39

SOLO

Between Camp One and Camp Two—20,950 feet

Mountain of Makalu, Province No. 1, Khumbu, Nepal

October 20, 2014

The helicopter bucked and roared in a fight to stabilize so close to the almost magnetic pull of the mountain. When its skids momentarily kissed the snow, Pertemba Chering’s hasty thumbs-up signaled Quinn to drop first his rucksack and then himself from his perch in the shuddering doorway.

Quinn postholed straight down into the twisting cloud of powder. Above, the H125, instantly lightened, jumped up and away before gracefully curving back down the long glacier to the embrace of thicker air in the valley far below.

Silence and emptiness took its place overhead. Quinn rose up like a snow creature to clear his mask with the back of his glove and pull the icy buff free of his mouth. He drew in a deep, preparatory breath. The extreme cold instantly gave him a brain-freeze. Riding it out, he shook himself down, gathered up his backpack, extended his ski poles, and orientated himself to the mountain above, to the thought that while he may have been dropped halfway up it, he still had a hell of a long way to go. He immediately set to the hard labor of breaking a trail to the Camp Two site farther up the wide white basin.

The going was not so fast and not so light. The snow was thigh deep, unconsolidated. The constant struggle to wade through it punched hard despite Quinn’s prior acclimatization from Shishapangma. His pack, although compact, was still heavy, everything he needed for the next days grinding on his hips and shoulders. The cold was intense. Despite it all, the Englishman knuckled down to the task, unable to deny an unexpected thrill at being alone on such a mountain with only himself to worry about, only his pace to set, only his goals to meet—the likes of Rasmussen, for once, thankfully elsewhere. The thought pushed aside the effort of constantly stumbling and falling in the deep soft snow and the lingering worry of how long the break in the weather might last to become an illogical regret that he wasn’t actually going for Makalu’s summit. This was his sort of challenge.

Steady.

A few tufts of old tent material and then the tip of a single pole from which blew a string of tattered prayer flags revealed the location of Camp Two. In what he judged must be the center of the area, Quinn scraped out a small platform, set up his single tent, then rested and rehydrated before determining to profit from the clear afternoon with an exploratory trip free of his heavy pack to the foot of the ice face that slipped down from the Makalu La, the high saddle in the northwest ridge, three thousand feet above. When he reached the bergschrund, Quinn was relieved to see that the gaping hole between the ice face and the snowfield below was crossable and that the wall above was mostly too steep for much snow accumulation. The pinned ropes from many previous attempts on the mountain still hung down.

Much of the fixed line was tattered and rotten but there was an almost new, blue rope that remained stitched to the side of the face. Henrietta’s notes from the night of the immolation had indicated that Lady Huang Hsu’s team fixed the line for their climb and would also have undoubtedly just left it in situ when they were done. Normally Quinn cursed teams that didn’t take their gear down after them but, that evening, hunkered back down at Camp Two, he gave the dead a pass. When darkness fell, he sent, as agreed, a simple text message on the satellite phone.

@2

The next morning the weather had closed in to hide the mountain above. To find his way, Quinn slowly followed what remained of his previous day’s tracks to the foot of the face. With a slow leap of faith, he made it over the bergschrund to find the Taiwanese blue line was still good and strongly fixed. He clipped in and, within the pale freezing haze, jugged blindly upward for what seemed like an eternity.

With every hard pull, the altitude and the cold increased but, well educated in the “science of suffering,” he just pushed onward and upward in that emotionless, automatic fashion that forward progress in those high places mandated. When the face leveled out into a heavily snow-laden shelf so deep that the blue rope couldn’t be pulled free, Quinn first thought he had broken the back of that day’s climb to reach the high saddle that led to the upper pyramid of the mountain.

However his altimeter soon told him another story. It was just one more false summit. The level shelf was actually about halfway up, and Quinn lost a lot of time finding his way across its snow covered plateau, wading and crawling through the huge buildup to finally regain the upper portion of the ice face and the remainder of that blue rope. When he eventually crested the ridge onto a wind-blasted arctic wasteland of rock and ice, Quinn was conscious that he was walking freely into Tibet even if there was no border, no spotlit strip of no-man’s land, no dogs and guns; the “death zone” of extreme altitude was guard enough.

Completely exhausted from the steep climbing, he stopped to begin a wretched night at the traditional Camp Three site, where his tiny tent was constantly lashed by a relentless north wind that funneled over the pass.

Back at the Lukla rescue center, in the warm electric light of the helicopter hangar, Pertemba Chering, working on the H125, momentarily looked at his phone when it bleeped.

@3

The next day there was just enough visibility for Quinn to take down his frozen chrysalis and continue. Pummeled by gusts and hunched against their flurries of icy snow that whipped like blown sand, he traversed the steep upper flank of the mountain to reach Camp Four, the mountain’s high camp at 25,600 feet. There, as quickly as possible, he set up his tent again, spent an hour kneading his fingers and toes back to life before making a lukewarm cup of black tea and studying Henrietta’s old photographs as best he could against the few glimpses of the mountain that appeared through the racing cloud.

Slowly he made out where that final great snow face curved up into sheer rock. He kept looking to identify the rising snow gully cutting left through that same rock wall to reach the snow crest of the northeast ridge. That would lead him first to a false summit—Huang’s mistake—then the true summit. That steep snow gully was the French Couloir, so named for the nationality of the climbers who first used it to avoid that treacherous north wall of rock and first make it to the top nearly sixty years earlier.

Putting himself into Anderson’s boots, Quinn drew an imaginary line from the approximate position of the true summit down that same wall of rock to where it intersected the couloir. That was the American’s ill-fated line—vertical and extremely technical, brutal in fact. At that altitude, only an elite climber would contemplate going such a way; after a few moves even fewer would have been able to actually continue. Quinn thought it likely that hiding the kapala would have been Anderson’s first objective, checking off the list before he focused on the remainder of such a difficult route to the summit.

He soon crawled into his sleeping bag, determined to start up the snow face at 2 a.m. so as to reach the couloir by sunrise. Huddled close to his small stove, preparing something more to eat and drink, it seemed that the constant drilling of the wind against the tent-fly was laughing at his plan. He ignored it and texted Pertemba.

@4^