Left for Dead Read online

  I concentrated on these blue blurs, torn between believing they were camp and fearing they were not, until I got within a hundred feet of them—when suddenly a figure loomed up! It was Todd Burleson, the leader of yet another climbing expedition, who beheld a strange creature lurching toward him in the twilight.

  Burleson later shared his first impressions of me with a TV interviewer:

  “I couldn’t believe what I saw. This man had no face. It was completely black, solid black, like he had a crust over him. His jacket was unzipped down to his waist, full of snow. His right arm was bare and frozen over his head. We could not lower it. His skin looked like marble. White stone. No blood in it.”

  SEVEN

  Todd Burleson’s amazement stemmed in part from my appearance, and in part from the news he’d received that everyone above High Camp, including me, was dead.

  He quickly recovered his composure, reached out and took me by the arm to the first tent—the dead Scott Fischer’s tent—where they put me into two sleeping bags, shoved hot water bottles under my arms, and gave me a shot of steroids.

  “You are not going to believe what just walked into camp,” they radioed down to Base Camp. The response back was “That is fascinating. But it changes nothing. He is going to die. Do not bring him down.”

  Fortunately, they didn’t tell me that.

  Conventional wisdom holds that in hypothermia cases, even so remarkable a resurrection as mine merely delays the inevitable. When they called Peach and told her that I was not as dead as they thought I was—but I was critically injured—they were trying not to give her false hope. What she heard, of course, was an entirely different thing.

  I also demurred from the glum consensus. Having reconnected with the mother ship, I now believed I had a chance to actually survive this thing. For whatever reason, I seemed to have tolerated the hypothermia, and genuinely believed myself fully revived. What I did not at first think about was the Khumbu Icefall, which simply cannot be navigated without hands. I was going to require another means of exit, something nobody had ever tried before.

  They left me alone in Scott Fischer’s tent that night, expecting me to die. On a couple of occasions I heard the others referring to “a dead guy” in the tent. Who could that be? I wondered as I slipped in and out of wakefulness.

  To complicate matters, the storm came roaring back, every bit as ferocious as the previous night. It shook that tent and me in it as if we were absolutely weightless. I remembered how Scott had talked about a new tent he was trying out, how it was an experimental, lightweight model, extremely flexible. I wondered if I was in that tent and, if so, how well it had been secured to the ground. The wind certainly was strong enough to blow me and the tent clear off the South Col.

  With each gust it pressed so heavily on my chest and face that I couldn’t breathe. In the brief moments between the gusts, I rolled onto my side, eventually discovering that if I lay on my side, I could breathe even as the tent pressed down on me.

  My right hand and forearm were less than useless in all this. They started to swell and discolor down to my wristwatch. I tried desperately to bite the thing off, but Seiko makes a darn good watchband, and I failed.

  All the commotion and discomfort notwithstanding, I must have lost consciousness repeatedly that night. I don’t remember the blizzard blowing out the doors and filling the tent with snow, but it did. I don’t remember being blasted out of my sleeping bag, but clearly I was, because that was how I found myself at dawn.

  Peach:

  I can sort of understand why no one was able or willing to risk their lives to rescue Beck or Yasuko. I even sort of understand the medical edict from Base Camp that Beck should be left to die at High Camp. What I don’t understand is why they left him alone in that tent overnight.

  I mean, if they were lucid enough to understand a doctor’s directive, they should have had the presence of mind not to leave him all alone. They might at least have checked on him a couple of times.

  I’ve thought this over again and again. Where was their basic human compassion? Being in the tent with Beck certainly would not have endangered anyone. If they figured he was going to die, then being there to hear his final words, and perhaps pass them on to those he left behind, would have been a tremendous comfort to us.

  Nearly everyone packed up to break camp at daybreak, and they did so very quietly. I didn’t hear any of it. Besides myself, only Jon Krakauer, and Todd Burleson and Pete Athans, who were guiding the same expedition together, remained in camp.

  I heard a noise outside.

  “Hello!” I yelled. “Anybody out there?” Krakauer, who was checking out each tent before he, too, headed down the mountain, stuck his head inside. When he saw me, Jon’s jaw dropped right down to the middle of his chest. I was supposed to be dead.

  “What the hell does a person have to do around here to get a little service!” I said, then added, “Jon, if you don’t mind, would you ask Pete Athans to step over here? I’d really like to talk to him.”

  Athans, an acquaintance from previous expeditions, looked in and saw that I, in fact, was still alive. I was fully dressed. I had my boots on. (You can’t take them off because your feet will swell and you can’t get back in them.) So it was a relatively simple thing for me to stand, put my crampons back on with Pete and Todd’s help, and drink two liters of tea.

  Now the dead guy was ready to head down the Lhotse Face.

  I peed down my leg again as I got my glacier glasses on. With Pete in front of me and Todd behind, holding on to my harness, we made it about a quarter way down the face to an area of crumbly rock called the Yellow Band. There we were met by members of an IMAX film crew: Ed Viesturs, America’s strongest high-altitude climber, as well as Robert Schauer, an Austrian photographer, who’d escort me the rest of the way down to Camp Three, which is 23,400 feet above sea level.

