Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia.
Robert Macfarlane
LATE IN 2003, I received an invitation from Ben Webster, a Canadian Everest summiteer, to join a documentary team that would be climbing Mount Everest in the pre-monsoon season of 2004. Ben’s plan was for four climbers to comprehensively record an Everest expedition from its inception to the summit, in all its gory detail and—for the first time—in high definition. We would be filming ‘daily diaries’ to add behind-the-scenes substance to the film, and at every point during the expedition we’d capture as much drama as possible.
Financed by the Discovery Channel Canada, this was a big-budget affair with a full-time director-editor and cinematographer. We’d use professional video equipment and have full Sherpa support throughout the climb. The climbing team was made up of Ben, who was both the producer and expedition leader; Shaunna Burke, his Canadian girlfriend, who was an accomplished competition skier but a relatively inexperienced climber; the Mexican Hector Ponce de Leon, a two-time Everest summiteer and mountain guide, and me. We four would be both the subjects and the high-altitude cameramen, filming each other as we climbed.
The invitation came as a total surprise, as there were plenty of other highly experienced climbers whom Ben could have asked. I suspect Hector and I might have been invited not only because we had the right high-altitude experience and were a good chance to get the cameras to the summit, but also because we were unknown personalities from completely different corners of the world. I guess Ben was thinking that there might be some tension, which would have added drama to the documentary. But that’s just a hunch.
Although I’d already climbed Everest, and joining this trip would further delay the rest of my project, it seemed like a very good opportunity to get back to the mountain. My strongest desire was to climb all the 8000ers without oxygen, but my Everest ascent in 2000 had been with auxiliary oxygen, as I’d been guiding clients at the time. This expedition offered a really interesting experience, and one that I might be able to leverage in the future, as well as a chance to climb Everest without ‘gas’. Ben required that we use oxygen while doing the filming, both for safety and to assist us to carry the additional high-definition video equipment. If we succeeded in that task and if there was still time left in the climbing season, however, I could potentially climb the mountain again without oxygen and achieve my own goal as well as that of the expedition. I decided it was worth the risk of being a pawn in the ‘drama’ and accepted the invitation.
In February 2004, Ben brought us all to Canada for a bit of preliminary filming and training in the use of the equipment. He had put together a very professional expedition. The support crew—director and editor David McIlvride and cinematographer Frank Vilaca, who would climb as far as Camp 2—were terrific team members and highly accomplished in their fields. For two weeks we climbed, filmed, did some preliminary physical and cognitive testing and got to know each other. The highlight was an ascent of the 600-metre ice face known as the Pomme d’Or in Quebec, a classic Canadian ice climb. While Hector and I climbed the face, Ben and the camera crew hovered nearby in a helicopter, capturing the climb on film.
Two weeks after returning home, I boarded another flight, this time to Nepal. After filming in Kathmandu and meeting the rest of the team, including our doctor, Matt, communications guru Mike, and three young women from Brown University who were there to conduct cognitive tests assessing the impact of high altitude on our memories, we started the trek. Unlike most of my expeditions, where I’d been on a mission to get to the mountain quickly, we took several extra days along the way so we could capture the necessary footage. This made for a very relaxing and enjoyable journey, and provided numerous opportunities to wander off and explore side valleys and nearby mountains.
At the village of Tengboche, the spiritual capital of the Sherpas, Ben arranged for a private puja ceremony to be conducted for the expedition inside the renowned Tengboche Monastery. Originally constructed in 1916, it was rebuilt after an earthquake in 1934, and again after a devastating fire in 1989. Such is the spiritual importance of the monastery that its inauguration in 1993, following its latest reconstruction, was attended by the country’s prime minister, many ambassadors to Nepal and Sir Edmund Hillary.
