Split Decisions (Cont.) | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Split Decisions (Cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine April 2002

Page:

The Hard Way
Split Decisions (Cont.)

I WAS ON THE 1986 U.S. North Face Everest Expedition. There were 11 of us, and I was the youngest. Most of us had high-altitude Himalayan experience. The Great Couloir route on the North Face of Everest, a merciless mile-and-a-half-high wall of blue ice and rotten rock, had been climbed only once, two years before, by an Australian team.

We paid for the expedition out of our pockets—$6,000 apiece, a whopping sum for dirtbag climbers. We brought our worn-out 11-millimeter ropes to use as fixed line. Mail—handwritten letters on thin blue aerograms—was sent and received via yak. We were on the mountain for 75 days. We all came home. We came home with all our fingers and toes. And we all came home friends. But we didn't summit.

And this remained stuck in my craw for 15 years—until I was driving around in the rain in New Zealand. Which is perhaps no surprise. New Zealand and Everest are inseparably linked by the greatest triumph and the worst tragedy the mountain has ever witnessed. Sir Edmund Hillary is a Kiwi. So was climbing guide Rob Hall, one of the eight men and women who perished on Everest in May 1996.

Squinting through the rain-battered windshield, I was replaying for the thousandth time our attempt at the summit. We had managed to fix lines from 21,000 to almost 26,000 feet, an exhausting, time-consuming job that had to be led one pitch at a time, most of it up solid ice. We'd fallen behind schedule, and by mid-May the monsoon began creeping into the Himalayas. Avalanches were starting to sweep the North Face. It was now or never.

This is my memory of what happened all those years ago: Four of us made the attempt—Dana Coffield, Sandy Stewart, Carlos Buhler, and me. Our high camp was at 25,000 feet, 4,000 feet from the top. Our only chance was to forgo establishing a final camp, carry a minimum of gear and supplies, and just start soloing beyond the last fixed line. One two-man tent for all four—one of us carrying the poles, another the tent body. One stove—one of us carrying the stove itself, another the fuel. The plan: Climb from 21,000 to 25,000 the first day, sleep, summit the next day, pitch a one-night bivy at 27,000 on the descent, and then downclimb all the way to our 19,000-foot base camp the following day.

We set out in single file in the dark, jugging the lines up the face in the dim light of our headlamps. It was snowing hard, and we were soon lost to one another. Shove one ascender up the ice-coated rope, then the next, step up one foot, then the next. Do it again.

Spindrift avalanches began hitting us, plummeting from far above. Hearing one coming, we would brace ourselves—hunch our shoulders, flatten our bodies against the ice, clamp our mouths shut, and cling to our ascenders. When they hit, we would be blasted right off the steep ice, momentarily lifted out into mid-sky in a swirling, breathless maelstrom, then slammed back into the face as the gust of snow rushed on.

We had planned to regroup at a camp at 23,000 feet—a miserable shelf surrounded by snow walls graffitied with urine. Two tents clung to the edge. Carlos arrived first, and I was second. We ducked into a tent, squeezed into our sleeping bags fully clothed, and waited, conserving energy, knowing Dana and Sandy were right behind us.

They didn't arrive. An hour passed, then another. After three hours we started to get worried. Carlos tried to raise someone on the radio. Nothing.

Careful not to drain the batteries, Carlos began calling once an hour. It was after dark when we heard a scratchy, faint reply. It was Sandy.

"Where are you guys?" Carlos shouted.

The static was so fierce we could only make out snatches of what Sandy was saying.

"...glacier camp..."

"Are you OK?" Carlos yelled.

"..."

Carlos repeated the question.

"...yes, we are, but..."

More static and clicks. Then one complete utterance got through.

"We decided it was too dangerous," Sandy said. "We turned back."

I couldn't believe it. But the ramifications were clear: Without the crucial components of the tent and stove that Dana and Sandy were carrying, Carlos and I weren't equipped to continue. We couldn't go on.

For us, the expedition was over.

Page: