Left for Dead Page 4

  “Something is wrong here,” he shouted above the din. “We’re stopping.” It was a good decision. We were not twenty-five feet from the seven-thousand-foot vertical plunge off the Kangshung Face. From where we stopped the ice sloped away at a steep angle. A few more paces and the whole group would have just skidded off the mountain.

  When we stopped something else stopped, too—that internal furnace that keeps you alive. The only way to stay warm in those conditions is through constant activity. To stand still is to freeze to death, which already was happening to me.

  I could no longer feel or move my right hand, no surprise under the circumstances, and normally a fairly simple problem to fix. You take off two of the three gloves you wear and jam the affected hand beneath your coat against your bare chest. When it’s warmed sufficiently, you take it back out, put on the gloves and go about your business.

  Now, I had been in very cold places, but what happened next was a complete shock. When I pulled those two outer gloves off, the skin on my hand and my arm immediately froze solid, even underneath that third expedition-weight glove. The shooting pain of instant frostbite so startled me that I lost my grip on the glove in my left hand, which the wind grabbed—whoooooosh—and sent into outer space.

  There was another pair of gloves in the pack on my back. But they might as well have been under my bed at home. In such a storm, there was no way I could take off that pack, put it down and rummage through it. The wind was strong enough to lift me bodily off the ground and drop me, which at one point it did.

  I didn’t have the time, or presence of mind, to consider my exposed right hand and forearm’s probable fate, or how I might fare in the future as a one-handed pathologist. I did reinsert my hand under my coat, a frozen Napoleon.

  Life and death were now the issue for all of us, with the odds against the former lengthening each moment.

  Just then, however, the racing clouds opened briefly above us, revealing the Big Dipper. I remember Klev Schoening, one of the Mountain Madness clients, calling out, “I’ve seen the stars. I know where the camp is!”

  Hope.

  We rapidly formulated a plan. The strongest among us—including Beidleman and Schoening—would make a high-speed trek in the direction of camp. If Schoening had his directions straight, and if they found the blue tents of High Camp, they’d get help and rescue the rest of us.

  If they didn’t make it, we were history anyway.

  Mike Groom and I discussed the situation. I could still walk okay, but because I couldn’t see, I’d have to hold on to his arm, which would slow him down. Since my life now depended on someone getting to camp and back before I froze to death, I agreed to stay.

  There was no question about Charlotte, Sandy and Yasuko. None of them could walk without help. So we four would remain. As the others moved away, Tim Madsen stopped abruptly.

  “I am not going to leave Charlotte here,” he said. “You guys can go, but I’m not going to leave her.”

  That took a lot of guts. Unspoken among us was the reasonable expectation that the women and I—and now Tim—were dead meat. Here’s to the power of love.

  As Beidleman, Groom and Schoening lurched off into the storm, Yasuko silently, desperately clung to Neal’s arm. Soon her hand slipped away, and they were gone. Then she and the rest of us dropped down to the ice and arranged ourselves like a dog pack, back to back and belly to belly, hoping to conserve heat, trying to get out of that wind.

  Charlotte Fox:

  I remember Beck saying to me at that point, “Well, Charlotte, this is the darnedest thing in the world, isn’t?” Uh-huh. You got that one right, Beck.

  Sleep was our deadliest enemy. Every mountaineer knows that if you allow yourself to be taken down by that cold, it is a one-way ticket to death. There are no exceptions. Your core temperature plunges until your heart stops. So we yelled at each other, and hit each other and kicked each other. Anything to remain awake.

  Charlotte cried out, “I don’t care anymore! All I want to do is die quickly!”

  “Uh-huh!” Tim told her. “Wrong answer, Charlotte. Move your legs! Move your hands. C’mon!”

  Charlotte Fox:

  I was freezing to death. It was so painful, I just wanted it to be over.

  Sandy Pittman fell apart.

  “I don’t want to die!” she yelled. “I don’t want to die! My face is freezing! My hands are freezing! I don’t want to die!”

