Dead Lucky

by Lincoln Hall

  Two hundred feet higher, at the junction of the snowy ridge and the rock-face above, was a campsite where the last of the tents were being packed up by Sherpas because all the climbers from that team were already off the mountain. Soon it would be the end of May—the close of the climbing season—and the number of climbers had decreased markedly. This suited me fine, as I had never before had to deal with crowds on a big Himalayan mountain and did not want to start now.

  Our Camp Two was approximately 500 vertical feet above the abandoned camp. On average, the rock-face was no steeper than the ridge had been, and the bright blue fixed rope that had been laid in place for the 2006 season showed us the easiest way up to our camp.

  The camp itself would not have met safety standards anywhere. The slope was a mass of loose rocks, which meant that tents could only be pitched if they were propped up on slabs of rock that had been piled together to form rough platforms. Each tent had its own platform, in every case too small, so a part of every tent overhung nothingness. It was not a place that induced a good night’s sleep.

  The tent that Dorje and I chose had a particularly lumpy floor. We worked out that the only place level enough for the stove was in the doorway. While Dorje melted snow for drinks and dinner, I carefully squeezed outside to take in the view. The wind had dropped to almost nothing, which encouraged me to take photos.

  It had become a magnificent afternoon, with views in every direction. Behind and above us was the unbelievable mass of Mount Everest, which had only seemed bigger with every upward step. Stretching to the east, beyond the cascade of lower peaks in the middle foreground, were the rocky brown hills of Tibet. On the skyline were distant snow-capped peaks, with names known only by nomadic yak-herders.

  Camp Two was an obvious turnaround point—after negotiating a couple of snow-filled rock gullies, it was a simple snow ridge all the way down to the North Col. I had not come up here to contemplate retreat, but I found that my feelings were taking me in that direction. I understood how David Lien had been happy to call it quits at this camp, where the A-Team had found their tents destroyed by wind. It was beyond this point that climbers drove themselves to their deaths, either because unbending ambition overpowered common sense or because the determination to overcome the cold, the discomfort, and the danger was as unwavering as a GPS-programmed missile locked on to its target. Most climbers survived, of course—some of them because they had turned back here.

  A maiden expedition to Mount Everest is the biggest first date you’ll ever have. You need to know when to say no, when to back off, and when to open the throttle. I knew what I was up against. Did I want to face that nightmare of choices and judgments in a place where the latest bodies had barely frozen solid? Was this place where I stood now not high enough? Was it not beautiful enough? I did feel some fear within me—it is always present when I am on a mountain—but it was not fear that was steering me away.

  There had been so much death this season—a ludicrous amount, given the good weather. I had wanted no part of it, and yet already I had been drawn in. I gave advice to a man who was to climb without oxygen, and he died because he followed that path. I witnessed an ocean of grief in a woman who had lost her husband. I heard wild tales of a man trapped between life and death but with no option to choose either. I heard rumors of another whose reality had become so distorted by the oxygenless air that he had leaped to his death. Everest had taken four lives from the hundreds of locals employed by the guiding industry. One of our teammates had expired while I had waited by the radio, ready to be the next man to step up in line.

  I did not want to be that next man.

  I returned to the tent, and Dorje grinned as he protected the stove while I moved past. I asked him what was involved in the climb to 27,000 feet the next day.

  “A big climb,” he said. “Not much place to rest. You have to keep moving. Otherwise can be problem.”

  I wondered if he was hinting that I might not be able to match the pace necessary to get to the camp. I pulled out my diary and drew a line down the middle of a blank page. On one side of the page I wrote the reasons why I should go up, and on the other side the reasons why I should not. Then I read through what I had written. There were good reasons on both sides of the page, so I put the diary away and deferred my decision to the morning.

  Dorje insisted on cooking a freeze-dried meal, but all I wanted was fluid. I had some snacks and energy gels that would satisfy me. I tried to tell him in Nepali that I hated freeze-dried meals, but I had never learned the word for hate, and he cooked it anyway. It proved to be as repulsive to me as always. I knew the fault was not Dorje’s, and not entirely the fault of the freeze-dried. At this height, I had no appetite for food and could not stomach the amount of fluid I needed to drink. In the cold, both were slow to prepare on our lightweight, low-powered stoves.

  Dorje attempted to eat enthusiastically, but I could tell it was a struggle. He kept insisting that I take more, but as a vegetarian I was expert at politely refusing food that I did not want to eat.

  When we wriggled into our sleeping bags, I expected to have a sleepless night. I put my oxygen mask on and set my regulator to less than half the daytime flow. Soon I slipped into a dozy kind of sleep. Without sensing the transitions in and out, I must have drifted into a proper sleep at some point, as the night passed much more quickly than I expected. It was the best sleep I had ever had on any expedition at such altitude, and I attributed it entirely to sleeping with a low flow of oxygen.

  THAT SAME NIGHT, the C-Team members of the SummitClimb Everest Expedition were settling down to sleep at the North Col. They called themselves the C-Team because they were the also-rans from the expedition’s summit attempts in the middle of May. While Phil Crampton and Jangbu Sherpa had been helping Ang Temba and their cerebral edema-stricken client down from the Second Step on May 17, two other members of the A-Team had reached the summit. Two days behind them, SummitClimb B-Team members Andrew Brash and Myles Osborne had been forced to retreat in the face of bad weather. With expedition leader Dan Mazur, these four plus Phil Crampton formed the C-Team and were ready to make a final shot at the summit at the end of the season.

  THE NEXT MORNING Lakcha stuck his head in the tent and chatted in rapid Nepali to Dorje.

  “Good morning, Lakcha Daai,” I called, wanting some advice drawn from his considerable experience.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “I don’t know whether I’ve got the strength to do this. You’ve seen me climb. What do you think?”

  He laughed. “Only you can know!”

  He was saying that reaching the summit depended on how much I wanted to push myself and how much I was prepared to risk. His laughter said he could tell me neither of those things.

  Lakcha said a few more words to Dorje about the oxygen they would carry, then he disappeared out the door.

  I picked up my diary and opened it.

  On the left-hand side of the page I reread what I had written the previous evening.

  SHOULD NOT GO UP BECAUSE:

  1. I would have a better chance of surviving and returning in one piece if I went down now.

  2. Don’t want to leave Barbara in the position of Caroline Letrange.

  3. Don’t want Dylan and Dorje to have no father.

  These three were the same reason—namely, variations on not wanting to die.

  4. Don’t want to spoil the run of great experiences I have had on my previous expeditions.

  Essentially, I did not want to cope with a climate of death that I felt came from a generational shift in values on Everest.

  5. Don’t want more frostbite.

  In a way, this seemed a wimpish, relatively trivial reason, but then I thought that there were very few sports where the participants expect to lose extremities or worse.

  6. Don’t want to have to give superhuman effort and endure the intense discomfort of high altitude.

  This was also nothing more than an excuse, given the di
scomfort I had already put myself through when acclimatizing.

  7. Don’t really need the summit.

  So why was I here? It was the kind of excuse a school student would use for not doing their homework.

  On the right-hand side of the page I had written the pros.

  SHOULD GO UP BECAUSE:

  1. Owe it to Barbara.

  Barbara had encouraged me to make this climb, sacrificing many things during the two months I would be away. She wanted me to succeed for my own sake. I owed it to her not to squander the opportunity I now had.

  2. Owe it to myself.

  Friends who understood the radical nature of our climb in 1984 would introduce me with the words “Lincoln has climbed Mount Everest.” I would then be asked, “And did you get to the top?” “No,” I would say, and inevitably they would emit a deflated “Oh,” as if I had embarrassed them with the answer. The fact that I had made the expedition happen and was largely responsible for getting everyone down alive counted for nothing. Twenty-two years of that was enough. I also wanted to find out whether or not I could get to the top.

  3. Owe it to the boys.

  I knew that Dylan and Dorje experienced a different kind of put-down. “So your Dad’s climbed Everest?” their schoolmates would ask. “Did he get to the top?” When my sons answered “No,” the kids were dismissive, understanding even less about the reality of climbing Everest.

  When I had woken myself up at 3:30 A.M. on the walkout from the Makalu Expedition in 1999 so that I could call Dylan on his eleventh birthday, he had asked me if I had reached the summit. When I’d replied “No,” I had received that same deflated “Oh.”

  The answer was obvious. I would climb Everest for Barbara, I would climb it for the boys, and I would climb it for me. And while I was at it, I would climb it because it was there.

  Today was May 24, Dylan’s birthday. When we reached the High Camp at 27,000 feet, I would ring him on Richard’s phone with my best wishes. I would tell him that while I was not yet on the summit, I was on my way.

  IN PACKING THAT MORNING, there was not much thinking involved, as everything I had carried up was coming with me, except my diary and SLR camera. The most time-consuming part of getting ready was putting on my harness and boots in the tent. It wasn’t until I emerged from the tent that I realized it was another perfect day. Of course, I knew that our tent was precariously pitched on a slope, but I was unprepared to deal with the huge drop. It was like stepping out onto the wing of an airplane. But once I had clipped my crampons to my boots, pulled my oxygen mask onto my face, and attached my ascender clamp to the rope, I felt at ease again, despite the visual restrictions of the mask. As I began to move up the fixed rope, I was immediately reminded of the difficulties imposed by the altitude; even when breathing oxygen, I understood why Dorje had warned me about the day’s climb. It was obviously more involved than yesterday’s snow slope.

  As we moved away from the camp, we encountered low rock walls, only two or three feet high, that we wended our way between. There were some big step-ups, which were simple enough, but they did take extra effort. I took a few too many of these at once and had to stop and breathe hard. We had climbed only 150 feet above the camp when we came to a broad shelf across the slope, with plenty of room for a tent. It seemed that one had recently been packed up, as the ground across the entire flat area was well trodden. There was a long pile of rocks on the downhill edge of the shelf, while on the uphill side lay an amazing flat block of rock, almost the ideal dimensions for a park bench. Dorje and I were a little ahead of Lakcha and Dawa Tenzing, so we immediately sat on the rock. It was a great campsite—much better than ours—but an inconvenient distance from the other tents.

