I've said it a thousand times; emotions have no place above 8,000
meters. And I've mostly lived true to my words. Rarely have I indulged in
fear or elation or thoughts of love, envy, greed, hatred or that other
stuff up on high mountains. In such places, I've always contended that us clumsy, average
folks need to keep our minds firmly focused on where our feet are hitting
the rock and snow. So what was that fogging up my sunglasses
at the Third Step of Everest's North Ridge last May?
Tears at 8700 meters? Clearly a violation of Rule #1. Perhaps there was some good excuse
for them when Eric Simonson, down at basecamp, had radioed up a moment
before asking finally if there wasn't some way we could still carry on to
the summit and I'd replied throatily that there wasn't a chance that we'd go
on. Let's just hope the tears weren't simply for a missed summit.
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" We'd
just tried, after an hour or so of poking and prodding and feeding and
administering drugs and O's to combat cerebral edema, to get Jaime and Andy
on their feet."
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People
already think I'm an idiot for having been on Everest's top three times;
nobody would believe I had a compelling reason to be there a fourth. And
though I looked around through my tears at my partners and remembered that
Tap Richards and Jason Tanguay and Phu Dorje had not yet been to the top of
the "big E" despite being strong and ready at 7am
on a nice day to easily go the last hour. Well, I wasn't crying for them. They were young, they'd be
there some day if they continued to want it bad enough.
Sure, I was
conscious that after months of hard work on the Mallory & Irvine Research
Expedition we were going to finally come up empty. No camera from 1924, no
more knowledge of where Andrew "Sandy" Irvine had finished up, no answer to the
great mystery of how high up George and Sandy had gotten, and lastly, no
summit after our team had fixed nearly every inch of the fixed rope for the
route. But none of that made me weepy.
It was Andy Lapkass and Jaime Vinals sitting there on the rocks with a few
empty oxygen bottles and some shreds of a space blanket. Two nice guys who'd spent the night out after making the top the previous day. Just sitting
up where jets fly and people die and where I've now cried.
Phu Dorje summed things up nicely when he'd given up his oxygen bottles for
the cause and was starting down, shaking his head in disbelief. "Bad luck!"
he kept saying to me, "Bad luck!" while pointing back at the summit pyramid,
painfully up close and personal.
Despite the succinctness and truthful nature of
his assessment, I still needed to check something with Tap and Jason. We'd
just tried, after an hour or so of poking and prodding and feeding and
administering drugs and O's to combat cerebral edema, to get Jaime and Andy
on their feet. The results were deeply discouraging and were most likely the
cause of my fogged glasses. But I needed to know how Tap and Jason saw
things since such decisive moments could potentially come back to haunt us
all.
"You guys realize that there is absolutely no way we can do what Eric
is suggesting, don't you?" Their answers came back through tight throats
that made me aware that they had some tears of their own.
No. Not a
chance of doing what we'd already been able to do before sunrise a few hours earlier when
we'd come across three Russians at the Mushroom Rock. There,
despite the fact that we'd found them lying about, feebly kicking their
feet, out of oxygen, inappropriately dressed and speaking in an unfamiliar
tongue about their predicament at 28,300 feet, we'd been able to revive them
somewhat and send them down on their own. It hadn't been easy.
Phu Nuru had
surrendered his own oxygen and any hopes of the summit then. We'd given out
decadron pills as if they were candy at a Halloween doorstep. We'd parted
with a fair amount of our precious food and water. We'd wrestled to get the
Russians up and dressed against the cold. But sure enough, as Eric had
suggested might be possible then, they'd come around and were once again
taking care of themselves while we were going higher. That was important
since, in our communications regarding the Russians we'd become fully aware
that both Andy and Jaime had spent the night out even higher. We didn't
know if they were alive or dead when we left the Russians.
It probably
sounds terrible to say that we were prepared for them to be dead, in which
case our response would have been to go on to the summit. Get your head
around it if you can, because we would have. And if they weren't so bad
off, we'd have helped them to their feet, patted them on their backs as they
proceeded down and we'd have still pressed on for the top. After all, they
had their expedition goals, we had ours. The two were separate.
But when Tap
and Jason and I were getting all misty eyed, it had become apparent that we
were into something far worse. The summit no longer existed. In fact, even the chance of getting these two climbers down alive no longer existed. We had each been
horrified to watch them trying to stand and walk. Without those abilities,
it was simply "game over" for these two.
In our heads swam visions of the
vertical Second Step, the ridiculous traverse back to the Mushroom Rock, the
even more ridiculous traverse back to the First Step, the vertical descent of
that feature, the treacherous hop down the rocks and gullies of the Yellow
Band. And what would it get you if you could somehow carry somebody over all
of that? Well, then you'd have a critically ill person at 27,000 feet
instead of 28,500 feet. Big deal.
