What about brain damage? I knew there was that risk; it was a real concern. Brain cells do not replace themselves; cerebral damage from hypoxia is a clinical fact. I had another whimsical thought: If I had any brains to begin with, I wouldn’t be up here at over twenty-seven thousand feet on K2 freezing to death, so what have I got to lose?
I chuckled at the thought.
I realized I was getting dingy.
I was very, very cold.
I set the mask and regulator in the snow, removed the bottle from the pack. Putting on the near-empty pack, I grabbed my ax and started across the traverse. I would climb without oxygen, and I would put every ounce of energy remaining in my body into reaching the summit. I thought, I might just be able to make it.
SEPTEMBER 7. SUMMIT PYRAMID. ABOUT 28,000 FEET. 2:30 P.M.
There are only two hundred more feet at the most even though I’m not sure I can lift my foot and then the next foot and the next until I get to the top. Not after coming this far. Not this close.
So up goes my boot and crampon. There, that’s better, now breathe a few times, and think about that next step. This will be over soon, and the sooner I lift the next foot, the sooner it will be over. Keep thinking: I’ve come this far, I have to make it.
I can’t lift the foot. I can’t move up any higher. Have to rest, have to rest, have to rest.
No. I cannot.
John is ahead of me. Look up at him. See, he’s still moving, and moving faster than me. He has been breaking most of the trail. I can’t let him do all the work. I have to do my share. So lift my foot and catch up and help break trail. There. That’s better. Now think about the next foot.
When will it end?
John is stopping to rest. He is hunkering over his ax, head down, facing the slope. I must catch him. If I can make ten more steps I can reach him, and then rest, but not before. That is it: Ten steps, then rest. O.K., now up with the foot, breathe, breathe, breathe, and another step. No good, can’t make it. Have to stop for a minute, getting dizzy again. John is still resting. Only four or five steps and I can rest too. Lift a foot. Now only three more steps, now one more step and I can rest. Careful, don’t collapse, don’t slide down the slope. Rest on my ax.
“You O.K.?”
“Slow. Hard, to breathe. Forcing each step. Sorry I’m not breaking more trail.”
“Can you lead a little?”
“I’ll try. Need to rest first.”
“We’re close—maybe a hundred fifty feet.”
“If that is the summit. If not, if it is farther behind the ridge, don’t know if I can make it . . . ”
“Don’t worry, we’ve got it now.”
John is right. We have it now, keep remembering that. We are too close not to make it.
I must get up; I must move on. This will soon be over. No more getting up at 3:00 a.m., no more freezing in predawn starts. I can sit in a hot bath and feel the steaming water on my skin. Never again for the rest of my life will I take a bath and not think of this moment I wanted to soak in steaming water, so get going and soon I can have that bath.
Lift a foot.
Carefully place my crampons. This surface is irregular, small crescent patterns in the ice, and my ankles hurt from twisting to the angle of the slope.
Lift a foot.
Noise and voices. Like there are many people around me, like on a crowded train with everyone talking. Echoes, noises, voices. A din like a million voices. But that’s crazy, there is no one around.
Lift a foot.
Fingers are so hard. There is no doubt this time they are frozen. It’s strange, like my fingers are made of a foreign material. Must be what artificial limbs are like. It’s my right hand, mostly, because that is the hand I’ve been holding my ax in. I should switch hands. But then my left hand would freeze, and since my right is already frozen, why freeze my left too. Does that make sense? I guess so, keep the ax in my right hand.
Lift a foot.
Look at the slope, scimitar-shaped, arching upward brilliant white against purple sky. The left side of the summit slope drops away, and I can see a steep rock ridge joining the summit slope near the top. Is that the finish to Bonington’s route? It would be too hard to climb that the way I feel now. Could anyone do it? Maybe a future generation of climbers? Poor Nick Estcourt, down there somewhere buried in ice.
Lift a foot.
How nice it would be to sit on a warm beach. A tropical beach with white sand and palm trees. It’s easy to imagine, look there, in front of me, I can even see a palm tree now, in the sand, growing there, in the snow. Lift a foot.
