That first day, we visited the members of the expedition sharing our permit. One of them was a doctor, but not a specialist in mountaineering. He took one look at Séb and his symptoms and said gravely: “You have something really serious. A pulmonary edema is no joke. You have to go down right away! Take the medicine I’m going to give you, if you wake up tomorrow—”
Before the well-intentioned doctor could finish his sentence, Séb and I burst out laughing like a pair of mischievous boys. We already knew what was going on, and while it was a nuisance, it posed no great risk. A couple of days of rest, and he’d be good to go. At most, he might have to return to the foothills for a day to recuperate. In fact, the same thing had happened a few years ago when we went to Mount Elbrus, but as soon as he went down to a lower altitude, he recovered.
Séb had a rough night, but the next day he was feeling better. He spent one more day recovering. On the third day, when he got up, he was able to run around the camp area, so we decided to go up to the advanced base camp at the foot of the mountain, where the yaks hadn’t wanted to go last year.
Once we’d set up camp, I went out to train and acclimate, and to check out the conditions on the mountain. Since the idea of attempting an ascent via the northeast face, where we’d left off a year ago, was still on my mind, I set off in the opposite direction of everyone else. I strayed from the track that led to the northern pass and crossed the glacier until I reached the foot of the north wall. There was far less snow than in summer. Fewer avalanches! This also meant there was much more ice.
I started to climb. The ice beneath me felt rock hard; the 10 centimeters of snow that covered it merely whitened it but added no firmness, and I supported my whole body weight on what little of my crampons and ice axe I could drive in. Since it wasn’t too steep, I started climbing anyway, until I’d made it a few hundred meters. Suddenly I stopped and asked myself what I was doing there. Aren’t you taking too many risks? If I’d faced these conditions last year, I was sure I would have kept climbing without thinking twice, but now, the truth was I was not feeling very at ease. What had happened a week ago had made me lower the threshold of risks I was willing to take.
IT HAD BEEN A WEEK SINCE I WAS ON CHO OYU WITH EMELIE. OUR acclimation and training in Norway had gone perfectly, and then—after a battle with the Nepalese bureaucracy, as despair-inducing as it was routine—we made a quick journey that got us to base camp in only three days, feeling refreshed and motivated.
My second day on the mountain, I received one of those messages that are hard to read. That morning, we had climbed from the camp to over 6,000 meters, and we were doing surprisingly well. When we came down, the smiles on our faces didn’t last long. I turned on my satellite phone to check the weather conditions and started to tidy the tent while the phone searched for coverage. After a few minutes, I heard the beep that indicated a message. Only two people have that phone number: Emelie, who was by my side, and Jordi Lorenzo, my agent. I used it just once a week to tell him I was fine so he could pass the news on to my family. If there was a message, something important must have happened. I picked up the phone and unlocked the screen.
“Have you heard what happened to Ueli? He died on Nuptse.”
Everything clouded over. An entire value system collapses each time one of the pillars sustaining it dies on the mountain. And all the questions arise again. “Is it right to do what we do?” “What’s the point of all the risks we take to climb a mountain?” “Up to what point is the pleasure of an activity more important than what we risk losing?”
I know that when I’m up there, I’m not looking for death but life. Yet sometimes it’s harder to understand. Then I thought of Nicole, Ueli Steck’s wife, and also of Emelie, who was reading beside me and still didn’t know what had happened.
UP THERE ON THE MOUNTAIN IS WHERE I FIND RELIEF FROM PAIN. Death, for me, would be to not go at all.
The day after getting the painful news, we went up again. We were walking at a good pace and reached 7,500 meters fairly quickly. We were in good physical shape, and this showed that our acclimation had been successful, since it had been only eight days since we had left Europe.
We’d been noticing for a while that bad weather was on its way, and decided to go down and wait for the next window of good conditions to try to reach the summit. That year in the spring there were only a couple of commercial expeditions, and since nobody seemed too keen to get up the mountain—fix the ropes and set up the camp for clients—we found that we had it all to ourselves.