  David Breashears, the IMAX director and cinematographer, joined us there. At that point, all I wanted to do was crawl into a tent and go to sleep, but David said no, we had to keep moving down.

  I said, “David, if you believe I can do it, I guess I can.”

  After a short rest and some more tea, we set off again, this time down a very steep part of the slope to Camp Two on the Western Cwm at 21,300 feet. We were walking so close to each other that I remarked if we were in my home state of Georgia, we’d be married.

  David walked in front of me. I rested one arm on the back of his pack. Each time he lifted his foot off the ice, I’d slide my crampons into his print. Behind me, either Ed or Robert kept a grip on my climbing harness. In this way we slowly lurched down the face.

  The three of them—David, Ed and Robert—are elite mountaineers, among the most famous and accomplished mountain climbers in the world. It wasn’t lost on me that I, the ultimate grunt at the end of his climbing career, suddenly was surrounded by a Dream Team of mountaineering. Another of life’s little ironies.

  It should be noted that escorting me down the Lhotse Face was among the least of the selfless acts performed by David and the rest of the IMAX team in that emergency. When they heard of the developing tragedy, they called up to High Camp on the South Col and instructed that whoever needed their cached stores there—oxygen, fuel, food, batteries, whatever—had only to cut open their tents and take anything that was needed. These men were acting as members of the brotherhood of the rope, undeterred by the real possibility that giving up their painstakingly cached supplies might scuttle a $7 million venture.

  I’m thankful that it did not.

  As we descended the Lhotse Face, I asked David whether he’d mind if we sang a little bit to help me keep up my spirits. I’m sure he thought I was crazy. Nevertheless we soon were singing Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools,” which seemed entirely appropriate to the moment. Trying to keep everyone’s spirits up, I even tried some vaudeville-grade humor.

  “They told me this trip was going to cost an arm and a leg,” I quipped shamelessly to David. �
�So far, I’ve gotten a little better deal.”

  Our mess tent at Camp Two was turned into a hospital. Inside, Dr. Ken Kamler, a hand surgeon from New York, and a Danish physician, Dr. Henrik Jessen Hansen, were seeing to the walking wounded.

  These included Gau Ming-Ho, leader of the Taiwanese expedition, who goes by the nickname “Makalu.” He’d also been caught late on the mountain, and had managed to get as far down as Scott Fischer’s perch twelve hundred feet above the South Col, where three Sherpas eventually rescued him, leaving the comatose Fischer behind.

  At Camp Two they stripped off my gear—including the Seiko—and in the space of a minute or so I was lying naked on the floor. It was a coed crowd, of course, but I could have cared less if they sold tickets.

  They eventually put me in a sleeping bag, and my hands in two bowls of warm water to begin thawing them. They were later dressed in silver nitrate, which is also used on burns—it’ll kill anything—and heavily bandaged into two big mitts. I took some Advil, a vasodilator and a little soup.

  Someone started a saline-solution IV in my right arm. It was very cold at Camp Two. Even though they ran the coils through warm water, when the fluid hit my veins it felt like an icicle in my heart.

  This was when I began hearing rumors of a helicopter rescue—Peach’s hidden hand. It sounded like a fairy tale: Ain’t ever happened. Ain’t ever gonna happen. The lowest camp on that mountain was way above the rated ceiling of the helicopter in question, an American EuroCopter Squirrel belonging to the Royal Nepalese Army. The air was so thin and unstable at that altitude that we’d simply fall out of the sky.

  However, nobody told Peach about this. And since she didn’t know it could not be done, she did it. Assisted by her bunch of North Dallas power moms—any one of whom I believe could run a Fortune 500 company out of her kitchen—they proceeded to call everybody in the United States. If you did not personally receive a phone call from my wife or one of her associates in this effort, it was because you weren’t home.

  They enlisted my home state senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, as well as Tom Daschle, the Democratic Senate minority leader, who lit a fire under the State Department, which in turn contacted a fine young man in the embassy in Katmandu, David Schensted, who worked with a beautiful Nepalese woman, Inu K.C. The initials stand for Khatri Chhetri, and they mean Inu is a member of a warrior caste, the warrior caste of Nepal.

  To be K.C. is a very serious matter. You live according to a much more demanding personal code than others. After several pilots had declined (quite reasonably) to attempt the rescue, Inu told Schensted, “I know a man who believes that he has a brave heart, but he’s never been sufficiently challenged to know if this is true. I will ask him.”

  They found forty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Madan K.C., just as he was taking his second shot on the first hole of the Royal Nepal Golf Club. Rather than refusing such a perilous mission, as any mortal might, Madan K.C. accepted the challenge. “I will do this thing,” he said. “I will rescue the Beck.”

  The optimum, indeed only time to hazard such a risky operation on Everest is early in the morning. As was true with moving through the Khumbu Icefall, the sun complicates high-altitude aviation by heating the atmosphere, making it even thinner and more unstable. Madan wanted it to be as cool and calm as possible.

