Seven Summits

by Dick Bass; Frank Wells; Rick Ridgeway

  Frank was through the Icefall. He dumped his load in front of a tent and felt like giving out a shout.

  Too bad Bass isn't here, he thought. This deserves a Tarzan call.

  Looking in one of the tents he found a radio and managed to get Ershler down at base.

  “Phil, I made it. I’m in camp one. Three hours flat! And I feel great. This may be my greatest day of climbing yet.”

  Frank thought, That should take care of those who wondered whether I could get through the Icefall.

  Frank peeked inside the tents to see if there was a place to spread his bag. Both tents were a mess: dirty pots, stained floors, soiled tea bags, spilled rice; the Sherpas were not good housekeepers. Frank pushed aside some soiled clothing to make room for his sleeping bag and pad, then lay down to read. He only finished one paragraph, though, when he set the book on his chest and considered the aluminum pot next to his head; it was half-full of some kind of brown gruel. Next to it was a spoon with the dried remains of the same concoction, and under the spoon a damp wool sock Frank guessed was an easy month past last washing.

  He smiled, picked up his book and thought, This is probably as far as you can get from Beverly Hills.

  But that wasn't a complaint. All in all, he wouldn't have traded that day for anything, anywhere.

  While Frank was relaxing in camp 1 the first summit team made final preparations to depart the next morning to begin their ascent. They would first climb to camp 3, the next day to camp 4—the South Col—then in the predawn of May 7 begin the final climb to the summit. Our ABC high altitude cameraman David Breashears was planning to accompany the team to the South Col camp and perhaps even a short distance farther.

  While Breashears, at age twenty-seven, was the youngest sahib on the expedition, he was also the most accomplished technical climber. He made his reputation while still a teenager when he showed up one day at the Boulder, Colorado, climbing cliffs while some locals were attempting unsuccessfully to scale what was considered the single most difficult route in the Rockies. The Kloberdanz Roof was a ten-foot wide overhanging ceiling that had then only been climbed once, and only when the climber had made a desperate but lucky lunge at a key hold. Some thought the route would never be repeated.

  “It looks like there is a hold on the edge of the lip you could use,” Breashears said to one of the locals.

  “Then why don't you give it a try, kid.”

  Breashears climbed up the vertical wall to the roof, then hanging upside down like a fly on a ceiling made a series of smooth moves, reaching the key hold without lunging.

  “Who is that kid?” one of the locals asked.

  “Never seen him.”

  So Breashears was given his nickname, the Kloberdanz Kid.

  Breashears was also a very accomplished ice climber, and a highly skilled cameraman. He had been on Everest the year before filming a team attempting the then unscaled East Face. The expedition failed to reach the top, but Breashears later won an Emmy for his efforts.

  While Breashears made last-minute adjustments to his camera, Pilafian and I were at camp 2 busy getting final interviews with the summit team. Roach said he felt confident he was about to make good his resolution after his 1976 failure and “finally get this Everest thing out of my blood.” Nielson too was ready to give it all he had even though without oxygen he knew his chances were reduced. What he didn't tell us, though (and what we wouldn't find out until later), was that for two days he had suffered nausea and dysentery. Still, he decided not to say anything for fear of missing his chance, and incredibly he still intended to try it without oxygen.

  The summit team left camp 2 on schedule and made good time up the lower part of the Lhotse Face. Frank had called earlier that morning saying he was waiting for Dick, who was at that moment en route up from base camp, and if Dick felt up to it, they would continue together to camp 2.

  “That is if Dick is up to a double carry,” Frank said on the radio. “Otherwise we'll spend another night here and see you tomorrow.”

  Although he didn't tell anyone, secretly Frank was hoping Dick wouldn't be up to it. Not that he didn't feel like going to camp 2 himself, but there just had to be a limit to how much Dick could do. Frank had of course long ago accepted the fact that Dick could far outperform him, but still enough was enough.

  Frank was lying on his sleeping bag reading when he heard the call:

  “Aah-eah-eaahhh!”

  He looked at his watch: 9:00 A.M.

  “That s.o.b. made it in two hours,” Frank muttered.

  He looked out the tent door and there was Dick with his wide grin and a full pack that probably weighed a good fifty pounds.

  “Pancho, get your buns out of that tent, boy. We gotta get on up to camp 2. Like John Wayne used to say, ‘We're burnin’ daylight.’ “

  “Dick, you're probably exhausted. We can stay here an extra day so you can rest.”

  Dick was a little puzzled by Frank's uncustomary concern for his welfare. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness, Frank, but I feel like I’ve got a tiger in my tank. Let's get moving.”

  Frank knew he was in a no-win position but he decided it would even be worse if he didn't at least carry a full load up to camp 2. He stuffed his backpack with all his personal belongings—forty pounds tops—and soon he and Dick were off into the Western Cwm.