For over an hour we sat cross-legged on colourful Tibetan rugs in the main prayer room, sipping sweet, milky tea, while nearly twenty lamas chanted prayers, blew horns and bashed cymbals to scare away evil demons and seek safe passage for us from the gods. The dimly lit room was stained dark by smoke from charcoal heaters and incense, while its walls were adorned with beautifully embroidered curtains of red, blue and gold. Barely-seen alcoves held ancient prayer books from which the monks recited their nonstop chants. At the front of the room, a huge sculpture of Buddha looked down upon the ceremony. I’ve always engaged fully in puja ceremonies at base camp, but to take part in a traditional ceremony in that monastery was very spiritual. I could literally feel the benevolence of the gods being bestowed upon us.
As it turned out, our expedition group didn’t have any conflicts and it was a great trip. In fact, about halfway through the expedition, Ben called a meeting and declared that there wasn’t sufficient drama happening in our own team. Several of the more ‘interesting’ members of other expeditions on the mountain were approached and asked if they were willing to be filmed. We soon found three volunteers.
The first was Annabelle Bond, a British socialite who, although so inexperienced that she’d crawl rather than walk over the ladders we used for crossing crevasses, had every intention of reaching the summit. Despite the occasional outbreak of tears, and her insistence on putting on a little makeup before I filmed her, even at 8000 metres, she was plucky and determined. To her credit, she overcame her fears and self-doubt to successfully reach the top. The second subject was Will Cross, an American who was trying to become the first diabetic to climb Everest. Despite making a strong attempt, he was unable to summit on this occasion, although he did successfully scale Everest during a later expedition. The final subject was an entirely dysfunctional joint Mexican-Canadian team, which I’m sure provided all the drama Ben was hoping for, and then some!
With the help of the Sherpa team, we established our camps on the mountain. As we moved up from camp to camp, we filmed ourselves, each other and our new subjects constantly. To get the best results possible, Frank would reshoot various sequences from multiple angles—at one point, he had us traversing the same serac in the Western Cwm between Camp 1 and Camp 2 for hours. I sure hoped that bit of footage would make it into the documentary and not end up on the cutting-room floor.
Throughout the climb I focused on keeping strong for the summit push. I knew that carrying the video equipment and capturing footage along the way would make it a much harder and slower climb. On several occasions, when the group decided to rest for a day at Camp 2, I dashed down the mountain in the evening, rested at Base Camp and then climbed back up to Camp 2 the following morning to join the team. Even with the effort of down-climbing and reascending the mountain, that one night’s rest at lower altitude was exponentially more beneficial to me than spending the day lying in a tent higher on the mountain.
On one rest day, though, I suffered a bout of a really virulent gastric bug that was going through all the expeditions. It hit me so hard that I was unable even to drink a sip of water without immediately reacting. I was flat on my back for five days. On the third day, our expedition doctor, Matt, came to check on me in my tent. He declared that I was becoming so dehydrated that he’d have to give me an intravenous drip, and told me he’d be back with it in a few minutes. That was the last I saw of him. As he went off to get my drip, he was struck by the same bug.
Another doctor put him on an intravenous drip, while I lay semi-comatose in my tent for another three days, waiting for the treatment that never arrived. I lost so much weight that I seriously doubted I’d have the strength to finish the climb, but in due course I overcame it naturally. After a couple of runs—pardon the pun—up the nearby trekking peak of Kala Pattar, I felt fit enough to rejoin the expedition.
A window of good weather opened up in May, and we prepared for a summit push. As we now had three extra subjects to follow, though, we no longer had sufficient cameras to film the four original team members. Ben decided that Hector and I would climb in the first summit team, each accompanied by a Sherpa who would assist with the filming, while the remaining cameras would be used to film Annabelle, Will and the Mexican-Canadian team. Shaunna and Ben would go for the summit during the second window of good weather—assuming a second one came.
