Left for Dead

by Beck Weathers

  Since the sun doesn’t set on McKinley at that time of year, but sort of circles the mountain each day, our surroundings hardly varied as we tried to wait out the weather. The cold days passed slowly in the perpetual, monochromatic light, which shifted almost imperceptibly from light gray to dark gray and back again. I stirred from the bag’s warmth only to relieve myself, discovering to my deep chagrin on each occasion that my hands would freeze before I could zip up. Every time I’d have to waddle back to the tent, climb in my bag and rewarm my hands until they were limber enough to pull up my zipper.

  One morning, the wind died down for a bit. Ken and I excitedly started sorting our gear, thinking that finally we were headed up. Steve just looked at us, his hands in his pockets, and then spoke.

  “There’s going to be at least one stupid sonuvabitch who tries to climb this mountain today,” he said. “But it sure as hell is not going to be me.” Ken and I looked at each other and started unpacking. Sure enough, that wind came roaring back like a freight train.

  As events on Mount Everest would later attest, one of the most important things a guide can tell you is when not to climb. Any fool can start up a hill. It takes real judgment and discipline to keep summit fever in check. Steve was not going to do something stupid.

  We persevered at high camp until the food was gone, four long days, then started back down. The wind was blowing at about a hundred miles an hour. This was not going to be easy, especially with the bonehead complication I contrived to introduce.

  Under very cold conditions, mountaineers not uncommonly pull on so-called vapor barrier socks—basically fancy trash-can liners—to keep their feet warm. Well, I had found an entire vapor barrier suit, which I had saved for the summit. When it was clear we were headed down, not up, in that frigid wind, I put on the suit—which made me resemble nothing so much as a human in a handy bag. But it certainly did keep me warm.

  As we descended the fixed line that leads to high camp, I began to tire, rapidly. It was all I could do to stand up. I worried that I might fall. It took every bit of willpower to keep moving.

  When we finally got to the bottom of the fixed line, Steve recognized that I was losing it. At one point, I did fall over, right on my keister.

  “Give me your pack,” he said, and I did. He put a loop around it and walked off, dragging my pack through the snow. This was a thoroughly shameful episode. Everyone but me was pulling his load. I would walk back to camp looking like a complete fool. I was mortified, and fell two or three more times before we got down to Med Camp.

  There, Steve took me to Dr. Hacket. Inside, I unzipped my suit to discover I was completely drenched in sweat, chin to toes. I’d created a portable steam cabinet, cooking myself like a Chinese dumpling.

  “Why in the world are you wearing that thing?” asked Hacket, who measured my resting pulse at 160.

  A couple of glasses of tea revived me somewhat, followed by some soup and a lot more tea, more than two liters of it.

  The strangest part of the experience was that though I was obviously very dehydrated, I hadn’t once been thirsty, just weakened. I don’t understand the physiology of it.

  We started walking again, with the wind howling louder and louder. About a thousand feet below Windy Corner we at last made camp, for which I was deeply grateful. I didn’t feel real good. When I pulled off my boots, I discovered they were sloshing in sweat. I was like those fishermen in the cartoons who pour fish out of their boots. As I got into my bag, I smelled myself for the first time, an overpowering odor of ammonia. I’d been burning muscle like crazy.

  Next morning, the storm was still blowing heavy. Our idea was to get beneath it. So we put on snowshoes and started down again.

  McKinley was the first mountain where my glasses were a problem. After they fogged up and froze over a couple of times, I didn’t wear them at all, which meant that I saw very little. The guys later kidded me that I could have gone downtown and gotten in a freezer and sat there for three weeks for all I was able to see on McKinley. That was largely true.

  Now it was blowing so hard that I repeatedly got this mask of ice across my face. I had to put my thumbs into my eye sockets to pop open my lids or my eyes would freeze shut. For some stupid reason, I didn’t think to wear goggles.

  Pretty soon I was operating on automatic, just putting one foot in front of the other. I was so exhausted and concentrating so hard that my world shrank to a radius of two or three feet. At one point we passed a dog team on the trail and I didn’t even notice. Not long thereafter I walked out of one of my snowshoes and immediately sank up to my chest. Steve was furious with me, and gave me a pretty fair tongue-lashing as we dug the snowshoe out of five feet of snow.

  We marched on through the blizzard, all of us sensing our gathering peril. Steve finally stopped and said, bluntly, “We have a big problem. I have no idea if we are still on the right trail. We’re going to have to dig in.”

  The wind was blowing way too strong for us to erect tents. So we spent the next ten hours digging a hole down into the glacier. We excavated on our hands and knees to a depth of about ten feet, then hollowed out a snow cave large enough to accommodate all six of us. It was brutal work.

  When we finally got into our sleeping bags and warmed up a little, I began feeling the pain of someone repeatedly slamming a ball peen hammer into my fingertips. I’d frozen them while digging but hadn’t noticed. Now my newly thawed nerve endings were emphatically informing me of the damage they’d suffered. As it turned out, several of my fingers were frostbitten down to the cuticle.

  Cecilia Boone:

  Ken later told us of a conversation he had with Beck in that snow cave.

