Into Thin Air Read online

  In a New Zealand television interview following the expedition, Hall somberly described how he took their favorite climbing rope and lowered Ball’s body into the depths of the glacier. “A climbing rope is designed to sort of attach you together, and you never let go of it,” he said. “And I had to let it just sort of slip through me hands.”

  “Rob was devastated when Gary died,” says Helen Wilton, who worked as Hall’s Base Camp manager on Everest in 1993, ’95, and ’96. “But he dealt with it very quietly. That was Rob’s way—to get on with things.” Hall resolved to carry on alone with Adventure Consultants. In his systematic fashion he continued to refine the company’s infrastructure and services—and continued to be extraordinarily successful at escorting amateur climbers to the summits of big, remote mountains.

  Between 1990 and 1995, Hall was responsible for putting thirty-nine climbers on the summit of Everest—three more ascents than had been made in the first twenty years after Sir Edmund Hillary’s inaugural climb. With justification, Hall advertised that Adventure Consultants was “the world leader in Everest Climbing, with more ascents than any other organisation.” The brochure he sent to prospective clients declared,

  So, you have a thirst for adventure! Perhaps you dream of visiting seven continents or standing on top of a tall mountain. Most of us never dare act on our dreams and scarcely venture to share them or admit to great inner yearnings.

  Adventure Consultants specialises in organising and guiding mountain climbing adventures. Skilled in the practicalities of developing dreams into reality, we work with you to reach your goal. We will not drag you up a mountain—you will have to work hard—but we guarantee to maximise the safety and success of your adventure.

  For those who dare to face their dreams, the experience offers something special beyond the power of words to describe. We invite you to climb your mountain with us.

  By 1996 Hall was charging $65,000 a head to guide clients to the top of the world. By any measure this is a lot of money—it equals the mortgage on my Seattle home—and the quoted price did not include airfare to Nepal or personal equipment. No company’s fee was higher—indeed, some of his competitors charged a third as much. But thanks to Hall’s phenomenal success rate he had no trouble filling the roster for this, his eighth expedition to Everest. If you were hell-bent on climbing the peak and could somehow come up with the dough, Adventure Consultants was the obvious choice.

  On the morning of March 31, two days after arriving in Kathmandu, the assembled members of the 1996 Adventure Consultants Everest Expedition walked across the tarmac of Tribhuvan International Airport and climbed aboard a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter operated by Asian Airlines. A dented relic of the Afghan war, it was as big as a school bus, seated twenty-six passengers, and looked like it had been riveted together in somebody’s backyard. The flight engineer latched the door and handed out wads of cotton to stuff in our ears, and the behemoth chopper lumbered into the air with a head-splitting roar.

  The floor was piled high with duffels, backpacks, and cardboard boxes. Jammed into jump seats around the perimeter of the aircraft was the human cargo, facing inward, knees wedged against chests. The deafening whine of the turbines made conversation out of the question. It wasn’t a comfortable ride, but nobody complained.

  In 1963, Tom Hornbein’s expedition began the long trek to Everest from Banepa, a dozen miles outside Kathmandu, and spent thirty-one days on the trail before arriving at Base Camp. Like most modern Everesters, we’d elected to leapfrog over the majority of those steep, dusty miles; the chopper was supposed to set us down in the distant village of Lukla, 9,200 feet up in the Himalaya. Assuming we didn’t crash en route, the flight would trim some three weeks from the span of Hornbein’s trek.

  Glancing around the helicopter’s capacious interior, I tried to fix the names of my teammates in my memory. In addition to guides Rob Hall and Andy Harris there was Helen Wilton, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of four who was returning for her third season as Base Camp manager. Caroline Mackenzie—an accomplished climber and physician in her late twenties—was the expedition doctor and, like Helen, would be going no higher than Base Camp. Lou Kasischke, the gentlemanly lawyer I’d met at the airport, had climbed six of the Seven Summits—as had Yasuko Namba, forty-seven, a taciturn personnel director who worked at the Tokyo branch of Federal Express. Beck Weathers, forty-nine, was a garrulous pathologist from Dallas. Stuart Hutchison, thirty-four, attired in a Ren and Stimpy T-shirt, was a cerebral, somewhat wonkish Canadian cardiologist on leave from a research fellowship. John Taske, at fifty-six the oldest member of our group, was an anesthesiologist from Brisbane who’d taken up climbing after retiring from the Australian army. Frank Fischbeck, fifty-three, a dapper, genteel publisher from Hong Kong, had attempted Everest three times with one of Hall’s competitors; in 1994 he’d gotten all the way to the South Summit, just 330 vertical feet below the top. Doug Hansen, forty-six, was an American postal worker who’d gone to Everest with Hall in 1995 and, like Fischbeck, had reached the South Summit before turning back.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of my fellow clients. In outlook and experience they were nothing like the hard-core climbers with whom I usually went into the mountains. But they seemed like nice, decent folks, and there wasn’t a certifiable asshole in the entire group—at least not one who was showing his true colors at this early stage of the proceedings. Nevertheless, I didn’t have much in common with any of my teammates except Doug. A wiry, hard-partying man with a prematurely weathered face that brought to mind an old football, he’d been a postal worker for more than twenty-seven years. He told me that he’d paid for the trip by working the night shift and doing construction jobs by day. Because I’d earned my living as a carpenter for eight years before becoming a writer—and because the tax bracket we shared set us conspicuously apart from the other clients—I already felt comfortable around Doug in a way that I didn’t with the others.

  For the most part I attributed my growing unease to the fact that I’d never climbed as a member of such a large group—a group of complete strangers, no less. Aside from one Alaska trip I’d done twenty-one years earlier, all my previous expeditions had been undertaken with one or two trusted friends, or alone.

  In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber’s actions can affect the welfare of the entire team. The consequences of a poorly tied knot, a stumble, a dislodged rock, or some other careless deed are as likely to be felt by the perpetrator’s colleagues as by the perpetrator. Hence it’s not surprising that climbers are typically wary of joining forces with those whose bona fides are unknown to them.

  But trust in one’s partners is a luxury denied those who sign on as clients on a guided ascent; one must put one’s faith in the guide instead. As the helicopter droned toward Lukla, I suspected that each of my teammates hoped as fervently as I that Hall had been careful to weed out clients of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another’s shortcomings.

  * It took Bass four years to ascend the Seven Summits.

  FOUR

  PHAKDING

  MARCH 31, 1996 • 9,186 FEET

  For those who didn’t dally, our daily treks ended early in the afternoon, but rarely before the heat and aching feet forced us to ask each passing Sherpa, “How much farther to camp?” The reply, we soon were to discover, was invariable: “Only two mile more, Sah’b.…”

  Evenings were peaceful, smoke settling in the quiet air to soften the dusk, lights twinkling on the ridge we would camp on tomorrow, clouds dimming the outline of our pass for the day after. Growing excitement lured my thoughts again and again to the West Ridge.…

  There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that
what I really sought was something I had left behind.

  Thomas F. Hornbein

  Everest: The West Ridge

  From Lukla the way to Everest led north through the crepuscular gorge of the Dudh Kosi, an icy, boulder-choked river that churned with glacial runoff. We spent the first night of our trek in the hamlet of Phakding, a collection of a half dozen homes and lodges crowded onto a shelf of level ground on a slope above the river. The air took on a wintry sting as night fell, and in the morning, as I headed up the trail, a glaze of frost sparkled from the rhododendron leaves. But the Everest region lies at 28 degrees north latitude—just beyond the tropics—and as soon as the sun rose high enough to penetrate the depths of the canyon the temperature soared. By noon, after we’d crossed a wobbly footbridge suspended high over the river—the fourth river crossing of the day—rivulets of sweat were dripping off my chin, and I peeled down to shorts and a T-shirt.

  Beyond the bridge, the dirt path abandoned the banks of the Dudh Kosi and zigzagged up the steep canyon wall, ascending through aromatic stands of pine. The spectacularly fluted ice pinnacles of Thamserku and Kusum Kangru pierced the sky more than two vertical miles above. It was magnificent country, as topographically imposing as any landscape on earth, but it wasn’t wilderness, and hadn’t been for hundreds of years.

  Every scrap of arable land had been terraced and planted with barley, bitter buckwheat, or potatoes. Strings of prayer flags were strung across the hill-sides, and ancient Buddhist chortens* and walls of exquisitely carved mani† stones stood sentinel over even the highest passes. As I made my way up from the river, the trail was clogged with trekkers, yak‡ trains, red-robed monks, and barefoot Sherpas straining beneath back-wrenching loads of firewood and kerosene and soda pop.

  Ninety minutes above the river, I crested a broad ridge, passed a matrix of rock-walled yak corrals, and abruptly found myself in downtown Namche Bazaar, the social and commercial hub of Sherpa society. Situated 11,300 feet above sea level, Namche occupies a huge, tilting bowl proportioned like a giant satellite television dish, midway up a precipitous mountainside. More than a hundred buildings nestled dramatically on the rocky slope, linked by a maze of narrow paths and catwalks. Near the lower edge of town I located the Khumbu Lodge, pushed aside the blanket that functioned as a front door, and found my teammates drinking lemon tea around a table in the corner.

  When I approached, Rob Hall introduced me to Mike Groom, the expedition’s third guide. A thirty-three-year-old Australian with carrot-colored hair and the lean build of a marathon runner, Groom was a Brisbane plumber who worked as a guide only occasionally. In 1987, forced to spend a night in the open while descending from the 28,169-foot summit of Kanchenjunga, he froze his feet and had to have all his toes amputated. This setback had not put a damper on his Himalayan career, however: he’d gone on to climb K2, Lhotse, Cho Oyu, Ama Dablam, and, in 1993, Everest without supplementary oxygen. An exceedingly calm, circumspect man, Groom was pleasant company but seldom spoke unless spoken to and replied to questions tersely, in a barely audible voice.

  Dinner conversation was dominated by the three clients who were doctors—Stuart, John, and especially Beck, a pattern that would be repeated for much of the expedition. Fortunately, both John and Beck were wickedly funny and had the group in stitches. Beck, however, was in the habit of turning his monologues into scathing, Limbaughesque rants against bed-wetting liberals, and at one point that evening I made the mistake of disagreeing with him: in response to one of his comments I suggested that raising the minimum wage seemed like a wise and necessary policy. Well informed and a very skilled debater, Beck made hash out of my fumbling avowal, and I lacked the where withal to rebut him. All I could do was to sit on my hands, tongue-tied and steaming.

  As he continued to hold forth in his swampy East Texas drawl about the numerous follies of the welfare state, I got up and left the table to avoid humiliating myself further. When I returned to the dining room, I approached the proprietress, Ngawang Doka, to ask for a beer. A small, graceful Sherpani, she was in the midst of taking an order from a group of American trekkers. “We hungry,” a ruddy-cheeked man announced to her in overly loud pidgin, miming the act of eating. “Want eat po-ta-toes. Yak burger. Co-ca Co-la. You have?”

  “Would you like to see the menu?” Ngawang Doka replied in clear, sparkling English that carried a hint of a Canadian accent. “Our selection is actually quite large. And I believe there is still some freshly baked apple pie available, if that interests you, for dessert.”

  The American trekker, unable to comprehend that this brown-skinned woman of the hills was addressing him in perfectly enunciated King’s English, continued to employ his comical pidgin argot: “Men-u. Good, good. Yes, yes, we like see men-u.”

  Sherpas remain an enigma to most foreigners, who tend to regard them through a romantic scrim. People unfamiliar with the demography of the Himalaya often assume that all Nepalese are Sherpas, when in fact there are no more than 20,000 Sherpas in all of Nepal, a nation the size of North Carolina that has some 20 million residents and more than fifty distinct ethnic groups. Sherpas are a mountain people, devoutly Buddhist, whose forebears migrated south from Tibet four or five centuries ago. There are Sherpa villages scattered throughout the Himalaya of eastern Nepal, and sizable Sherpa communities can be found in Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, but the heart of Sherpa country is the Khumbu, a handful of valleys draining the southern slopes of Mount Everest—a small, astonishingly rugged region completely devoid of roads, cars, or wheeled vehicles of any kind.

