Chapter Eight

The Ultimate Reality

T he drama was not as yet played out. The brave Sherpa, believed to be dead, had spent the night on the summit, searching for his lost friend. Shortly after dawn, he miraculously emerged from the storm and entered the camp. He looked like nothing so much as the Yeti, the ghost monster of the Himalayas. Somehow he’d managed to live through a violent night in the Death Zone.

The blizzard continued that day. Hoping against all odds, Doc Cal and his hearty Sherpa waited for others, but no one came down. Reluctantly, once the storm lifted, they retreated down to Advanced Base Camp, where Doc Cal accepted the inevitable. He’d paid his price for dedication, losing toes on his right foot to frostbite.

For some days the expedition, or what remained of it, waited. It had lost its heart in Derek and its soul in Reggie. When it became apparent that no other climbers could possibly reach the summit of Everest that season, all hope of recovering Derek’s body was given up. The expedition began its slow, mournful crawl away from the lofty Himalayas.

Tarja spent her days on the sat phone talking to her publicist and God only knows who else. At night, she eased her pain with the services of one of the climbers. Whatever sadness the new widow felt was gone long before she reached Kathmandu.

And so what had begun so auspiciously ended in tragedy. It was a tragedy recorded with the most modern technology. If ever there was a moment in time when we should know exactly what took place, this is it. Instead, we are as much in the dark as we are for so much of history. In this case, we remain uninformed because people refuse to talk.

You can only ask why they remain silent. What are they trying to hide? Why did so many so-called ‘friends’ abandon Derek in his hour of greatest need? What really happened on the shelf that day? Already rumors drift down from the high regions—stories that suggest something very sinister was afoot that tragic day.

“We know what happened,” my Sherpa source told me. “In time, everyone will know and understand. We lost some of our best up there. It is a lesson to every Sherpa. I think you Westerners learned nothing. You still think you own the world.”

What will happen next? It’s hard to imagine that one of the world’s richest men would leave his only son up there. With all that money and power, you’d think he’d want his son to have a proper burial. Perhaps he will. We’ll see.

And rumors swirl about, as they will, about what really happened, about what Scott and others did and did not do. We’ll see about that, too.

A fight for the Derek Sodoc fortune began. Michael Sodoc is refusing to give an inch. His wife reportedly despises Tarja. No surprise there. The Norwegian beauty is small fry compared to the senior Sodoc. If she hadn’t been his son’s wife, he’d swat her like a fly.

But even the all-powerful Michael Sodoc must be careful about public perceptions. Tarja knows that and is banking on it. “She’ll get a fortune,” a pal says. “She’s got one coming, legitimately, and Sodoc will pay up rather than have her write a tell-all book. She’s sitting pretty.”

This account may be as close to the truth as we’ll ever have—though a chapter or two may yet remain to be written. It has been, in its way, a morality tale. If we’ve learned nothing else, we now know that to be rich and famous and handsome guarantees nothing in life.

All mountains kill, and our greater lesson is that Everest just happens to be the biggest killer of all. On Everest, death is the ultimate reality.