At 10 p.m. on 15 May, I set out from Camp 4 for the top with Mingma Tsiri Sherpa. To protect our high-definition video cameras, which were about 30 centimetres long, from the extreme cold, we’d made little insulated covers into which we inserted small chemical heat packs. We shot some great footage on the way up, but by dawn the heat packs were failing and at times we had to shove the camera inside my down suit to coax the batteries and operating mechanism into life. Hector set out several hours later with his Sherpa, Lhakpa Gelu, who at the time held the speed record for climbing Everest. Hector would carry a light load and go as fast as possible, as he found climbing through the night to be too cold. I preferred the slow and steady approach, trying to walk the fine line between pushing myself hard enough and pushing too hard.
In a relatively straightforward climb, Mingma Tsiri Sherpa and I summitted Everest at 7 a.m. on 16 May, my second successful ascent of the ‘Big E’. On the summit, we filmed our radio call to Ben, who’d waited anxiously through the night for news. The relief in his voice was palpable. He had invested a huge amount of himself in the project, and numerous financial and media stakeholders were awaiting news of our success. I confess to feeling a little emotional myself. Despite its ever-increasing popularity, Everest remained an enormous physical and psychological challenge, and I felt truly blessed to have been able to visit that beautiful, spiritual peak a second time.
Hector and Lhakpa Gelu arrived about thirty minutes later, and we enjoyed a fabulously clear and still summit, with crystal-clear views to the horizon in every direction. It was a far cry from the storm-battered summit I’d been on four years earlier. We were so high above the brown Tibetan plains to the north and Nepal’s green forests to the south that the curvature of the earth was quite distinct. I found it almost overwhelmingly enriching to soak up the energy of that very special place. I’m not one to jump and shout with joy, but the inner glow I felt was certainly burning brightly.
After staying on top for nearly two hours, filming and photographing, it was time to descend. Our bottles of oxygen were running low. I’d changed to my second bottle some hours before, and had cached my third bottle at the South Summit, ready for use as we descended. With about an hour’s oxygen left in my second bottle, I had ample time to get down to my third, and then six or more hours’ worth of oxygen to enable my safe descent. More than enough.
Enter the human element.
*
We quickly backtracked to the Hillary Step, but as I moved away from the bottom of that cliff I came across a British climber, Ted Atkins, whom I’d seen on the summit earlier. He was now slumped against the rock face. When I asked if he was okay, he rambled on without really answering my question, so I checked his oxygen supply. It was empty.
To run out of oxygen at extreme altitude is a disaster. In fact, it’s worse than not using auxiliary oxygen in the first place, because the body has become used to the enriched air supply. When the supplementary oxygen is cut off, the result can be severe hypoxia, leading to clumsiness—not recommended near the summit of the world’s highest mountain—as well as altitude-induced cerebral oedema, which can cause collapse and death, if you haven’t already fallen off the mountain. I’d seen first-hand the results when Lobsang Tshering had run out of oxygen during my 1993 Everest expedition and had shortly afterwards fallen to his death.
I told Ted to keep climbing down to the South Summit, which was only about 80 metres away. He could use my third bottle of oxygen when he got there. I would go ahead to find it for him, but I needed him to keep down-climbing to save time. He understood and slowly started moving.
I took off quickly but had only descended another 40 metres when I came across Luis, a climber from the Mexican-Canadian team we were filming. He’d collapsed onto the snow and was barely able to talk. His mittens and other equipment were scattered on the steep slope below him. Luis, too, had run out of oxygen and clearly had already fallen victim to cerebral oedema. Without supplementary oxygen, he would quickly die. He needed my third oxygen bottle even more than Ted.
Lhakpa Gelu went to the South Summit and collected my oxygen bottle while I put Luis’ mittens onto his hands and shook him back to consciousness. I met Lhakpa halfway, took the bottle back to Luis and exchanged my full bottle with his empty one. It was incredible how quickly he recovered when I turned on a full flow of oxygen. Within a few minutes he was conscious, sitting up and talking to me. By the time I’d collected his camera and reattached him to the rope, he was able to stand.
