Classic Krakauer

by Jon Krakauer

  Although containment dams would probably stop a lahar, says Patrick Pringle, a geologist with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, “the cost of building and maintaining them would be substantial, and I don’t think the public is willing to commit those kinds of funds in this economic climate. It’s hard to galvanize people to do anything until after a disaster has already happened. Mudflows occur so infrequently that people would rather just take their chances. They’d rather spend their tax money on a new baseball stadium. Such dams would also pose environmental problems.”

  In the absence of containment dams and a reliable early-warning program, an obvious way to reduce the risk would be to enact zoning laws that would prevent people from building homes or businesses in the path of documented mudflows. “But most of the land we’re talking about is prime real estate,” laments Don Swanson. “It’s probably unrealistic to think that very much of it will be placed off-limits.”

  Given fiscal and political realities, Swanson, Scott, Pringle, and other experts believe the best course of action for the time being is to learn as much as possible about the hazards posed by the mountain and aggressively share that knowledge with the public. Toward that end, the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior has designated Rainier, along with fourteen other mountains worldwide, a “Decade Volcano”: an unusually dangerous volcano earmarked for intensive study.”

  “We’re trying to come up with hard statistical data,” says Pringle, “actual numbers people can use to get a handle on the risk. We want to give people enough knowledge to make rational decisions concerning their options. The challenge is to get the public’s attention without alarming anybody unnecessarily.”

  “It’s extremely hard to quantify these kinds of risks,” Swanson concedes. “How do you put large but infrequent hazards into any sort of meaningful statistical context? A catastrophic mudflow is not likely to happen on Rainier in our lifetime. But it will happen somewhere down the road, in one or more generations. And when it does, a lot of people will lose everything.”

  PUBLISHED IN SMITHSONIAN, JULY 1996

  Death and Anger on Everest

  For many years, the most lucrative commercial guiding operation on Mount Everest has been a company called Himalayan Experience, or Himex, which is owned by a New Zealand mountaineer named Russell Brice. In the spring of 2012, more than a month into the climbing season, he became increasingly worried about a bulge of glacial ice three hundred yards wide that was frozen tenuously to the side of the Everest’s West Shoulder, hanging like a massive sword of Damocles directly over the main route up the Nepal side of Everest. Brice’s clients (called “members” in the parlance of Himalayan mountaineering), Western guides, and sherpas repeatedly had to climb beneath the threatening ice bulge as they moved up and down the mountain to acclimatize and establish a series of higher camps necessary for their summit assault. One day Brice timed how long it took his head guide, Adrian Ballinger (“who is incredibly fast,” he wrote in the blog post excerpted below) to climb through the most hazardous terrain:

  [I]t took him 22 min[utes] from the beginning to the end of the danger zone. For the Sherpas carrying a heavy load it took 30 min[utes] and most of our members took between 45 min[utes] and one hour to walk underneath this dangerous cliff. In my opinion, this is far too long to be exposed to such a danger and when I see around 50 people moving underneath the cliff at one time, it scares me.

  Adding to Brice’s concern, some of his most experienced sherpas, ordinarily exceedingly stoical men, approached him to say the conditions on the mountain made them fear for their lives. One of them actually broke down in tears as he confessed this. So on May 7, 2012, Brice made an announcement that shocked most of the thousand people camped at the base of Everest: he was pulling all his guides, members, and sherpas off the mountain, packing up their tents and equipment, and heading home. He was widely criticized for this decision in 2012, and not just by clients who were forced to abandon their dreams of climbing the world’s highest mountain without receiving a refund for the 43,000 euros they had paid him in advance. Many of the other expedition leaders also thought Brice was wildly overreacting. The reputation of Himex took a major hit.

