The Lost Explorer

by Anker, Conrad

  A week later, tragedy struck the north side of Everest. An Australian, Michael Rheinberger, set out for the top with the New Zealander Mark Whetu. Rheinberger was fifty-three years old and had tried Everest seven times before without making it; this time he was determined to summit. He and Whetu finally summitted at 7:18P.M. They had to bivouac in the open just twenty yards below the summit. Amazingly, they survived the night, but the next day, after eleven hours of all-out effort, they’d only gotten down to the Second Step. By now Rheinberger was blind, delirious, and unable to walk. The winds were so strong that potential rescuers sent up from Camp VI had to turn back at the First Step. Finally Whetu had to abandon his friend just to save his own life. It was a close call even so, and he suffered severe frostbite. Rheinberger got his summit, but it cost him his life.

  There might be those who would criticize Dave Hahn for pushing on in ’94 and reaching the summit so late. Dave knows the value of turning back when he needs to. On his other two previous Everest expeditions, he turned around both times at 28,000 feet.

  After deciding to go down, Tap and Jake waited for a while at the Mushroom Rock to watch us try to climb the Second Step. As I headed off again, I assumed the Sherpas were coming. But at that moment, Ang Pasang decided to drop out too. He stayed with Tap and Jake and then descended with them. He didn’t tell me he was turning back, so I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to him.

  The continuation of the traverse, between the Mushroom Rock and the Second Step, is at least as tricky as the first half. The loose rock alternates with deep pockets where the snow ranges from knee- to even waist-deep. On some of those pockets, there was no fixed rope in place. They were quite spooky. You had to be alert: if the snow started sliding, it could take you off the hill and send you flying down to the Rongbuk. As I led this traverse, I thought often about Mallory and Irvine crossing the same terrain in 1924.

  I got to the base of the Second Step and waited for Dave and Dawa. I was feeling strong enough that day that even breaking trail, I’d get ten, fifteen, twenty, or more minutes ahead of the others. Now Dawa came up, sort of shaking his head. I looked at him, and he said, “I’m going to go down.” I said, “I understand. No problem.” He gave me the last fixed rope, which I cached there to use on the descent. I wasn’t worried about Dawa traversing back to the First Step by himself. The experienced Sherpas are very surefooted on that sort of terrain. I knew he’d catch up to Jake, Tap, and Ang Pasang before too long.

  So it was down to Dave and me. We turned to face the Second Step. It was about 10:30 in the morning. We weren’t going super-fast, but the pace seemed all right, and the weather looked good.

  THE SECOND STEP is an unlikely barrier, ninety feet high, on what would otherwise be a moderate ridge. The bottom section is angular and blocky; the best route up it surmounts a series of high steps and mantles. In the middle of the Step, a snow triangle leans against the cliff. Above that, a fifteen-foot crack in a large corner, slightly overhanging, forms the crux of the climb. It was here that the Chinese in 1975 affixed their ladder. Ten feet of less steep rock above the ladder complete the cliff.

  As Dave joined me at the bottom of the Second Step, which was in shade, he said, “Darn it, the video camera’s fogging up.” We’d have to pop open the cassette and dry it out in the sun, so I suggested he ascend the fixed ropes to the base of the ladder, where he could get back into the sunlight, then work on the camera.

  Dave jugged up the rope, got to the top of the snow triangle, and clipped in to the base of the ladder. Then I rock-climbed the first forty-five feet, using my ascender on the fixed rope to catch me should I slip. The climbing was moderately hard, but not extreme. By the time I got up to the ladder, Dave got the camera working intermittently.

  At this point I took off my pack with the oxygen apparatus. I’d decided to try the free-climb without oxygen, mainly because the rig was so cumbersome, the mask protruding so that I couldn’t properly see my feet with it on. I pulled a 112-foot-long line out of my pack, a good climbing rope nine millimeters in diameter, and tied in to the rope. Dave would belay me with that. He wanted to shoot video while belaying, but I needed a good, secure belay here, and the video would have to take second priority. You can’t both shoot well and belay safely.

  I had a small rack of gear just for this pitch—four cams of different sizes and six Stoppers, devices climbers place in cracks to shorten a potential fall. I got my rack organized, then had a good look at the crux.