While the extra oxygen enabled him to walk, he was still unsteady on his feet and very likely to fall, so I tied a ‘short rope’ between us, which would allow me to hold him if he slipped. It would have been a challenge to actually stop him from falling, though, as he was very solidly built and much heavier than me. And he was using my last bottle of oxygen—the very oxygen which might have afforded me the strength to hold him if he did fall. But there was little choice, so we climbed on.
I was in a dilemma. Ted still needed a bottle of oxygen, and I’d just given away my last bottle, putting me at risk of suffering exactly the same effects as Ted and Luis. I needed to find oxygen for both Ted and me if we were to get off the hill alive.
I shouted at Ted to keep moving, then traversed to the South Summit with Luis, in the hope of finding an abandoned bottle, or even a half-empty one that might have been left behind. No luck, so we kept descending. On the way, I radioed Ben at Camp 2 to have him ask the other teams if they had a hidden stash of oxygen somewhere on the mountain. This set off a quite a communication chain. Ben radioed our base camp and asked the Sherpas, who then went to the other expeditions and asked them to radio their own climbers to find out if they had spare oxygen somewhere up above Camp 4. The answers would have to be recommunicated back along the same chain to me.
There wasn’t a quick response from below, so I kept looking. The next most likely spot to find a bottle, I guessed, was around 250 metres lower, at The Balcony. Many climbers changed bottles there, I knew, rather than at the South Summit. I descended with Luis as quickly as I could but was briefly delayed when we came across a Greek climber who’d caught his foot in the rope on a short rock cliff. He was hanging upside down, unable to free himself. I freed him from the tangle and kept on with Luis, but within another hundred metres we came across two more members of the Mexican-Canadian expedition who were also in trouble. Both were trying to summit without oxygen and were suffering badly as a result.
The leader of that expedition, Andres Delgado, was in agony, battling to regain warmth in his hands and feet. He was moaning aloud from the pain, willing himself to continue despite the very serious risk of frostbite. More serious, though, was his teammate Tom, who was lying face-first in the snow, flailing, with one crampon hanging loosely from his boot. He was calling out that he’d lost his jumar, an essential piece of climbing equipment. When I rolled him over, I saw immediately that his jumar was in place and correctly attached to the rope. Tom was clearly also suffering from cerebral oedema. He needed oxygen immediately and, I suspected, a shot of dexamethasone to reduce the oedema’s pressure on his brain. I radioed base camp to confirm with our doctor, Matt, that this was appropriate, and he agreed.
Things were getting desperately serious. Both these guys needed help, as did Luis, who was still tied to me, and Ted, who was still way above us, near the South Summit. Thankfully, Hector and our two Sherpas arrived. Hector handed his third oxygen bottle to Andres, an act that undoubtedly saved Andres’ fingers and toes from the ravages of frostbite. Andres agreed to descend.
Tom was another story. He refused to allow me to give him the injection and literally fought me off. I was hanging on to the needle with one hand and the mountain with the other. I was already feeling quite groggy from lack of oxygen myself, and didn’t need this idiot to kill me before the altitude did. I tried to talk him into having the injection and taking some oxygen, but he refused. He actually told us that he was going to continue for the summit. At that late time in the afternoon, and in the state he was in, he’d have died within the hour.
Luckily, Andres, with the aid of Hector’s oxygen, was considerably more alert than he had been when I arrived, and he convinced Tom to at least take some oxygen. One of the Discovery Team’s Sherpas passed over his final bottle, receiving a wholly ungrateful response—‘I don’t need this! You people have ruined my expedition!’ I wondered whether that was the altitude or the character talking. With the aid of the oxygen, though, he too decided that the summit was no longer an option and agreed to descend.
The whole group, including Andres and Tom, then made its way down the slopes towards The Balcony, still a couple of hundred metres lower. Even with the aid of oxygen, Tom was very slow and shaky and had to be supervised by the Sherpas, lest he have some relapse en route to Camp 4. Luis and I continued our own descent more slowly than the others. I had to keep him on the short rope to safeguard him, and I was starting to suffer, having now run out of my own oxygen. Already I was feeling light-headed and unsteady on my feet.
