The Other Side of Everest Page 3

  The term he invented is a uniquely chilling one, and one that sums up the sheer horror of a place in which every breath signals a deterioration in the human body, where the cells of vital organs are eliminated in their millions each hour, and where no living creature belongs.

  Like the “Killing Fields,” the “Death Zone,” in two simple words, carries with it a sense of unspeakable horror. It conjures up pictures of a place that might only have been imagined in the mind of a writer such as Tolkien; a place of quest in the medieval sense—a battle zone where warriors and dreamers come to fight the darkest forces of nature, and from which some men emerge so shaken by what they have experienced that they never find the strength to speak of it again.

  The Death Zone is a place where the mind wanders into strange and dark corners, where insanity and illusions are ever-present traps, and where the corpses, of far stronger warriors than you will ever be, lie in the screaming wind with their skulls gaping from the ripped remains of their battle dress. Ghosts are there in plenty, and their warning cries echo through the night.

  Death Zone visas are issued by the gods of the wind. They last just a few days at most, and expire without warning. Get caught on the wrong side of the border when the barrier comes down and you will never return.

  On May 10, 1996, the barrier came down on Everest.

  There were two very different types of expedition high on the peak making their summit attempts that day: the traditional style of national expedition that raises its funds through sponsorship, and the new-style commercial expedition that raises its funds through paying clients.

  In the case of the first, members are normally selected on merit, do not pay for the privilege of joining, and are responsible for their own safety on the mountain. In the case of the second, while clients have to prove they have some climbing experience, their primary qualification for acceptance on an Everest expedition is the ability to pay. High-altitude specialist guides are employed by the companies to assure the safety of their clients. Our own expedition was a commercial one such as this.

  The two traditional-style expeditions involved in the events of May 10 were the Indian team on the northern side—organized and staffed by members of the Indo-Tibetan border police led by Mohindor Singh—and the Taiwanese national team on the south, led by “Makalu” Gau.

  The two commercial expeditions with paying clients were the Adventure Consultants team led by Rob Hall, and the Mountain Madness team led by Scott Fischer.

  Compared to the Indian and Taiwanese teams, the commercial expeditions had managed to get much larger numbers of people, and correspondingly larger amounts of vital oxygen equipment, into position for the summit bid on that day. The Indian team numbered six, with no Sherpas. The Taiwanese team was reduced to just the leader, Makalu Gau, and two Sherpas.

  The Adventure Consultants group that set out at about midnight from the South Col included no fewer than fifteen people: three guides, eight clients, and four Sherpas. The Mountain Madness team also had fifteen people on the Southeast Ridge, of which six were clients.

  For Rob Hall, leader of the Adventure Consultants team, the midnight departure from the South Col for the summit was business as usual. Hall, more than anyone, had been at the vanguard of commercial guiding on Everest since it began and, as he led his team up through the night, he would have been confident of success. He had reason to be: he had personally summitted Everest four times and had led a total of thirty-nine clients to the top of the world over the previous five years.

  As a high-altitude guide with responsibility for the lives of his clients, Hall had impeccable credentials. On a personal level he was an inspirational leader, as his 1996 Base Camp doctor Caroline Mackenzie recalls:

  Rob was a very enthusiastic person with an open mind. He was very encouraging to everybody, very forward-thinking, a stimulating person to be around. He was always thinking of the morale of his group, and taking note of individuals’ morale.

  Rob Hall began his Himalayan climbing career at the age of nineteen when he climbed Ama Dablam, 6,828 meters (22,401 feet), in Nepal, via its difficult North Ridge. He followed that with three summer seasons in Antarctica as a guide and rescue team leader for the American and New Zealand Antarctic programs and then moved on to a series of high-altitude expeditions including Denali, Annapurna, K2, Everest, Lhotse, and the Vinson Massif. During 1990 he climbed the “Seven Summits”—the highest points on each continent—in a record-breaking seven months.

