The Lost Explorer (21 page)

So we started on. Dave was the official leader of the party; but since I was breaking trail and stringing the fixed ropes, I became the de facto leader. At the foot of the First Step, I was going first, with the two Sherpas right behind. I had to fix another rope on the Step, but to climb it I clipped in to the old
fixed ropes. What I did was to put more than my weight on those old lines by bouncing up and down on them while I was still in a secure place. That way I was testing them with more impact than they would bear if I fell going up. The Sherpas payed out the new rope as I led the Step, sliding my ascender up the old fixed ropes. At the top, I anchored the new line by tying it to long, thin pitons that other parties had driven into the rock. This was not only time-consuming; I also had to take off my mittens and wear only fleece gloves while I tied the knots.

The First Step was very exposed fourth-class climbing; if it had been any harder, we would have roped up and belayed. Mallory could have done it. I doubt that he and Irvine would have gone where the ropes go today; more likely they would have climbed the Step on the left hand side of the ridge, closer to the Kangshung Face. This may be the place where they were when Noel Odell caught his famous glimpse of them outlined against the sky.

Above the First Step, I started the traverse to the Second. This is very tricky ground; there are dangerous pockets of deep snow, and the whole traverse is underlain with downsloping, loose, shaley stones. The route goes a little below the crest of the ridge, over the north face. I didn’t string out new rope here; that would have taken too long, and besides, we had no rope to spare. In place there was a single strand of thin old rope, maybe six millimeters in diameter, severely abraded in places. As I moved along, I took up the slack in the fixed line and tied it off at intervals to make it safer.

Forty-five minutes along the traverse, halfway to the Second Step, I came to a feature that’s called the Mushroom Rock. It’s a mushroom-shaped bollard of rock maybe seven feet tall. I went around to the east side of it, out of the wind, in the sun, and for the first time that day, I got warm.

Amazingly enough, in 1975 the Chinese team put their Camp VII here, the highest camp ever pitched on Everest. They installed twenty climbers here. (There were some 400 members of the expedition!)

At the Mushroom Rock, we regrouped for the second time. Dave switched his oxygen cylinder. We knew he was going on a higher flow than the rest of us, maybe four liters per minute,
because he thought he would need the extra gas to shoot video all the way, which was his role. Later that increased flow would have consequences.

The traverse from the First Step to the Mushroom Rock proved to be very demanding, with insecure footing and the weather changing constantly. After a while, Tap and Jake came up. I could see that the look in their eyes had changed.

Weeks before, down at Base Camp, we’d had long discussions about this sort of moment. I always said to the others, You can’t go for the summit because you feel obligated to. You can’t do it because you want to shoot pictures. You can’t do it because you want to write a story about it. And you can’t do it for someone else, because that someone else won’t be there if you screw up. You have to do it because you’re really motivated from inside, because you have your own personal reasons to do it.

I’ve had partners get wishy-washy on other big climbs, and I’ve said to them, “Let’s go down.” If they are not into it, we’re going to get in trouble. At Base Camp, when Tap and Jake heard my views, one of them said, “Wow, that sounds pretty harsh.”

Now they said, “Hey, it’s just not in the cards. I can’t see us going on. The weather’s not looking good.” They had decided to turn around.

Part of their reasoning may have had to do with their training as guides. When you guide, your assessment of risk has to be conservative. If, when they were eighteen, they’d gone after climbing hard and had the drive to make really difficult first ascents, instead of starting out as guides, perhaps now at twenty-five they would have wanted to go on.

I said, “Hey, the decision is one hundred percent yours. I’m going to go on. I feel comfortable with what I see up here. But I understand how you feel, and I appreciate your judgment.” We got on the radio again and told Simo that Jake and Tap were turning around. He didn’t have any trouble with that. The main thing in his mind was that some of us were going to push on for the summit.

Later Tap amplified his feelings at that moment. “Things just didn’t feel right. We’d seen what happened to the Ukrainians. There was a bit of a feeling that death was breathing in our faces.”

“It was the hardest decision I’ve ever made in the mountains,” Jake added. “I was in tears.”