Watching Jaime and Andy collapse back to
the rock, Tap and Jason and I knew what nobody watching through a telescope
from below could know, not only were these men going to die, but they were
going to do it with us as companions. And I think that was what made us
emotional. To make matters worse, to really choke us up, they were far from
dead at the moment, in fact they were very much alive.
Andy Lapkass was,
despite a night fighting to keep his client warm and frostbite free, despite
the impaired vision and slurred words caused by the swelling of his brain in his
skull, still the kind of guy you look up to for his generosity and
strength and experience. Jaime was so alive that it scared us; utterly
cheerful and seemingly unconcerned about his predicament.
But both were
pitifully unable to walk. Without choices, we simply gave them a little
more of everything and kept trying to get them to rally. After a time, Tap
and Jason had Andy moving. But it took both of them to support him and keep
his feet going in the right directions. That left me and Jaime and my
emotions.
I decided then that I'd been wrong about emotions in the "death zone."
Everybody probably should have a set. The fact that Jaime was devoid of
them struck me as just plain wrong and I set about changing that.
"Jaime,
you have a family, don't you?" He cheerfully replied, "Oh yes, my wife is
pregnant." My big brainstorm had backfired. I was choking up again and
Jaime was merely happy to have his attention diverted to warm, fuzzy
thoughts from the cold hell of the Third Step.
"You want to see them again,
don't you?" "Oh yes!" So I started trying to shock him with "Then you
better start walking. You HAVE to survive this." But I just got back a
cheerful, "Oh, yes."
Even so, we began making slow progress back toward the
Second Step. Jaime was only able to go a few steps at a time and then I'd
feel him tapping me on the pack to stop and sit down. We walked about two
feet apart since I had his oxygen bottle in my pack and just the rubber hose
connecting us. The terrain between the Second and Third Steps of Everest's
North Ridge is by far the easiest ground of that particular climb. Even so,
when we'd get walking along, I half expected to just hear a little "pop" of
that rubber hose separating as Jaime tumbled off the Kangshung Face a few
feet to our right.
In fact, at one point I considered momentarily that
Jaime might step off that face on purpose to save me from an unworkable
future. But what emotion immediately chased that thought? That was guilt,
for sure. I wanted Jaime to live, but I still just didn't have a clue as to
how he would live with just my help and 20 feet of progress between
protracted sit-down rests. I started telling him that he needed to get it
together before the Second Step or he'd die. This information was still
getting tangled up in Jaime's struggle to deal with a poorly fitting oxygen
mask and glasses that wouldn't stay clear and in place. He was still too
happy to be alive to truly think of death.
We'd fallen so far behind Tap
and Jason and Andy that I'd lost track of them completely. My world was down
to Jaime and my bad thoughts. The Second Step was filling my head with
feelings of inadequacy. That's what you get up that way when you legalize
emotions.
I've known people who would have been perfectly able, in the same
circumstance, to have left Jaime at the top of the Step, rappelled down and
found a half-rotten length of rope, cut it out from the climbing route,
climbed back up the Step with it, anchored it, lowered Jaime down and gone
about their rescue business. But I knew I didn't have all that in me then
and there.
My friends and acquaintances down below must have known it too
because they started suggesting over the radio that I was going to have to
consider leaving Jaime and saving my own bacon. Finally, running out of
options and nearing the top of the Step, I heard Eric winding up for a
direct order via the radio. I pulled it from the muffling effect of my down
suit and held it out a few inches from Jaime's face. Eric didn't sugarcoat
it, "Dave, if Jaime can't do any better than he's doing now, you'll have to
leave him up there." I watched Jaime's eyes get pretty wide then as emotion
flooded back into him. Anger. That is what he later told me he felt. It
was actually the first part of that morning that he was able to fully recall
afterward. Not a moment too soon, since we'd arrived at the step. And then
it was all Jaime.
He found some deep and as yet untapped source of strength
and determination, clipped in and rappelled the Second Step without oxygen.
Not bad for a dead man, I thought as I accompanied him. Upon reaching the
lower rappel of the step, I preceded Jaime and was thus just below him when
he neared the bottom of it all and got hung up in ropes just six or eight
feet above me. I was mighty tired then and reaching up to scratch my head
kind of uselessly when Phurba Sherpa jumped in like Superman.
Phurba, a
member of Jaime's team who had summited the day before and then gone all the
way down to Camp V at 25,700 feet had now returned with a vengeance. He
jumped up past me, placed his own goggles and oxygen mask and oxygen on
Jaime and disentangled him from the ropes in about two minutes flat.