I still had an obligation to Ted, but the hopeful suggestions that Ben had radioed through failed to materialise. Luis and I arrived at The Balcony without finding a single bottle along the way. Luckily, a Sherpa from another team, who was resting at The Balcony, still had a full bottle in his pack. I asked him for it, to give to Ted. Luis had improved significantly by that time, so I handed him over to the Sherpa, who escorted him down to Camp 4.
I’d been out of oxygen for a couple of hours by now, so I hunted around The Balcony for an extra bottle. I could feel the effects of hypoxia starting to grow—my vision was becoming blurry, it was an effort to think clearly, and I had to literally force myself to focus on what to do next. I hoped that my state wouldn’t deteriorate into cerebral oedema before I reached Ted with the oxygen he needed. Unfortunately, there weren’t any oxygen bottles to be found for me.
The idea of climbing back up to Ted seemed as hard as … well, as climbing Mount Everest. Again. I barely had the strength to continue descending. I waited at The Balcony as the last few climbers came down from the top, hoping Ted would be one of them, but he wasn’t. After half an hour I had no option but to start back up the ridge.
This was probably the most exhausting climb I had ever had to do. Every step was a mountain in itself, and I felt as though I was in a trance. I desperately wanted to lie down and sleep but knew that it would be fatal. In any case, Ted needed the full oxygen bottle I had in my backpack. From somewhere deep within my memory, I recalled the mantra sung by the lama who’d conducted the puja ceremony at base camp. It gave me something to focus on and actually eased the stress I was feeling a little. I continued up the mountain. The ridge and the valleys so far below swirled and moved in my vision, almost in time with the chant.
Finally, Ted came into view, slowly and unsteadily making his way down from the South Summit. He was the last person on the mountain. We must have been like two drunks staggering towards each other. When we linked up, he didn’t recognise me or remember that I’d gone to fetch oxygen for him. He could barely speak. I connected the bottle to his regulator and turned the valve to 4 litres per minute, double the normal flow rate, to ensure it acted quickly. As with the others, the effect was almost immediate and Ted suddenly had a new lease of life.
The descent to Camp 4 was dreamlike as the effects of altitude took control. I could lurch only a few steps before sinking into the snow to regain my breath and my balance. Ted became the fast one, while I tottered behind. I knew that the hypoxia was developing into cerebral oedema, just as it had for the others, but there was no one left to help me. Shaking my head to clear the fuzz allowed me to keep going for another few steps. It was like a strange race as I moved a couple of metres at a time, aiming for Camp 4’s lower altitude and renewed oxygen supply.
When Ted and I made it there, Hector was waiting for us. He tried to interview me for the documentary, but it was eight hours since I’d given up my oxygen and twenty since I’d set out for the top the night before. I was beyond exhaustion and couldn’t speak. With a fresh oxygen bottle, however, I too came back to life, warm and secure in the confines of our high-altitude nylon home.
Altitude is a funny business. For some reason, my body had held out without oxygen where others had failed. No matter what your experience, you never actually know how you will cope with extreme altitude. I’m glad that, on this day, I did.
Ted Atkins later drew upon his near-death experience on Everest, designing a new oxygen mask that he called the TopOut mask. More efficient than the older Russian masks that had been used for many years, Ted’s mask has since become the preferred choice in the Himalaya.
*
The next day, Hector and I descended from the mountain, our jobs complete. We stopped at Camp 3 to rest and found both Andres and Tom packing up their equipment. Andres was humble and grateful for our assistance the day before, but Tom was still hostile. He was also demanding that Andres source a Sherpa to carry his equipment down the mountain. Andres kept telling Tom that they didn’t have any Sherpas, so how then could he provide one?
