Into Thin Air Read online

  On April 3, after an acclimatization day in Namche, we resumed the trek toward Base Camp. Twenty minutes beyond the village I rounded a bend and arrived at a breathtaking overlook. Two thousand feet below, slicing a deep crease through the surrounding bedrock, the Dudh Kosi appeared as a crooked strand of silver glinting from the shadows. Ten thousand feet above, the huge backlit spike of Ama Dablam hovered over the head of the valley like an apparition. And seven thousand feet higher still, dwarfing Ama Dablam, was the icy thrust of Everest itself, all but hidden behind Nuptse. As always seemed to be the case, a horizontal plume of condensation streamed from the summit like frozen smoke, betraying the violence of the jet-stream winds.

  I stared at the peak for perhaps thirty minutes, trying to apprehend what it would be like to be standing on that gale-swept vertex. Although I’d ascended hundreds of mountains, Everest was so different from anything I’d previously climbed that my powers of imagination were insufficient for the task. The summit looked so cold, so high, so impossibly far away. I felt as though I might as well be on an expedition to the moon. As I turned away to continue walking up the trail, my emotions oscillated between nervous anticipation and a nearly overwhelming sense of dread.

  Late that afternoon I arrived at Tengboche,* the largest, most important Buddhist monastery in the Khumbu. Chhongba Sherpa, a wry, thoughtful man who had joined our expedition as Base Camp cook, offered to arrange a meeting with the rimpoche—“the head lama of all Nepal,” Chhongba explained, “a very holy man. Just yesterday he has finished a long period of silent meditation—for the past three months he has not spoken. We will be his first visitors. This is most auspicious.” Doug, Lou, and I each gave Chhongba one hundred rupees (approximately two dollars) to buy ceremonial katas—white silk scarves to be presented to the rimpoche—and then we removed our shoes and Chhongba led us to a small, drafty chamber behind the main temple.

  Seated cross-legged on a brocade pillow, wrapped in burgundy robes, was a short, rotund man with a shiny pate. He looked very old and very tired. Chhongba bowed reverently, spoke briefly to him in the Sherpa tongue, and indicated for us to come forward. The rimpoche then blessed each of us in turn, placing the katas we had purchased around our necks as he did so. Afterward he smiled beatifically and offered us tea. “This kata you should wear to the top of Everest,”* Chhongba instructed me in a solemn voice. “It will please God and keep you from harm.”

  Unsure how to act in the company of a divine presence, this living reincarnation of an ancient and illustrious lama, I was terrified of unwittingly giving offense or committing some irredeemable faux pas. As I sipped sweet tea and fidgeted, his Holiness rooted around in an adjacent cabinet, brought out a large, ornately decorated book, and handed it to me. I wiped my dirty hands on my pants and opened it nervously. It was a photo album. The rimpoche, it turned out, had recently traveled to America for the first time, and the book held snapshots from this trip: his Holiness in Washington standing before the Lincoln Memorial and the Air and Space Museum; his Holiness in California on the Santa Monica Pier. Grinning broadly, he excitedly pointed out his two favorite photos in the entire album: his Holiness posing beside Richard Gere, and another shot of him with Steven Seagal.

  The first six days of the trek went by in an ambrosial blur. The trail took us past glades of juniper and dwarf birch, blue pine and rhododendron, thundering waterfalls, enchanting boulder gardens, burbling streams. The Valkyrian skyline bristled with peaks that I’d been reading about since I was a child. Because most of our gear was carried by yaks and human porters, my own backpack held little more than a jacket, a few candy bars, and my camera. Unburdened and unhurried, caught up in the simple joy of walking in exotic country, I fell into a kind of trance—but the euphoria seldom lasted for long. Sooner or later I’d remember where I was headed, and the shadow Everest cast across my mind would snap me back to attention.