  Farming is difficult in the high, cold, steep-walled valleys, so the traditional Sherpa economy revolved around trading between Tibet and India, and herding yaks. Then, in 1921, the British embarked on their first expedition to Everest, and their decision to engage Sherpas as helpers sparked a transformation of Sherpa culture.

  Because the Kingdom of Nepal kept its borders closed until 1949, the initial Everest reconnaissance, and the next eight expeditions to follow, were forced to approach the mountain from the north, through Tibet, and never passed anywhere near the Khumbu. But those first nine expeditions embarked for Tibet from Darjeeling, where many Sherpas had emigrated, and where they had developed a reputation among the resident colonialists for being hardworking, affable, and intelligent. Additionally, because most Sherpas had lived for generations in villages situated between 9,000 and 14,000 feet, they were physiologically adapted to the rigors of high altitude. Upon the recommendation of A. M. Kellas, a Scottish physician who’d climbed and traveled extensively with Sherpas, the 1921 Everest expedition hired a large corps of them as load bearers and camp helpers, a practice that’s been followed by all but a smattering of expeditions in the seventy-five years since.

  For better and worse, over the past two decades the economy and culture of the Khumbu has become increasingly and irrevocably tied to the seasonal influx of trekkers and climbers, some 15,000 of whom visit the region annually. Sherpas who learn technical climbing skills and work high on the peaks—especially those who have summitted Everest—enjoy great esteem in their communities. Those who become climbing stars, alas, also stand a fair chance of losing their lives: ever since 1922, when seven Sherpas were killed in an avalanche during the second British expedition, a disproportionate number of Sherpas have died on Everest—fifty-three all told. Indeed, they account for more than a third of all Everest fatalities.

  Despite the hazards, there is stiff competition among Sherpas for the twelve to eighteen staff positions on the typical Everest expedition. The most sought-after jobs are the half dozen openings for skilled climbing Sherpas, who can expect to earn $1,400 to $2,500 for two months of hazardous work—attractive pay in a nation mired in grinding poverty and with an annual per capita income of around $160.

  To handle the growing traffic from Western climbers and trekkers, new lodges and teahouses are springing up across the Khumbu region, but the new construction is especially evident in Namche Bazaar. On the trail to Namche I pa
ssed countless porters headed up from the lowland forests, carrying freshly cut wood beams that weighed in excess of one hundred pounds—crushing physical toil, for which they were paid about three dollars a day.

  Longtime visitors to the Khumbu are saddened by the boom in tourism and the change it has wrought on what early Western climbers regarded as an earthly paradise, a real-life Shangri-La. Entire valleys have been denuded of trees to meet the increased demand for firewood. Teens hanging out in Namche carrom parlors are more likely to be wearing jeans and Chicago Bulls T-shirts than quaint traditional robes. Families are apt to spend their evenings huddled around video players viewing the latest Schwarzenegger opus.

  The transformation of the Khumbu culture is certainly not all for the best, but I didn’t hear many Sherpas bemoaning the changes. Hard currency from trekkers and climbers, as well as grants from international relief organizations supported by trekkers and climbers, have funded schools and medical clinics, reduced infant mortality, built footbridges, and brought hydroelectric power to Namche and other villages. It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.

  A strong walker, pre-acclimatized to the altitude, could cover the distance from the Lukla airstrip to Everest Base Camp in two or three long days. Because most of us had just arrived from sea level, however, Hall was careful to keep us to a more indolent pace that gave our bodies time to adapt to the increasingly thin air. Seldom did we walk more than three or four hours on any given day. On several days, when Hall’s itinerary called for additional acclimatization, we walked nowhere at all.