This went on for half an hour or so, until Andres snapped. He picked up Tom’s duffle bag of equipment and threw it off the side of the mountain. It bounced down the steep Lhotse Face and dropped neatly into a crevasse, not to appear for another thousand years or so. He then turned and yelled at Tom: ‘Is there anything else you want a Sherpa to carry?’ Hector and I laughed so hard that we nearly followed Tom’s bag into the same crevasse.
A week or so later, a second window of good weather appeared, and Ben and Shaunna launched their own summit bid. By this time I’d recovered, so I asked Ben if I could attempt to climb to the summit without oxygen and he agreed. Despite the earlier epic I’d been through, I was feeling incredibly strong. I climbed direct to Camp 2 on the first day, and the next day continued straight to Camp 4. These were big jumps, each of around 1500 metres in altitude. In fact, I was feeling so strong that I overtook a couple of teams climbing from Camp 3 to Camp 4, and they were using oxygen!
A short distance before Camp 4, a strange feeling came over me. The hairs went up on the back of my neck and I experienced a real feeling of dread. I didn’t know what the problem was, but I knew that something was wrong. I’d had this feeling before. My inner voice was telling me to get out of there. Without hesitation, despite being just a day away from an oxygen-less summit of Everest, I turned around and descended. It seemed a crazy decision, even to me, because everybody else was continuing up, but the feeling was so strong that I couldn’t ignore it.
That night a storm blew in high on the mountain, although none had been forecast. Those who’d climbed to Camp 4 on the South Col that afternoon were trapped in their tents for several days while the blizzard raged. As the storm wore on, they used the vital supplies of oxygen, which they’d hoped to use during their summit push, but at least they were able to stay alive. Had I, with no oxygen, gone to Camp 4 at 8000 metres and then become trapped in that blizzard, I probably would not have survived. I’d always listened to my inner voice, but that experience was extremely powerful and reinforced for me the value of being open to my ‘sixth sense’. I’ve not ignored it since.
Neither Ben nor Shaunna was able to reach the summit that year, but the rescues in which we were involved provided all the action that the documentary needed. Our footage was eventually produced into a six-part mini-series of one hour each. Called Ultimate Survival: Everest, it was shown across North America and further afield numerous times, but it didn’t come to Australia, which was a pity, since it was a good one.
More importantly, those rescues demonstrated that the right ethic of helping those in trouble on the steep slopes of Everest was still alive among climbers and Sherpas. Too often, stories have been told of climbers turning their backs on those in trouble. In this case, climbers and Sherpas had come together to assist not just one but many others. I like to think that that is still the norm.
Summitting Everest for a second time was a good confidence booster after the disappointments I’d had in 2003. I’d been strong on the mountain, probably stronger than in 2000, and, importantly, I’d had a really fun time with the team. Over the last few years I’d been starting to feel more at home in the mountains than back in the ‘real world’, and this trip only strengthened that emotion. Expedition life, for all its remoteness and hardships, felt more normal to me than civilisation. I needed my expeditions, because they filled the dissatisfying void that the pettiness of regular society created in me. I was becoming addicted to the thrill, the fear and the intense clarity of life that the mountains provided.
I was happy, too, to have been able to continue to perform at extreme altitude after giving up my oxygen. Although I’d been affected to a degree by the sudden loss of oxygen saturation, it hadn’t knocked me down as quickly as the others. I knew that I’d been lucky, but the experience reinforced to me that I have a physiology that copes well with extreme altitude. This wasn’t something to be blasé about, but it boosted my confidence to continue my project and finish the fourteen 8000ers, particularly as I still had some of the toughest peaks ahead of me.
My only disappointment from the expedition was that I hadn’t realised my dream of climbing Everest without gas. That would remain a thorn in my side.
In 2006 Andres Delgado disappeared on Mount Changabang in India. Hector, hoping once again to rescue his old friend, flew to India to search for him, but no trace was ever found.