Left for Dead (2 page)

The practical-minded Sherpa have traded their hoes and hunting tools for backpacks to act as porters for the various expeditions. Today, a Sherpa can earn a couple of thousand dollars or more lugging gear up and down the mountain for a typical two-month climbing expedition. That’s more than ten times Nepal’s annual per capita income.

The downside, of course, is that the work is arduous and dangerous: Memorial cairns erected along the upper reaches of the narrow trail to Everest remind you that one in three of those who’ve died on the mountain has been a Sherpa.

In his definitive chronicle of our doomed expedition,
Into Thin Air
, the journalist Jon Krakauer would describe me as “garrulous” on the walk in. That’s probably charitable. I could have talked the ears off a rubber rabbit. I was eager to be liked, accepted, a member of the group. Under such circumstances, I typically talk a lot. If someone had thrown a Frisbee, I would have caught it with my teeth to please them.

The long trail, which rises ever upward through the Khumbu, is the important first step toward preparing yourself to withstand high-mountain conditions that no organism of more than single-cell complexity was ever meant to endure. It’s a pleasant
trek, in any event, or can be if the route isn’t choked with trekkers, climbing parties and the Khumbu’s ubiquitous yak trains. Every once in a while you come around a turn and there, off in the distance, is this giant rock, nearly six miles high, thrusting its head up above everything around it.

On clear days you can see a steady plume of ice and snow streaming for a mile or so off Everest’s summit. This is the mountain’s distinctive white banner, highlighted against the cobalt sky, and a signal that the jet stream, with its winds of 150 to 200 miles an hour, is screaming right over Everest, as it does for most of the year. No one tries to reach the top in these conditions.

But at one time in the spring, and once more in the fall, the banner fades. The ferocious winds lift off Everest, offering a brief window of opportunity for you to go up there, try to tag the top and then hope that you get back down alive.

The Khumbu trail leads up out of the valleys past the treeline to the lower stretches of the twelve-mile-long Khumbu Glacier. At an altitude of approximately sixteen thousand feet you encounter the last settlement of any consequence, a pestilential, medieval hellhole known as Lobuje.

One of the ironies of mountain climbing is that in order to achieve the pristine heights, you must inevitably slog through noisome hog wallows such as Lobuje. There is a straightforward explanation for this. Remote settlements like Lobuje were not established with hordes of visitors in mind. Put several hundred humans and the odd herd of yaks together in a primitive hamlet where dried dung soaked in kerosene is the primary fuel, and sanitation a foreign expression, and you get these characteristically
foul trailside settlements. In Lobuje, there was the added frisson of knowledge that the hands that piled up the dung also put out your dinner. Our single hope was to get in and out of Lobuje without contracting any major diseases.

The second I saw Lobuje I realized there was no way I was going to patronize any of its facilities for travelers. Lou and I decided instead to pitch a tent. We had to scout for some time to find a spot both free of offal and upwind of the dung fires.

That season there’d been heavy snow on the trail up to Everest Base Camp, about seven miles beyond Lobuje. Yaks still couldn’t negotiate the final stretch, meaning that all gear, equipment and food had to be carried the last few miles on human, mostly Sherpa, backs. Even beneath Lobuje the path was steep and deep with snow. At one turn we saw a bloody yak leg sticking straight out of a snowbank. We were told the limb simply had snapped off as the animal had struggled through the snow.

In Lobuje, we received word that one of our Sherpas had fallen 150 feet into a crevasse and broken his leg while scouting trails on the mountain above us. We all spent an extra day in Lobuje while Rob Hall and one of his guides went ahead to help manage the Sherpa’s rescue and evacuation.

Everest Base Camp, where you actually
begin
to climb the mountain at 17,600 feet, is higher than all but two points in the United States, both in Alaska. Interestingly, you cannot see the upper part of Mount Everest from Base Camp. As it is, you are huffing and puffing by the time you get there, and you wonder when you finally arrive, exhausted, just how in the world you’re ever going to survive. We arrived on April 7.

