A Day to Die For: 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - One Survivor's Personal Journey to Uncover the Truth (42 page)

‘Bring it with you on Friday. I want to read this for myself,’ was Geoff’s uncommitted reply.

Typical lawyer, I thought, too calm by half.

The morale boost Ed’s reply gave me was huge. Prior to this, I was losing belief that my work would lead anywhere. I felt I’d been confronted with an impenetrable wall of silence. For one brief moment, Ed’s reply swept that aside.

On the Friday evening, I sat across the table from Geoff, watching him intently as he studied Ed’s reply. For the first time, I could see in his eyes that he thought I might be making some progress. As he dissected in his mind each sentence of Ed’s reply, he went one step further than I had. With a broad grin on his face, he said, ‘“Also” means “as well as” or “at the same time”.’

We spent the remainder of that evening in deep discussion about the implications of the reply and my next planned move.

Buoyed by this small but important breakthrough, I turned my newly acquired fishing skills to Neal Beidleman. However, Neal proved more difficult than most to track down. There were plenty of references to him on the Internet but no contact details I could find. Eventually, after three or four weeks and a number of enquiries to different organisations in Aspen, Colorado, I managed to get hold of his email address.

With a heavily baited line, I wrote to Neal, informing him that I understood prior to the disaster the Imax team had been receiving their weather forecasts from the London-based Met Office and these had been shared with Rob Hall and Scott Fischer; from these, each of the three teams had chosen their summit day.

I also told Neal that I knew of the meeting that had taken place between Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, Andy Harris and himself to make final plans for summit attempts. I asked if during this they discussed any contingency plans in case the Imax team, on their way to the summit, were delayed by a day.

Neal replied:

After such a long fallow period in my research, I could hardly believe my luck: first Ed and now Neal.

Significantly, Neal had confirmed that, to his knowledge, Scott did not have specific forecasts from any other source. The only source I’d mentioned anywhere in my email to Neal was the forecast I understood the Imax team were receiving from London: the ones he’d said he’d seen.

Once again, Catherine witnessed me utterly elated by these smallest of details. She sensed that I thought I was on the verge of a major breakthrough. My whole demeanour had changed to one bursting with energy and motivation.

I arrived at my usual Friday meeting with Geoff with the sense I’d achieved something important with my newly found fishing skills. Geoff, however, although impressed with what I’d managed to find out, was concerned by Neal’s careful use of words and phrases, such as, ‘mildly aware’, ‘not much credence’ and ‘never seemed to be very accurate anyway’. The words were too vague for him to draw any conclusion that he’d be comfortable with.

I found it difficult to accept this dampening of my enthusiasm. These precious discoveries were so difficult to achieve and so rare that I hung on to them tightly. To relinquish them was not something I wanted to do. They were virtually all I had after two years of work.

I carefully considered the replies I’d received from both Ed and Neal, and wrote to them once more to clarify matters, but in doing so I added into the equation my understanding of Rob’s knowledge that ‘the weather was due to turn bad the next day’, 11 May.

I set out for Neal the sequence of events that I thought was very close to how the summit attempts ended up being planned: that it appeared as though 10 May was the date chosen first by Rob then Scott before the Imax weather forecasts were looked at. When the forecast was seen by Rob and Scott, this confirmed there was a possible window on 10 May with the weather holding until 11 May when there was going to be a change for the worse with a drop in temperature and the wind speed picking up considerably. With Rob and Scott having already announced the 10th, the Imax team decided to go for the summit the day before. I asked Neal if he could confirm that this was a reasonable synopsis of the way the planning for the summit attempts proceeded.

Neal’s entire reply was short and succinct:
‘Seems reasonable, but this all happened a long time ago. Good luck. Neal.’

I then sent more or less the same email to Ed Viesturs. I received no reply.

For whatever reasons, the avenues of contact with both Ed and Neal appeared to have been closed. They seemed to have joined an ever-growing list of those who either had nothing further to add or simply did not respond. In truth, I was running out of key people to contact. Nothing I’d read had brought me any closer to actually proving my suspicions. It appeared, although tantalisingly close, I’d reached the end of the road. I felt I was so close to the truth, but still it was out of reach. This turned out to be more painful than not knowing at all. The agony of being in this position but not being able to prove my findings brought a depression that I had not expected to feel. My expectations at the onset had been that such information would be easily uncovered. It was not. I was beginning to understand why no one had spotted it immediately after the tragedy of 10 May. I had the crushing sense that my search was doomed to fail, that I would be left isolated, burdened with both torment and guilt.

Proof beyond doubt was part of my journey. Merely knowing within myself was not enough. My deep-rooted feeling was that if I did not expose the full facts about what had brought about this seminal event in Everest’s history, then no one ever would.

The press had missed their opportunity to discover it back in 1996. They had been so wrapped up in the gift of a story that they had never looked beyond the surface. Rob Hall was out of reach and dying slowly near the summit of Everest, speaking via a radio link to his pregnant wife in New Zealand; high-paying clients caught out in a ferocious storm; eight people dead – what more could the press ask for? Possibly what had led to this catastrophic outcome? But in the end, the right question was never asked or, if so, it had been asked in such a way that it was easily deflected. Time and the accounts that followed would bury the information almost beyond reach.

Following the highs I’d felt after receiving the replies from Ed and Neal, I’d now hit rock bottom. In hindsight, this was probably a natural reaction, but at the time it was hard to deal with: a problem neither Catherine nor Geoff could help me overcome. On this occasion, I was on my own, in a situation I’d not expected to find myself. Time had marched on.

