Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster by Krakauer Jon

Author:Krakauer, Jon [Krakauer, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780330470025
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2011-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Suffice it to say that [Everest] has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen, and that all the talk of an easy snow slope is a myth. . . .

My darling, this is a thrilling business altogether, I can’t tell you how it possesses me, and what a prospect it is. And the beauty of it all!

George Leigh Mallory,

in a letter to his wife,

June 28, 1921

Above the South Col, up in the Death Zone, survival is to no small degree a race against the clock. Upon setting out from Camp Four on May 10, each client carried two 6.6-pound oxygen bottles and would pick up a third bottle on the South Summit from a cache to be stocked by Sherpas. At a conservative flow rate of two liters per minute, each bottle would last between five and six hours. By 4:00 or 5:00 P.M., everyone’s gas would be gone. Depending on each person’s acclimatization and physiological makeup, we would still be able to function above the South Col—but not well, and not for long. We would instantly become more vulnerable to HAPE, HACE, hypothermia, impaired judgment, and frostbite. The risk of dying would skyrocket.

Hall, who had climbed Everest four times previously, understood as well as anybody the need to get up and down quickly. Recognizing that the basic climbing skills of some of his clients were highly suspect, Hall intended to rely on fixed lines to safeguard and expedite both our group and Fischer’s group over the most difficult ground. The fact that no expedition had been to the top yet this year concerned him, therefore, because it meant that ropes had not been installed over much of this terrain.

Göran Kropp, the Swedish soloist, had ascended to within 350 vertical feet of top on May 3, but he hadn’t bothered to put in any ropes at all. The Montenegrins, who’d got even higher, had installed some fixed line, but in their inexperience they’d used all they had in the first 1,400 feet above the South Col, wasting it on relatively gentle slopes where it wasn’t really needed. Thus on the morning of our summit bid, the only ropes strung along the precipitous serrations of the upper Southeast Ridge were a few ancient, tattered remnants from past expeditions that emerged sporadically from the ice.

Anticipating this possibility, before leaving Base Camp Hall and Fischer convened a meeting of guides from both teams, during which they agreed that each expedition would dispatch two Sherpas—including the climbing sirdars, Ang Dorje and Lopsang—from Camp Four ninety minutes ahead of the main groups. This would give the Sherpas time to install fixed lines on the most exposed sections of the upper mountain before the clients arrived. “Rob made it very clear how important it was to do this,” recalls Beidleman. “He wanted to avoid a time-consuming bottleneck at all costs.”

For some unknown reason, however, no Sherpas left the South Col ahead of us on the night of May 9. Perhaps the violent gale, which didn’t stop blowing until 7:30 P.

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