John is just behind me. I’ve been leading now for some time, but I’ve only come, what?—twenty feet since I rested. It seems so far, though. There is a slightly offset edge in the ice surface—a convenient mark—about another twenty feet in front. Focus on it. Begin stepping until I get there. Think of nothing else.
Lift a foot.
Breathe, breathe, breathe, gasp hard, even then I can’t get enough air.
Lift a foot, another, another, keep going to the mark.
It’s close. Keep going.
Getting dizzy, head pounding, noises—the voices, the voices. Keep going, force it out from somewhere, somehow force out the will to step, to lift the foot, the mark is close, one more step.
I made it.
Breathe, breathe, breathe. Getting dizzy again, spinning, can’t get enough air. Can’t breathe fast enough. Don’t panic, keep control, breathe fast. Feel like I’m drowning, will my lungs explode?—don’t panic. Lean on my ax. Breathe fast. There, the dizziness is starting to go away, but the voices, the voices.
“You O.K.?”
“Have to rest. Tried to go too fast. Hallucinating.”
“I’ll take the lead.”
Rest while John climbs. He is stronger than I am. How can he do it? He is doing most of the step-kicking. I can’t do my share. Not enough strength. But we are close now. Maybe fifty feet to the summit ridge. Hope to God the summit is close behind the ridge. If it’s farther . . .
Get up, follow John. It’s so much easier following in his steps. Sections of the ice are hard and it doesn’t matter who leads, but sometimes the crust breaks, and that is when John’s job is hardest.
Lift a foot.
It’s not bad the first few steps after I’ve rested. But then each one starts getting harder. My body is screaming for oxygen. Each step harder, need to breathe more. The farther away from the last rest, the harder, but I can’t rest again. Not now.
Lift a foot.
So close. Soon it will be over. John is maybe fifteen feet ahead, now maybe twenty. He is climbing faster. He is making the last steps to the summit ridge. His head is even with the ridge, now he is on it.
What does he see? How far is the summit? He isn’t saying anything. Is it farther behind? Do we still have more to go? How can I do it?
Lift a foot.
Catch up to John. He is resting on the top of the ridge. Close now, only a few more feet. He isn’t saying anything. But I can’t talk to him because I have to breathe fast.
Stop. He is ten feet away. Look at him. He is looking down at me. Breathe a few times so I can talk.
“Can you see it? How far? How far to the top?”
John is looking at me. Now he is smiling. Is it good news?
“Fifty feet. A fifty-foot walk up a gentle slope and we’re on the summit.”
SEPTEMBER 7. THE SUMMIT OF K2. 28,250 FEET. 3:30 P.M.
No wind. No clouds. Cerulean sky, brilliant sun, and at once a feeling of warmth through the thick parka, and also a strange cold. Nothing quite real, the feeling of dream. Below, a world falling in all directions. Snow peaks too numerous to identify, and glaciers traveling to distant horizon. Quiet, but an inner noise, a ringing in the ear. A thought: As an old man I will often recall this moment; I must try to remember it. It must be important. But there is failure to feel much emotion. The only feeling is absolute fatigue.
We were on th
e summit. We had made the last few steps together, arm in arm. From the summit ridge it was an easy walk to the highest point, but just short of it John had stopped.
“It may be corniced. Summits usually are. I’m not going up there.” He spoke with much finality. Neither of us seemed to remember Lou and Wick had been there the day before and had reported no cornice. But we were beyond remembering, beyond rational thinking, operating only on instinct. I thought, It may be corniced, but we’ve come too far not to reach the very pinnacle.
I volunteered to belly-crawl up to the highest point. John stood back, holding my ankles. I eased up to the edge, and peered over. There was solid snow under me, and the south face dropped down so steeply, about twelve thousand feet, I had a euphoric sense of flying. John crawled up behind me, and together we sat on top, holding each other, too exhausted to speak.
I told myself several times, Remember this moment. Remember what it is like. Later in my life, years from now, I will look back, many times, on this scene; this day will stand above all.