Although dejected, l knew the only way to deal with the scenario was logically. I wondered how many more years I could end up wasting, going nowhere with this search. I felt worn out. Eventually I concluded that it was in the best interests of both my family and myself if I called it a day and shelved the whole project.

For a short while, I felt a huge burden of responsibility had been lifted from me. My assumption was that I could merely move on with my life.

My newly found free time brought with it a loss of direction; the intensity of my focus had come to an unsatisfactory and abrupt end. It was early April and my 52nd birthday had slipped past unnoticed. Melancholy was in the air, as were the strong winds that accompany this change in season.

The morning was bright and the sky clear as I scuffed my feet along Tynemouth Long Sands: a broad, gently curving golden beach, some half a mile long with a steep grassy sand-dune slope behind and a rocky outcrop at either end, popular with surfers because of the waves that roll in with the predominantly easterly breeze. However, the wind that day was scouring the surface and whisking sand grains up a few inches into the fast-moving air, weaving it in broad trails as it danced towards the water’s edge. The hard grains drummed against my trouser legs as though shot from a grit blaster. I leant backwards against this westerly barrage; the roar of air rushing past my ears deafened me to all around. There were no surfers today. Beyond, the sea had been flattened by the onslaught of the west wind. Such was the wind’s strength that it was ripping water from the surface and transforming it into fanning columns of dense spray over a hundred feet high. The sea had taken on the appearance of a ferociously boiling cauldron. A mile or two offshore, I caught glimpses of cargo ships travelling north. They moved like ghostly apparitions as they passed in and out of partial sight, obscured by the huge sprays of water being hurled into the air. Rarely could I see a whole ship at once. The bow of a ship appearing in the distance, seemingly out of nowhere, when the rest of the vessel was out of sight, gave the scene an unnatural feel.

At that precise moment, I understood that if the wind blew stronger I would still be able to see the ships; the increase in strength would merely serve to make the vision more ghostly. Likewise, the sight of two head torches flickering on the South Col through the furiously wind-driven snow: they would not fade in time but would become more haunting.

The next morning, I was woken prematurely by the light of the early-morning sun shining through a gap between the curtains of our bedroom window. The howling roar of the previous day’s wind had long since subsided. I found myself lying there pondering the huge amount of time and effort I’d put into the whole project and how this would be completely wasted, as nothing had been resolved. If anything, I was in a worse position than when I had set out, as my denial was no longer buried beyond reach. I was tormented by the frustrations in my search. There and then I decided I would write down whatever I had and see where I ended up, in the knowledge that the manuscript I finally produced had the strong possibility of becoming little more than a collection of my personal thoughts.

No sooner had I started putting pen to paper than my enthusiasm returned. Whether this was going to last, I’d no idea, but I sensed rejuvenation in my project. Maybe my mental detachment for that short intervening period was what I’d needed.

For some unearthly reason that I cannot explain, I decided it would be useful if I spent the time when I wasn’t writing going through the magazines I’d amassed just one more time. In what way I thought this might have helped is beyond me now. Maybe I couldn’t help looking at the haystack, knowing that somewhere inside was the needle, the clue I’d been searching for.

It was while I was grasping at straws, re-reading the first few of the many magazines piled on the living room floor, that I had my luckiest break of all. Whether it was destiny pointing her finger, I will never know. This was the break I had been praying for, but not from a source where I had expected to find it. I’d stumbled across a reference to Audrey Salkeld posting regular updates to NOVA online from the Imax expedition’s Base Camp during April and May 1996. I had surely seen this reference on the previous reading but must have been so engrossed in my search for the missing quote that I passed over it without stopping. Now I was leaving no stone unturned.

Visiting the archives of NOVA online, which is part of the www.pbs.org website, I clicked onto the dispatches/reports sent by Audrey. Reading through each and every one of them, my expectations were that I’d find nothing much to help my research. I could not have been more mistaken.

In the report, submitted by Audrey Salkeld to NOVA online on 5 May 1996, the opening paragraph read:

The euphoria I felt when I read these words instantly blew away all the despondency I’d had to endure. The trust in my instincts was vindicated. This was not hearsay: this was on record.

It can still be viewed on PBS’s archive using the following link then clicking on to May 5th 1996: www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/everest/expeditions/96

I had found weather forecasts and meteorologists, but they were from Denmark. Had I got it that mixed up? Was the source of the Imax expedition’s forecasts the Danes? This made the information I’d gathered thus far rather confusing.

Despite this, I had confirmation that accurate weather forecasts were being received at Base Camp before 10 May 1996. These were being shared, at the very least, between the Danish climbers on Mal Duff’s team and the Imax expedition.

I considered contacting Audrey at this point, but decided it might be more sensible to locate the actual source of these forecasts and to approach members of the Danish expedition first.

Before drawing conclusions, it was essential that I got verification that these Danish forecasts had actually existed. I’d built up my hopes on previous occasions, simply to have them dashed. Initially, Catherine was the only one I told of my discovery.

Prior to communicating with the Danish climbers from Mal Duff’s team, or mentioning this to Geoff, I approached the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) to confirm they had indeed supplied these forecasts. This led me to Søren E. Olufsen, a highly experienced meteorologist. From 1981 until 1993, he’d worked as an aviation forecaster with the Danish Civil Aviation Administration/DMI, after which time he was promoted to Head of the Central Forecasting Office. When I contacted Søren, he’d been appointed as Deputy Director of Forecasting Services at the DMI.