  To understand the pivotal importance of the twenty-five feet of rock I was now facing, one has to consider the strange, murky history of the Second Step. The 1924 party had looked hard at that bump on the skyline from far below. On June 4, Teddy Norton had traversed through the Yellow Band well below the crest of the ridge, as he headed for the Great Couloir, explicitly to avoid the Step. But Mallory had believed all along in an attack on the crest of the ridge—that was his style of climbing. And in his famous sighting, Noel Odell had initially believed that it was the Second Step he saw the two tiny figures surmount in only five minutes.

  With the closure of the north side of Everest to foreigners after 1938, no one again came anywhere near the Second Step until 1960. That year, a huge Chinese expedition—214 Chinese and Tibetan climbers, none of whom, however, had more than five years’ experience in the mountains—assaulted Everest from the north. The stories that filtered back to the West from this mass assault puzzled nearly everybody. The main account available in English appeared in a propaganda magazine called China Reconstructs. It reads more like a homiletic Maoist tract than a mountaineering narrative. According to that article, an initial pair of would-be summiteers flailed away at the Step for a long afternoon and into the night, climbing all but the last “three meters,” before enduring a grim bivouac in a crevice, then descending the next day. Three weeks later, another trio came to grips with the Step. One man made four all-out attempts to solve the crux, falling off exhausted each time. Finally another climber, Chu Yin-hua, took off his gloves and boots, used a shoulder stand, and had a go at the cliff in stocking feet. The partner who hoisted him up “trembled all over, short of breath, but he clenched his teeth and steadily stood up, with much heroic effort.” Topping the cliff after a three-hour struggle, Chu brought his comrades up on a tight rope.

  Three men then supposedly continued to the summit, arriving at 4:20 A.M. Because it was dark, they took no pictures above the Second Step. The summitteers claimed they left a plaster bust of Mao on top, but it has never been found. For his heroic effort, Chu later lost his fingers and feet to frostbite.

  A lot of Western climbers felt then, and many still feel that this Chinese ascent was a hoax. After summarizing the China Reconstructs account in the American Alpine Journal, editor H. Adams Carter, who was an absolute stickler for accuracy, dryly editorialized, “The details are such that mountaineers in nearly all parts of the climbing world have received the news with considerable skepticism.”

  The next alleged ascent of the north ridge, also by Chinese, came in 1975, during the expedition on which Wang Hongbao found his “old English dead.” From their comrades in 1960, these climbers learned all about the difficulty of the Second Step. Having ferried all kinds of gear up to their Camp VII at the Mushroom Rock, the team hauled their ladder up to the crux, tied it to pitons they pounded into cracks in the rock, then climbed the ladder. All subsequent ascents of the north ridge have used the ladder and/or the fixed ropes now strung in place on the Step.

  Mallory and Irvine, of course, had had no ladder. This was why I wanted to free-climb the Second Step, for unless Mallory and Irvine made it, the crux had never been free-climbed. (Even the 1960 shoulder stand, if not a piece of fiction, has to be classified as artificial climbing.)

  In recent years, several climbers who used the ladder wondered whether another crack about ten feet to the right might serve as a possible route. Before I tackled the wall beside the ladder, I sidled out to the right to check out this alternative.
I couldn’t start from the top of the snow triangle, but had to kick steps down the edge of it to get to the crack. The rock was so rotten, none of my cams or Stoppers would have held. If I had come off on this crack, I would have taken a very bad fall. Finally I got to the base of the crack. It was filled with loose, disjointed rock, really dangerous. I just stood there, picking up grapefruit-sized stones in my hands and moving them around. The crack just wasn’t an option.

  This illustrated for me the limitations of all the theoretical approaches to the Mallory and Irvine mystery that have been advanced over the years. Jochen Hemmleb had become fascinated with the Second Step. In previous years, he’d written three lengthy “research papers” about it, posting them on the Internet. One was called “How to Get Up the Second Step—A Topo Guide.” In his latest paper, Hemmleb had gone so far as to rate the crack I was now investigating. “If free-climbed,” he postulated, “the original headwall pitch is probably Grade IV-V (British 4b, USA 5.6).” All this, without his ever having seen Mount Everest! Even on this expedition, Jochen never got higher than a little above the North Col, at 23,000 feet. None of this kept him from being the world’s leading expert on features like the Second Step. In the lower camps, I’d hear him say, “There are many climbers on this expedition, but I am irreplaceable.”