  They could see how a quarter mile ahead the huge walls of the valley bottlenecked, and the glacier floor, compressed through the narrow, began to split into transverse crevasses. Soon they were zigzagging, paralleling one crevasse until they came to a natural snow bridge, then reversing direction to the next crossing. Then they came to a wide chasm with no natural bridge, and here the lead climbers had rigged a ladder span. There were three sections bolted together—24 feet spanning a split in the ice maybe 200 feet deep —and even though there was a handline for balance that supposedly doubled as a safety rope, it was easy to figure that if you slipped and fell, the rope probably wouldn't stay secured with so much weight on it. Even if it held, you'd be hanging over the chasm like laundry on a line strung between high-rise buildings.

  The Sherpas who had left camp 1 with Dick and Frank walked across first with hardly a change in stride. Dick went next. He had a length of nylon webbing tied to his harness with a carabiner snap link at its end which he clipped into the safety line. Then he stepped carefully, reminding himself to place his crampon spikes properly so they straddled the ladder rungs and he wouldn't skate off into space.

  He moved his next foot, and looked over: about 200 feet down the blue-white ice walls constricted to a black bottomless pit. He made another combination of steps and felt the ladder start to sway and decided he had better keep moving.

  “You're halfway,” Frank called, trying to sound encouraging despite his growing anxiety about his own attempt.

  “This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have a pack on,” Dick called back.

  Frank felt his own pack suddenly gain twenty pounds. Dick made another two steps and was on the other side.

  “Okay, Pancho, your turn.”

  Frank timidly tested the first rung with his boot. He stepped back, studied the ladder for a moment, then said “This isn't going to look too dignified, but what the hell.” He then got down on all fours and crawled across.

  “You've just got to know how to do these things,” Frank said with a sly grin when he reached the other side.

  They crossed two more big ladder sections and several smaller ones to gain the top of the bottleneck. The morning had been cool, but now they were in direct sun. “Let's take a break,” Frank said. The Sherpas, always courteous, agreed to stop. One of them pointed up the Cwm to a spot on the Lhotse Face and said, “First team maybe two hours from South Col.” Frank and Dick studied the huge ice slope and finally spotted five dots moving in a line.

  “Gives you perspective on the size of this mountain,” Dick said.

  “And an idea how far we have to go,” Frank added, removing his pack and
setting it in the snow to use it as a seat. Both of them shed their nylon shell parkas. Dick smeared sunblock on his arms and face, and passed the lotion to Frank. They were both perspiring.

  Dick got out his water bottle to take a drink, and Frank noticed it was doctored with lemonade mix.

  “Dick, how about a packet of lemonade mix for your buddy here?”

  “Frank, I swear, all you think I am is a walking grocery shelf where you can get whatever you want, whenever you want.”

  “I forgot to bring any, Dick.”

  Shaking his head, Dick rummaged in his pack until he found his standby packet. Frank poured it in his bottle. They both sat quietly for a few minutes, feeling the lethargy seep in.

  “You sure get lazy fast when you stop moving. Must be the altitude combined with the heat,” Frank mused.

  “We wait here any longer, we'll never be able to get up.”

  Dick groaned as he hefted his pack to his shoulders; it was turning into a long day since he had left from base camp early that morning, and he was feeling each of those fifty pounds on his back. Frank was feeling his pack too, and with ski poles as walking sticks and a rope between them in case one should fall in a hidden crevasse they slowly followed the tracks in the snow toward the back of the Western Cwm.

  Now they could see for the first time the huge southwest face of Everest. There were evaporation clouds beginning to form over the summit, but they were too small to shield the sun and in the direct rays sweat dropped from their foreheads. They stripped to their long johns and would have removed these except they didn't dare risk baring skin to the intense ultraviolet rays at high altitude. They were now close to 21,000 feet.

  Their pace slowed.

  Small bamboo wands with orange tags marked the trail every 200-odd feet, and Frank played a game of picking a wand as a goal and convincing himself he could keep going until he reached it. When he got to it he would look for the next.

  Dick, too, was reaching into his bag of tricks and he pulled out his favorite—Kipling's poem “If”—and started through the litany that worked so well to get his mind off his aching body.

  “Let's take another break,” Frank said.

  They dropped their packs and pulled out their water bottles; both had only a few sips left. They felt like the caricature of the ragged man crawling through the desert dying of thirst, only this was a desert of ice. The Sherpas, stopped a few yards ahead, were pointing up the valley.

  “Camp two tents, sahib.”

  “Where?”

  “On rocks at end of snow.”

  “I still don't see them. Do you, Dick? Wait a minute. You mean those tiny colored dots way up there?”

  “Lord have mercy,” Dick said.

  Frank looked back over to the Lhotse Face to see how the other dots were doing. The guys were closer to the South Col, and would be there in an hour or less.

  “They're really small,” Frank marveled, pointing to the Lhotse Face.

  Again Frank considered how tiny the dots of the climbers were and how huge the mountain was.

  He thought, If I’m having this much trouble down here, how can I ever make it that far? Maybe with oxygen …

  But Frank knew oxygen wasn't a magic elixir; at best it would make an apparent change in the altitude of a few thousand feet. No, there was no getting around it: if he was slow down here, he would be slow up there. Now he worried that he might hold up Dick if they were to go on the same summit team.

  Frank thought, Maybe I should see if I could set up another team separate from Dick. That way Dick and his Sherpas could be the third summit team, and I could follow as a fourth team with my own group of Sherpas. And I wouldn't hold him back.