  I said nothing, in part because Sandy was covering it pretty well. She certainly was expressing my point of view.

  (Sandy later told me that in the midst of the freezing horror, she’d had this odd dream of being at peace in a tea garden. For some reason, I was playing a flute in this reverie. I appreciated being included. In fact, it reminded me that at one point in my life, I’d intended to take up the flute. Maybe in my next life.)

  From about the time of Sandy’s screams until the next day, my memory is vague or nonexistent. I was starting to freeze, which was not unpleasant. You really do start feeling warmer. Then I had a sense of floating. I wondered if someone was dragging me across the ice. I wasn’t really well enough glued together to comprehend these sensations.

  Charlotte Fox:

  It was so windy that I had my hood pulled tightly around my face. I wasn’t really looking around. But Tim remembers Beck standing up on a rock, putting his arms out and saying, “Okay, I’ve got this all figured out.” Then he toppled over and that’s the last Tim saw of him.

  FIVE

  Neal, Mike and Klev somehow did find High Camp that night, but were on their hands and knees by the time they did. None of them had anything left. They weren’t going to return for us; they couldn’t. The Sherpas in camp wouldn’t. There was no one else to try, except for the Russian, Anatoli Boukreev.

  That day, Anatoli had forsaken his duty as a guide. While everyone was struggling up and down the ridge to the summit, or stacked up like cordwood at the Hillary Step, Anatoli climbed for himself, by himself, without oxygen. He just went straight up, tagged the summit, and came straight back down. Because he lacked oxygen, he couldn’t persist in the cold, and was forced to retreat to the shelter of his tent.

  So Boukreev had been in his tent recovering for hours, and if that was where his story had ended that night, the climbing community would have stripped the flesh right off his bones. They are not a forgiving bunch.

  But Anatoli did what no one else could, or would do. He went out into that storm three times, searching both for Scott Fischer, who froze to death on the mountain, about twelve hundred feet above the South Col, and for us. Boukreev twice was driven back to camp by the wind and cold. The third time he located our little huddle by the face and brought in each of the three Fischer climbers—Tim, Charlotte and Sandy. He left behind Yasuko and me, the Hall climbers.

  Charlotte Fox:

  I just remember Anatoli suddenly being there. He grabbed me first. I stood up and walked in with him. He led me by the hand. Then he brought in Sandy and Tim. I don’t recall any conversation about Beck and Yasuko.

  Anatoli later told at least three stories of what occurred out there on the South Col. It doesn’t matter which one was true. In that moment, by saving those three people who otherwise surely would have died, Anatoli Boukreev became a hero.

  Let that be the way Anatoli is remembered. On Christmas Day of 1997, Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna.

  Which brings me to the rest of the lost climbers from my group: Rob Hall, Doug Hansen and Andy Harris.

  Doug Hansen, as I said, was climbing poorly. The year before, when he’d come so close to that summit, Doug had looked good going up. But when he turned around, he lost it and had to be helped down.

  Your body doesn’t carry you up there. Your mind does. Your body is exhausted hours before you reach the top; it is only through will and focus and drive that you continue to move. If you lose that focus, your body is a dead, worthless thing beneath you.

  Doug kept climbing past t
wo o’clock, then three o’clock and four o’clock, ignoring the risk. I don’t know why Rob let him do it. But when Doug finally reached all the way to the summit, it was a rerun of 1995. That’s all he brought with him. That’s all he had.

  Now Rob Hall had a heck of a problem on his hands. He could not save Doug. He could not rescue him. Doug had to get down on his own legs.

  Rob called down to Base Camp. He was told, “Rob, this is hard, but you have got to leave him. You cannot save him. Save yourself.”

  It comes as no surprise to those of us who knew him that Rob could never do that, leave Doug alone on the mountain to save himself. If he did, Rob could never again look in the mirror.

  So this father-to-be would damn himself if he did not, and be doomed if he did. He got back on the radio and said, “We’re in desperate trouble,” and asked for help. Young Andy Harris, who was about a third of the way down to High Camp and pretty much exhausted himself, heard this.

