Fresh Air

Location: The southeastern Nepalese border of Tibet
Elevation start: 17,384'
Summit elevation: 29,028'
Elevation gain: 11,644'
Difficulty: The hardest one on the planet

May 10, 1996, was the deadliest single recorded day on Everest. There were several different expedition teams making summit bids for Everest that day when a freak storm hit in the late afternoon. The storm brought extreme weather covering the area from the Hillary Step through at least high camp 4...the exact path through which the hikers had to descend. Five people died on Everest that day. The storm claimed the lives of the following: Yasuko Namba - an accomplished women climber from Japan, though she had no previous ice-climbing experience, Andy Harris - a guide for Adventure Consultants, Doug Hansen - a paying client member of the Adventure Consultants, Rob Hall - the safety conscious leader of the Adventure Consultants from New Zealand and Scott Fisher - the highly experienced leader of the Mountain Madness team, from western Seattle.

In this article I want to give a little background on Everest, a little on what it requires from climbers and a brief account of three books written by surviving climbers of the May 1996 trek. For the full details and complete stories, I really suggest reading the books.

Everest Background

Mount Everest is located on the southeastern border of Nepal and Tibet. Both are third world countries where top-notch hospitals and medical facilities are not readily available. Arranging for emergency evacuation isn’t quite the same in the Himalayas as in the Unites States.

Everest base camp sits a little over three miles above sea level. People not accustomed to living in an altitude with so little oxygen need to do what is called acclimatize to the elevation before even thinking about hiking. Acclimatization refers to the series of exercises climbers go through on arrival to build up their strength and stamina to successfully hike in such high altitude. A typical acclimatization schedule follows:

Scott Fisher's group took a full 36 days to fully acclimatize before making a summit attempt.

The Death Zone

Anything above 25,000 feet is considered the death zone. At this altitude the body quickly starts to die. Whether you go out and hike or stay in your sleeping bag, your body starts dying. Eating becomes impossible; it simply takes too much oxygen to consume and digest anything. Sleeping in that altitude is near impossible, as the benefit of breathing deeply is not relaxing enough to drift off. To simply stay alive, the body will begin consuming nearly three pounds of muscle per day for nourishment. The better a climber acclimatizes, the better chance they stand to make a legitimate summit bid.

However, all the conditioning a climber does is only one a portion of the equation. In the perfect shape, some human bodies are able to function in that high altitude and some are not. They say altitude is the leveler, making conditioning almost irrelevant. Each person is simply able to function in the oxygen-deprived air, or not, and you’ll find out when you get there.

Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

No other Everest attempt has had so much publicity. Jon Krakauer was a writer/client for his employer, Outside Magazine. They sponsored him in Rob Hall’s group, the New Zealand based Adventure Consultants. Krakauer published the first piece on this expedition for his magazine printed shortly after the tragedy. He went on to subsequently write a book about that trip, Into Thin Air.

In his book, Krakauer was sharply critical of one guide in Scott Fisher’s group, Anatoli Boukreev. Anatoli was a very strong Russian guide who thought that if you need a guide to hold your hand up the mountain - you don’t belong there! He was less inclined to pamper and cater to the whims of the clients, but more focused on setting up the required fixed lines, organizing the supplies at each of the camps and the like. This didn’t really make him that popular with the clients or Krakauer..nonetheless he was of immeasurable value to them all!

Anatoli made it to the summit on May 10, with the very first of the clients. Once he reached the top he made his way abruptly back to camp 4 to get supplies ready and to be rested if called on to assist the others in their descent. Krakauer thought Anatoli’s efforts would be greater if he didn’t make such a quick departure, but hiked up slower, and went down with more clients. As it turned out, when the freak storm hit during most everyone’s descent, it was Anatoli who WAS well rested and able to make it out in the dead of night and save the lives of the four descending climbers he found.

The conditions of that storm were unearthly. The air temperature was somewhere near 60, the wind was whipping near 80 miles per hour and there were ice pellets being whirled around that would blind the naked eye. A person could scarcely look down and see their own feet! These were the conditions that Anatoli Boukreev ventured out into, in a desperate attempt to find lost clients struggling to make it back to camp 4.