But I could not appreciate it. I was only thankful at the moment to rest, to breathe and lessen the dizziness, and if I felt anything akin to elation, it was from the realization I no longer had to go up. This was it; there was no higher place to climb.
We rested. The sky was calm; at 28,250 feet there was no breath of wind, and the sun shone through cloudless atmosphere. We could see to the curve of the earth. To the north and east, two distant peaks somewhere in the wild vastness of Chinese Turkestan; to the west the peaks of Hunza, Shangri-La, the secret valley; to the west and south the great Karakoram—a turbulent sea of endless summits and glaciers. Away to the south the singular Nanga Parbat. Closer, the Gasherbrums, and below us the summit of Broad Peak, a flat, wide strip like an airplane landing field. Broad Peak, the first eight-thousand-meter peak to be climbed without oxygen in 1957, and now, in 1978, we, also without oxygen, looked down on its summit. To the east the brown hills of Sinkiang, and far, far off, at places distant and mysterious, occasional glacier-covered summits.
Twenty feet below the summit, toward the northwest, there was a flat rock bench, and we climbed down to rest. The rock was warm and I lay back and my breathing eased and I closed my eyes and drifted to half-consciousness. I had few coherent thoughts, just images of boots and crampons and snow and endless steps. I opened my eyes.
I thought, Remember where I am. I am on the second highest point on earth. I must remember that. Think how hard I have worked to get here.
I had the idea that to better remember the summit I would take some of it with me. I got out my climbing hammer and started pounding on the rock. John looked over.
“What are you doing?”
“Souvenirs. Take a few pieces of rock back. Christmas isn’t far off, and they’ll make great presents.”
“Good idea.”
Soon John and I were sitting on the rock beating on it with our hammers, prying small chips of stone.
“We should take some photographs, too,” John said.
“Yeah, I forgot about that.”
I lay back on the rock, propped on one arm, while John took my photograph.
“We’ve been up here almost an hour,” he said.
“An hour?”
“We should take a couple of pics on the summit and head down.”
We climbed back to the high point on the snow ridge and took a few photographs of one another. I recalled the way summit photographs normally looked: The climber stands, ice ax above head in victory, chest puffed out, flags waving like a sale at a used car lot. That was not at all how I felt. I had no feeling of having conquered anything. I thought of something Barry Bishop said after he climbed Everest: “There are no conquerors—only survivors.” It was true. We were two small humans on top of an awesome mountain that was indifferent to our climb. I stood on the high point, dropped my arms, and held the ax across my waist. I could not wave my arms; I could not grin in victory; I could only stare across the empty space below me. John took the photo, and we began our descent.
SEPTEMBER 7. CAMP VI ABRUZZI. 25,750 FEET. ABOUT 5:00 P.M.
Hard as he tried, Wick could not sleep. He had arrived back in Camp VI, after passing John and me on our way to the top, about nine that morning, and was greeted with warm drinks and warm hugs by his summit companion. Lou was much relieved to see that Wick had weathered his ordeal, apparently suffering only a few frostbitten fingers and toes. Lou had been uncomfortable with his decision to leave Wick on the summit, although at the time it seemed the logical thing to do: Lou had been, without his parka, extremely cold, and it had been very late in the day; Wick had said he intended to leave the summit just behind Lou. Nevertheless Lou knew if Wick had had any major problem on his bivouac—if he had not been able to survive the night—he would have had to live with his decision the rest of his life. It was with that thought heavy on his soul that Lou had seen Wick’s weathered face appear that morning in the tent door.
Other than an hour spent shoveling drifted snow off the tent walls, and a few more minutes lowering Lou into a crevasse (Wick holding Lou’s ankles) to retrieve an ice ax he had somehow dropped, they passed the day in sleeping bags. They were languid, physically spent, but not able to sleep—only to lie in an indolent dreaminess as the hours melted together. It was about five when John arrived, an hour ahead of my much slower descent.
They offered John hot lemonade, which he drank with enthusiasm. John crawled in the tent he and I shared, and in the last twilight I arrived. It had taken all my inner resources to make the last steps to Camp VI. Just above camp, I had slipped, sliding about twenty feet before digging my ax into the hard snow. I had barely acknowledged the mishap that normally would have caused sharp self-reprimand to be more careful; as it was, I was so exhausted I hardly recognized the ease with which such a slip could have resulted in fatality.
