb of yours? Before I knew I’d be coming as well.”
“Sure, mate,” he croaked. “And you wanted to get your hands on some PeakFuel, too.”
“Yeah, but I ran out of time.”
He shrugged understandingly, saying nothing, to give his voice a break.
“So your voice will be okay?”
“Hope so.”
“Sorry. I’ve got to stop asking you questions.”
He smiled, and to show I was holding back my questions, I said nothing at all. Bob and Jen started talking to Mike. My interview with Mark for Outdoor magazine had been about his goal to become the first double-amputee to climb Mount Everest, having tested his prosthetic legs by climbing Cho Oyu with Russell.
I had phoned Mark again when I knew I was going to Everest because I wanted to get my hands on the energy gels that he manufactured. For twenty years Mark had been a winemaker, with his focus on the flavors. It was his skill with flavors that had given his PeakFuel energy gels a good reputation. Gels had been developed as instant nutrition for cyclists, marathon runners, and adventurer racers, but they were also ideal for extreme altitudes where mountaineers frequently did not have the energy to dig into their packs for food but could easily suck the gel out of a foil sachet. The difference with Mark’s line of gels was that they tasted good.
Mark knew that he shouldn’t talk, but when he found that withholding his voice was too hard a chore, he excused himself and returned to his tent. The four of us shared an Australian perspective on what was happening in this extraordinary place, until the temperature dropped sufficiently to send Mike and me back to our camp.
The next morning I was sitting outside my tent, packing and getting ready to head up to the North Col for the first time, when I became aware of somebody nearby.
“Hey, dude,” said a voice. “Is that you, Lincoln?”
I looked up to see the smiling face of Ken Sauls, his beard a bit more rugged than the last time we’d met.
“Sure is,” I said. “What the hell are you doing here?” I stood up and gave him a hug, squeezing him as hard as I could to make him think I was as strong as he was.
We’d first met in Bangkok in 1999, me coming from Sydney, Ken coming from Los Angeles, both of us en route to Kathmandu to join the Australian-American Makalu Expedition. He had introduced himself as the cameraman, which meant that we shared the same role—only he looked like a hardcore rock climber with muscles on his muscles. Turned out that’s what he was.
“Long way from Silverton, Colorado,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Small world, eh?”
“Nah,” said Ken. “Just running out of places to hide. You know how it is . . . IRS . . . Jealous husbands with big fists . . .”
“Hear you climbed Everest a few years back with Sue Fear?”
“Yeah, that was filming with Russ. This year I’m working for Discovery, but still with Russ. That’s how I heard you were here.”
“You only just got me. We’re about to head up to the North Col for the first time.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to catch up at BC. Sink a few beers.”
He slapped me on the back and sauntered back up the hill. It was great to see him. We’d clicked on Makalu, but afterward the trickle of e-mails had slowly dried up, both of us too laid back to keep the cycle going.
BY MIDDAY the B-Team was trudging across the uppermost reaches of the East Rongbuk Glacier, a huge snow bowl contained on three sides by the Northeast Ridge of Changtse and the North and Northeast ridges of Everest. The low point in Everest’s North Ridge was the North Col, and that was our destination. There was little breeze, and the sun reflecting from the mountain walls had us baking in the bowl. There was a well-trodden path across the snow, with a line of dots up the snow face below the North Col, marking the line of fixed rope, and with each dot a climber.
Our small Australian party was now four teams of two, as each of us was traveling with a Sherpa. I had directed Lakcha to Mike because I judged him to be the most useful and experienced person when it came to Mike’s filmmaking needs. Pasang and Dawa were with Richard and Christopher. I had suggested that Dorje accompany me because he was young and keen, and I felt that, for our short time together, I could be his mentor. The ratio of four Sherpas to four Westerners was the safest option for us, given the special factors of Christopher’s young age and our filming of his climb.