  Having established his credentials as New Zealand’s most experienced expedition leader, and with an excellent track record at extreme altitude, Rob Hall set up Adventure Consultants with fellow Kiwi Gary Ball, a certified mountain guide, who had shared many of Rob Hall’s more ambitious ascents.

  Based out of Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island, the duo specialized in challenging and expensive guided climbing expeditions. They were one of the first companies to feature Everest in their brochure. With their considerable charm, and a talent for generating publicity, the two climbers quickly established a growing list of clients keen to “bag” the highest summit even if it did cost them $40,000—ex-Kathmandu.

  On May 12, 1992, Hall and Ball pulled off an amazing coup. In near-perfect weather conditions they placed an astonishing fourteen climbers (six were clients) on the summit of Everest and got them down safely again. It was an outstanding achievement that, more than any other event, confirmed that Everest had entered a new era: this summit, like the peaks of the Alps and the volcanoes of South America, was now for sale.

  By the 1993 season, Adventure Consultants was a company with a multimillion-dollar turnover and a calendar that hardly gave the two partners time to draw breath; in March they were offering Everest, in September Mera Peak. November was Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea, December the Vinson Massif in Antarctica. Hall and Ball had not only tapped into a new vogue for “superadventure,” they had virtually created it themselves. Now they were reaping the rewards as they shuttled backward and forward across the globe from one adventure to the next, shepherding their high-paying clients, many of whom had built up a fierce loyalty to their charismatic guides.

  But no matter how glamorous their other climbing destinations, Everest was the jewel in the Adventure Consultants’ crown. That was what justified the huge amount of time and organization getting there required, and that was what justified the risk. Putting clients on the summit of Everest was the very lifeblood of the company. So long as they got down again in one piece.

  Yet while Hall and Ball had the golden touch, and the lion’s share of the publicity, they did not have an exclusive on the ultimate summit. Other companies, equally ambitious, equally keen to win a slice of the Everest pie, were now competing for permits—and clients.

  The British company Himalayan Kingdoms entered the fray in 1993 under the command of Steve Bell, a climber and ex-army officer who had made notable winter ascents of the North Faces of the Eiger and Matterhorn. Bell had trodden Everest’s slopes twice before on army expeditions in 1988 and 1992 (but although he had reached 8,400 meters [27,559 feet], he had not previously summitted). Their asking price for the expedition was £21,000 per head, and as a benchmark of qualification they were unwilling to consider anyone who had not previously been to 23,000 feet. During selection Bell turned down an application from journalist Rebecca Stephens, considering her “too inexperienced,” but he did agree to take the fifty-six-year-old actor Brian Blessed, now on his second attempt. Brian’s celebrity status in Britain considerably boosted the amount of publicity the expedition could generate but many doubted he was a serious candidate for the summit.

  Steve Bell rose to the logistical challenge of Everest with military thoroughness. Although he didn’t have the sheer charisma of Hall and Ball, his leadership was every bit as impressive. He led seven paying members of his team to the summit via the South Col route, including Ramon Blanco, a Spanish guitar-maker resident of Venezuela who became, at the age of sixty, the oldest ma
n to reach the top. They also put Ginette Harrison on the summit, the second British woman to get there.

  Rebecca Stephens, Himalayan Kingdoms’ “reject,” had found her way onto another expedition and beat Harrison to the summit by five months. Bell is honest enough to admit that striking Rebecca from his list had been a mistake.

  Himalayan Kingdoms had been very lucky in two respects: not only had they encountered an exceptional period of fine weather, they had narrowly avoided a total catastrophe when, by chance, they had no one at Camp Three (7,400 meters [24,278 feet]) on the Lhotse Face when a huge avalanche swept down and destroyed the camp. The company had not been so lucky just a couple of months before on August 4 on Khan Tengri (7,010 meters [22,998 feet]) in the Tien Shan mountains, when a similar avalanche killed two Russian guides and two British clients.