  Andy, sapped by his exertions as well as an intestinal bug he contracted in Lobuje, turned and slowly labored his way back up that hill. He reached an oxygen cache and took several canisters all the way back to Doug and Rob near the summit. What happened next is unclear. However, hours passed as they tried to get Doug across the knife-edged summit ridge.

  Rob and Andy made it to the South Summit, but Doug did not. He apparently fell on the way. Andy stayed with Rob until sometime in the night when, disoriented and physically spent, he disappeared into the storm, never to be found.

  Harris’s ice ax later was recovered near Rob’s body, suggesting that Andy had reached his limit. No climber readily surrenders his ice ax.

  Rob lived through that night, but late the next afternoon, as darkness began to fall, when there was no longer any hope of a rescue, Base Camp called his wife, Jan, in New Zealand and patched her through to her dying husband. Everyone on that mountain with a radio bore silent witness to their last moments together. Hall had regained his faculties. He and Jan decided at that moment to name their unborn child Sarah.

  Jan to Rob: “Don’t feel that you’re alone. I’m sending all my positive energy your way.”

  Rob to Jan: “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.”

  Both of them knew exactly what lay ahead. When those moments had passed and Rob no longer had to be strong, you could hear him quietly weeping as he faced his own death. He didn’t know the radio was still on.

  SIX

  The storm relented on the morning of the eleventh. The winds dropped to about thirty knots. Stuart Hutchison and three Sherpas went in search of Yasuko and me. They found us lying next to each other, largely buried in snow and ice.

  First to Yasuko. Hutchison reached down and pulled her up by her coat. She had a three-inch-thick layer of ice across her face, a mask that he peeled back. Her skin was porcelain. Her eyes were dilated. But she was still breathing.

  He moved to me, pulled me up, and cleaned the ice out of my eyes and off my beard so he could look into my face. I, like Yasuko, was barely clinging to life. Hutchison would later say he had never seen a human being so close to death and still breathing. Coming from a cardiologist, I’ll accept that at face value.

  What do you do? The superstitious Sherpas, uneasy around the dead and dying, were hesitant to approach us. But Hutchison didn’t really need a second opinion here. The answer was, you leave them. Every mountaineer knows that once you go into hypothermic coma in the high mountains, you never, ever wake up. Yasuko and I were going to die anyway. It would only endanger more lives to bring us back.

  I don’t begrudge that decision for my own sake. But how much strain would be entailed in carrying Yasuko back? She was so tiny. At least she could have died in the tent, surrounded by people, and not alone on that ice.

  Hutchison and the Sherpas got back to camp and told everyone that we were dead. They called down to Base Camp, which notified Rob’s office in Christchurch, which relayed the news to Dallas. On a warm, sunny Saturday morning the phone rang in our house. Peach answered and was told by Madeleine David, office manager for Hall’s company, Adventure Consultants, that I had been killed descending from the summit ridge.

  “Is there any hope?” Peach asked.

  “No,” David replied. “There’s been a positive body identification. I’m sorry.”

  About four in the afternoon, Everest time—twenty-two hours into the storm—the miracle occurred: I opened my eyes. Several improbable, if not impossible, events would follow in succession. I would stand and struggle alone back to High Camp. Next day I’d stand again and negotiate the Lhotse Face. Then there would be the highest-altitude helicopter rescue ever. Those were the big things. The miracle was a quiet thing: I opened my eyes and was given a chance to try.

  In my confused state, I at first believed that I was warm and comfortable in my bed at home, with Texas sunlight streaming in through the window. But as my head cleared I saw my glove-less hand directly in front of my face, a gray and lifeless thing.

  I smashed it onto the ice. It bounced, making a sound like a block of wood. This had the marvelous effect of focusing my attention: I am not in my own bed. I am somewhere on the mountain—I don’t know where. I can’t see at any distance, but I know that I am alone.

  It would take a while to recapture the previous night in my mind. When I did, I assumed the others all were rescued and that for some reason I was overlooked, left behind. Was it something I said?