For me, the weather, far from seeming ominous, had just improved. The lenticular was gone from the summit. I was warmer than I’d been all day. And Dave’s mood had completely turned around. He was in great spirits, totally psyched. He and I were clicking. He seemed now to be picking up on my vibe.

Dave was the person who’d gotten me invited to Mount Everest. He and I had climbed together before, during two seasons in Antarctica. Dave is the chief guide for Adventure Network International down there, guiding Mount Vinson, which he’s climbed fourteen times, the record. Dave and I did the classic route on Mount Gardner, and we climbed an unnamed 5,000-foot pyramid nearby. Last winter, we discovered two caches left by the first American team to climb Gardner, in 1967. As we ate thirty-two-year-old chocolate, Dave and I joked about the upcoming Everest expedition.

Dave’s thirty-seven years old, tall and craggy-looking. He’s a really solid big-mountain guide. Very good with clients—patient and understanding. He’s got a wry sense of humor, with a weakness for puns. I think he’d like to be a professional writer: he put a tremendous amount of effort into his Internet dispatches, which were the cream of the Mountain-Zone reportage. He’s also serious about becoming a filmmaker. On summit day, he was determined to shoot video for
NOVA
all the way to the top.

This was Dave’s fourth expedition to Everest. In 1994 he had summitted, but the climb turned into an epic. This was also an expedition led by Simo. On May 19 of that year, Dave set out for the top with an Italian climber, who turned back at the Second Step. Dave went on alone, summitting at 4:45
P.M.
, which is pretty late, but he’d made the first successful ascent of the season. He had to do most of the descent in the dark, and he was forced to bivouac just above the First Step. Breathing oxygen during the night, he miraculously avoided frostbite. Just before dawn, a teammate came out to meet him with food, water, and extra oxygen. He found Dave dehydrated and exhausted, yet they managed to get back to camp safely.

A week later, tragedy struck the north side of Everest. An Australian, Michael Rheinberger, set out for the top with the
New Zealander Mark Whetu. Rheinberger was fifty-three years old and had tried Everest seven times before without making it; this time he was determined to summit. He and Whetu finally summitted at 7:18
P.M.
They had to bivouac in the open just twenty yards below the summit. Amazingly, they survived the night, but the next day, after eleven hours of all-out effort, they’d only gotten down to the Second Step. By now Rheinberger was blind, delirious, and unable to walk. The winds were so strong that potential rescuers sent up from Camp VI had to turn back at the First Step. Finally Whetu had to abandon his friend just to save his own life. It was a close call even so, and he suffered severe frostbite. Rheinberger got his summit, but it cost him his life.

There might be those who would criticize Dave Hahn for pushing on in ’94 and reaching the summit so late. Dave knows the value of turning back when he needs to. On his other two previous Everest expeditions, he turned around both times at 28,000 feet.

After deciding to go down, Tap and Jake waited for a while at the Mushroom Rock to watch us try to climb the Second Step. As I headed off again, I assumed the Sherpas were coming. But at that moment, Ang Pasang decided to drop out too. He stayed with Tap and Jake and then descended with them. He didn’t tell me he was turning back, so I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to him.

The continuation of the traverse, between the Mushroom Rock and the Second Step, is at least as tricky as the first half. The loose rock alternates with deep pockets where the snow ranges from knee- to even waist-deep. On some of those pockets, there was no fixed rope in place. They were quite spooky. You had to be alert: if the snow started sliding, it could take you off the hill and send you flying down to the Rongbuk. As I led this traverse, I thought often about Mallory and Irvine crossing the same terrain in 1924.

I got to the base of the Second Step and waited for Dave and Dawa. I was feeling strong enough that day that even breaking trail, I’d get ten, fifteen, twenty, or more minutes ahead of the others. Now Dawa came up, sort of shaking his head. I looked at him, and he said, “I’m going to go down.” I said, “I understand. No problem.” He gave me the last fixed
rope, which I cached there to use on the descent. I wasn’t worried about Dawa traversing back to the First Step by himself. The experienced Sherpas are very surefooted on that sort of terrain. I knew he’d catch up to Jake, Tap, and Ang Pasang before too long.