  I decided that the only place to climb the Step was right where the ladder had been tied in. I started to the left of the ladder, where a crack angles up and right. I left my crampons on, because it would have been too much effort to take them off, and I knew it might be icy at the top of the pitch. Besides, I felt comfortable climbing hard rock with crampons on.

  The exposure here was unbelievable—8,000 feet of space down to the Rongbuk Glacier. I knew I was going to have to move fast, because that’s the way to go on hard routes, especially at an altitude as high as 28,230 feet. If you rest and hang on to a hold too long, you just flame out. I started up with an arm bar and a knee jam; then I stepped onto some tiny edges with my right foot. Dave had hoped to film my lead, but as soon as I started climbing, it was all he could do to stay alert and pay out the rope. It was in his interest to pay attention, because once I got above him, if I’d popped off and landed on him with my crampons, we could both have been badly injured.

  It wasn’t until I got about fifteen feet above Dave that I could place my first and only piece of protection. There was a chockstone wedged in the crack, underneath which I placed a perfect hand-sized cam. As soon as I clipped my rope to the cam, I felt better. At this point, I had to step right. Now I had a hand jam with my left hand, my right hand on a sloping hold, my left foot jammed in the crack, and I was only about six inches away from the ladder. The place I needed to put my right foot was between the rungs of the ladder. It was really awkward—the ladder was in the way.

  I reached my foot between the rungs, but at that point I was panting, totally winded. I just had to step on the rung and rest.

  I rested just long enough to unleash a string of swear words and catch my breath. I was mad because by stepping on the rung, I’d compromised my free climb. Then I moved on up. There was one tricky move, and then the cliff sloped back. I led on up to the anchor, which is a coffee-table-sized boulder sitting on a ledge, backed up with several knife-blade pitons pounded into some shallow, fissurelike cracks. All the fixed ropes are tied to this anchor.

  I tied in, gave myself some slack, crept back to the edge of the cliff, and had Dave tie in my pack so I could haul it up. Then Dave climbed the ladder, ascending the fixed ropes.

  I hadn’t free-climbed the Second Step. That achievement still awaits a stronger climber. I had done all but one move, yet I’d failed in what I set out to do. Nonetheless, the effort had given me a good idea of how hard the climb was. At the time, erring on the side of caution, I tentatively graded the pitch at 5.8. Later, when I got back to the States and saw at what level I was climbing in Yosemite and Indian Creek, Utah, I changed my mind. The Second Step is probably a solid 5.10. And that’s a lot harder than anything climbers were doing in Wales, with plimsoll shoes, hemp ropes, no pitons, and a “gentleman’s belay” (with no anchor to the rock), in the early 1920s.

  I got on the radio to Simo. I said right off the bat that I hadn’t free-climbed the Step. I told him I’d been weak, I’d had to step on the ladder at one point.

  I’d done the twenty-five feet quickly, in about five minutes. It was 11:00 A.M. now. We left the climbing rack there, an empty water bottle, a couple of other odds and ends. Before we started on, I asked Dave, “How are you feeling? Are you psyched to go on?” I felt it was important to present him with the option. I said, “Dave, if you want to go down, I understand. I can get to the top from here on my own. I feel comfortable on this terrain.”

  Right away he answered, “Let’s go for the summit.”

  ABOVE THE SECOND STEP, the ridge broadens into a region called the Plateau. The going here is relatively easy; there are only a couple of little rock towers you have to climb over. I was actually getting warm here, so I unzipped the sides of my down suit to ventilate. On the Plateau, we passed near the bodies of two Indian climbers who had died here in 1996, the year of all the deaths chronicled in Into Thin Air. These were the Indians whom members of the Japanese team had ignored, going for the summit themselves rather than trying to save their lives. We went within about thirty yards of them, but I didn’t look at them up close.

