The Call of Everest Read online

  ASKING WHY

  We spend hours cutting out an icy ledge in the sky. Camp I and Camp III are the only camps the Sherpas don’t build for us. From our perch 23,000 feet above sea level, we peer down into the blinding whiteness of the Western Cwm. We spy the miniature tents of Camp II in the moraine, then out farther the crevasses around Camp I, and still farther to Base Camp, obscured by roiling clouds that resemble a slow-motion avalanche. The horizon, fading with great distance as in a watercolor painting, is a series of jagged ridgelines. We can see so far we can almost see into ourselves. A view you only get by getting up here.

  After two months on Mount Everest, we are friends. We know each other’s battles and betrayals—some of them anyway—and we’ve got each other’s backs: When Hilaree sprained her ankle, when Sam lost heart, when I was too sick to sit up. This is what happens when you sleep beside each other in tiny tents on a long expedition. It’s what is supposed to happen. You start out as individuals and transform each other into a team.

  Camp III, halfway up the Lhotse Face, is like a skyscraper with no walls. No one else is on our floor, we have our own slice of solitude, although there are tents and climbers below us and above us.

  Despite holing out directly beneath a serac that could collapse and crush us at any moment, this aerie is magical. There is not a breath of wind, which inexplicably has been the case every time we’ve been up here. The evening sun has turned the glacier into a wide, brilliant passageway, the flanks of Everest into the shimmering walls of a castle. The view is to die for, and many have.

  “You know, at home, I ask myself why,” says Hilaree, sitting on her haunches on the brink of emptiness, sipping coffee, her crampon points sunk into the snow. “Why climb mountains? Why leave my kids and my husband? Take all the risks …” An athlete on a dozen expeditions, Hilaree pauses, then sweeps an arm before her. “Well, this is why.”

  Kris, camera squeezed to his eye as usual, is scrambling back and forth on our slippery ledge.

  “Right now, right here,” he exclaims, “this is as good as it gets.” With legs like an Olympic skier, he has survived six 8,000-meter ordeals.

  Skinny Sam steps too close to the edge, and Emily, sitting cross-legged in the tent, shoving her blond hair under a wool cap, shouts at him. “Sam!” These two are the young guns, and neither has climbed above 13,000 feet before this expedition.

  The landscape is glowing. We all are transfixed by the sublime view. There is a brutal, black-and-white beauty to snow and stone and nothing more. It is symbolic of the consequential simplicity of climbing mountains. Make the right decision, you live; make the wrong decision, you die. Most other sports are mere games. Mountaineering is mortal. There is luck but little forgiveness. Everything is distilled down to the elemental. Hot drinks, cold fingers, burning light, stench of sweat, rumble of avalanches. There is nothing alive at this altitude—the color green doesn’t even exist—nothing alive but our determination to make it to the top.

  CAMP LIFE

  The moment the sun sinks, the temperature plunges, but we’re already in our tents inside our foot-deep sleeping bags. Two women and three men on the edge of the world. Sam and Emily and I are lying side by side. Sam is melting snow on the camp stove, Em is wagging her head to José González crooning through her earbuds, I’m writing. Next door, Kris and Hilaree are cutting chunks of cheese and prosciutto while singing along to the Raconteurs ripping from matchbox-size speakers. All the activities are interchangeable, as they have been whenever we have been at Camp III or Camp I. Soon I’ll be melting ice and Em will be opening our food packets and Sam listening to Glitch Mob, Kris calling Base Camp for a weather report and Hils collecting hunks of ice for the pot and humming Johnny Cash to herself.

  As darkness grips us like a cold fist, we are all hyperaware that in 24 hours—after 55 days of climbing—we will be going for the summit.

  We’ve marched up and down the mountain four times to get our bodies in condition, but anything could still happen. One of us could get sick, or slip and fall, or simply become too exhausted to carry on. A rope could pull loose or a serac topple. It could snow a foot or a ferocious wind could turn us around. This is Everest, after all.

  The only thing we can control is our minds. Climbing Everest takes so long, just keeping your head in the game is half the battle. We switch off our headlamps and burrow down into our bags. Tomorrow it’s finally showtime.

