Fischer team's new leader unravels a disaster

Neal Beidleman

[Editor's note: Neal Beidleman, who has taken over as leader of Scott Fischer's expedition following last weekend's disaster, in which eight climbers died, talked with us from base camp about those harrowing hours on the mountain when the entire team nearly perished.]

The team is going to be heading down to Pheriche very shortly, later this morning. They were going to go down yesterday (Wednesday) but we all got to talking and they decided to wait until today.

I'll stay another day and get things ready, close up our base camp and take care of everything that needs to be done, clean up camp and all that.

So we're heading down. But we don't consider this a retreat, an abandonment. We're all hurting and healing, and we're at 18,000 feet, so we need to move on down the mountain. Mentally, physically, we're pulling it together as a group.

On Tuesday we started that process with a memorial service at our stupa, a rock altar-type thing that most teams have in their base camp, with prayer flags. Anyway, everyone came that knew Scott (Fischer) and Rob (Hall), and everyone stood up and related stories or read passages that meant something to them. We opened our base camp and drank a lot of beer and Starbucks and served up lots of food. Anatoli (Boukreev) got out his guitar and we sang songs.

Charlotte (Fox) left yesterday (Wednesday) on a helicopter. She left in tears because she didn't want to leave her team. But she was advised that, because of frostbite on her toes, that she avoid walking on them for a while. We'll all rejoin in Kathmandu.

[Editor's note: Anatoli Boukreev left Thursday morning on a speed ascent of Lhotse [27,930 feet], the peak adjacent to Everest. "Apparently he is feeling very, very sad, but physically he's feeling well," said Jane Bromet, who relayed the news from base camp. "He said nothing about the weather. He's pretty possessed at this point. He's climbing alone. Basically he's doing the same thing he did on Dhaulagiri [26,951 feet]. He's going to go up, to the top, and come on down the mountain. There's nobody on the mountain now. There's lots of things, tents and such, up on the mountain. Everyone is just hoping and praying everything goes well for him." French climber Chantal Mauduit reportedly became the first woman to summit Lhotse on Friday, May 10, the same day the storm swept the mountain causing leaving eight dead.]

But for the team as a whole, I feel it is very important that we start moving down the mountain. The team has to continue on and seeing the mountain is a constant reminder that is holding everyone back from pulling this together.

We've been talking about what happened, trying to sort through what happened, what we think happened--and what we just hallucinated or whatever up on the mountain--it becomes very surreal. So we've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct exactly what happened, kind of a timeline.

Everything is pretty clear up to the summit (on Friday, May 10).

(Rob Hall) started up one hour ahead of us, then we started intermingling a while on our way up and so we climbed together. We had some unfixed ropes in places--we had a problem with a sick Sherpa who was supposed to have gone up to do these sections--so I took some ropes from Lobsang and moved to the front of the group and worked as fast as possible to get it secured.

When we reached the top, our group was first. Rob's group had a couple of stronger climbers and they came up after I summited at 1:25 p.m. Waited at the top as people came up. I remember being very anxious to get back down, and when the last member of our team came up, we turned around and headed back.

The view from the summit was literally like being in an airplane, looking down 10,000, 12,000, or 14,000 feet to the clouds below, seeing all sorts of weather patterns below, swirling around. So it looks very different from above. Your scale of reference, of what you see, is so vast in a 360-degree way. You're seeing weather patterns happening over two countries, and none of it looks normal. Your perception up there, it's just really difficult to tell what's normal. You see so much, but it's not like seeing a (weather) system from below, over a familiar pattern coming from a familiar direction.

But I could see one set of clouds maybe as high as Everest a way off to one direction. Appreciating what that formation meant to us would require some speculation, something based on experience that I don't have watching weather from up there. The storm was visible below us. It was snowing, but we didn't know that. You're looking down and it was hard to tell what was going on through the clouds, if it's snowing or just cloud cover.

But what I was feeling, I was just feeling incredible nervous energy to get the hell down. So that's what we were concentrating on.

We passed Scott between Hillary Step and the summit, so it was not too far from the top. He said he was having trouble, a hard time. But he was Scott and I wasn't too worried about him. But I think his descent was a very, very difficult one. Conceivably he ran out of oxygen. I talked with Lobsang (his lead climbing Sherpa) about it and he said Scott was having a very difficult time, staggering around. He kept saying he was not doing well. After he collapsed, Lobsang stayed with him as long as he could and then went down to (Camp) IV to recover.

Scott was now about one hour above Camp IV, if conditions were good. But you have to remember the weather was extremely bad and he was in really bad condition.

Somewhere around dusk the wind started to really kick up. We had to shield our faces; you can only look one way to protect them, and everyone was shouting at the top of their lungs just to hear someone standing right next to you. It was turning into a difficult situation.

We had a logical plan, a process where we planned to walk along a specific part of the ridge, keeping to the highest ridge, moving between the Kangshung face and the Lhotse face. If you get too close to either one, it gets steeper and steeper and if you stray too far and fall, you're falling a couple of miles.

