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The Everest Decade: 2006
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Everest in 2006: The Mad Season
This past spring on Everest was the most crowded and unpredictable yet. Records were broken, climbers rose from the dead, and brutal indifference
met head-on with breathtaking heroism.
Text by David Roberts
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Eventually, however, Abramov recruited 11 Sherpas
As the time passed (four hours, eventually), Mazur and his three companions realized that they were almost certainly sacrificing their own summit chances to save Hall. Mazur and Jangbu Sherpa were guiding for Mazur's SummitClimb outfit; Andrew Brash and Myles Osborne, though experienced climbers, were paying clients. "We could maybe have left him," reflects Mazur, "knowing the Sherpas were coming up. I'd summited Everest before and so had Jangbu, but for Myles and Andrew, it would be their only chance.
"The last thing I wanted to do that day was find this guy. I didn't want to get involved in a rescue. My job is to get my partners up the mountain and back down safely."
A week after returning from Nepal, Osborne voiced his feelings about giving up the summit: "It was a perfect day and we were feeling really strong. There's no question we could have made it to the top. For the first day or two afterward, I was absolutely gutted with disappointment. But by the end of the second day, I got over it. I'd never make a different decision."
One might suppose that the ideal witness to Lincoln Hall's ordeal would be Hall himself. As of late June, however, he had stopped talking to the media, except for Today and its sister program, Dateline—apparently with the aim of snagging an exclusive book deal. Yet, according to Mazur, "Lincoln doesn't remember a single thing from 10 a.m. on May 25 [shortly after he had started down from the summit] until 10 a.m. on the 26th [or two and a half hours into the resuscitation effort launched by his rescuers] He doesn't remember our saving him."
Yet on Dateline in June, Hall told a slightly different story. Sometime in the middle of that nearly fatal night, he said, "I remember waking up with a start. . . . I don't know what time in the night—pitch-black, way up—I suddenly realized I'd blown it." Hall then was seized with a hallucination of people in the distance coming to his aid. But when he couldn't rouse them, he realized the rescuers he saw were a hallucination. The setback only stiffened his resolve. I've got to get back to my wife and boys, he told himself. "I was determined to stay alive."
In Kathmandu, with speculation mounting about Hall's impending press bonanza, Mazur said to his cronies, "I hope we didn't rescue a jerk." But then, says the guide, "Lincoln came over to our hotel. He was quiet and humble. He thanked us very sincerely for giving up the summit to save his life. It was good to find out that Lincoln's a nice guy, not a jerk."
Mazur's team asked Hall, whose hands were now heavily bandaged, how bad his frostbite was. "You know, it's pretty bad," Hall answered, "but I'm alive. Anything better than being dead is a bonus."
Besieged by criticism for reportedly advising his clients to leave the dying David Sharp and go on to the summit, Russell Brice deflected reporters for nearly a month before issuing an official statement in mid-June. It is a curious document.
The most surprising claim in Brice's rendering of events is that none of his team members, on their way up the mountain, radioed him about encountering Sharp in his bivouac hole: "At no stage during the ascent did I know that there was a man in trouble." It was only on the descent from the summit that the members of Brice's Himex expedition apprised him of Sharp's situation, he insists, and by then it was too late.
This timetable seemed directly to contradict the previous accounts of Himex team members (among them, the New Zealander Inglis), who were initially quoted as saying they had radioed Brice for advice on their way up the mountain in the wee hours of May 15. Yet, contacted later in New Zealand's Christchurch Hospital, dopey with morphine after his new amputations, Inglis said he couldn't remember for sure whether he had radioed his team at the North Col, or if he had done so, whether it was Brice he had talked to.
No matter what the truth is, there was considerable sympathy in the climbing community for Brice's dilemma. Says Osborne, "When you're paying as much as $45,000 [as a client], there better be a damned good reason for turning back. If Brice had turned his team around, they might well think, Hey, we paid all this money and never got to the summit."
When applied to Everest, Marx's aforementioned maxim may be too optimistic. History on the world's highest mountain, many believe, will repeat itself not twice, but many times. Says Osborne, "I can't see how this whole thing won't happen again. There'll always be people willing to pay money to be guided on Everest. And for Tibet and Nepal, it means a huge influx in the economy."
Mazur agrees: "There are more and more people going to Everest. And when people learn that David Sharp paid only $7,500 for his trip, that will attract a whole new horde of clients. More bad things are going to happen on Everest. But maybe some good things will also happen."
Continue reading Part II: 2006: The Mad Season: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next >>
Part I: Ed Viesturs: 1996: Turn Around, Guys! >>
Everest Map: The 2006 Cast of Characters >>
Everest Main Page >>
Adventure's September 2006 issue features 31 amazing adventure towns; chaos at the top of Mount Everest; an inside look at surfing California's Lost Coast; 11 fall weekend getaways near you; the best high-tech footwear, world class adventure travel; hiking the Alps, and more!
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