  After what happened last Friday, though, it’s hard to argue with Brice’s call. On April 18, shortly before 7:00 A.M. local time, an overhanging wedge of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion broke loose from the same ice bulge that had frightened Brice into leaving Everest in 2012. As it crashed onto the slope below, the ice shattered into truck-size chunks and hurtled toward some fifty climbers laboring slowly upward through the Khumbu Icefall, a jumbled maze of unstable ice towers that looms above the 17,600-foot base camp. The climbers in the line of fire were at approximately 19,000 feet when the avalanche struck. Of the twenty-five men hit by the falling ice, sixteen were killed, all of them Nepalis working for guided climbing teams. Three of the bodies were buried beneath the frozen debris and may never be found.

  Although many news reports indicated that all the victims were Sherpas, the legendary mountain people who comprise just half of one percent of the Nepali population, three of the sixteen were members of other, much larger ethnic groups: one was Gurung, one was Tamang, and one was a member of the Hindu Chhetri caste. All, however, were employed as high-altitude climbing sherpas, with a lowercase s—an elite profession that deservedly commands respect and admiration from mountaineers around the world.

  It was the worst climbing accident in the history of Everest, twice as deadly as the infamous storm in May 1996 that killed eight people, the subject of my book, Into Thin Air (four of my teammates accounted for half of that grim tally). But dying on Everest has been an occupational hazard for sherpas ever since a team led by George Leigh Mallory to attempt the Tibetan side of the peak in 1922 became the first mountaineers to ascend higher than the lower flanks of the mountain. In the final days of that expedition, seven sherpas from Darjeeling, India, were swept to their deaths in an avalanche. Sad to say, the job hasn’t gotten any safer for sherpas with the passage of time. According to a piece by Jonah Ogles posted on outsideonline.com, the death rate for climbing sherpas on Everest from 2004 until now was twelve times higher than the death rate for U.S. military personnel deployed in Iraq from 2003 to 2007.

  There is no denying that climbing Everest is a preposterously dangerous undertaking for the members who provide the sherpas’ income. But running counter to the disturbing trend among sherpas, climbing Everest has actually grown significantly safer for Western guides and members in recent years, according to the available data. This can be attributed to a number factors: Western climbers now use bottled oxygen much more liberally than they did in the past; weather forecasts are much more accurate than they were eighteen or twenty years ago; and many Western climbers now prophylactically dose themselves with dexamethasone, a powerful steroid, when they ascend above 22,000 feet, which has proven to be an effective strategy for minimizing the risk of contracting high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE) and high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), potentially fatal ailments that are common on Everest.

  During the seventy-six years from the first attempt on Everest in 1921 through 1996, when I was guided up Everest, 144 people died and the summit was reached 630 times, a ratio of one death for every four successful ascents. Notably, over the eighteen years that have passed since 1996, 104 people have died and the summit has been reached 6,241 times—one death for every 60 ascents. Furthermore, non-sherpas accounted for only 71 of these deaths, which equates to just one death for every 88 ascents.

  The reason the risk remains so much greater for sherpas can be traced to several factors. Sherpas aren’t provided with nearly as much bottled oxygen, because it is so expensive to purchase and to stock on the upper mountain, and they tend to be much better acclimatized than Westerners. Sherpas are almost never given dexamethasone prophylactically, because they don’t have personal physicians in their villages who will prescribe the d
rug on request. And perhaps most significant, sherpas do all the heavy lifting on Everest, literally and figuratively. The mostly foreign-owned guiding companies assign the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs to their sherpa staff, thereby mitigating the risk to their Western guides and members, whose backpacks seldom hold much more than a water bottle, a camera, an extra jacket, and lunch. The work sherpas are paid to do—carrying loads, installing aluminum ladders in the Khumbu Icefall, stringing and anchoring thousands of feet of rope—requires them to spend vastly more time on the most dangerous parts of the mountain, particularly in the Icefall—the shattered, creaking, ever-shifting expanse of glacier that extends from just above base camp at 17,600 feet to the 19,500-foot elevation. The fact that members and Western guides now suck down a lot more bottled oxygen is wonderful for them, but it means the sherpas have to carry those additional oxygen bottles through the Icefall for the Westerners to use.