  We all trekked at our own pace, pausing often for refreshment at trailside teahouses and to chat with passersby. I frequently found myself traveling in the company of Doug Hansen, the postal worker, and Andy Harris, Rob Hall’s laid-back junior guide. Andy—called “Harold” by Rob and all his Kiwi friends—was a big, sturdy lad, built like an NFL quarterback, with rugged good looks of the sort that earn men roles in cigarette advertisements. During the antipodal winter he was employed as a much-in-demand helicopter-skiing guide. Summers he worked for scientists conducting geologic research in Antarctica or escorted climbers into New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

  As we walked up the trail Andy spoke longingly of the woman with whom he lived, a physician named Fiona McPherson. As we rested on a rock he pulled a picture out of his pack to show me. She was tall, blond, athletic-looking. Andy said he and Fiona were in the midst of building a house together in the hills outside of Queenstown. Waxing ardent about the uncomplicated pleasures of sawing rafters and pounding nails, Andy admitted that when Rob had first offered him this Everest job he’d been ambivalent about accepting it: “It was quite hard to leave Fi and the house, actually. We’d only just gotten the roof on, yeah? But how can you turn down a chance to climb Everest? Especially when you have an opportunity to work alongside somebody like Rob Hall.”

  Although Andy had never been to Everest before, he was no stranger to the Himalaya. In 1985 he climbed a difficult 21,927-foot peak called Chobutse, about thirty miles west of Everest. And in the fall of 1994 he spent four months helping Fiona run the medical clinic in Pheriche, a gloomy, wind-battered hamlet 14,000 feet above sea level, where we stayed the nights of April 4 and 5.

  The clinic was funded by a foundation called the Himalayan Rescue Association primarily to treat altitude-related illnesses (although it also offered free treatment to the local Sherpas) and to educate trekkers about the insidious hazards of ascending too high, too fast. At the time of our visit, the staff at the four-room facility included a French physician, Cecile Bouvray, a pair of young American physicians, Larry Silver and Jim Litch, and an energetic environmental lawyer named Laura Ziemer, also American, who was assisting Litch. It had been established in 1973 after four members of a single Japanese trekking group succumbed to the altitude and died in the vicinity. Prior to the clinic’s existence, acute altitude illness killed approximately one or two out of every 500 trekkers who passed through Pheriche. Ziemer emphasized that this alarming death rate hadn’t been skewed upward by mountaineering accidents; the victims had been “just ordinary trekkers who never ventured beyond the established trails.”

  Now, thanks to the educational seminars and emergency care provided by the clinic’s volunteer staff, that mortality rate has been cut to less than one death per 30,000 trekkers. Although idealistic Westerners like Ziemer who work at the Pheriche clinic receive no remuneration and must even pay their own travel expenses to and from Nepal, it is a prestigious posting that attracts highly qualified applicants from around the world. Caroline Mackenzie, Hall’s expedition doctor, had worked at the HRA Clinic with Fiona McPherson and Andy in the autumn of 1994.

  In 1990, the year Hall first summitted Everest, the clinic was run by an accomplished, self-confident physician from New Zealand named Jan Arnold. Hall met her as he passed through Pheriche on his way to the mountain, and he was immediately smitten. “I asked Jan to go out with me as soon as I got down from Everest,” Hall reminisced during our first night in the village. “For our first date I proposed going to Alaska and climbing Mount McKinley together. And she said yes.” They were married two years later. In 1993 Arnold climbed to the summit of Everest with Hall; in 1994 and 1995 she traveled to Base Camp to work as the expedition doctor. Arnold would have returned to the mountain again this year, except that she was seven months pregnant with their first child. So the job went to Dr. Mackenzie.

  After dinner on Thursday, our first night in Pheriche, Laura Ziemer and Jim Litch invited Hall, Harris, and Helen Wilton, our Base Camp manager, over to the clinic to raise a glass and catch up on gossip. Over the course of the evening, the conversa
tion drifted to the inherent risks of climbing—and guiding—Everest, and Litch remembers the discussion with chilling clarity: Hall, Harris, and Litch were in complete agreement that sooner or later a major disaster involving a large number of clients was “inevitable.” But, said Litch—who had climbed Everest from Tibet the previous spring—“Rob’s feeling was that it wouldn’t be him; he was just worried about ‘having to save another team’s ass,’ and that when the unavoidable calamity struck, he was ‘sure it would occur on the more dangerous north side’” of the peak—the Tibetan side.

  On Saturday, April 6, a few hours above Pheriche, we arrived at the lower end of the Khumbu Glacier, a twelve-mile tongue of ice that flows down from the south flank of Everest and would serve as our highway—I hoped mightily—to the summit. At 16,000 feet now, we’d left behind the last trace of green. Twenty stone monuments stood in a somber row along the crest of the glacier’s terminal moraine, overlooking the mist-filled valley: memorials to climbers who had died on Everest, most of them Sherpa. From this point forward our world would be a barren, monochromatic expanse of rock and windblown ice. And despite our measured pace I had begun to feel the effects of the altitude, which left me light-headed and constantly fighting for breath.

  The trail here remained buried beneath a head-high winter snowpack in many places. As the snow softened in the afternoon sun, the hoofs of our yaks punched through the frozen crust, and the beasts wallowed to their bellies. The grumbling yak drivers thrashed their animals to force them onward and threatened to turn around. Late in the day we reached a village called Lobuje, and there sought refuge from the wind in a cramped, spectacularly filthy lodge.

  A collection of low tumbledown buildings huddled against the elements at the edge of the Khumbu Glacier, Lobuje was a grim place, crowded with Sherpas and climbers from a dozen different expeditions, German trekkers, herds of emaciated yaks—all bound for Everest Base Camp, still a day’s travel up the valley. The bottleneck, Rob explained, was due to the unusually late and heavy snowpack, which until just yesterday had kept any yaks at all from reaching Base Camp. The hamlet’s half dozen lodges were completely full. Tents were jammed side by side on the few patches of muddy earth not covered with snow. Scores of Rai and Tamang porters from the low foothills—dressed in thin rags and flip-flops, they were working as load bearers for various expeditions—were bivouacked in caves and under boulders on the surrounding slopes.

  The three or four stone toilets in the village were literally overflowing with excrement. The latrines were so abhorrent that most people, Nepalese and Westerners alike, evacuated their bowels outside on the open ground, wherever the urge struck. Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible not to walk in it. The river of snowmelt meandering through the center of the settlement was an open sewer.

  The main room of the lodge where we stayed was furnished with wooden bunk platforms for some thirty people. I found an unoccupied bunk on the upper level, shook as many fleas and lice as possible from the soiled mattress, and spread out my sleeping bag. Against the near wall was a small iron stove that supplied heat by burning dried yak dung. After sunset the temperature dropped well below freezing, and porters flocked in from the cruel night to warm themselves around the stove. Because dung burns poorly under the best of circumstances, and especially so in the oxygen-depleted air of 16,200 feet, the lodge filled with dense, acrid smoke, as if the exhaust from a diesel bus were being piped directly into the room. Twice during the night, coughing uncontrollably, I had to flee outside for air. By morning my eyes were burning and bloodshot, my nostrils were clogged with black soot, and I’d developed a dry, persistent hack that would stay with me until the end of the expedition.

  Rob had intended for us to spend just one day acclimatizing in Lobuje before traveling the final six or seven miles to Base Camp, which our Sherpas had reached some days earlier in order to ready the site for our arrival and begin establishing a route up the lower slopes of Everest itself. On the evening of April 7, however, a breathless runner arrived in Lobuje with a disturbing message from Base Camp: Tenzing, a young Sherpa employed by Rob, had fallen 150 feet into a crevasse—a gaping crack in the glacier. Four other Sherpas had hauled him out alive, but he was seriously injured, possibly with a broken femur. Rob, ashen-faced, announced that he and Mike Groom would hurry to Base Camp at dawn to coordinate Tenzing’s rescue. “I regret to have to tell you this,” he continued, “but the rest of you will need to wait here in Lobuje with Harold until we get the situation under control.”

  Tenzing, we later learned, had been scouting the route above Camp One, climbing a relatively gentle section of the Khumbu Glacier with four other Sherpas. The five men were walking single file, which was smart, but they weren’t using a rope—a serious violation of mountaineering protocol. Tenzing was moving closely behind the other four, stepping exactly where they had stepped, when he broke through a thin veneer of snow spanning a deep crevasse. Before he even had time to yell, he dropped like a rock into the Cimmerian bowels of the glacier.