The camp is essentially a tent town of about three hundred
transient inhabitants mingling with a bunch of yaks on a glacier. Some structures are built partially of stone, and must be rebuilt each spring due to the constant movement of the glacial ice below. Our cook tent, for instance, had stone walls, as did our dining and storage tents. We also had a first-rate latrine, fashioned from stone, with an opening in the back where our wastes could be shoveled out. This was a necessity under a new rule that mandates all human feces eventually must be removed from the mountain.

This rule, of course, applies only to foreigners. The Sherpas were unconstrained by it. In addition, the feces police there to enforce the rule themselves insouciantly retreated behind any convenient boulder when nature called.

Our facility was easily the grandest in camp, and naturally attracted interlopers. In time, unauthorized deposits became such a problem that a plywood sign with a warning note was placed in the front: “YO! Dude! If you are not a member of the New Zealand Everest Expedition
please
do not use this toilet. We are a way serious bunch of shitters, and will have no trouble filling this thing up without your contribution. Thanks.” The message was signed “The Big Cheese,” and proved an effective deterrent. Jon Krakauer composed the sign on orders from Rob Hall.

Each climber in our group was assigned an individual tent, a rare and welcome bit of privacy in the otherwise highly communal world of mountain climbing. Our other amenities included a solar-powered satellite phone and fax, and access on three or four occasions to an outdoor shower. To wash oneself under the little dribble of warm water was an exquisite pleasure.

My first fax home from Everest: “If you wish to send me a fax,” I wrote by hand, “you probably need to wait until after 10:00
P.M.
Dallas time. The fax here is a thermal unit, and it is too cold to print before then. We had a long approach to the mountain. … Lower down the valley the villages were nice, but as you get closer they become
very
primitive. Several of us got the trots. I was lucky and have remained well. … The climbing group is strong, and has nice folks. I think I am on the weak end of the team, but am doing OK. I think of you and the children each day. All my love, Dear.”

“Dear Dear,” Peach replied in typescript. “Received your fax last night in the 3:30ish
A.M.
… Scooter [our dog] was certain there was a gremlin on the deck, so he sounded his own special alarm regularly. At 5:00
A.M.
, I finally put him out in the hall.”

She went on to inform me that our car had suffered a fender bender; that our son, Beck, a member of his school’s fencing team, had advanced to a national fencing tournament; and that our daughter, Meg, had begun taking voice lessons—all events occurring in Dad’s absence, as usual. “We miss you,” she signed off. “Love & Kisses, Peach.”

The quality of the food on a mountain climb is usually a direct function of availability and the willingness of someone to lug it up there for you. Base Camp on Everest, for example, was a busy place and a big market for provisioners. As a result, we enjoyed eggs every morning. But the higher you go and the farther away from civilization you are, the more practical and less palatable the fare becomes.

By the time you get really high (and have just about stopped caring about food altogether), all that you generally consume
are simple carbohydrates and the occasional swallow of soup with cookies or crackers.

The major rigor of Base Camp is boredom; you spend a lot of time getting ready to do things, and a lot of time recovering from doing them, and therefore a lot of time doing nothing. Knowing this from previous excursions, I brought along a favorite author, Carl Hiaasen, to help beguile the hours, plus a little book on learning to juggle, a skill I thought would be fun to master. I became a familiar camp figure, fumbling away in front of my tent. Those of us who had trouble keeping the Sherpas’ names straight also used the downtime to take Polaroids of them and then memorize their faces.

For entertainment there was a stereo. Each morning after the Sherpas had burned juniper and chanted their Buddhist prayers, Robin Williams roared “Good Morning, Vietnam!” across the camp, blasting us from our sleeping bags. The rest of the day was rock and roll, plus Indian music from the cooking tent.

We had a couple of parties, for which we broke out the beer. Some people ended up dancing on our dining tent’s stone table. It wasn’t a mosh pit, exactly, but not unlike one. There were also theme-night dinners, when the food and its preparation and everyone’s dress were supposed to complement one team member’s salient characteristic.

I’d brought with me several pounds of bodybuilding powder, which I consumed daily to help keep my weight up. So at my theme dinner, the crowd showed up looking like drug dealers. For table decoration, someone produced a mirror and did lines of my powder on it.

By far the predominant physical feature of Base Camp is the
great Khumbu Icefall, which begins just a quarter mile away and stretches up the mountain for two miles and almost two thousand vertical feet.

The Icefall is the midsection of the Khumbu Glacier. It starts above Base Camp at a declivity where the glacier pushes itself out over a precipice, creating giant blocks of ice that tumble downward with an ear-splitting roar. These so-called seracs are the size of small office buildings. They can weigh hundreds of tons. Once inside the Icefall, they continue to groan and thunder along. The whole dangerous mess moves downhill at about four feet a day in the summertime.

Back in 1953, when Edmund Hillary’s expedition encountered the Khumbu Icefall on its way to the first successful climb of Everest, team members thought up colorful and highly descriptive names for various stretches of the Icefall. These included Hellfire Alley, the Nutcracker, Atom-Bomb Area and Hillary’s Horror. In 1996, we chose to call a giant leaning serac at the top of the Icefall the Mousetrap; no one wanted to be the mouse squashed when the highly unstable Mousetrap inevitably slammed shut. It would snuff out more than just your tender spirits.

In Base Camp, the gargantuan collisions register through your feet as well as your ears, creating in the first-time visitor to Mount Everest the unnerving impression that serial earthquakes and train wrecks are occurring simultaneously just outside your tent.

But that’s only the noise.

The reason the Khumbu Icefall concerns you in Base Camp is that it stands between you and the summit. You must go up and
down the thing at least five times, spend about twenty hours in it, like an ant trapped in the bottom of an ice machine, if you are to successfully climb Everest.

One of the Icefall’s more challenging features is the lightweight aluminum ladders you use to negotiate its jumble of slippery, cantilevered walls and deep crevasses. Anchored to the shifting ice, and lashed to one another, the ladders have a makeshift look and feel to them. On your five round-trip circuits of the Khumbu Icefall, you cross approximately seven hundred of these ladder bridges.

Your first traverse is a religious experience, certainly not something you can practice at home. When you pass through the Icefall, you try to do so at first light, so you can see, but before the surrounding hills and ice fields can reflect the high-altitude sun’s intense radiation directly onto the Icefall, partially melting and dislocating the ladders’ moorings, and also energizing the chockablock seracs, loosening them to tip, slide and crash all the more.

It can get extremely warm around Base Camp on a sunny day in May. A thermometer left out in the afternoon sun by the Hillary expedition reportedly registered a high temperature of about 150 degrees.

Above the Icefall’s upper edge, and also hidden from your view, is the gradually sloping valley of the Western Cwm (pronounced
koom)
, which rises another two thousand feet toward an immense, jagged amphitheater, anchored on the left by Everest, with 27,890-foot Lhotse in the center and, on the right, the third of the three brute sisters that dominate the high terrain, 25,790-foot Nuptse.

The Cwm (Welsh for “valley”) was named in 1921 by George Mallory, who led the first three assaults on Everest, all from the Tibetan side. Mallory, when asked why he wished to climb Everest, quipped famously, “Because it is there.” He may also have been the first person to summit Everest. Then again, maybe he wasn’t.

On June 8, 1924, the thirty-eight-year-old Mallory and his protégé, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, twenty-two, were seen by Noel Odell, a member of their team, about nine hundred feet below the summit and climbing strongly. Then Mallory and Irvine were swallowed from view by a cloud, and disappeared with no trace.

Mallory’s fate remained a mystery for seventy-five years, until May of 1999, when an American expedition organized specifically to hunt for the famed British climber found his frozen body approximately two thousand feet below the summit, where he apparently had fallen. Whether George Mallory made it to the top before his fatal plunge is an unsettled debate. His altimeter, a monogrammed scarf, some letters and a pocket knife were recovered in 1999, but the Kodak cameras that Mallory and Irvine brought along to record their ascent were not found; nor (yet) was Irvine’s body.

A brief note on my own equipment for Everest: I bought new boots for this trip to replace a set I’d purchased seven years before. They were from the same company, allegedly the same size exactly.

I’d never bought the idea that you need to break in new mountaineering boots; either they fit you from the beginning or they don’t. My old boots had developed holes you could shine a
light through. I didn’t think they could withstand one more expedition.