The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

  The next radio communication from Hall came at 4:43 A.M. on May 11. Not surprisingly, his speech was slurred and he sounded disorientated and dazed after what must have been the most horrific night of his life.

  He told Base Camp that he was “too clumsy to move” and reported that Andy Harris had been with him through part of the storm. He was unsure what had happened to Harris, and when asked about Doug Hansen he replied, “Doug is gone.”

  Thirty minutes later, by patching their Base Camp radio set to a satellite telephone line, the Adventure Consultants’ support team enabled Jan Arnold, Hall’s wife, to talk to her husband from New Zealand. Arnold, who was seven months pregnant with their first child, had been to the summit with Hall in 1993, and knew, as any Everest summiteer would, precisely how desperate his situation was. “My heart really sank when I heard his voice,” she later recalled. “He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I’d been up there; I knew what it could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, ‘You might as well be on the moon.’ ”

  With daylight to assist him, and with the worst of the storm now blown away, Hall now began to try and clear his oxygen mask of ice. He had two full oxygen cylinders with him but they were useless unless he could free his regulator and mask. Shivering violently, and with his hands almost certainly already frostbitten, his task must have been unbearably frustrating and painful.

  But by 9:00 A.M., Hall did manage to free the obstruction in his breathing equipment. He plugged into the oxygen for the first time since the previous afternoon and this news brought a burst of optimism to those who waited on tenterhooks below.

  The radio calls continued, as members of Hall’s team and fellow climbers tried to bully him into moving down the mountain toward Camp Four. Helen Wilton, Adventure Consultants’ Base Camp manager, told him, “You think about that little baby of yours. You’re going to see its face in a couple of months, so keep on going.”

  Ed Viesturs, a member of the IMAX team and a close friend of Hall’s, spoke to him several times as the day wore on. “Rob, you gotta get moving. Put that pack on, get the oxygen going, get down the hill.”

  Viesturs used humor to try and get a response out of Hall: “We’re going to get down, and we’ll go to Thailand, and I’ll get to see you in your swimsuit with your skinny legs.” And, “You’re lucky, Rob, your kid’s going to be better-looking than you.”

  Hall responded to the chiding, as Viesturs recalls. “He laughed. He said, ‘Geez, thanks for that.’ ”

  By ten o’clock that morning, five Sherpas carrying extra oxygen and flasks of hot tea had set out from Camp Four in a last-ditch attempt to rescue Hall, Fischer, and Makalu Gau. Their actions were heroic to say the least, particularly as they were still physically exhausted from the rigors of the previous day.

  They found Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau on a ledge about 400 vertical meters (1,312 feet) above the Col. Fischer was alive, just, but he did not respond to the Sherpas and they decided he was too close to death to be rescued. The Taiwanese climber was in slightly better shape and the Sherpas were able to rouse him to a semiconscious state after giving him tea and oxygen. Cradled between three of the Sherpas, Gau was able to stagger down to Camp Four.

  Meanwhile Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri bravely continued up toward Hall, determined to reach him if they possibly could. Risking their own lives, they fought on until high winds defeated them approximately 300 meters (984 feet) below Rob Hall’s position. The Sherpas could do no more—no human being could. It was 3:00 P.M., and the New Zealander now had just hours to live.

  Just before nightfall, at 6:20 P.M., Hall made his last radio contact with the world. Fittingly, the final words he spoke were to his wife.

  “Hi, my sweetheart. I hope you’re tucked up in a nice warm bed. How are you doing?”

  “I can’t tell you how much I’m thinking about you,” Jan Arnold replied. “You sound so much better than I expected. Are you warm, my darling?”

  “In the context of the altitude, the setting, I’m reasonably comfortable,” Hall told her.

  “How are your feet?”

  “I haven’t taken me boots off to check, but I think I may have a bit of frostbite.…”

  “I’m looking forward to making you completely better when you come home, I just know you’re going to be rescued. Don’t feel that you’re alone. I’m sending all my positive energy your way!”