  Historically, more Everest climbers have perished from severe weather, HACE, HAPE, exhaustion, falling from steep terrain, or some combination of these hazards than being crushed or buried in the Khumbu Icefall. This seems to be changing, however. Accurate weather forecasting has reduced the risk of being surprised by a killer storm like the one that struck in 1996. But the pronounced warming of the Himalayan climate in recent years has made the Icefall more unstable than ever, and there is still no way to predict when a serac is going to topple over. And sherpas spend much, much more time in the Icefall than their Western employers.

  In 1996, for example, I made four round trips through the Khumbu Icefall: three circuits as I progressively acclimatized to 24,000 feet during the month of April, and then one final round trip on my journey to the 29,035-foot summit and back. I was terrified each of the eight times I moved through the frozen chaos, which usually took more than three hours to ascend even with my nearly empty backpack, and slightly less than an hour to descend. In contrast, each of the sherpas supporting my team’s ascent was required to make something like thirty trips through the Icefall, often while carrying 80-pound loads of food, propane, and bottled oxygen.

  These days, moreover, members are apt to spend even less time in the Icefall than I did when I was on Everest eighteen years ago. It’s becoming increasingly common for Western guides and members to acclimatize in hypobaric chambers before they arrive in Nepal, and/or on other, less hazardous Himalayan peaks in advance of their summit assaults, greatly reducing the number of times they must expose themselves to the perils of the Icefall. Some members now make only a single round trip through it, while each of the sherpas supporting them must still pass through that hazardous terrain between two and three dozen times. Most Western climbers feel more than a little guilty about this, but none that I know of have ever offered to take an extra lap through the Icefall with a heavy load in order to reduce a sherpa’s exposure.

  The statistics suggesting Everest has become safe for members may in fact be giving Westerners a false sense of security, however. The astounding number of climbers who now attempt to reach the summit on the limited number of days when the weather is favorable presents a new kind of hazard. A notorious photo shot by Ralf Dujmovits in May 2012 showed more than 150 people attached to a series of fixed ropes as they ascended the Lhotse Face towards the South Col of Everest, jammed together so tightly they had to move in lockstep. The static weight of all these people and their gear was well over 30,000 pounds. If some mishap had occurred that caused more than a handful of the climbers to put their full weight on one of these ropes simultaneously, the shock to the anchors securing the ropes to the ice could easily have caused them to fail, resulting in the climbers falling, en masse, 2,000 or more feet to the base of the Lhotse Face. If such an accident should come to pass in the future (which isn’t far-fetched), the death count for both members and sherpas would be horrific.

  In any event, no Western members or guides were killed or injured in last week’s avalanche. At the moment, in the immediate aftermath, almost everyone climbing on the Nepal side of Everest has retreated to base camp to try to come to grips with the catastrophe. Most of them, sherpas and foreign climbers alike, are reeling from the unprecedented loss of life. At least one expedition has already announced it will be abandoning the mountain. For the foreign climbers, to go home now will mean forfeiting most or all of the $50,000 to $90,000 they have spent to be guided up Everest. For the sherpas who make the guided ascents possible, however, to quit now after only a few weeks’ wages will be an even greater economic sacrifice, relatively speaking.

  Depending on their talent, experience, foreign-language skills, how many loads they carry up and down the mountain, and how generously they’re tipped by their clients, climbing sherpas will generally take home between $2,000 and $8,000 at the conclusion of an Everest expedition, which commences for them in late March and typically ends around the first of June. If a climbing sherpa dies on the job, his family will receive a million rupees (approximately $10,500) from the insurance his employer is required to provide. By any reasonable measure, neither these wages nor insurance payouts are fair compensation for the risk involved. But in Nepal, where the median annual income is less than $600, most of the sherpas’ countrymen would eagerly take similar risks for the opportunity to receive that kind of pay.