  “Okay,” he said, “we need to decide right now whether we’re ever doing any of this again. I’m thinking we shouldn’t. This is hell. This is miserable. This is not worth it.”

  Beck said, “No, you can’t make that decision now. You have to wait until the end, when you’re back home. This is not the time.”

  Ken said, “Hell, yes, it is!”

  We slept about six hours and then dug out of our cave. The storm had finally let up. The rest of the walk down to Base Camp was uneventful, save for the last little part, called Heartbreak Hill. Incoming aircraft meet the Kahiltna Glacier on a downward slope, meaning that the last mile of your return from the mountain actually is uphill, an unwelcome final test of your endurance.

  It turned out that another group was coming down the same time as we were. Steve’s ex-con second-in-command suddenly decided to pick up our pace in order to beat these other guys to the finish. This was high-school-Harry stuff. At this point, with each step I was mumbling over and over to myself a parody from The Wizard of Oz; to wit, “Hamburgers, steaks, french fries, oh my!” But Ken and Ed Clark, one of our fellow climbers, were steamed. They started yelling unpleasant things at the guide.

  When we finally got to camp, Ed and Ken nearly came to blows over which one would get to beat the living stuffing out of the ex-con. Eventually, they both simmered down, a process mightily abetted by the superchilled Wild Turkey that Ken liberated from the snowbank. Imagine what kind of buzz two guys in our shape can get from straight bourbon at eight thousand feet. Eventually we invited the other two guys over and they helped us finish it off.

  As we discussed the expedition, their general view was that they never wanted to see a place like that again. Ken and I kept saying, “Wow! Wasn’t that great!”

  We thought it was just wonderful.

  Ken Zornes:

  We even laughed about that conversation in the ice cave. After we got home and healed, we forgot all about that.

  NINETEEN

  When we got back to Dallas, everyone met us at the airport with champagne. Then we went out to dinner. Peach wasn’t as interested in celebrating as some of the others. I’m not sure she realized that I was going to continue doing this.

  Peach:

  He was exhilarated—beat all to hell, frostbitten and exhilarated. I thou
ght a little pain was a good thing. I didn’t realize what was happening. Later, Beck told some McKinley war stories at a party. Mike Mack, one of the thoracic surgeons at the hospital, said it sounded to him like Beck had had an attack of pulmonary edema.

  Beck doesn’t talk much about his infirmities. He said that he had only been a little dehydrated. Mack said that wasn’t true.

  I had a few rales, lung noises. I never thought I had edema.

  Terry White:

  It was after McKinley that we started worrying about the mountain climbing. He sat up there for four days, almost getting blown off the mountain. Got some frostbite. When that didn’t slow him down at all and he started planning his next climb, I wondered about his reasoning, whether he was thinking about his family.

  It’s one thing to risk your life. Some people are driven to do it. In those circumstances, would I? Certainly not. This bothered us.

  Mountain climbing didn’t replace ocean sailing as my passion so much as it temporarily displaced it, or postponed it—at least in my strategic thinking.

  I saw the need to prioritize these things in a temporal sense. I could sail when I was sixty, but I wouldn’t be climbing mountains. I was in my early forties, and I very much realized that I had a decade at most when I could reasonably expect my body to work. If I wanted to explore any of that stuff, now was the time to do it.

  So I dropped the sailing back fifteen or twenty years. All the time I was climbing I still maintained the same sailing training: I continued to read avidly.

  In the winter of 1990 I headed south to climb two volcanoes in Mexico, both conveniently located a cab ride away from Mexico City. Popocatepl (17,887 feet) and neighboring Pico de Orizaba (18,700 feet) are not tough climbs, although you should have glacier experience before attempting them. They are generally considered good warm-ups for more challenging peaks, such as Denali, so I expected a comparatively simple time of it in Mexico.

  But I learned it is unwise to take a big mountain for granted. “El Popo,” for example, suddenly began erupting four years after I climbed it, and is now indefinitely closed to mountaineers. Five climbers who came to film the eruptions died on the mountain in May of 1996.

  The more subtle lesson that I took away from Popocatepl was how everything needs to click in order for you to get to the top; how fragile and contingent you are on a climb; how easily things can go awry; how something that would be a minor annoyance at sea level can be dramatically amplified at high altitude. Take, for instance, the common stomach bug—please.

  We did the usual altitude acclimatization program on Popocatepl, and settled into the hut from which we’d launch our summit assault. That evening, a dozen or so mice began running around inside my belly. I’m experienced with the feeling, and recognized what was ahead long before I got to enjoy the full moment.

  They hit me in the middle of the night. I headed for the bathroom, selected a stall and stayed there serenading the commode until dawn. I was careful to lock the stall door. There was no way they were going to get me out of there alive.

  Another guy was in there with me, too, making animal noises. It was dawn before the vomiting subsided enough for me to crawl back into my bunk.

  I spent the day praying for relief. The idea of food set me retching. But as our appointed departure hour approached, the other guy, a kid in his twenties, pulled on his boots and prepared to climb. This was not something I had considered possible. But I’d be damned if I’d let this kid leave me sitting there.