  VOICES

  MOTHERHOOD AS MOUNTAIN TRAINING

  It was pretty late in the game when I began telling friends and family that I was going to spend ten weeks of my spring climbing Mount Everest. I was met with many a blank stare and uncomprehending blinks. This reaction was not related to the fact that I wanted to climb Everest—anyone who knows me understood that attempting to climb to the highest point on Earth was inevitable for me. The expressions I was seeing had more to do with “how” versus “why.”

  The expedition only finalized for me in mid-January 2012. With an impending departure date of late March, how was I going to organize my life, let alone train for such a massive undertaking, in such a way that I could be away from home for ten weeks?

  LEAVING THE CHILDREN

  This expedition came together at a rather inconvenient time for me. I am the mother of two small boys: In the winter of 2011–12, they were two and four years old. While I had always had the Khumbu and Everest on my mind, I’d envisioned it to be a few more years down the road, when my children were in school. No such luck. Even my husband agreed that this opportunity to climb Everest was too good to pass up. The team was outstanding, the sponsorship very solid, and the partners—The North Face, National Geographic, and the Mayo Clinic—were all too intriguing.

  Together, my husband and I decided I should go. The next two months were absolute and utter chaos. Apart from the logistics of arranging child care and a support system for my husband while I was away, I needed to train. As a professional ski mountaineer I was not starting from scratch, but as a full-time mom I had a limited training window at best.

  TRIPLE CHALLENGE

  Everest was not my first 8,000-meter peak. I had already climbed and skied Cho Oyu and attempted Gasherbrum II in Pakistan. From these experiences, I knew training for me was a threefold endeavor: physical fitness, mental toughness, and weight management.

  In hindsight, the abominable snow conditions of the 2011–12 winter season actually worked in my favor. As a skier, if there is good skiing, that is the only activity I will do. But as a skier, I know that it gets me in shape for nothing other than skiing. The poor snow conditions allowed me to think outside the box when it came to getting in shape for Mount Everest. First and foremost, I needed a way to train while being with my two kids. At least three days a week I would take both boys skiing by myself. While my four-year-old could mostly manage on his own, my youngest was often between my legs or on a harness with me controlling his speed from behind. Both of these methods require serious snowplowing on my part, which is way more challenging than just skiing! The rest of the time, I would carry him.

  For me, training is not only about physical fitness but also mental fitness. Carrying an often screaming and kicking 30-pound two-year-old around the mountain for hours at a time was torturous but amazing training physically and, especially, mentally.

  As the winter shaped up a bit, I did go back to my normal standard of training: ski touring. This was pretty important to me as a tool for Everest because it was my intention to try to ski from the summit. With that in the back of my mind, I knew I needed to get on terrain that provided mental training in the form of exposure, and lots of it.

  THE TOLL ON THE BODY

  One of the noted physiological responses to extreme altitude is a relentless loss of weight and overall deterioration of muscle. Having spent a lot of time at high altitude, I am very aware of the delicate balance between proper acclimation and the deterioration of the physical body. Many high-altitude climbers, including myself, try to give their bodi
es a bit of a cushion by putting on extra pounds before attempting an 8,000-meter peak. I call it the expedition diet. Eat anything and everything in hopes of prolonging your body from eating its own fat reserves and muscle. In my case, this is not so easy. One side effect of having children is that it changed my body type to be much leaner. It is very difficult for me to put on weight, and my average weight is about five pounds less than it was pre-children. Therefore, eating was another important aspect of my preparation for Mount Everest.

  The most challenging thing I find with balancing being a mom and trying to stay fit for big expeditions is that I am not in the dangerous, exposed terrain often enough to be as comfortable as I would like. With that said, I spent a fair amount of the time I had without my kids trying to ski very steep lines in the backcountry. I also found friends to take me ice climbing just to reacquaint myself with exposure and hanging from ropes and crampons and ice axes. I find these types of training to be much more valuable to me than pure fitness.

  In the end I felt relatively ready for the expedition. The final challenge was switching mental gears from mom to mountain climber—perhaps the hardest task of all.

