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Outside Magazine September 2003

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The Survivors (Cont.)

CONCLUSIVE PROOF OF DEATH is a basic human need. On May 25, 1996, 37-year-old Bruce Herrod, a British photographer on the first South African Everest expedition, reached the summit of Everest and was patched through via Base Camp to his girlfriend, Sue Thompson, in London. He was never heard from again, and his fate remained a mystery for a year. Then, in 1997, Sue received an e-mail from an expedition on Everest telling her that a team led by Russian climber Anatoli Boukreev—who himself would die on Annapurna that December, leaving behind his own grieving partner, American Linda Wylie—had found a body attached to the fixed ropes at the bottom of the Hillary Step. There was little doubt that it was Herrod; he'd been the last person to summit the mountain in 1996, and Boukreev's team was the first to go so high since then.

"My first reaction was, 'Oh, so you can come home now,' " says Sue. "Until you think, No, he's still just as dead as ever."

She contacted several expeditions at Everest Base Camp, asking them to look for personal effects on Herrod's body. Most important was his camera—she knew that he would have been recording his journey for as long as he was able. "You're aware it's the most horrible request to make: 'Can you look through his pack, and if his camera's there, can you bring it back?' But that became my obsession," she says.

An expedition led by American filmmaker and mountaineer David Breashears agreed to the task. When they reached Bruce's body, it was still clipped into the fixed ropes. He was hanging upside down, his arms dangling, his mouth open, and his skin black. "Like Captain Ahab," Breashears wrote in his memoir, High Exposure, "lashed to his white whale." Another American climber on the team, Pete Athans, secured Herrod's pack to the fixed lines, then cut the body free and watched it fall out of sight.

The roll of film inside the camera was marked, in Herrod's writing, "Eve of 24/5/96 South Col." There were only two exposed frames. They were identical: There was the memento-strewn marker on the summit of Everest, and Herrod, leaning over it, smiling jubilantly at the camera, the earth curving behind him. (The photo is reproduced on page 86.)

The image brought Sue some comfort, but the questions of how Bruce had died and whether he had suffered still haunted her. In the spring of 1999, she went to Everest and met Athans, who had just come down through the Khumbu Icefall. "To meet the guy who carried out the burial," she recalls, "who sent Bruce spinning thousands of feet into space, is the ultimate proof that his body has gone and he no longer exists. I knew that when I shook his hand, the hand that had cut the rope, this would be confronting the final truth as far as I was ever going to see it."

Sue suspects Athans was being kind when he assured her that, despite having hung near the summit for a year, Herrod was recognizable. He told her that he thought Herrod had suffered a very bad head wound, and that it was likely that he'd got his leg caught in old ropes and flipped back, knocking himself out. Athans also assured her that, unlike the remains of George Mallory, which had been discovered that spring, Herrod's body would not greet future climbers—the fall from the Hillary Step was long and hard. "I got this image of a body in pieces, and it's almost like that was the dissolution I needed," Sue says. "I realized it's easier to deal with when you don't think of the body as a dead entity anymore. It's somehow dissipated."

Imagining a body broken into a thousand pieces, watching a coffin being lowered into the earth, planting flowers around a cairn: These are ways of finding acceptance that someone is truly gone. But the questions that surround death in the mountains always linger. Herrod chose to go to the summit of Everest alone, late in the day, when his climbing partners were on their way down. Joe and Pete were fully aware that their strength was sapped by weeks on Everest, and that, should anything go wrong, their tiny team was too depleted to mount a rescue attempt. Nonetheless, the two men set out from advance base camp that May morning. What happened remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that they didn't say to each other—in good enough time—"This is crazy. We're way beyond our limits. Let's turn back. Let's return to the people who love us."

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