  So I rolled out of bed, assuming I’d make it about a quarter mile before I barfed again and then would have a manly excuse for diving back into the rack. To my surprise, however, I did not buckle as expected. The kid and a couple of other guys started retching on the trail—the bug was going around—and quit the climb. I soldiered on with the rest of the group. It took forever, but finally we made it to the top.

  It was late in the day by then, so part of the way down we were in pitch darkness. Feeling better as we went along, I joined one of the guides in a trot to the hut, where we rejoiced at the discovery that someone had turned on the hot water.

  After El Popo we climbed Pico de Orizaba without incident, and I headed back home for Texas more certain than ever that I’d found my métier in mountaineering. The sport fulfilled me on several levels. I loved its simplicity and how it took me completely outside the boundaries of my day-to-day existence. It remained my refuge from the dull ache of depression, which still isolated me back in Dallas, but was becoming more manageable now that I knew how to pry myself loose from it from time to time.

  It was also a delight to discover that my combination of physical and mental toughness could carry me where some younger, stronger and more physically talented climbers weren’t able to go. I didn’t measure myself against them. As I said, mountaineering is not a competitive sport.

  I didn’t feel superior, either. I was pleased to be welcome in their company, and to acquit myself well when challenges arose. It was a tremendous ego boost for someone who’d spent so much time focused on his limitations to go where only a select handful of very tough and determined athletes had been.

  There was also the sheer thrill of facing down my demons.

  I usually didn’t get scared in the mountains unless I was belayed. I remember one time dangling from these little gadgets crammed into the rock face, about three hundred feet up, with birds flying below me.

  Have I entirely lost my mind? I wondered.

  On a Colorado climb with Ken Zornes and Steve Young, we were on a pretty steep face when lightning, high wind and freezing rain suddenly came up. We were wearing T-shirts and shorts, standing on a perhaps half-inch-wide crack.

  Steve decided it was too dangerous to continue on up, so a rappel down an unfamiliar face was going to be our exit route. The belay was a thumblet of rock, over which Young put a quarter inch of webbing, attached himself and rappelled away. Ken was next, leaving me alone up there in that storm, hugging the rock and wondering how my obituary was going to look. I comforted myself that there are worse ways to check out. It was better than being run down while riding a moped.

  This may have been the single most terrifying moment in my life, confronting my ultimate fear. I pushed off—making sure not to push too far lest the webbing pull free of the thumblet—and quickly descended to where Steve and Ken were hanging in free space, bolted to the side of the hill.

  I didn’t let on how terrified I was, and managed to control a bad case of the shakes until later, when no one was watching. I now understand that I wanted that terror. At the time I would have denied it. It was a jolt, no question. You can really get juiced by something that frightening.

  Peach:

  In the spring of 1991, Beck and I and the children flew to Boston to revisit our first home. Beck had a meeting to attend as well. Afterward, we put Meg and Beck on the plane for Dallas, and then went back to our hotel. Beck said he needed to talk to me.

  “I’m suicidal,” he disclosed. “And the problem is our marriage. I’m real unhappy and it is your fault.”

  At this stage of our relationship, I was still willing to believe that. There wasn’t a night for five years that I had not cried about it, but I didn’t blame him. I was sure I was at fault for whatever was wrong. I asked him if he’d explain it to me.

  “You’re not supportive of me,” he said. “You’re not supportive of my hobbies. I think you love me, but I don’t think you like me.”

  That last sentence gave me pause. I wondered if it might be true.

  I did tell her I was so damned depressed that I thought I was going to do myself in. But I don’t think I dumped my depression on her so much as I laid it open to her, revealed what was very, very difficult for me to reveal.

  I didn’t see her problems with me as any kind of failure on her part. And I don’t recall ever feeling that the cause of my depression was our relationship. However, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if that is what she took away from that conversat
ion.

  I’d been hiding the fact I was miserable for a long time. But it was not my intention to say, “What’s wrong with us is you.” Or, “What’s wrong with me is you.”

  Peach:

  I think he was looking for a way to ditch all of us.

  That’s not true!

  Peach:

  You said you were depressed, and that it was my fault.

  I was suicidal. Peach told me that I needed help. Even though this was the last thing I would do on my own, I made an effort. I knew the wife of a colleague at the hospital was a psychiatrist, and I thought I could get some idea from her of who to talk to. She gave me a guy’s name.

  Peach:

  This psychologist was terrified. Beck told him he was suicidal, and that two members of his family, a cousin and a great-uncle, had committed suicide, although he tried to justify it.

  I wasn’t trying to justify anything. My cousin was a juvenile diabetic. I think my great-uncle was concerned about becoming a burden to somebody. He didn’t think he was going to be able to take care of himself. So he gave his gun to my father to clean, then took it back and shot himself. I did tell this psychologist that I always thought I’d die by my own hand.

  Peach:

  Beck came back from seeing him and told me I had to go see him, too, because everything wrong was related to our marriage. So I went, and the guy seemed absolutely sure that Beck was going to kill himself. He said we had to get rid of all the guns in the house.