So it was down to Dave and me. We turned to face the Second Step. It was about 10:30 in the morning. We weren’t going super-fast, but the pace seemed all right, and the weather looked good.

T
HE
S
ECOND
S
TEP
is an unlikely barrier, ninety feet high, on what would otherwise be a moderate ridge. The bottom section is angular and blocky; the best route up it surmounts a series of high steps and mantles. In the middle of the Step, a snow triangle leans against the cliff. Above that, a fifteen-foot crack in a large corner, slightly overhanging, forms the crux of the climb. It was here that the Chinese in 1975 affixed their ladder. Ten feet of less steep rock above the ladder complete the cliff.

As Dave joined me at the bottom of the Second Step, which was in shade, he said, “Darn it, the video camera’s fogging up.” We’d have to pop open the cassette and dry it out in the sun, so I suggested he ascend the fixed ropes to the base of the ladder, where he could get back into the sunlight, then work on the camera.

Dave jugged up the rope, got to the top of the snow triangle, and clipped in to the base of the ladder. Then I rock-climbed the first forty-five feet, using my ascender on the fixed rope to catch me should I slip. The climbing was moderately hard, but not extreme. By the time I got up to the ladder, Dave got the camera working intermittently.

At this point I took off my pack with the oxygen apparatus. I’d decided to try the free-climb without oxygen, mainly because the rig was so cumbersome, the mask protruding so that I couldn’t properly see my feet with it on. I pulled a 112-foot-long line out of my pack, a good climbing rope nine millimeters in diameter, and tied in to the rope. Dave would belay me with that. He wanted to shoot video while belaying, but I needed a good, secure belay here, and the video would have to take second priority. You can’t both shoot well and belay safely.

I had a small rack of gear just for this pitch—four cams of different sizes and six Stoppers, devices climbers place in cracks to shorten a potential fall. I got my rack organized, then had a good look at the crux.

To understand the pivotal importance of the twenty-five feet of rock I was now facing, one has to consider the strange, murky history of the Second Step. The 1924 party had looked hard at that bump on the skyline from far below. On June 4, Teddy Norton had traversed through the Yellow Band well below the crest of the ridge, as he headed for the Great Couloir, explicitly to avoid the Step. But Mallory had believed all along in an attack on the crest of the ridge—that was his style of climbing. And in his famous sighting, Noel Odell had initially believed that it was the Second Step he saw the two tiny figures surmount in only five minutes.

With the closure of the north side of Everest to foreigners after 1938, no one again came anywhere near the Second Step until 1960. That year, a huge Chinese expedition—214 Chinese and Tibetan climbers, none of whom, however, had more than five years’ experience in the mountains—assaulted Everest from the north. The stories that filtered back to the West from this mass assault puzzled nearly everybody. The main account available in English appeared in a propaganda magazine called
China Reconstructs
. It reads more like a homiletic Maoist tract than a mountaineering narrative. According to that article, an initial pair of would-be summiteers flailed away at the Step for a long afternoon and into the night, climbing all but the last “three meters,” before enduring a grim bivouac in a crevice, then descending the next day. Three weeks later, another trio came to grips with the Step. One man made four all-out attempts to solve the crux, falling off exhausted each time. Finally another climber, Chu Yin-hua, took off his gloves and boots, used a shoulder stand, and had a go at the cliff in stocking feet. The partner who hoisted him up “trembled all over, short of breath, but he clenched his teeth and steadily stood up, with much heroic effort.” Topping the cliff after a three-hour struggle, Chu brought his comrades up on a tight rope.

Three men then supposedly continued to the summit, arriving at 4:20
A.M.
Because it was dark, they took no pictures above the Second Step. The summitteers claimed they left a
plaster bust of Mao on top, but it has never been found. For his heroic effort, Chu later lost his fingers and feet to frostbite.

A lot of Western climbers felt then, and many still feel that this Chinese ascent was a hoax. After summarizing the
China Reconstructs
account in the
American Alpine Journal
, editor H. Adams Carter, who was an absolute stickler for accuracy, dryly editorialized, “The details are such that mountaineers in nearly all parts of the climbing world have received the news with considerable skepticism.”