  We got up at five-thirty that morning and moved the two thousand vertical feet down the Cwm to Camp One at the top edge of the Icefall. As we arrived, the radio came alive. A voice announced from Base Camp, “The helicopter is here, and he’s going to try it. He’s here for Weathers. Get ready. One climber. One climber only.”

  Madan:

  The American embassy alerted us that Beck Weathers was sick on the mountain at twenty thousand feet. We had never been that high before, so we discussed it among ourselves. That is a very, very dangerous place, with high winds. But when I am on duty it is my moral obligation not to back out when I can save someone’s life.

  I said to the American embassy, “We’ll try.”

  I planned to take off from Katmandu at six o’clock that morning. But when we got to the airport there was a message:

  “Very high winds. Don’t send the helicopter.” Then they called again: “The wind is down. Send the helicopter.”

  We took off. We were just going to try. We were not confident. We had never been that high before, and you have to fly within feet of the Khumbu Icefall to get up into that valley. Power is almost nil.

  You have to be very precise. You are flying at the upper limits of everything.

  Just as we received the radio message, a group of Sherpas came running down the valley toward us. They were dragging something, which turned out to be Makalu Gau, whose feet had been destroyed by the cold. He could not stand.

  Now we had a problem. We talked about it, and I told the others that I couldn’t get on the helicopter and leave Makalu. I think that was the right thing to do, but that wasn’t why I said it. I didn’t want to second-guess myself every day for the rest of my life.

  Then we saw the Squirrel. The shiny green machine rose directly above us, and moved up the valley, ascended toward us and then just disappeared off the face. I thought to myself, This guy is not stupid. This was a supremely dumb idea. If he puts the machine down for any reason and cannot take off, he is a dead man. He’s got to know that.

  He was up there in civilian clothes. He was not a climber. He did not have the clothing. He did not have the experience. He did not have the skills. He’d be trapped above the Khumbu Ice fall, two thousand of the most vicious feet of real estate on earth. Altitude sickness would kill him before he could walk out of there.

  Madan:

  We flew up to Camp One, but we didn’t see anybody. Usually, with a rescue there’s a flag or something like that. So we flew up to Camp Two and then came back down when we saw people pulling a body through the snow. He looked like he was in real trouble.

  At that altitude, the helicopter was too heavy for us to attempt the rescue. My copilot said, “Let’s go. It is not possible.”

  I said, “Let me try.”

  One thing, you have to make up your mind. Either yes or no. If you don’t you can make a mistake up there. I was certain—“Okay, I’m going now.”

  So I flew back down to Base Camp and dropped my copilot and some gear and fuel. Then I came back up alone—I had twenty minutes of fuel—and made a pass by the camp only one foot above the ground. I was looking to see if all the fresh snow would blow up. If it did I could not land. If I had landed and not been able to take off, I wouldn’t be alive today. It was fifteen degrees Fahrenheit.

  Once again the helicopter rose. One lone man. He moved up that valley with deliberate and delicate precision, and lay those skids down on the surface. He dared not let the weight of the helicopter descend. He had no idea if this was solid, or if this was chiffon over air. You never know up there whether you’re standing above a crevasse.

  The power was full on. His hands were frozen on the controls. His head didn’t move left or right—that changes your depth perception. We grabbed Makalu like a sack of potatoes, ran him over there and threw him in the back of this machine, slamming the door shut. The tail of the helicopter rose up. It did not lift up, but it did move forward toward the Icefall, where it plunged out of sight, as did my heart, because I knew he was not coming back.

  Madan:

  When I flew over Camp One they tied a rag to an ice ax to show me which way the wind was blowing, and they marked a spot for me to land. I later heard they used Kool-Aid. I saw the one little spot on the snow. It was too slopey, so I just moved a little farther to the left, where I decided to land. I said, “Now, God, you make it possible for me.”

  We were between two big crevasses. There were only a few feet on either side of the helicopter. The crevasses were dark blue. You could fit a whole house in them. And I found out there were two sick people. I was not giving any attention to them. I couldn’t move my hand from the control, and I didn�
�t want to move my head. That could affect my judgment. I said, “Only one,” and they finally understood.

  I took off very nicely and dropped the guy at Base Camp. But he was not the Beck. So I went back for the Beck.

  That mission was specially requested for the Beck. It was really a very, very difficult mission. There was no room for the helicopter to move if something went wrong. There were high winds—tail winds. You want head winds that give you extra lift.

  And I had to land as close as possible to them. To walk fifty meters they need an hour. I only had a few minutes of fuel.

  We stood there maybe five minutes. We didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say. And then I heard one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard in my entire life, that whap! whap! whap!—the distinctive chop of a helicopter. Long before we could see this thing we could hear it claw its way up that two-thousand-foot wall, once again this same lone man rising into view. He moved up the valley with greater authority.

  With the same consummate skill he lay those skids down again. Not waiting, I hot-footed across there and dove into the back of this machine. They slammed the door and one more time the helicopter tail went up and we moved toward the precipice, crevasses gliding by beneath the skids.

  We crested the edge and then went screaming down that face with the blades whipping around above us, trying to grab hold of cold, heavy, dense air that would provide lift. The machine felt alive beneath us as it pulled us out of the dive, and we knew we were safe.