I told Emelie to start going down while I took a look at where we would need to get past the yellow band on our next attempt. This is a fairly steep strip of rock of about 50 meters, characterized by its yellow color, which can be seen in all mountains in the Himalayas, at an altitude of between 7,800 and 8,200 meters. I climbed a dozen meters to get a better look. Once I had looked and looked again, I turned back to see if Emelie was getting down without any trouble. Shit! My heart stopped and I was speechless when I saw her sliding down the snow at high speed, upside down on her stomach. She was falling uncontrollably down a forty-degree slope covered in hard snow that led to . . . Well, it was better not to think about it, if she didn’t manage to break her fall. As soon as I got my voice back I began to shout, and went down as fast as I could, following the tracks her ice axes had left in the snow as she tried to hold on. I reached the point where Emelie had lost the first one. “Stop! Please, stop!” I couldn’t breathe and my heart had stopped pumping blood. Finally, about 100 meters farther down, she managed to break her fall with the one she had left. When I reached her, my heart started beating again, this time fast and out of control. I hugged her. She was breathing hard, but she hadn’t panicked.
“You wanted to get down a little faster, huh?” I tried to avoid any emotional drama, and she smiled at me.
The next day, she told me she wanted to go back up, and a couple of days later we made a second attempt at the summit. It was terribly cold. A night of gale-force winds forced us to take cover in a cave at 7,200 meters and wait for the sun to come out and make the strongest gusts disappear. When day came, the temperature rose again to normal, but we saw black clouds approaching from the north. When we reached the yellow band, Emelie decided to go down, and I continued for a few hours. Between the snow and the fog, I couldn’t find the summit.
EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED THAT WEEK REMINDED ME OF THE IMPORTANCE of failure, and of failures. We are nothing more than insignificant, fragile people, and this is something we should always keep in mind. Especially when we’ve grown used to success and we get overconfident. We think we’re indestructible and that we can win everything. If we compete, we can be arrogant, but on the mountain, this can end in grief for somebody else.
I guess in one sense, all this made me not want to take any risks—not even one—in this attempt to reach the top of Everest, because right then I didn’t feel comfortable climbing this slope on the north face. The challenge of climbing from Rongbuk in one go and without support was already quite big in itself, since I’d never been so far up and didn’t know how my body would react.
In today’s media, things get trivialized, and we end up thinking that only success has value, whereas failure is a sign of weakness. This leads us to choose between lowering the level of our activities to increase our chances of victory, or accepting failure and criticism, and being patient and stubborn enough to keep trying year after year, until maybe one day we achieve our dream. It’s clear that failure doesn’t sell. Newspapers, radio, TV, and digital platforms won’t talk about mere attempts. People only want to hear about success, because heroes are successful; despite the difficulties, through hard work and persistence, they achieve whatever they set their minds to. No one admires a failure. Sponsors want news from an athlete they can announce with fanfare, and mountain climbers try to reach the highest or most dangerous summit to make the money they need for the next expedition. If a climber doesn’t want to take on simpler projects
to guarantee a quota of success, the line that separates him from lethal risk gets thinner and thinner. Jean-Christophe Lafaille, Benoît Chamoux, maybe Ueli Steck himself . . . We’ll never know why they accepted one risk too many. Media, social, or financial pressure can end up pushing you to say to yourself, All right, let’s do it. You’ve tried and failed a bunch of times. This time it’ll work out. You put on a blindfold, even just for a moment, and don’t see that what you’re gambling with is your life. It’s really important to detach yourself from this pressure—external or internal—and accept that in mountain climbing, success and failure aren’t black-and-white like in other sports. You have to be patient and keep trying year after year, knowing that at least half your attempts won’t have the desired result.