  Frank made a mental note to talk about it with Ershler. But before he could talk to anybody he needed to get to camp.

  “Guess we'd better keep moving,” he said.

  A half-hour later they stopped again and finished their water. It was 2:00, and it felt as though the sun was at maximum strength. If someone had told them in advance they would suffer possible heat prostration at 21,000 feet on Everest they would have laughed. The Sherpas had now gone ahead to dump their loads and get back to camp 1.

  Dick thought, Man alive, this is about as tired as I’ve ever been on a climb.

  It was as though he had been drugged, as though some kind of unnatural lethargy had polluted his body so that it was nearly impossible to take another step.

  Dick knew he had to mine deep into his inner resources. He recited a few more lines from “If,” but it was no good. His mind drifted, and he felt his strength start to go. He could see the tents ahead—they weren't really that far—and then he imagined he could see something else, actually not something but someone, right in front of him. He smiled: it was Marty Hoey.

  This was a game Dick had learned recently, a game his mind tended to play whenever he really needed to find inner strength, whenever he really needed to get his mind off his aching body. It had happened a few months before on Aconcagua, just below the summit. He had decided it must have been a combination of fatigue and lack of oxygen, but as he neared the top and had to find the strength to keep going Marty had appeared right in front of him, and he just started following her, just like he used to when she was alive. She could goad him by sheer example into pushing himself to the top of anything.

  And now that he needed her again, there she was. Dick just made one step after another, following in her bootmarks, keeping her step-step-step pace. She glanced back at him and smiled. Dick felt good, almost good enough to keep going indefinitely.

  “Thought you two might appreciate someone to carry your packs the last hundred yards.”

  Startled, Dick looked up. It was Gary Neptune and Jim States, coming to give them a hand into camp.

  “Why howdy to you all, and thanks a million,” Dick said, shaking their hands.

  Dick took off his pack and handed it to Neptune, and Frank gave his to States. In a few minutes they were on the edge of camp 2. And there was that Sherpa cookboy, once again carrying that tray with two cups of steaming tea, and even though Frank and Dick were still a little overheated they accepted the cup with a smile and a warm regard for the graciousness of this young kid.

  9

  EVEREST: LIVE FROM THE TOP

  Asharp crack from somewhere deep in the ice brought me quickly awake. My tent shuddered, and with ear close to the ice I heard the rifle report sound down the deep crevasses, like a hammer blow on a long steel beam, reminding me I was pitched on living ice that was growing, expanding, sometimes cracking.

  Then it was quiet. I burrowed in my bag, my eyes open. I could see with gray vagueness the gear around me—boots, climbing equipment, cassette recorder, journal, notebook. I realized it must be nearing dawn. I looked at my watch: 5:30 A.M., May 7.

  I thought, Today's the big day. The summit team should already be on their way, weather permitting.

  I unzipped the tent door and peeked out. No wind, clear sky, perfect day for climbing Everest. I found the walkie-talkie, turned it on and placed it in my bag between my legs to warm the batteries. It was probably too early for a call but the previous evening I had told Breashears I would monitor beginning at dawn. At that time Breashears had reported everyone at camp 4, the South Col, was getting to bed early, confident of a predawn start. He added that he was planning to climb with the team a short way above the Col to test the microwave and give final instructions before handing the camera gear off to the others as they continued, we hoped, to the summit.

  I dozed again until I heard the Sherpa cookboy outside my tent. “Good morning, sahib. Would you like tea?” I opened the flap and handed out my metal cup and he filled it with steaming milk tea. I wrapped my fingers around the warm cup wondering what those guys up there would give this moment for such luxury.

  I dressed and walked to the mess tent. Ershler was there, and Frank came a moment later. “Still no word,” I said.

  “Let's try to call them,” Ershler s
uggested. I tried the walkie-talkie again but had no luck.

  “They're busy climbing,” Ershler said. “I’m sure they'll call when they take a rest break.”

  Now Dick and the others arrived, and we waited. By 9:00 clouds rose in scattered puffs around the Lhotse Face, and we crossed our fingers the weather would hold long enough for them to reach the top and get back down. About 9:30 the radio crackled.

  “Breashears calling camp two. Does anybody copy?”

  “Dave, this is camp two. Where are you?”

  “About 27,000,” Breashears said, breathing hard.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Right here. We're taking a break. Everything's fine. We're making good progress. It's a nice day although some clouds are starting to build below. I’ve got the microwave transmitter and camera.”

  “Are you going higher?”

  “I hope all the way. The camera's too heavy for Gerry and Peter, and Larry is going without oxygen. So the Sherpa and I are lugging it up. We've got to go now. I’ll call from our next rest, and try to send some pictures.”

  A half hour later Larry Nielson called down, and I handed the walkie-talkie to Ershler.

  “How you doing, Larry?”

  “A little slow, but still keeping up. We're at a rest break, maybe 27,400. Dave's got his camera out to try this microwave thing. I need to reach the engineers at Everest View. Hello Everest View. Anybody copy?”

  “Got you loud and clear.” It was the voice of the engineer at the receiving dish twenty miles away.