  By now, with papers all over the world publishing photographs of relatively inexperienced adventurers queuing on their way to the summit, the global perception of Everest had shifted once and for all. For the media the myth had been conclusively debunked. Everest was as affordable as a Porsche or a Mercedes—and every bit as glamorous. All you had to do was reach for your checkbook, swap your Gucci loafers for a pair of plastic boots, and the summit was as good as yours.

  A new perception had emerged almost overnight: that Everest was achievable by any reasonably fit person who had the motivation—and the cash. In just a few years Everest had gone from the ultimate summit—the preserve of elite mountaineers—to a “trophy peak,” the stomping ground of a new breed of climbers who, largely ignorant of the dangers they might face, were buying their way to the top. To the press, inevitably, they were “social climbers,” people who would pay almost any price to put a summit photograph on a mantelpiece.

  Now Everest was back in the news, big time. QUEUE AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD screamed the front-page headline feature in the Observer review on May 16, 1993. Contrast this with the situation back in the late 1980s, when the media had virtually run out of interest in the peak. With all of Everest’s major faces climbed, and oxygenless ascents of the southern and northern sides ticked off, the press had grown weary of reporting on it. In September 1988 the death of a Sherpa in an Everest avalanche rated just an eighteen-word report in the London Times. The speed climb of Marc Batard in the same month (he raced to the summit and back again in a lightning twenty-two hours and thirty minutes) was reported in the same paper with just seven words more. In May 1989 the deaths of five Polish climbers in another avalanche were similarly reported in less than a column-inch.

  Now, thousands of column-inches were devoted to Everest as the new era of guided expeditions came in.

  Out of the whirlwind of publicity, a new debate was spun. The increasing commercialization of Everest was attracting criticism in powerful quarters, not least from Sir Edmund Hillary who, interviewed in a Newsweek article on May 3, 1993—timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Hillary’s own first ascent—was quoted as saying, “The change I dislike most is the fact that [climbing the mountain] has become a financial proposition. Everest is too important a mountain and a challenge to be able to buy your way up.”

  It was by no means the first time Sir Edmund had opened Everest up to public debate. In 1990, the Associated Free Press reported his call for a five-year closure of Everest to all mountaineering activity so that nature could repair the damage caused by the hundreds of climbers who flocked to the slopes.

  The ascent of Peter Hillary, Sir Edmund’s son, graphically illustrated the growing traffic in May of that same year. On the day in which he made it to the summit, sixteen other climbers also added their names to the ever-growing list.

  As fellow New Zealanders, and inevitably childhood fans of Sir Edmund’s, Hall and Ball were stung deeply by this very public criticism from Hillary. And there was another twist: Peter Hillary’s climbing companions on that May day in 1990 had been none other than—Rob Hall and Gary Ball. All the more reason perhaps for their subsequent bitterness when Sir Edmund’s pronouncements put their efforts under the scrutiny of an increasingly hostile press pack. By bringing the mountain into reach for the ordinary man, Hall and Ball had been treading a delicate and dangerous line in public relations. Up until now their sheer charm and talent for generating good publicity had cocooned them from attack.

  Up until now, also, their luck had held. But for how much longer? As early as 1991, editorial comment in the climbing press had raised the specter of an imminent catastrophe. Bernard Newman, editor of Mountain magazine, wrote in April of that year on the subject of commercial Everest expeditions:

  It is indicative of the way that mountains are being abused. It would be terrible if the Himalayas were exploited in the same way as Zermatt or Mont Blanc. People think that, with modern technology, clothing and easy accessibility, it’s less of a mountain to climb. That’s not true. It’s as much of a mountain as ever, and it will bite back.

  There was a growing feeling among the climbing fraternity that guided expeditions above 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) were playing with fire and that, sooner or later, a disaster would befall one or more of the teams.