When I arrived Lou and Wick had more hot lemonade. I savored first the feeling of the mug on my hard fingers (the ends were too numb to feel even the hot liquid), and then the tangy, steaming drink washing my mouth, heating my throat, then my stomach, and finally spreading to my body. Other than rest, and a fuzzy hope to soon be off the mountain—to be safe in Base Camp with this ordeal behind—hot liquid was the only desire left to me.
Finishing the hot lemonade, I made my way to our neighboring tent and crawled in to join John. Light had disappeared, and the stars were sharp in clear, black sky. I wanted badly only to find my sleeping bag and crawl in. Nothing else mattered.
“Why don’t you sleep in the Denali,” John offered. “I’ll take the McKinley tonight.”
The Denali is a warmer and consequently heavier bag than the less substantial McKinley model. John and I had chosen to take the lighter bag, intending originally to use it for bivouac on the direct finish, but since plans had altered we were then sleeping one in the warm bag and one in the much colder bag. For three nights I had used the light bag, and for three nights I had been cold. John’s offering to switch bags agreed with my desire to get warm as fast as possible. Also, since for three nights there had been only an hour, or two hours at the most, in which we had been able to try to sleep, the thought of a night with no 1:30 wake-up, combined with warm bag, seemed a full and just reward for the day’s effort.
“Thanks, buddy,” I said.
It took several minutes to remove my boots. My breathing was heavy and labored; it seemed the congestion my lungs suffered on Everest was returning, and for a moment I thought it could be pulmonary edema. I considered the symptoms: There was no gurgling in my lungs—the telltale of edema—and consequently I supposed I most likely had a bronchial congestion compounding the already difficult task of breathing at such high altitudes. With my boots off, I removed my parka and jumpsuit, and clothed only in wool underwear, I quickly slipped into the thick down bag before my shivering became more violent. For several minutes I lay fetus-style, shaking, but slowly gaining warmth and slowing my breathing. There were no thoughts in my mind.
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br /> “We should drink more liquid,” John said.
I did not acknowledge. He was right, of course, but there was no way I had the energy necessary to start the stove and melt the snow to prepare drinks.
“I’ll get the stove going,” he said.
“Thanks, John. I’m too out of gas to help.”
I thought, And only yesterday I was upset at John because I thought he wasn’t doing his share digging the tent platform. It’s so easy to lose patience under the strain of altitude.
Warmth slowly returned to my body, and my shivering stopped. I lay listening to the stove hissing, feeling pleasure from the Pavlovian recognition that we would soon have hot brews. John was fiddling with another stove, apparently changing fuel cartridges, but I paid no attention. I was thankful he had the discipline necessary to melt snow; I knew even with a major dredging for possible remaining energy I could not help him. I was so exhausted it took over a full second to respond to the deep, airsucking explosion.
“Out of the tent!” John screamed.
I opened my eyes. Flames were everywhere, covering everything. My hair was burning, the tent walls were burning, and my sleeping bag was in flames. The stove had exploded; I had an instant flash—a panic—of being burned alive, and then I felt the claustrophobia from not being able to breathe. The next second I had only one, dominant thought: Escape the tent. Which entrance? I could see the shape of John’s body already half out the main door; that left me to bolt through the opposite end, the vestibule. In a continuous motion I slipped out of my bag and through the drawstring back entrance of our flaming tent.
Outside I could see John already reaching through the gaping holes in the tent walls to save boots and climbing clothing—the loss of which would jeopardize our ability to descend. I pulled my bag out—still burning. It was nearly destroyed, and without thinking I threw it down the slope. It appeared to have been the major fuel to the fire, and with the emergency under control John and I turned to see the bag, still aflame, roll hundreds of feet down the Abruzzi Shoulder and disappear over the ten-thousand-foot drop to the glacier. It reminded me of when as a child I watched the firefall display in Yosemite.
The Last Step Page 37