I decided to take the normal route along the north-northeastern ridge, and from there, everything sped up. I rested for a day at advanced base camp, at 6,300 meters, and went out for one last acclimation before attacking the summit. After breakfast, I put an ice axe, an anorak, and some thick gloves into my backpack, and set off uphill. First, I reached the North Col without too much effort, then continued along the north ridge, pushing myself along with poles. It was like a Vertical Kilometer, like in Fully, but at a fifth of the speed. It felt perfect. I could keep a consistent, dynamic rhythm, even sprinted to see how my body reacted so I didn’t pay for it later. I was considering reaching 8,000 meters and going back down, but I’d come this far in four hours and I was still feeling strong, so I kept going. In less than six hours, I reached the third camp, the last used by commercial expeditions before their final attack on the mountain. I walked through the tents and saw Pemba, the Nepalese guide who was taking clients from the expedition we were sharing a pass with.
“Namasté, Pemba. How’s it all going?”
“Great.” He took off his oxygen mask. “Where did you come from?” He looked surprised. He hadn’t expected to see me there.
“I left the ABC this morning.”
“Are you staying to sleep tonight?” I noticed he looked baffled and must’ve been putting two and two together.
“No, I don’t have a tent. And anyway, I sleep better down there. I just came up to take a spin.”
“You’re a monkey!” He laughed and laughed, staring at me in amazement.
I answered him with a smile, waved goodbye, and kept going slowly until I reached the beginning of the north ridge, at 8,400 meters. I paused when I arrived. The views were lavish, and the sun shone brightly at midafternoon. It was hot, and Look—I’m up here. I hesitated a few seconds. I didn’t know whether to keep going to the summit; it seemed so close . . . But I decided to stick to the plan: acclimation that day, and wait a week to attack the summit. I stayed there a few minutes to savor the air and the landscape, then started heading down. Since I was feeling good, I started jogging along the snowy slope, and it took me less than three hours to get to the advanced base camp, just in time to clean up a bit, unpack, and have dinner. It was clearly my best day from a physiological standpoint, which showed the success of the acclimation process and confirmed the performance I was capable of at high altitude. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if I’m feeling good, it’s better to keep going up and see what happens, because the altitude doesn’t give you too many chances.
IT WAS CURFEW TIME ON MAY 21, AND I FELT LIKE A THIEF STEALING quiet moments out on the mountain, when there shouldn’t have been anyone in that area, on a ridge above 8,500 meters, with the sun dipping down behind Cho Oyu. All the mountains around me seemed small, and despite feeling ill—I wanted to throw up and had diarrhea, thanks to gastroenteritis that had shown up at the worst possible moment—I forgot everything and experienced this unique moment intensely, which allowed me to embrace the night in all its serenity and beauty.
For the past four days, I’d been resting at the Rongbuk base camp, and I’d taken the chance to go out running and eat fried potatoes at the Tibetan lodges. Essentially, I’d been getting bored in my tent. Until about twenty hours before, after dinner on May 20, when I’d left the rock-and-powder esplanade at the end of the road that delivered tourists every day, who would take photos of themselves with the highest summit on Earth in the background, and maybe would buy a souvenir where two thousand years ago Milarepa had hidden away in a cave to meditate. I threw my backpack on my back with everything I needed—a down ski suit, some boots with crampons, an ice axe, two poles, a liter of water, fifteen gels and energy bars, a headlamp, gloves, mittens, and sunglasses. I have studied and optimized my equipment selection for years. “Not this. This, no. We can leave this out,” is what engineers and designers heard me say whenever I visited them to make prototypes of boots, clothing, or backpacks. I would take an eraser to the paper and start rubbing out the zippers, pockets, and anything that seemed unnecessary, until the design was so simple that it could be drawn with only one line. The boots I was wearing, for example, were like enormous socks lined with insulating material, with carbon fiber soles and crampons already attached. That way, they took up less space and hardly weighed anything. I could set out running in sneakers and, when I reached the snow, pull on those socks with crampons over the top and keep going over the ice.
At ten in the evening I began to run, and spent all night crossing the endless 20-kilometer moraine until I reached the glacier where the advanced base camp was located. I stopped for a couple of hours for a rest and some food and water, waiting for the sun to come out and warm my surroundings before I set off into the snow. With the first rays of light, I pressed forward over the glacier and climbed up as far as the North Col. That was when I began to notice that something wasn’t quite right that day. My stomach was unsettled, and every once in a while I retched unexpectedly. By the time I realized it was gastroenteritis, I had already passed 8,000 meters, and the idea of turning back when I was so close to the summit made me feel ashamed. In any case, I was sure I would survive the stomachache and diarrhea. At the most, I was in for a rough time. The diarrhea was the most inconvenient, because it meant I had to unzip my snowsuit and take the top part off so I could take a shit, and up there on the mountain, this was pretty annoying. The solution was not to eat anything. My body could rely on its fat reserves for hours, though it would suffer a drop in energy. But that way I could keep climbing, little by little.
Given that the conditions on the mountain meant there was no chance of an avalanche, now that I was up on a ridge, the only risks, as far as I could tell, were suffering an edema or seizing up from the cold. I kept going slowly, and no worrying symptoms appeared.
When the sun disappeared behind Cho Oyu, I didn’t hesitate to keep going. I knew as long as I kept moving constantly I wouldn’t have any problems, no matter how cold it got. Step by step, I kept ascending, with no sense of time or worry, embracing the night’s gifts of solitude and darkness.
Up there, your sense of time is strange and intuitive. It floats around you, but you can’t touch it—it’s diffuse. The same happens with your thoughts, which also stand still, and your mind goes blank. It is absorbed in a deep meditation, alien to the body, which fights to move forward at a glacial pace. Only a technical difficulty interrupts this concentration, and for a few seconds your thoughts return to command a precise maneuver, before plunging back into the abyss.
I began to sense that I should have reached the summit a while ago. In the darkness, I couldn’t see where the mountain ended, and with every rock that jutted out, I wished I had reached the end of the route, but there was always another. Until the moment came when I glimpsed a ridge in the gloom, felt a breeze, and saw lights slowly twinkling on the other side.
I checked my watch for the first time in many hours and saw it was past midnight. Ahead of me, I saw prayer flags flapping at the mountain’s summit. Exhausted and destroyed, I sat down beside the flags and breathed deeply, hanging my head between my knees. Right then, I didn’t feel any satisfaction, just a very essential liberation. Finally, finally I don’t have to keep climbi
ng. To help my recovery along, I took an energy gel from my pocket and ate it. It was the first thing I’d eaten in many hours.
The night was black and bright, and I saw lights like fireflies from the north and south, leaving the last camps to head up to where I was sitting. Satisfaction began to knock at my door. It said, Yes, I’m in the highest place I can possibly be. Luckily, exhaustion was more powerful than this feeling and didn’t allow my head to lose sight of things and let itself be defeated by the excitement.
Soon, I slowly began to head down. When I reached the pyramid, at 8,700 meters, my stomach urgently demanded that I undo my ski suit and squat. Damn it, I shouldn’t have eaten that gel! I grabbed a rock and used it, as carefully as was possible under the circumstances, to wipe my ass. It was complicated with mittens so thick. Finally I figured it out and kept going down, laughing to myself about the situation. At the foot of the pyramid, I passed the end of a long, illuminated line of fifty people—porters, guides, and clients—climbing in disciplined silence, tied to the ropes and blocking the way at the most technical stretches. Soon I left the last light in the group behind and I was alone again. I went down along the ridge until the bright sun greeted me. Sheltered from the wind, with the pleasant warmth of the rising sun, I stopped and lay down on the ground. I rested for a while.
More than 8 kilometers away, Emelie didn’t know where I was. It had been hours since I should have gotten back to base camp and sent news. The phrase “No news is good news” doesn’t apply when the person you love is on a large mountain. We always think the worst when we don’t hear from them. She was imagining me suffering or dead, somewhere up on the highest part. In a hyper-connected world where we find out about everything immediately, I had chosen an experience that was the polar opposite. I wanted to be the only one making decisions up there, with no other influence or external pressure, with no one to encourage me when things were going badly, or to tell me I had to give up because bad weather was coming or I was moving too slowly. That’s why I’d left my satellite phone with Séb. That decision, which was making my experience more authentic, was making those who love me suffer. Neither Séb at base camp nor Emelie in Zegama knew where I was or what was happening to me.
Above the Clouds Page 17