  At 20,500 feet, the altitude was deemed too high for safe evacuation by helicopter—the air was too insubstantial to provide much lift for a helicopter’s rotors, making landing, taking off, or merely hovering unreasonably hazardous—so he would have to be carried 3,000 vertical feet to Base Camp down the Khumbu Icefall, some of the steepest, most treacherous ground on the entire mountain. Getting Tenzing down alive would require a massive effort.

  Rob was always especially concerned about the welfare of the Sherpas who worked for him. Before our group departed Kathmandu, he had sat all of us down and given us an uncommonly stern lecture about the need to show our Sherpa staff gratitude and proper respect. “The Sherpas we’ve hired are the best in the business,” he told us. “They work incredibly hard for not very much money by Western standards. I want you all to remember we would have absolutely no chance of getting to the summit of Everest without their help. I’m going to repeat that: Without the support of our Sherpas none of us has any chance of climbing the mountain.”

  In a subsequent conversation, Rob confessed that in past years he’d been critical of some expedition leaders for being careless with their Sherpa staff. In 1995 a young Sherpa had died on Everest; Hall speculated that the accident may have occurred because the Sherpa had been “allowed to climb high on the mountain without proper training. I believe that it’s the responsibility of those of us who run these trips to prevent that sort of thing from happening.”

  The previous year a guided American expedition had hired a Sherpa named Kami Rita as a cook boy. Strong and ambitious, twenty-one or twenty-two years old, he lobbied hard to be allowed to work on the upper mountain as a climbing Sherpa. In appreciation for Kami’s enthusiasm and dedication, some weeks later his wish was granted—despite the fact that he had no climbing experience and had received no formal training in proper techniques.

  From 22,000 feet to 25,000 feet the standard route ascends a sheer, treacherous ice slope known as the Lhotse Face. As a safety measure, expeditions always attach a series of ropes to this slope from bottom to top, and climbers are supposed to protect themselves by clipping a short safety tether to the fixed ropes as they ascend. Kami, being young and cocky and inexperienced, didn’t think it was really necessary to clip into the rope. One afternoon as he was carrying a load up the Lhotse Face he lost his purchase on the rock-hard ice and fell more than 2,000 feet to the bottom of the wall.

  My teammate Frank Fischbeck had witnessed the whole episode. In 1995 he was making his third attempt on Everest as a client of the American company that had hired Kami. Frank was ascending the ropes on the upper Lhotse Face, he said in a troubled voice, “when I looked up and saw a person tumbling down from above, falling head over heels. He was screaming as he went past, and left a trail of blood.”

  Some climbers rushed to where Kami came to rest at the bottom of the face, but he had died from the extensive injuries he’d suffered on the way down. His body was b
rought down to Base Camp, where, in the Buddhist tradition, his friends brought meals to feed the corpse for three days. Then he was carried to a village near Tengboche and cremated. As the body was consumed by flames, Kami’s mother wailed inconsolably and struck her head with a sharp rock.

  Kami was very much in Rob’s mind at first light on April 8, when he and Mike hurried toward Base Camp to try and get Tenzing off Everest alive.

  * A chorten is a religious monument, usually made of rock and often containing sacred relics; it is also called a stupa.

  † Mani stones are small, flat rocks that have been meticulously carved with Sanskrit symbols denoting the Tibetan Buddhist invocation Om mani padme hum and are piled along the middle of trails to form long, low mani walls. Buddhist protocol dictates that travelers always pass mani walls on the left.

  ‡ Technically speaking, the great majority of the “yaks” one sees in the Himalaya are actually dzopkyo—male crossbreeds of yaks and cattle—or dzom, female crossbreeds. Additionally, female yaks, when purebred, are correctly termed naks. Most Westerners, however, have a hard time telling any of these shaggy beasts apart and refer to all of them as yaks.

  * Unlike Tibetan, to which it is closely related, Sherpa is not a written language, so Westerners are forced to resort to phonetic renderings. As a consequence there is little uniformity in the spelling of Sherpa words or names; Tengboche, for instance, is written variously as Tengpoche or Thyangboche, and similar incongruities crop up in spelling most other Sherpa words.

  * Although the Tibetan name for the peak is Jomolungma and the Nepali name is Sagarmatha, most Sherpas seem to refer to the mountain as “Everest” in daily conversation—even when speaking with other Sherpas.