Anatoli Boukreev, The Climb

After the events of May 10, 1996, Anatoli was quite troubled at having been there, survived the deadly storm and saved four lost hikers. After all that, he was severely judged by Jon Krakauer for making selfish and unsafe decisions. Anatoli needed to make HIS statement about the expedition and wrote The Climb, with G. Weston DeWalt co-author. In his book, Anatoli goes far out of his way to establish the discussions that led to his decision making. Having Anatoli at camp 4, well rested and ready with supplies, was all part of the plan that he and Scott Fisher put together in case something went wrong. There is some corroborating evidence of this contingency plan in the post hike de-briefing.

Another criticism that Krakauer made of Anatoli was his decision not to use bottled oxygen. Many climbers relied on bottled oxygen to enable their climb through the death zone. Anatoli thought it was too risky to use oxygen. He felt that with only a limited oxygen supply, when you run out you would die before you had the chance to descent to heavier air. He thought he could be of better use to the group if he were not oxygen dependant. Anatoli had climbed Everest and many other death-zone mountains without oxygen, and stood by his fear of oxygen dependency. Jon Krakauer disagreed.

The picture that Krakauer painted of Anatoli being a cold man might have been appropriate coming from a client’s perspective. But after reading the different accounts of the same trek, I think his serious disposition came from a deep respect for the Everest and it’s difficulty. Further, I agree that if you need your hand held up mount Everest - you might not belong there!!!

Beck Weathers, Left for Dead

Beck Weathers was a client in Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultant group. He was a successful pathologist from Dallas, TX. Beck was a well conditioned and well disciplined hiker, but had only done a few high altitude climbs and was still a novice coming to Everest.

Beck ran into trouble leaving camp 4 well before the summit. He was having some trouble with corrective eye surgery from a year before. He couldn’t see too well in the dark, but didn’t mention it in hopes that he’d be ok when the sun came out. He had to eventually tell Rob Hall that he couldn’t see and Rob stopped him. Rob asked him to stop and wait for him by the Hillary Step well before the summit. He would be risking death to continue to the summit. Beck held to his word and waited half way between camp 4 and the summit for hours. As the day rolled on, Beck let countless climbers pass him on their way back to camp 4, but Beck promised he wouldn’t leave that spot without Rob - Rob Hall never returned.

Beck finally gave in late in the afternoon and headed down to and got stuck in the storm with Yasuko Namba and four others. As the disoriented group tried to find their way down, they tried to wait out the storm ehind a rock, out of the wind. When they tried to get moving again, they were forced to leave Beck and Yasuko behind. The two had slipped into what seemed to be hypothermic comas. They were still breathing, but completely unresponsive. By this time Beck had lost a glove and his right hand had been frozen solid. In that storm, any attempt to carry back another body was suicide.

Beck and Yasuko were both left for dead, lying next to each other on the mountain side. Yet somehow, out of the delirious cold, Beck Weathers got up. He came to and focused on his dead frozen hand. It took him a minute to figure out he was all alone and nobody was going to come for him. He knew if he wanted to live, he had to get himself down, so that’s what he did. Dazed and still nearly blind, he stumbled into Anatoli on his search for camp 4, and was helped into a tent and given warm tea and a sleeping bag with hot water bottles. . His wife and family amazingly arranged (half a world away) for a medi-flight to Katmandu and Beck began recovering and putting his life back together.

The frostbite gave Beck a prosthetic right arm from the elbow down and a couple stubs on his left hand. He had surgery done to his face to repair some frostbite on his nose, and took a few other injuries on the way down

His book, Left for Dead, discussed what really compelled him into his extreme hiking. Throughout his life, Beck Weathers was haunted by an unavoidable depression that he could only escape when hiking. His book was wonderful to read. Beck Weathers got more out of this Everest expedition than anyone else. His experience helped him put his priorities back in line. I hope he’s still doing well today.

The Aftermath

Rob Hall could not be helped down from the south summit. He ran into trouble with another client who was later taken down by sherpas to safety, but they could not bring down Rob. Frostbite and high altitude hypoxia had take too great a hold on his body. He did manage to survive bivouacked on the open face of the south summit for one night. The next day he just didn’t have the strength to climb down, and made his last radio call down to base camp at the same moment his wife happened to be calling to check on Rob’s expedition. Rob and his wife got to say good-bye, and in his last words on earth he wished that she was in a warm safe bed and asked her to try not to worry.