  My eyes were first taken by the view—out across Changtse and westward to the peaks on the Nepalese border. But then my eyes dropped to the long pile of rocks in front of us, which had been stacked in a curiously regular fashion. At the same instant Dorje and I realized what we were looking at.

  “Igor,” said Dorje.

  It was Igor Plyushkin, buried beneath a pile of stones, his boots and trousers visible between the rocks. Suddenly it made sense that the whole area had been heavily trodden. This was one of the jobs the Sherpas had been doing only two afternoons before. I had known of Igor’s death from the moment it had happened, but now it was macabre—the magnificent panorama, a perfect campsite with its God-given perfect park-bench rock, forever haunted by the centerpiece of a semi-open tomb.

  When Kirk Wheatley had passed Dorje and me on our way to the North Col, he had told us about finding Igor slumped on the slope, but with a tent not far below him. Kirk had sat with him for twenty minutes and had finally been able to urge Igor into the tent. It seemed that Igor had pushed himself too far and too hard. He survived the night but the next day fell sick only fifteen yards into the descent, complaining he could not breathe properly. Extra oxygen, medicines for altitude sickness, and injections of adrenaline did not save him. He was an accomplished climber, who had won the coveted Snow Leopard Award for climbing all five of the former USSR’s 23,000-foot peaks in less than forty-two days.

  Before we left, I began to say a Buddhist prayer for Igor, one that I had memorized in Tibetan eleven years ago, but after a few dozen syllables, the remainder of it disappeared from my mind. Perhaps the prayer had been taken for Igor; perhaps I had just lost the lot.

  That morning when I had decided to go for the summit, I had accepted that there was an atmosphere of death and that I would have to take it in my stride. Now was my test. There was no insensitivity in my decision to continue—just an extra resolve to play everything very safely.

  Soon I began to enjoy the climbing, as we were in an incredibly spectacular place with enough challenging sections to keep me engaged and enough horizontal sections to ease the effort. There were another eight or so climbers not far from us, and we slowly gained on them. We had a brief stop for a snack and a drink and then continued climbing. Because bluffs rose above us, our view of the mountain was restricted, so every buttress we rounded revealed a different scene. Although I enjoyed the variety of the climbing, it seemed to go on forever. I was amazed at how long it took to reach our highest camp. The last 500 feet was a long slog up a wide slope with good views across to the summit pyramid. Disconcertingly far above us, near the top of the snow slope, was the cluster of our tents—Camp Three, or High Camp. I set myself a rhythm, which matched the pace of the man above me, Scott Woolums, the leader of the Project Himalaya team we had been climbing among all day.

  As we approached the tents, Scott veered off to the right while I continued upward. The first two tents were occupied, and Harry shouted a greeting to me as I passed.

  “Welcome to High Camp!”

  I merely waved, deeply tired and wanting to find a tent. Again we faced the propped-on-rocks syndrome. Every tent seemed as insecure as the next, so I chose the nearest empty one. Dorje was not far behind me, and as soon as we were settled inside, I took my ice axe with me to visit Harry, who was only ten yards away. The axe would provide the means for me to stop myself if I slipped.

  I squatted outside in my big mountain boots, which are not designed for squatting.

  “Sit in the doorway,” said Harry. “It’s more secure.”

  Then he laughed. Security needed to be redefined before being applied to this highest settlement on earth. Admittedly, the tents not taken down would all have blown away within a few weeks of our departure, but for the time being, it was a settlement for nearly two dozen people.

  I flopped into Harry’s tent and accepted a drink. I did not take much because all our water bottles were almost empty, and in each tent it would take a couple of hours in the cold oxygen-thin air to melt enough snow for a couple of decent drinks each. Simple pleasures were not easily won up here.

  Although I had some basic knowledge and had used my oxygen set effectively enough over the past two days, I asked Harry to run through the system again. Tomorrow would be the clim
ax of the climb, and I wanted to be sure I knew everything I needed to know. The system was not complex, but at high altitude routine tasks can prove challenging. I also wanted to confirm the location of our spare bottles.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Harry said. “The Sherpas have got it under control, and you’ll be together.”

  I had not been using my oxygen set around camp because it was cumbersome when unpacking and taking photos, but now I was beginning to feel lightheaded. Harry passed his mask across to me, and I pulled it over my mouth, inhaled, then passed it back to him. We continued this as we talked. It was like being in an anti-opium den where we partook of oxygen to prevent hallucinations.

  Because Harry had summited Everest the previous year, I asked him about the final climb. It was only a matter of hours away, and there was nothing like a recent update from the horse’s mouth.

  With our summit strategy agreed upon and my other questions answered, I carefully climbed back uphill. I stopped by Lakcha and Dawa’s tent to tell them I had spoken with Harry and that our departure for the summit would be at 11:30 P.M., which was much as they expected. It was still a beautiful afternoon. All we needed was for the weather to hold for another twenty-four hours. I squeezed into the tent, which was at an even more ridiculous angle than the one at Camp Two. We were now at 27,300 feet—I couldn’t blame the Sherpas for not going to the same lengths to make things comfortable.