We flopped into the snow at the base of the fixed ropes and had a quick drink and a snack before starting up the ropes. The slope was at an angle of only forty degrees and the snow was a good consistency for the sharp crampon points clipped to our boots, so the process of climbing was straightforward. The difficulty came from the altitude. I knew that on any expedition, the first climb up to 23,000 feet is very hard work. I also knew that it would get easier with every subsequent ascent.
There were dozens of climbers on the ropes and a dozen behind us. No doubt there were many more who had already reached the col. I told myself not to be bothered by the crowds and to enjoy the considerable pleasure of being on the mountain again. After all, there is only one Everest.
A climber overtook us, carrying a multicolored Berghaus pack. I noticed it because I had taken one exactly like it to Carstensz Pyramid in 1993. It had given me good service over the years, and I still used it for hiking in Australia. Our pace on the fixed rope was dictated by the speed of those above us, which was not fast. The man with the Berghaus pack was in more of a hurry. Rather than being delayed by the fixed rope full of climbers, he climbed ten feet to the left of the rope. It was not a hugely dangerous thing to be doing, as the snow was good and the slope not too steep. His approach could be compared to cycling in traffic, which is safe enough if you have the right skills and know what you are doing. I became a little frustrated when the climbing train on the rope above slowed down. I looked ahead to see if there was an obvious reason for the go-slow, and I saw Mr. Berghaus climbing confidently and drawing farther away. It was only later, when it had been mentioned in the media, that I realized that this thirteen-year-old Berghaus pack had belonged to David Sharp.
Clouds came in during the afternoon and we climbed up into them. I had dressed for a nonstop push through to the col, planning to have only short stops for filming. However, a serious “rope-block” developed above us, forcing us to stand still minutes at a time and then only moving up a few feet before waiting again. With only thermals and a light fleece jacket underneath my Gore-Tex wind-suit, and with no concerted exercise to generate heat, I became uncomfortably cold. A steep section near the lip of the North Col was slowing everyone down, some climbers much more than others. I unclipped from the rope to step past a few slow-moving people, then clipped back on before tackling the steeper part. I warmed up during the climb and was relieved to reach the first tents. My relief that the up was over evaporated when I realized that the main North Col camp was beyond a huge crevasse spanned by three aluminum ladders strapped together, which rose upward at an angle of forty-five degrees. I climbed the ladders, filming my feet stepping from rung to rung, which meant I had only one hand to keep my balance on the rope. Luckily, Christopher and I wore the same La Sportiva boots, so the feet that I had filmed could be passed off as Christopher’s when Mike got the film to editing stage. At the same time, Mike filmed Christopher from below on the ladder. It had started to snow, and I was getting colder by the minute, so I was pleased to put the camera away.
Soon enough we were at the main camp. I had expected a crowded campsite, but there were more tents than I thought possible pitched in a long hollow beneath a sheltering ice cliff. We were a hundred yards away from the lowest part of the col, which was not protected from the wind by the ice cliff.
The 7Summits-Club mess tent contributed to the crowding. It was much smaller than those at Base Camp and Advance Base Camp but still the biggest tent at the North Col. I certainly found it welco
ming, with the stoves chugging away producing heat and hot tea poured into my mug by Dawa the cook. Already in residence were Harry, Thomas, and their Sherpas, Pemba and Passang. When I heard Richard and Christopher arrive, I grabbed the camera and recorded their snow-covered entry into the tent.
There was plenty of good food for dinner that night, but none of us ate very much—the altitude was now 23,182 feet. Richard and Christopher headed for their sleeping bags early, as did Thomas, but Harry and I were in no hurry to retire to our tents. I expected a long cold night, with sleep interrupted by waking and gasping for more air to breathe, and that proved to be the outcome.
The difficulty of high-altitude sleeping is the inevitable fall in breath rate as you doze off to sleep. At normal altitudes your body needs less oxygen while you are sleeping, and sleep triggers a slower rate of breathing. The problem at high altitude is that the slow rate is still triggered when you finally manage to sleep, but soon the emergency “not-enough-oxygen” light turns on in your brain, and you wake up gasping for breath. I made my first night at the North Col endurable by reading a book for an hour or two in the middle of the night. During that time I did not let my breathing operate in auto mode. I breathed deeply but not forcefully, making sure my lungs were full with every breath. This got more oxygen into my system and allowed me to sleep more deeply for the rest of the night.