  —HILAREE O’NEILL Named by Outside magazine as one of the most adventurous women in sports, Hilaree O’Neill skis and climbs around the world as a North Face athlete.

  DODGING THE CROWD

  The next morning we awake to enthusiastic shouts. Our Sherpas have arrived from Camp II, ready to climb with us up to Camp IV. Donning our down suits and crawling out of the tent, we are stunned to see an endless line of climbers passing near our camp. What the hell? Where did all these people come from? We pull on our harnesses and step in line, clipping our ascenders onto the string of ropes that rise up the Lhotse Face.

  Below us I spot over a hundred climbers, trudging nose-to-butt like cattle. Above us struggle another hundred climbers, also in single file, dragging themselves up the ropes. We went to sleep on a mountain and woke up in a traffic jam!

  I am wedged between an unknown climber above me and an unknown climber below me. Bumper to bumper, we all must move at exactly the same speed, regardless of strength or ability. I am appalled. This is a parody of mountaineering.

  DANGEROUSLY LONG LINES of climbers make their way through the Yellow Band, above the Lhotse Face, in 2012.

  Of course, we knew that too many people were crowding the Everest route. That’s why we waited for the second window of good weather—hoping most climbers would go for the top the first chance they got. Alas, hundreds of other climbers had the same idea.

  Some problem has halted climbers on the line above me. The human highway stops. After ten minutes of standing still, I can take it no longer. I remove my ice ax, unclip from the lines, and swerve off on to open ice, roaring past one climber after the next. I overtake 10 climbers, 20 climbers. I am unroped, soloing, but the terrain is moderate. When I get to the end of the jam, I discover a Sherpa trying to help a fumbling climber who doesn’t know how to unclip his ascender or reattach it to the next rope. I move past them and clip back onto the lines.

  I soon reach the tail end of another clot of climbers. Once again I unclip and go around them. En route, I note that at least 30 people are hanging on a single ratty rope that is anchored by a single badly bent picket pounded into the ice. This is lunacy. If the picket popped, the rope or carabiner would instantly snap from the weight of three dozen falling climbers, and they would all cartwheel down the Lhotse Face to their deaths.

  Separated from my own team, I continue to hopscotch up the ropes, crossing the steep, bare rock of the Yellow Band and traversing behind the Geneva Spur. I reach Camp IV, at 25,900 feet, before lunch. At least a hundred tents are spread out across the desolate South Col like some wind-blasted refugee camp. Debris is everywhere: garbage, tattered nylon flapping on the skeletons of abandoned tents, piles of frozen human excrement.

  Our team’s Sherpas have erected a pair of tents, and I collapse inside one of them. I take off my oxygen mask, lie back, and close my eyes. Kagi brings me a bowl of hot noodles. Panuru ducks his head into the tent and tells me to put my oxygen mask back on. One by one my teammates arrive, first Hilaree with Kris, both of whom crash inside the other tent. Emily shows up, then Conrad, lastly Sam. Conrad, the old lion, ascended all the way from Camp II to Camp IV without oxygen. He looks shattered, his face drawn and grizzled.

  “I’m cooked,” he croaks. “I can’t go for the summit.”

  In a few hours we will set out, along with at least 200 others, and we know already it will be a mess. Above 26,000 feet, in the death zone, the safety margin is as thin as skin and rescue almost impossible. Our biggest fear is not for ourselves, but for all the climbers around us, too many of whom don’t have the mountaineering experience or technical skills to be so high.

  THE PATH LESS TRAVELED

  In 1963, Whittaker and Gombu had been utterly alone up high on the mountain; today this would be unimaginable. Relying heavily on Sherpa support and bottles upon bottles of supplemental oxygen, more than 300 people a year summit Everest, a total of almost 4,000 since 1963. (When all the numbers are compiled, more than 400 people will summit in the spring of 2012.) Sans oxygen—the blood doping of mountaineering—and Sherpas, Everest would still be the exclusive domain of the world’s best high-altitude mountaineers. Like colorful Simone Moro, who, after forsaking the West Ridge and switching to the South Col, couldn’t take the crowds and turned around. “If I want to stand in line, I can go to the grocery store,” he would tell me later.