We continued working around, contouring around until the wind kicked up even more. There was a white-out and getting very dark, but we tried to stick to the contour until we lost our orientation. Everyone was getting panicky. We were getting lots of different ideas about where camp was. We had to keep together, but people were panicking and going off in different directions. Some of the team was getting hysterical and it was really a serious situation now.

I went to the top of a small rise. Either I sensed it or actually saw something; whatever it was, I knew I was at the edge of the earth, that it was just right there a few feet away. I went back and started to scream and yell at the others, trying to get them all back together, to stop them from walking around, to huddle together.

Once we got everyone to stop walking off, we huddled together and concentrated on not falling to sleep, keeping each other awake and together as best as we could. The night before, there was a storm at the South Col and at 10 or 11 it cleared. I was hoping it would clear the same, that if we held out it would pass. Hoped it was not the killer storm and that soon we'd have some clearing.

Then, around midnight, we could look up and see a small section of the stars, enough that we could find the big dipper. The starlight was enough that we were now able to see Lhotse and Everest. And we started to figure out our bearings.

We'd been out of oxygen for hours, shaking uncontrollably from hypothermia. We pieced together the most probable direction to camp and stood everyone up. Some were worse than others. Some were a terrible mess and would not stand. They were crawling, stumbling, and falling. For some, they were just totally fucked-up people.

There were three of us who were doing better, but we could not carry the others. We decided that the three would go ahead and find camp and get help.

We didn't know how much time we had. Maybe the storm would come back. So we took off and headed in the direction we thought was the most logical. And then we saw two headlamps ahead. It was Camp IV, they were people at camp, Anatoli and Sherpa.

We gave them the best direction we had. We were shaking uncontrollably and barely thinking and just collapsed in the tent. Anatoli was the first back to the tents after the summit. Scott told him to go back down to (Camp) IV and make some tea and get ready, to conserve his strength, in case people needed help later.

Once he had our general directions back to the others, for the next two or three hours, I guess, Anatoli went out two or three times, up to bring people back.

Anatoli found the bivouac about 400 meters from camp, and about 15 meters from the Kangshung face.

The first group was brought in at 1 to 1:30 (Saturday morning). The last were brought in probably between 4 and 4:30 (a.m.). He literally was dragging some of them back by their harnesses, just dragging them back to the tent.

In the morning, everyone was still totally out of it. We tried to get everyone organized. I was insistent about everyone getting down right away. We had to actually drag some people out of the tent. We found some oxygen in one of the tents from previous nights. And we headed down.

Once we got below the yellow band, things started to be more recognizable and things slowly started to stabilize a little.

The rescue process continued on the mountain. Lobsang was in the tent (at Camp IV) and was pretty wasted. He climbed without oxygen, which may not have been the best thing, but that was his decision, and was in the tent trying to recover.

After a few trips up, he eventually found Scott at about 7 o'clock (Saturday evening) and he was dead.

[Editor's note: At this point, it appears that Sherpas had already arrived and helped Makalu Gao, leader of the Taiwanese expedition, down to the Camp IV. Both men had been found unconscious and apparently roped together. The Sherpas were only able to revive Gao and were unable to bring both of the stricken climbers to camp.]

He (Gao) was with Scott. They were with Scott when they found them, but it's not clear what happened. But on the way down, Lobsang said he and Scott bivouacked and it was clear that Scott was dealing with something serious, maybe cerebral edema, maybe pulmonary edema. Lobsang said he was saying some crazy things, that 'I'm never going to make it out of here' and to 'get me a helicopter.' But Scott knew that a helicopter couldn't come in at that altitude, so something was wrong.

In the morning, Makalu was able to get down. It's still not clear if (Scott) was helping Makalu or why they were together.

At this time, we were still coming down from Camp IV. The clients were in a pretty bad way. Some pretty fucked-up people at this point.

At Camp III some people came out and helped us, gave us some tea, and we climbed into the tents to rest. It was very, very hot in the tents, but late in the afternoon it cooled down a little and we headed down. At this point, two Sherpas were helping Klev (Schoening) with his pack, about 500 feet from the Lhotse face. Rocks started screaming down the face. We yelled "rocks" but one of them hit a Sherpa right in the back of the head as he was standing right in front of Klev. He fell and was not breathing. We were not sure if he had a pulse. We revived him and were able to lower him down to some Sherpas below. He was taken down and I understand he's fine now.

It was one thing after another. It seemed like we couldn't escape the mountain, that the mountain had turned very angry. And this was another very emotional period as we tried to get out of there when all of this kept happening all around. It really felt like we'd never get out of there.

The next day we walked to base camp and have started to recover. But we keep talking about all of this. The whole thing is like some kind of military strike, or war, or a car bomb or something. You go in with these plans, but then it hits. You hear rumors and don't know what really is going on. You listen to people around you and what they are experiencing but you're never sure what really is going on. And everything keeps changing. It takes days, maybe weeks or months, to piece it all together.

Sure, we made little mistakes all along the way. But looking back, none of it went to cause the death of Scott Fischer.

Soon the team will be back together in Kathmandu. We'll have a chance then to raise a glass to Scott. Nobody wants to feel like they're running from any of this, that they left the expedition behind in retreat. We've got to keep all this together.