Clear skies greeted us the next morning. The sun shone brightly on the North Ridge of Everest, but the shadow of the ice cliff above us kept our camp bitterly cold. Irregular gusts blew whirlwinds of yesterday’s fresh snow around the camp. I figured we were being buffeted by the edges of turbulence caused by a strong wind blowing over the lowest and most exposed part of the North Col.
I clambered onto the cornice above the tents so I could peer down over the névé of the East Rongbuk Glacier. From three o’clock the previous afternoon we had continually climbed up through clouds. Now, under clear skies, the view from the cornice was a revelation. Suddenly I remembered how high it is at 23,000 feet and how spectacular the views are from this elevation.
Advance Base Camp no longer looked like the world’s highest village. The colorful collection of tents had been swallowed by the moraine trough below Changtse’s Northeast Ridge. Looming above me was Changste’s East Face, edged by its South Ridge. Its sheer size and mass made it impossible for me to forget that we had not reached even the halfway height of the lowest of Everest’s subpeaks.
To the north, Everest’s main summit was tucked behind the farthest point of its long Northeast Ridge. The snowy pyramid, which hid the true peak, looked so impossibly far away that I could not begin to conceive what had to be endured to reach the final summit. Suddenly, whirling snow blasted the camp and distracted me—a perversely welcome disruption. Spindrift stung my face and my exposed hands, and the camera I held was too cold for the snowflakes to melt upon its black surface. Cold, tired, and unacclimatized—now was not the time to think about what kind of miracle would be needed for me to climb the inconceivable.
Ten
SKY BURIAL
IN MID-MAY THE CLIMATE on Everest changed. The first month of the 2006 season had delivered weather that was better than it had been for many years. The wind blew as often as usual but rarely as strongly as in other pre-monsoon climbing periods. The afternoon storms were both less regular and less ferocious. In that sense, there were more good days than bad. But the weather had no influence on the ominous change in circumstances. It was the human interface with the mountain that altered in the middle of May. The change of climate was one of atmosphere, and the new atmosphere was death. Even on a good day on Everest there are many ways for people to die.
At the beginning of the 2006 Everest season, there had been four fatalities. The first to die had been Himalayan Experience’s Tuk Bahadur in April. Two weeks later, on the opposite side of the mountain, ten Sherpas from several different expeditions were carrying supplies up the Khumbu Icefall. The climb of the standard ascent route on the Nepalese side of Everest begins with the notoriously unstable icefall. Unfortunately, there is no other way to gain access to the high valley of the Western Cwm. As the Sherpas followed the ropes upward, a huge ice tower (or serac) toppled onto a neighboring one, shattering both. Large chunks of ice, some of them the size of cars, tumbled onto the route followed by the Sherpas. There was no time to run—and nowhere to go. Six of the Sherpas were hit by the debris. Three were injured, but Dawa Temba, Lhakpa Tsheri, and Ang Phinjo were buried beneath the ice. Unlike a snow avalanche, where buried climbers can sometimes be dug out, the jumble of broken glacier ice was like being buried under truckloads of boulders. It was fifty-year-old Ang Phinjo’s forty-ninth expedition to an 8,000-meter peak, as any mountain over 26,250 feet is known.
The deaths were a sobering start to the season and, for me, a reminder of why I was climbing the north side of the mountain. There was nothing as inherently dangerous on the Northeast Ridge route, but the difficulties concentrated on the long and exposed summit ridge made the final climb more challenging.
APART FROM THE SHADOW of those deaths, there was nothing but good news until the middle of May. The fine weather was holding, and long-range forecasts suggested it would continue to do so. Although the Himalayan Experience Sherpas finished setting the fixed ropes on April 30, the first Western climbers did not reach the world’s highest point until May 11.