  We climbed the Third Step, an enjoyable scramble, much easier than the First or Second. At the top of that, we were at the base of the summit pyramid, only some 500 feet below the top of the mountain. I was so warm I started to take off the top of my down jacket, but all of a sudden a snow squall hit. It began snowing thick, heavy, wet flakes.

  I started traversing up and right across the summit pyramid. The snow underfoot got deeper and deeper, until it was mid-thigh. I’d gotten a bit ahead of Dave here. With my ski stick, I could probe down through the loose snow and hit a hard layer of ice beneath. The slope was about 45 degrees. I kept crossing small, bell-shaped pockets of windslab snow that were particularly likely to avalanche. I started to get really concerned.

  I radioed down, “Dave, this is not good. Do you mind waiting there? We’ve got to load this slope one person at a time.” I went ahead while Dave waited. My intuition, from years of being in the mountains and studying snow pack and snow texture, told me this was really dangerous.

  I got on the radio again, to talk to Simo and Russell Brice at ABC. At one point, Simo said, “You guys just get on up there and ring the bell and get on down.” He was understandably invested in someone from our expedition making the summit. I didn’t feel manipulated, but his words were a bit too gung ho. I kept worrying: This is not safe. Then I’d reflect that the Ukrainians had crossed here without incident; but that was nine days earlier, and the conditions could have been entirely different.

  Russell Brice got on the radio. He’s climbed Everest from the north three times. In a droll voice, he said, “The summit pyramid’s always like that. It’s always a bit spooky. I’ve had to traverse it the way you are each time I’ve been up there.” That was valuable advice for me; that was real information I could use.

  I could see rock ahead, the ridgeline where I knew there’d be hard snow, thanks to its being exposed to the wind. I didn’t come close to turning around here, but it was the one time on the expedition I really had to stick my neck out. I figured, I’ve just got to punch through and hope my karma is good.

  By 1:30, I had reached the rock at the top of the traverse. I sat down to wait for Dave. Then I realized that I was at the exact spot where Rheinberger and Whetu had made their desperate bivouac in 1994. I was only sixty feet below the summit.

  I waited there for forty minutes, on the lee side of the slope, out of the wind. I took my oxygen set off, sat on a rock bench, and tried to dry out my glove liners and fleece hat.

  Simo kept coming on the radio, saying, “What’s up?”

  I said, “I’m having a great time
here, just enjoying the view.”

  “Where’s Dave?”

  “He’s fine. He’s coming up.”

  Each time Simo talked to me, he sounded more anxious. “All right, good job. We’re totally psyched and really hoping you guys can get up there.”

  I had to say, “I’m going to wait for Dave before I go to the summit.” It was a team thing. If it weren’t for Dave, I wouldn’t have been on the expedition.

  At last Dave came into sight. I could see that he was breathing hard, looking out of it. Then suddenly, just as he got up to me, he was ill.

  On Himalayan expeditions, everyone is exposed to strains of unfamiliar bacteria. Your intestinal tract is constantly assaulted. Now Dave was struck with a sudden wave of nausea and diarrhea. He almost got his suit open in time. So right there, sixty feet below the summit, he had to open up his trousers, clean himself up, and seal his suit back up. Maybe it was just a stomach bug, but when you’re severely stressed, one of the first parts of your system to react is your digestive tract. What had happened to Dave was no reflection on his toughness, nor was it personally humiliating. It simply proved that Everest is always a serious mountain if someone as strong as he could be reduced to the thinnest of margins.

  In the Karakoram once, I was struck by a similar violent incontinence midway through a dangerous icefall. To this date, it stands as one of my most unpleasant experiences in climbing. I could empathize with Dave, yet what alarmed me was not so much the diarrhea as the nausea and the depleted look on his face.

  “Dave, do we need to turn around?” I asked.

  He said, “No, no, let’s go to the top.” But his words were very slow. I was thinking, This is really bad. Dave’s not in good shape.

  People get too blasé about Everest, especially people who’ve never been there. All the talk about it being a routine climb, a walk-up. Even experienced veterans can fall into that thinking, like Scott Fischer with his “yellow brick road” in 1996.