  Innately, I knew that the cavalry was not coming. If they were going to be there, they already would have been there. I was on my own.

  One mystery still unsolved is why I no longer was lying next to Yasuko. She remained where Stuart Hutchison and the Sherpas found, and left, us that morning. But I awoke from the coma alone and a good distance away that afternoon. I can only surmise that sometime between morning and late day I semi-revived and somehow made my way (perhaps fifty yards) in the direction of High Camp before collapsing again.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this came another shock—my epiphany. Suddenly, my family appeared in my mind’s eye—Peach, Bub and Meg. This was not a group portrait or some remembered photo. My subconscious summoned them into vivid focus, as if they might at any moment speak to me. I knew at that instant, with absolute clarity, that if I did not stand at once, I would spend an eternity on that spot.

  I thought I was inured to the idea of dying on the mountain. Such a death may even have seemed to me to have a romantic and noble quality. But even though I was prepared to die, I just wasn’t ready.

  I struggled to my feet and took off my pack, discarding it along with the ice ax. This was going to be a one-shot deal. If I don’t make that camp, I’m not going to need equipment, I decided. It would just slow me down. For a fleeting moment I reflected that these likely were my last earthly possessions.

  I also realized at just that moment that I had to take a major-league leak. There was no choice but to let fly in my suit. At least that warmed me up, temporarily.

  My first idea was to walk in a sort of grid. I started out in a succession of squares, searching for some landmark or way to orient myself. Soon, however, I realized that was getting me nowhere.

  Then I recollected that the night before someone had yelled out during the storm, “What direction does the wind blow over High Camp?”

  The answer was “It blows up that face, across the camp, across the Col.” Which meant that if the wind had not shifted, High Camp ought to be somewhere upwind.

  So I chose that direction, feeling it was as good as any of the 359 other choices I had. If I fell down, I was determined to get up. If I fell down again, I would get up again. And I was going to keep moving until I fell down and could not stand or I walked into that camp, or I walked off the face of the mountain.

  Both my hands were completely frozen. My face was destroyed by the cold. I was profoundly hypothermic. I had not eaten in three days, or taken water for two days. I was lost and I was almost completely blind.
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  You cannot sweat that small stuff, I said to myself. You have to focus on that which must be done, and do that thing.

  I began to move in that same repetitive, energy-conserving motion that my body knows so well. The ground was uneven, scattered with little ledges maybe five to eight inches deep that in the flat light of late afternoon were invisible to me.

  Each time I encountered one of these hidden ledges, I would fall. At first, I instinctively put out my hands to break the fall, but I didn’t want to compound the effects of the frostbite by further damaging my hands, so I held them close to my body and tried to turn on my back, or on my side, each time I slipped and fell. I hit the frozen ground pretty hard. Blam! Each time there’d be this little light show in my head from the jolt. Then I’d get up and start again.

  Part of me was apathetic, even accepting, a reprise of the previous afternoon up on the Balcony. The sun was going lower and lower, and I knew the second it was gone, I was gone, too. I’d lose the light, and the temperature would come screaming down. I had thoughts of falling one last time and not being able to get up and then just watching that sun set.

  What surprised me about that realization was I was not at all frightened by it. I am not a particularly brave individual, and I would have expected myself to be terrified as I came to grips with that moment. But that was not what I felt at all.

  No, I was overwhelmed by an enormous, encompassing sense of melancholy. That I would not say good-bye to my family, that I would never again say “I love you” to my wife, that I would never again hold my children, was just not acceptable.

  “Keep moving,” I said to myself again and again.

  I began to hallucinate again, getting awfully close to losing it. Things were really moving around.

  Then I saw these two odd blue rocks in front of me, and I thought for one moment, Those might be the tents! Just as quickly I said to myself, Don’t! When you walk up to them and they are nothing but rocks, you’re going to be discouraged and you might stop. You cannot do that. You are going to walk right up to them and you are going to walk right past them. It makes no difference.