On May 14, ten members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Expedition reached the summit with four Sherpas. Rumors travel fast at Advance Base Camp, where many different expeditions are clustered close together in limited space. We heard that one of the successful Indian climbers had descended to the Second Step, and then tore the oxygen mask from his face before jumping off the cliff. It was such a crazy story that we dismissed it as a wild rumor, but two days later—after a second team from the Indian Army Expedition summited and the organizers put out a press release—the basic fact was announced that a Constable Srikrishna had died during the descent from the summit.
Any further speculation about Srikrishna’s demise was suddenly replaced by talk of a climber who had spent a night out on the Northeast Ridge. It seemed that no one knew who he was or which expedition he was with, but his passage up the mountain—and partway down—was noted by others high on the ridge at the time. Then the dreadful news surfaced that climbers from two expeditions had passed by the terminally weakened climber during the night. In total darkness it is difficult to judge the state of an unmoving body. Most of those climbers had thought he was either dead or resting—the two usual states of anyone slumped beside the fixed rope above 27,800 feet. A few of the climbers who passed him that night thought he was alive but assessed him as being impossibly close to death.
However, by the time the two expeditions, Himalayan Experience and the Turkish Everest Expedition, were wearily plodding down the ridge in groups of two or three after their summit attempts, it was broad daylight. It was then that more climbers from both expeditions realized that the man was alive, thirty-six hours after he had set out for the summit.
At Advance Base Camp, Russell Brice had taken it upon himself to identify the unknown man, and one possibility seemed more likely than any other. The head Sherpa of the Himalayan Experience team, Phurba Tashi, was able to identify David Sharp from his passport photo, which they found in the man’s luggage.
This basic information about the tragedy was instantly broadcast on websites. It was exactly the kind of dramatic, controversial story that the mainstream media picks up in a flash. Dispatches full of assumptions and misinformation, padded with a few facts, were broadcast around the world.
When I heard what was going on, I did not know what to think. I certainly did not jump to any conclusions. Base Camp seemed close to the dreadful events that had unfolded, but in fact I knew too few of the details to invest emotional energy in an opinion. It was not that I did not care about David Sharp, just that I did not yet know the truth of his circumstances. In the past, newspapers in Australia
had written that I was missing, assumed dead, when the fact was that our small expedition had no radio communications on the mountain, only a mail-runner at Base Camp. After my first Himalayan climb, a journalist had written that my minor frostbite was so bad that I would never walk again, but I was to have more than thirty years of climbing and trekking ahead of me. I was keen to hear the facts about David Sharp, but I would not be seduced by the rumors or the outraged opinions of people who knew less than I did.
The topic was not foremost in our minds when Mike and I hiked across the glacial flats to the Himalayan Experience Base Camp. We needed the exercise, and I wanted to congratulate both Ken Sauls and Bob Killip on having reached the summit.
When we arrived at the Himex Camp, we were pointed to their large rectangular mess tent, set up to cope with the wind. As soon as Bob saw us, he leaped to his feet to share his triumph but grimaced as he put weight on his frostbitten toes.
“Congratulations, Bob!” I said, before I thought to ask about his injuries. “Well done!”
“Thanks, mate. It was hard, man. So cold.”
“I’ll bet. And you remember Mike from ABC?”
“Sure. Welcome.” Then he said to us both, “I’m the oldest Australian to summit. Fifty-three. Should get a photo of me and young Christopher. Youngest and oldest Australians.”
For the moment at least, Bob’s exuberance at reaching the summit overshadowed the issue of his frostbite.
“That would be a great outcome for the season,” I said, “Christopher topping out as well.”
“It would be,” agreed Mike. “Christopher’s watching a DVD at the moment.”
We sat and listened to Bob’s account of his climb. He had arrived at Base Camp less than an hour earlier, so his story was fresh, and it began with the fact that he and his rope-mate, Mark Inglis, who also summited, had been unlucky enough to pick the coldest night of the season for their summit push.