  In contrast to the annual trail of bodies up Everest, the most respected ascents in modern alpinism are undertaken by a small, undeterrable, unsupported team that pushes the limits of skill and stamina. They lead all the pitches themselves, make all the decisions, take all the risks, and carry all their own accoutrements. “Everesting” is in many ways the antithesis of the best 21st-century mountaineering: Sherpas put up all the ropes, Sherpas put in all the camps, Sherpas carry all the loads, Sherpas do all the cooking, and Sherpas escort the climbers to the top. The Sherpas want the work and are well paid for it, but outsourcing so many of the hazards and so much of the heavy lifting has turned climbing Everest into a form of trophy hunting. It’s like shooting an elephant. The elephant isn’t going anywhere. It will just stand there. And with enough bush beaters and a big enough gun, you can kill it.

  Luckily for skilled mountaineers, all guided climbers use only two standard routes on Everest, either the South Col in Nepal or the North Col in Tibet. These two routes, from an experiential point of view, are ugly and abused—littered, shit ridden, crowded. They are superhighways. Fixed ropes, put in by the Sherpas, run up both routes all the way to the summit, which is precisely why they are guided. Clients would not be able to climb Everest without them.

  But don’t get the wrong idea. Everest is hardly crawling with climbers. There are a dozen other routes on the mountain! Most of them were put up in the 1980s, and all of them are difficult and seldom climbed. Everest is a massive, majestic, wondrous peak with two tiny ant lines on it. You can still climb Everest and not see a soul—you must merely have the courage, capability, and experience to tackle a tough route.

  SUMMITING

  At Camp IV, we rest in our tents until 9 p.m.: Then it’s time. A frigid wind is roaring as we strap on our oxygen masks, and every patch of exposed flesh will be frostbitten. In our bulky down suits, goggles, respirators, and huge gloves, we resemble astronauts more than mountaineers.

  As we set off in the swirling darkness, I look up at a Christmas tree of twinkling lights, climbers’ headlamps rising straight up into the black sky. Reaching the fixed lines, we again find ourselves behind dozens of dangerously slow-moving clients.

  Only an hour above Camp IV, we pass our first body. The dead person is lying on his side as if napping in the snow, his head covered by the hood of his parka. Ten minutes later we pass another body, her torso and head wrapped in a Canadian flag. Twenty minutes later, another corpse, a Korean. Stil
l attached to the rope, he is sitting in the snow, frozen solid as stone, his face black, his eyes wide open.

  Four people died on the first summit push a week ago. How? Why? In interviews with Sherpas, I will discover that in every case, the cause of death was arrogance. All four were told by their Sherpas that they were moving too slowly, that even if they reached the summit they would not have the strength to get back down—and all four refused to turn around.

  The woman wrapped in the Canadian flag was said to have required nine bottles of oxygen (two or three is typical) before she collapsed. Tragically, pride goeth before the fall. Danuru told me that he has had clients in the past who, when told to turn around, said that they’d paid a lot of money for the trip and expected to reach the summit. When they finally collapsed, Danuru simply lassoed them and dragged them down through the snow. With the mountain so dry and rocky, this kind of rescue is now impossible. If you stop and sit, you freeze to death.

  The Korean, when his Sherpa pleaded for him to turn around before he died, had actually punched the guide in the face. Now, stepping over his icy corpse, his face frozen in a rigid grimace, I overcome the gruesomeness of the scene by reminding myself that the mountain did not kill these climbers—they killed themselves. They died of hubris.

  Panuru and I submit ourselves to the stop-and-go traffic for as long as we can stand it. Then Panuru taps me on the shoulder and motions for me to go around. Despite the fact that it is pitch-dark and we are on a knife-edge ridge of snow with 5,000-foot drops on either side, I gladly unclip and climb around a knot of ten climbers. Panuru follows, then passes me wordlessly, giving me the thumbs-up. From that point on, Panuru and I form a team. We use the ropes only when no one else is climbing directly above us. Otherwise, we solo around every bottleneck.