  Nevertheless, on April 20, after holding several emotional, contentious meetings at Everest basecamp, the climbing sherpas announced they would go on strike unless the Nepali government agreed to meet thirteen demands within a week. The threat of a work stoppage was provoked by the sherpas’ outrage over the Nepali government’s offer to provide just 40,000 rupees—slightly more than $400—to the families of the sherpas killed in the avalanche to defray their funeral expenses. Among the sherpas’ demands are that the government increase this compensation to approximately $1,000 per family; provide $10,000 to climbing sherpas who have been seriously disabled; establish a permanent relief fund for injured sherpas with a portion of the $10,000 permit fees every Western Everest climber is charged by the Nepali government; double the current insurance benefit provided by the guiding companies to $21,000; require the guiding companies to pay sherpas their salaries even if they call off the remainder of the 2014 Everest climbing season; and establish a monument in Kathmandu to memorialize the deceased sherpas.

  The collective anger and resentment expressed by the sherpas over the past few days is unprecedented. On April 20, Tim and Becky Rippel, the owners of guiding company called Peak Freaks that lost a sherpa named Mingma Tenzing to a fatal case of HAPE earlier in the month, stated in a blog post:

  As we suggested in a previous post the Sherpa guides are heating up, emotions are running wild and demands are being made to share the wealth with the Sherpa people on the table.

  Now that there are more Sherpa operators today on Everest, they’ve come to learn how much the government of Nepal makes in revenues from Everest expeditions and they are asking for a share. This is their time and under very unfortunate circumstances….

  In any case things are getting very complicated and there is a lot of tension here and it’s growing….

  Peak Freaks is in support of the Sherpa people any which way it goes. They are our family, our brothers and sisters and the muscle on Everest. We follow their lead, we are guests here.

  PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014

  Descent to Mars

  I awoke facedown in the dirt, drenched with sweat, engulfed in darkness so absolute that it made no difference whether my eyes were open or closed. Groggy and disoriented, I sat bolt upright and tried to figure out where I was. Then I remembered, and had to fight back a wave of panic: I was a thousand feet underground, in the far reaches of a claustrophobic labyrinth called Lechuguilla Cave.

  I groped inside my sleeping bag until I found a flashlight, and flicked it on. The beam illuminated a low, domed space the size of a parking garage festooned with preposterous limestone udders. Nine other people were sprawled on the ground nearby. Three of them
—Chris McKay, Penny Boston, and Larry Lemke—were NASA scientists who had descended into this disquieting netherworld because, as McKay had explained earlier with an apparent non sequitur, “We want to know if there’s life on Mars.”

  It was not easy getting here. The mission had been launched two days earlier, from a scorched New Mexico hillside freckled with prickly pear and lechuguilla plants—the spiny agave after which the cave was named. Located in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, just a few miles from Carlsbad Caverns, the unmarked entrance to Lechuguilla is a forbidding vertical shaft. Wearing helmets, headlamps, mountaineering harnesses, and fifty-pound backpacks, we attached ourselves to a frayed rope, shuffled backward over the edge, and rappelled one by one into the gloom. Within moments, we found ourselves in an environment that felt more alien than any place I’d ever been.

  Presently considered to be one of the most spectacular and geologically unique caves in the world, until nine years ago Lechuguilla was known to extend no further than its 90-foot entrance pit. At one edge of the pit, however, recreational cavers noticed a distinct breeze blowing from a pile of jumbled rocks, inspiring them to probe deeper. On May 25, 1986, after a decade of intermittent excavation, three men dug through the last of the rubble and discovered a narrow, twisting passageway leading down into the bowels of the earth.

  One of the trio who made this discovery was a celebrated caver named Rick Bridges, and it was he who led the NASA team into Lechuguilla last December. The trip down was long and arduous. The temperature remained a constant 67 degrees Fahrenheit, which initially seemed quite comfortable. The humidity hovered near 100 percent, however, so the slightest physical effort produced a flood of perspiration that soaked our clothing and never dried.

  Bearing all our food and equipment on our backs, we scrambled through a chaos of truck-size boulders, slithered like lizards down narrow slots, and dangled above chasms that appeared bottomless. At times, we used ropes and technical caving gear to rappel into pits that overhung on all sides. I knew that the only way to return to the surface five days hence would be to climb strands of rope we left behind as we descended, so my anxiety grew as we pressed deeper and deeper underground.