"Now
why didn't I do that?" I wondered. "Oh yeah, because I'm getting wasted."
But I rallied some, out of shame (a timely emotion) and with Phurba and a
steadily stronger Jaime, we got our man back across the first ridiculous
traverses to the Mushroom Rock. And there was Andy Politz from our own
expedition, who'd come up to swing it all in our favor.
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"...I sat up and told him what I'd just realized with his words, that the day would be far more
important to all of us than any summit could ever have been."
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Andy, my tentmate at
high camp, had decided not to go for the summit that day. Instead, he wanted
one last day of searching for Sandy Irvine, despite the new snow still
hanging around our search area. Andy had some hunch he wanted to pursue.
But on hearing of all our trials and tribulations with errant campers that
morning, Andy had grabbed all the oxygen he could and had bolted up to fight
the good fight. And when I saw him, I believed we had won the battle.
Joy,
a most welcome emotion, started flooding into me there at the Shroom, even
as strength was evaporating. I'd given away my food and water and had now
been about 12 hours without the stuff, a bad idea for a guy like me. The
rescue proceded then with me kind of tagging along. Andy Lapkass and Jaime
were gathering speed as yet another of their Sherpa team, Lobsang, got up to
help. That left Tap and Jason and Andy Politz and myself following and
decompressing. But when we started into the Yellow Band, Andy and Tap and
Jason encountered a pair of the Russians we'd tried so hard to help that
morning.
One of them collapsed then and sitting just up the slope I myself sat
down in defeat. Watching the guys struggle with injectible drugs, with their radio calll to our doc, Lee Meyers, and with searches for some signs
of life. I can't quite say what my emotions boiled down to. There I was,
with all my rescue training, a ski patroller and all that, just watching.
I
told myself that it was because I would not be able to climb down the 40-degree slope directly above this operation and onto the crowded slope
without kicking rock and ice onto the victim. I told myself that the poor
man was dead and that we could do no more. I told myself that it just didn't matter what any of us ever did anyway. But Politz was not encumbered by
such useless, nameless emotions, as he worked furiously there at 28,000 feet finally determining beyond all doubt that the Russian, Alexei, had died.
I
came down to join my partners then and together we did our best to deal with
what seemed to be the end of a bad day.
Back at high camp finally, Politz, Tap and Jason decided that they were not
sticking around for more epics and a night of thin air. Since Jaime, Andy
Lapkass and the surviving Russians were all in the care of their various
teammates, my partners hightailed it down the mountain to make their own
lives better.
I lay back in one of our remaining tents, exhausted. Our
Sherpa team had taken away much of high camp that day and it was with only
dull concern that I noted that they had pulled all of the odd food that I
survive on. I had to go down as well. But I just lay there uselessly,
drained of emotion, brains and strength. It crossed my dull mind that this
whole saga would be used to further the "Everest Bashing" popular in some
circles; the people who drone on to say that us accident-prone riffraff
should not be allowed onto such hallowed ground. Save it all for the
Ivy League climbing clubs.
There would certainly be much depressing ado
made of those who didn't, couldn't or wouldn't help out today, I thought glumly. And there was death and what a dead climber looks and feels like crowding my brain with darkness.
So I was wallowing in bad feelings and exhaustion when the procession of
climbers from the team we'd helped started down past my tent. Andy Lapkass, the accomplished and friendly man I look up to and admire was obviously in
great pain from his frostbite and continuing ordeal when he stopped and
leaned in to say thanks and that he was sorry we had to miss out on an
Everest summit to help him.
Coming to my senses again, I sat up and told him what I'd just realized with his words, that the day would be far more
important to all of us than any summit could ever have been. As he moved
away, I saw through the tent door the final pyramid of Everest glowing
magically in the late afternoon sun. Still a beautiful and worthy mountain.
Leaning out, I saw what I'd been missing all day in my frenzy, Tibet and
Nepal and a million mountains and cloud tops. I found a little strength of
my own then and got my tired body out of high camp and down lower.
I walked
on after darkness, rappelling this and traversing that under shimmering
stars until I plodded into Advanced Base Camp at 21,000 ft. It was dark and
quiet as one would expect at 11:30pm, but to my amazement and everlasting
gratitude, Kami Sherpa climbed out of bed and started fixing me a plate of
fried rice. He went back to bed after setting it in front of me and I did
my best to get it down my neck. Even so, I woke up several times in the
next hour, with my face progressively closer to the rice. Passing out with
your face in a plate of food after a big day is not an emotion, but it
should be. A good one.
Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist