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"At this exact moment, enormous black clouds were smearing across the summit, like a combine harvester cutting a swath through a small ornamental rose garden...." |
We were headed for Camp 1, in support of John Arnold, Ian Hatchett, and Yang Li Cun, who were in Camp 2, and pushing for Camp 3. We had been speaking with them on the radio, and they said the weather looked stable enough to try for the summit. Our plan was to do what was needed to help the three summit, then clear Camps 3, 2, 1, and clean all the rubbish off the mountain.
It seemed we were the last expedition on Cho Oyu this season. The date was October 10th, and our team had agreed that the last day to summit would be October 12, as the yaks were prearranged to arrive in Base Camp on the 15th. This would barely give enough time to clean up, and pack and load them. In previous years, I had summitted Everest on October 10th and Makalu on October 8th, so the 12th seemed like a reasonable date.
After trying to help an ill climber, part of a descending team, at the cache tent at the base of the scree slope, Durga, Jangbu and I headed up the horrible hill and arrived in Camp 1 at 7pm on a sunny, relatively calm evening on October 10th. We found John Arnold in the camp, sneezing and sniffling and hacking, with a horrible head cold. He had returned from Camp 3, very ill. Luckily, he was well enough in the morning to descend to Base Camp.
By the next day, October 11, the wind had picked up, and was buffetting the tents in Camp 1 a bit. At the 9am radio call, we heard the horrible news that the climber from the other team had died. My God, what a tragedy.
We hung out in camp that day, mourning and waiting for news on the 7pm radio call. It was sunny and the tents were rattling fairly well. I read the first several chapters in the Baghavad Gita, and felt fairly depressed. I longed for the lowlands, and wondered how long it would be before I breathed some real air. Throughout the day, I bugged Durga and Jangbu in the tent across the way to drink and eat lots.
That afternoon we saw two dots ascending the long slope to Camp 3. One dot was very far (several hours) in front of the other one. At the radio call that evening, Ian announced they were in Camp 3, and that Yang had reached the camp, but had been several hours (perhaps three) late. He said they planned to go to the summit at 7am, that it was currently windy but perhaps do-able, and that the next radio call would be at 9am, the following day.
At 3am that night, the wind exploded out of the icy full-moon sky, and it was so loud it sounded like trains crashing together in some high-altitude freight yard. The tent was rattling a steady scream of nylon, plunging up and down in the great gusts, with about as much stability as a Christmas tree bauble in a hurricane.
At times the wind would abate for a few seconds, but you could hear the next gust coming across the Cwm, much as you would hear a 747 coming in for a landing, from the fence at the edge of Heathrow Airport. Then the gust would hit, and the fly would shake, then rip, and the tent would flatten into the ice.
Suddenly an even more powerful blast would lift the tent from the ground, and the whole confabulation, of poles, people, and plastic would begin to slide in the gale, ever so slightly, across the polished ice coating the earth in Camp 1.
Since it was a full-moon night, you could see the clouds scudding through the sky, like some unearthly bumper cars, in a heaven-bound psychotic carnival.
By 5am, the wind had ripped, torn, and lacerated the fly from most of my tent, and there was only the thin inner shell between me and the freezing, evil sky. Sleep, needless to say, was not possible, and I whiled away the time trying to brew little bits of water in the twirling, bouncing, spilling, and spraying hanging stove.
It wasn't possible to cook more than a cup at a time, and even this amount was likely to dump onto my sleeping bag if I wasn't careful to catch and hold the stove by its suspension wires. Cooking in these conditions was an extremely unpleasant and arduous task.
My comfort was certainly not aided by the fact that the floor of the tent was fully concave — like the inside of a magnifying glass lens — because after a month of having people laying in the tent nearly daily, the floor of the tent had melted this way. Also, whoever put the tent up in the first place had not been thinking with a long term view, and had not stomped the tent platform out properly.
The sun began to rise just before 6am, and it was a long horrible wait for the 9am radio call, as the tent would go nearly two dimensional, fully flattening to the ground. Even in such a pancaked condition, it still flapped, and it seemed the poles were all broken by this time. Can you guess what speed the wind could have been? What sort of wind speed is required to fully wreck a perfectly good tent so thoroughly?
At 9am, Ian came on the radio, and said that his tent had been destroyed during the night, and that the other tent in Camp 3 had blown away, and that he had crawled into Yang's tent in the wee hours. I asked he and Yang to come down from Camp 3 as soon as possible, because the storm might continue, or even increase.
Ian said 'Okay,' and Jon Otto, in Base Camp, agreed that the next radio call would be at 1pm. At this exact moment, enormous black clouds were smearing across the summit, like a combine harvester cutting a swath through a small ornamental rose garden. The summit was actually and frequently being obscured between these huge horrible speeding clouds.
It was a terrifying moment for me as I contemplated what the descent could mean for Ian and Yang. I imagined them being blown from the mountain, smashed to chopped liver in some serac field 1000 meters below, or succumbing to frostbite, and barely able to drag their frozen, cramponed stump-feet across the unforgiving hard ice which now made up the trail from Camp 3 down to Camp 1.
I called across the wailing breeze to Durga and Jangbu, whose tent I noticed had the door ripped from it, to get ready to go up and help in Camp 2, and cook lots of water, and eat food, because it promised to be a cold and horrible journey.
As we tried to melt a bit of snow for our shriveled stomachs and frozen water bottles, we occasionally peered out the tent and were surprised and delighted to notice a climber descending from Camp 3. The climber was moving extraordinarily rapidly, at what could only be described as a sprint, and we all marveled that this was probably the fastest they had seen anyone move down this obstacle-filled slope. But, where was the other climber?
