Left for Dead (5 page)

Another half hour or so passed, and here came Mike Groom with Yasuko. She looked like a walking corpse, so exhausted she could barely stand. Fortunately, Neal Beidleman and some other members of the Fischer group also came along just then, including Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fox and Tim Madsen, all of whom had summitted, and all of whom were close to the limits of their endurance.

Yasuko and I were the acute problems, however. Neal took her and headed on down the Triangle. Mike short-roped me, which is exactly what it sounds like. One end of a rope went around the waist of the downhill climber, me. Twenty feet back was Mike, who’d use muscle and leverage to stabilize me as we descended.

It was nearly 6:00
P.M.
by now.

Climbing down a mountain is a lot more dangerous than climbing up. If you’re going to get yourself killed, that’s generally when it happens. In this case, we had the added problem of
exhaustion and blindness and one other little detail, my crampons. They were so-called switchblade crampons, good for technical climbing but prone to clog up in wet or sticky snow. Pretty quickly, the accumulated snow extends down beneath the blade tips and suddenly you’re better equipped for skiing than clinging to the mountainside.

So here goes. I move, commit and plant my weight on what I believe to be that hill. Wrong. I step onto nothing but air and come whipping off the front of the face. The rope snaps taut, and pulls Mike right off his feet.

Both of us start to slide. We take our ice axes, jam them into the hill, and both of us roll our body weight on top of them to stop the fall.

We do this another two or three times before we get all the way down. Mike later described the experience as “somewhat unnerving.” Little did he guess what lay dead ahead.

Except for some rips in my down suit and a whole lot of wounded pride, I was fine, and heartily relieved. We were back on the South Col—practically home free. In less than an hour of easy traverse we were going to be in those tents, in those sleeping bags, drinking hot tea and putting the long, exhausting day to bed.

But as we all began to move, we heard that throaty rumble come surging up the mountain. Suddenly, the blizzard detonated all around us. It crescendoed into a deafening roar. A thick wall of clouds boiled across the South Col, wrapping us in white, blotting out every discernible feature until the only visible objects were our headlamps, which seemed to float in the maelstrom. Neal Beidleman later said it was like being lost in a bottle of milk.

It quickly became
incredibly
cold.

I grabbed Mike’s sleeve. He was my eyes. I dared not lose contact with him.

We instinctively herded together; nobody wanted to get separated from the others as we groped along, trying to get the feel of the South Col’s slope, hoping for some sign of camp. We turned one way, and that wasn’t it. We turned again, and that wasn’t it. In the space of a few minutes, we lost all sense of direction; we had no idea where we were facing in the swirling wind and noise and cold and blowing ice.

We continued to move as a group, until suddenly the hair stood up on the back of Neal’s neck. Experience and intuition told Beidleman that mortal danger lurked nearby.

“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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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.