  Disaster did indeed strike Adventure Consultants in 1993, but it didn’t happen on a guided climb. On October 6, six months after his fortieth birthday, Gary Ball died of pulmonary edema at 6,500 meters (21,325 feet) on the Northeast Ridge of Dhaulagiri—the eighth-highest peak in the world. He was there with Rob Hall on a private expedition sandwiched into their busy schedule. It was the sixteenth major expedition the two had shared, and it wasn’t the first time that Ball had suffered from the onset of acute mountain sickness. A previous epic on K2 had necessitated a fast withdrawal from the highest camp of the “savage peak” after breathing difficulties set in.

  He died in Rob Hall’s arms. Two days later, a devastated Hall lowered the body of his climbing partner and friend into a crevasse on the slopes of Dhaulagiri, using their best-loved climbing rope for the task. He wrote the following words in a later obituary:

  In his guiding career, which spanned twenty years, he enjoyed an unbroken safety record of which he was rightfully proud. Arguably his greatest guiding achievement was taking clients to the summit of Mount Everest. He believed that the whole Everest scene had become far too elite and he gained enormous satisfaction in being able to make this goal attainable for climbers of more modest skill.

  Hall finished the obituary with this moving sentiment: “Some people come into your life and leave footprints across your heart—and they never go away.”

  Although the untimely death of Gary Ball affected Rob Hall deeply on a personal level, his determination to continue the commercial venture they had founded together never wavered. The 1994 brochure for Adventure Consultants was as full and as ambitious as ever, and 100 PERCENT SUCCESS ON EVEREST! was the headline on one of their advertisements in the mountaineering press.

  On May 9 that year Rob Hall and Ed Viesturs—a legendary American high-altitude climber—led a team of eleven expedition members to the summit; they broke several records in the process, becoming the first Everest expedition to get every member to the top and back down again in one piece. At the same time, Rob Hall became the first Westerner to have reached the summit four times.

  As Adventure Consultants’ own literature concluded: “This now brings the Adventure Consultants Everest summit tally during our last four expeditions to 39 climbers!”

  In 1995, however, the successful pattern of the first few years was finally broken. The Adventure Consultants expedition that year ground to a halt just a few hours from the summit. In conditions of deep snow, and with an exhausted team, Rob Hall decided to turn his expedition around. His decision was a wise one based on his intimate knowledge of the peak and the dangers of being on the summit too late; but it must have rankled nonetheless, particularly with that “100 percent success on Everest!” advertisement still fresh in the minds of his commercial rivals.

  Now, in the premonsoon season of 1996, Adventure Consult
ants was back again, and so was the British company Himalayan Kingdoms, based in Sheffield, the rival that had stolen much of Rob Hall’s thunder with its successful expedition of 1993. This time Himalayan Kingdoms would tackle Everest from the northern side—a much longer and more technically demanding route. Their choice of the northern side was made despite the fact that they had tried this route in 1994 and failed to get anyone to the summit.

  Adventure Consultants, sticking to what they knew, would once again tackle the “standard,” tried and tested, route from the south. Hall attacked the preparation with his customary thoroughness, as Caroline Mackenzie revealed. “When it came to the planning there was no complacency at all,” she told me. “Rob was constantly thinking around what could go wrong—even down to the tiniest of details.”

  Alongside them on the southern side was another commercial expedition, the Mountain Madness team, led by the flamboyant American climber Scott Fischer, who—at forty—was aiming to break into the potentially lucrative Everest market.

  Fischer had the type of physique and craggy good looks normally only found at Hollywood casting agencies. In many ways he was the all-around American hero, a top climbing athlete consumed with the desire to be the best—and to be recognized as such. Fischer had ambition oozing out of his fingertips right from the time he first began pushing himself on the rock faces of Wyoming at the age of fifteen.

  Fischer wore his blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Clean-shaven, with a jawline that might have been carved out of rock, he was a charismatic leader and raconteur—a larger-than-life character when compared to the bearded, more studious persona of Rob Hall.