  Hall’s last words to his wife were unbearably poignant, “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.”

  Hall did not speak on the radio again and within a few hours he was dead.

  At Camp Four on the afternoon of May 11, the scene was not unlike the aftermath of a battle. The surviving climbers were in a state of shock, their tents ripped and half destroyed, everyone trying to come to terms with the catastrophe that had come out of the blue. In the normal run of events, the climbers would have descended that day following their summit attempt. As it was, they did not have the strength. Breathing oxygen from the IMAX tents (given without hesitation by IMAX leader David Breashears even though it threatened the success of his own multimillion-dollar expedition), they lay in the ever-strengthening wind in a state of mental and physical paralysis.

  Then, at about 4:30 P.M., as one piece of bad news seemed to follow another, a single, astonishing ray of hope came out of the blue.

  Beck Weathers rose from the dead.

  The Texan pathologist had been unconscious and without shelter for more than fifteen hours after passing out during the storm of the previous night. Like Yasuko Namba, who lay nearby, he had been considered beyond help and left to die. Weathers later recalled, “I’d lost my right glove. My face was freezing. My hands were freezing. I felt myself growing really numb and then it got really hard to stay focused, and finally I just sort of slid off into oblivion.”

  Having entered that oblivion, and with his body core frozen to within the tiniest possible margin of the point at which death would be inevitable, Weathers recalls nothing whatsoever of the long hours that followed as his body was battered by the freezing hurricane-force winds.

  Then, incredibly, some primeval survival instinct fired up a spark of life in the deep-frozen core of Beck Weathers’s brain. Breaking the crust of ice crystals that coated his face, he was able to open his eyes for the first time. What he saw shocked him into consciousness.

  “Initially I thought I was in a dream,” Weathers told his fellow team member Jon Krakauer. “When I came to, I thought I was lying in bed. I didn’t feel cold or uncomfortable. I sort of rolled onto my side, got my eyes open, and there was my right hand staring me in the face. Then I saw how badly frozen it was, and that helped bring me round to reality. Finally I woke up enough to recognize I was in deep shit and the cavalry wasn’t coming so I better do something about it myself.”

  In fact the “cavalry” had already been there, and had pronounced him as good as dead. Two rescue attempts had reached Weathers where he lay and both had decided that to try and drag him into camp would merely prolong the inevitable.

  Now, squinting half-blind into the wind, Weathers made a guess where the tents of Camp Four would be and stumbled toward them. With his right arm frozen out in front of him, and his face still largely covered with ice, he made a gruesome sight as he reached the tents, reminding the awestruck climbers at the camp of a “mummy in a low-budget horror film.”

  But this was no cheap piece of fiction. Weathers was suffering from the extreme ravages of frostbite and exposure, and in the opinion of Stuart Hutchison, the doctor that examined him, “None of us thought Beck was going to survive the night. I could barely detect his carotid pulse, which is the last pulse you lose before you die. He was critically ill. And even if he did live until morning, I couldn’t imagine how we were going to get him down.”

  To the utter astonishment
of his fellow climbers Beck Weathers did survive the night. And not only that. Like Makalu Gau, he recovered sufficiently to stand on his own two feet the next morning. He had to, it was his only hope of survival.

  On Sunday, May 12, the descent began. Meter by meter, Makalu Gau and Beck Weathers were supported off the South Col, down the Geneva Spur, and right down the Lhotse Face to Camp Two. It was a rescue of epic proportions, given the immensity of the terrain and the appalling physical condition of the injured climbers. In this, as in many other aspects of the story, Weathers and Gau were lucky. Two waiting teams of extremely strong climbers, the IMAX team of David Breashears and the Alpine Ascents team of Todd Burleson, climbed up to assist the exhausted Sherpas with their task.

  Meanwhile, at Base Camp, the final piece of the rescue was being put into place. Guy Cotter, an Adventure Consultants guide who had come across from nearby Ama Dablam to help coordinate moves to fight the crisis, had managed to persuade the Nepalese army to fly a helicopter up from Kathmandu to airlift Weathers and Gau to a hospital.

  Helicopter evacuations from Base Camp are not unusual, but Weathers and Gau were in too ravaged a state to be brought back through the maze of crevasses of the Khumbu Icefall. If it happened at all, the rescue would have to happen in the Western Cwm, at an altitude that would endanger the pilot and his machine.

  The pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri, flew his French-made B2 Squirrel up the icefall and circled above the waiting climbers at just a shade under 20,000 feet. To say that he was pushing the operational envelope of his aircraft would be putting it mildly. The last helicopter to fly into the Cwm had crashed on the glacier below.

  The rescuers had created a giant red cross in the snow, etched into the white surface by dribbling Kool-Aid drink out of a bottle. The Nepali pilot hovered above it and Makalu Gau was loaded on board. Half an hour later the courageous pilot returned for Beck Weathers.

  Lieutenant Colonel Madan’s action was the last in a long line of heroic actions that in combination saved the lives of the American and Taiwanese climbers. A couple of hours later the two men were being treated in a Kathmandu hospital, and they were then evacuated to their home countries.

  On the northern side of the mountain the storm had also taken its toll, but the central story that had emerged was not at all like those from the southern side, where heroism and selfless action had saved lives that would otherwise have been lost.

  In the north, a climbing team in desperate need of help after failing to return to their top camp were passed by a team whose priorities lay with their own summit bid and not with an attempt at rescue.

  The climbers in peril were the three Indians of the Indo-Tibetan border police team who had failed to return to Camp Six at 8,300 meters (27,230 feet) after their announced summit success of the afternoon of May 10.

  Like most of the summiteers on the southern side, the three Indians on the Northeast Ridge were still alive as day broke on May 11. Frostbitten, their oxygen finished, they were in desperate need of fluids and oxygen if they were to stand any chance of survival. Down at Camp Three, their distraught leader, Mohindor Singh, kept a vigil at the radio in the tent next to ours, hoping against hope for a miracle. The Indian leader knew, as we all did, that the chances of surviving a second night out would be negligible for the three climbers, but if they could somehow make it back to Camp Six, then at least there would be a fighting chance of saving one life and perhaps more.

  The conditions were too severe to allow a rescue party from the Indian team to go up, and in any case their arrival would have been too late; the distances involved on the northern side are greater than those on the southern. To get a rescue team from where we were at Camp Three to Camp Six would take a minimum of two days, or even three if the winds remained strong.

  As luck would have it, a team of five strong climbers—two Japanese and three Sherpas—were about to stumble upon the Indians. They were equipped with oxygen, fluid, and food—all the ingredients for a rescue. The Japanese climbers were twenty-one-year-old Eisuke Shigekawa and thirty-six-year-old Hiroshi Hanada from the Japanese-Fukuoka Everest expedition.

  The Japanese team had made no secret of their intention to summit on May 11. The complicated pyramid of logistics involved in any summit attempt means that it actually makes good sense to work backward from a given summit day when calculating the supplies of oxygen, gas, and food that have to be portaged on a tight schedule to the higher camps. Most Everest expeditions work this way—but most have the flexible attitude that, although everything should be ready for a given summit day, other factors will probably cause delays.

  Ironically, our own original proposed summit day had been May 10, but the bad weather in the days prior to that date had delayed our departure. The Japanese, more committed than most to their penciled in “ideal” date of May 11, seemed hell-bent on summitting that day almost regardless of what the weather was going to do.

  Having sat out the storm at Camp Six (which in itself must have been a terrifying experience) on the exposed North Face, the Japanese team, apparently ignoring the fact that the weather was still obviously very dangerously unstable, left the 8,300-meter-high (27,230-foot-high) base on schedule not long after midnight on May 11.

  By 8:00 A.M. the five climbers had climbed up the steep cliffs of the Yellow Band and reached the First Step—a twenty-meter-high (sixty-five-foot-high) cliff that is the first of the major obstacles on the Northeast Ridge. Here, to their surprise, the Japanese team came across one of the Indian climbers, who was badly frostbitten and clearly suffering from the ravages of acute mountain sickness after a night out without oxygen. No communication passed between the Japanese team and the stricken Indian. According to the lead climbing Sherpa, who later spoke to Richard Cowper, the Financial Times journalist with our expedition, about the incident, the Indian just “made a big noise.”

  The Japanese team hardly paused. Leaving the Indian lying in the snow, they continued their climb toward the summit. Later, at the top of the Second Step, the Fukuoka team found the other two Indians, also horrifically frostbitten and close to death.

  Again they continued. Again, as the lead Sherpa Kami later confirmed to Richard Cowper in an interview, they made no attempt to assist the Indians but carried on into the worsening wind toward the summit. The fact that they made it at all speaks for just how determined the Japanese team was to reach the top on such a marginal day, as the rescuers on the southern side had found as they attempted (and failed) to reach Rob Hall on the South Summit. In a howling gale, the Japanese summitted just before midday and began their descent, which would once more take them past the Indian climbers.

  Down at Advance Base Camp, all was confusion. The Indian team were frantic for news of their missing team members and whether or not any rescue attempt was to take place. At 4:00 P.M. on May 11, just after Sundeep, Roger, Tore, and Simon arrived at the camp, Indian leader Mohindor Singh asked Sundeep to accompany him as translator to the Japanese leader’s tent where vital radio communications were being made.

  “Singh was desperate to get news of his climbers,” Sundeep recalls, “and he knew there was a chance that at least one might be rescued by the Japanese climbers as they descended.”

  The Japanese leader radioed up to Camp Six where the first of the returning summiteers arrived sometime between 5:00 and 5:30 P.M. Due to some confusion, perhaps as a result of the fact that information was being exchanged via radio link with poor reception and that the conversation was a three-way one in Japanese, English, and Hindi, the hope of rescue was not at this stage dashed.

  “The radio call definitely gave myself and Singh the impression that one of the Indian climbers was being helped down—that he would arrive at Camp Six within the next couple of hours,” Sundeep remembers. “In a way, that was the big mistake. If they had told Singh from the start that no rescue was possible, then the situation would have been different. As it was, the first Japanese climber back to Six—and then the second too
—both gave the impression a rescue was under way.”

  But as the remainder of the five-strong Japanese team reached Camp Six, and still with no sign of any of the Indian team arriving, the penny finally dropped.

  “By about 8:30 P.M., when it was dark,” Sundeep continued, “Singh and myself finally realized the truth. There had been no rescue. In fact there had been no rescue attempt at all. That was when we realized that all three climbers would certainly be lost.”

  Singh returned to his camp to give the dreadful news to his heart-broken team. Sundeep reported back to us in the mess tent.

  “That’s it,” he told us. “There’s no chance of any rescue now. We have to assume the Indians are dead.”

  The meal that night in the frozen tent was one of unparalleled misery. Most of us sat, wrapped in our own morose thoughts, pushing forkfuls of oily noodles around on a dirty plate and mulling over the fate of the Indian climbers.

  The next day, incensed by the way in which the Japanese had apparently ignored his stricken climbers, Singh called a meeting of all the other expedition leaders (but not the Japanese leader, Koji Yada) in his tent on the morning of May 12. The session was tape-recorded by the Indian team. He ran through the events of the previous two days and informed the gathering that he wanted to issue a joint statement, to be agreed to by all present, condemning the Japanese for their failure to try a rescue.

  Having listened to the account, the other leaders (who included some extremely experienced Himalayan climbers) did not agree with Singh’s proposal. Some had doubts that the Indian climbers could have been rescued at all, others recalled similar incidents from their own climbing careers where they had had to leave living climbers behind who were beyond saving.

  Our own expedition leader, Simon Lowe, was one of those present: