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The Everest Decade: 1996
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Ed Viesturs on 1996: Turn Around, Guys!
America's preeminent high-altitude mountaineer dissects the decisions made during 1996—the deadliest season in Everest's history.
Adapted from No Shortcuts to the Top, by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts; to be published in October 2006 by Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
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URGENT CALL: Huddled together with the members of the IMAX team on May 11, one day after the storm hit, Viesturs (center) pleads with guide Rob Hall via radio to descend from high on the mountain. |
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Doug Hansen was a postal worker from Renton, Washington, whom Rob and I had guided the year before on Everest. We both had taken an immediate liking to him. So when Doug had needed to turn around at the South Summit in 1995, Rob's disappointment had been as keen as his client's. Doug had pushed himself so close to the limit that it was all I could do to get him down to the South Col, shouting at him with my laryngitic voice to keep him moving. But after that expedition, Rob had offered Doug a big discount on the client fee if he came back in '96 and had all but guaranteed him the summit on his second try.
We later pieced things together from broadcasts Rob had made to his Base Camp manager, Helen Wilton. On May 10 Rob had gone up the mountain near the tail end of his own Adventure Consultants team. He reached the summit himself well after 3 p.m., where he waited for Doug, who was once again giving it all he had and leaving no reserves of energy for the descent. As Doug came into sight, Rob descended to him, then helped him the last bit of the way to the top. But it was not until 4 p.m. that the exhausted Doug topped out. That was at least two hours beyond the turnaround time Rob had otherwise so firmly insisted on. His passion to get Doug to the top, sadly, may have clouded his usually impeccable judgment.
Rob had broadcast to Base Camp from the summit to report his and Doug's success. Then, only half an hour later, he had come on the radio again to say that the two were in trouble and needed oxygen. Mike Groom, an Adventure Consultants guide, overheard Rob's broadcast from lower on the ridge as he shepherded another fast-failing client down toward the South Col. Mike knew that there were two full oxygen bottles cached on the South Summit. But he was having transmission problems of his own, and it took a while before he could get through to Rob with that news.
Meanwhile Doug Hansen had collapsed at the top of the Hillary Step. Unable to lower his client down the 40-foot (12-meter) cliff, Rob stayed with him, apparently willing to risk an overnight bivouac well above 28,000 feet (8,534 meters)—a feat very few climbers have ever pulled off, even in good weather.
Guy Cotter, who had been our fellow guide on the South Col route the year before, was leading an expedition on nearby 23,494-foot (7,161-meter) Pumori. At Base Camp, overhearing Rob's increasingly sketchy broadcasts, Guy got on the radio himself, pleading with his old friend to leave Doug and get down to the South Summit, if only to retrieve the oxygen bottles so he could start breathing gas and gain the strength to aid his client. Rob radioed back that he could get down to the South Summit himself, but that Doug couldn't. Forty minutes later, he had not moved a step.
At this point, just before 6 p.m. on May 10, Guy urged Rob to perform a desperate triage: to leave Doug behind so he could save himself. Yet it was not advice Rob was willing to heed. At 2:45 a.m. Guy heard a few words of broken transmission over a background of howling wind. Guy suspected that Rob wasn't even trying to broadcast, but that his clip-on mike on the shoulder strap of his pack was getting bumped and keying on in interrupted bursts. What Guy heard was Rob yelling, something like "Keep moving! Keep going!" Evidently he was trying to push Doug down to the South Summit in the middle of the night, in an all-out storm, by sheer force of will.
Through the night of May 10 and the morning of the 11th, we at Camp II were unaware of these struggles—until, at five in the morning, we heard Rob's despairing radio call, beginning with the terrible pronouncement, "I'm all f---ed up."
By that morning, Rob had gotten down some 350 vertical feet (107 meters) to a spot just short of the South Summit. Somehow he'd survived the night, without even a bivouac sack for protection. But Doug was gone. We would never learn what those three words really meant. Did Doug die on the way down, from hypothermia and exhaustion? Had he broken through a cornice and plunged down the Kangshung Face? Or had he frozen to death bivouacking there beside Rob, only to be buried by snow?
Now Rob's voice over the radio was badly slurred. "I'm stuck here," he said. "My hands are f---ed. When is somebody coming up to help me?" Listening in the tent at Camp II, Veikka was in tears.
It was then that David Breashears exhorted me, "Ed, you get on the radio. You know Rob best. Talk to him. See if you can get him to move."
Continue Part I: 1996: Turn Around, Guys!: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 Next >>
Part II: 2006: The Mad Season >>
Everest Map: The 2006 Cast of Characters >>
Everest Main Page >>
Photograph by Robert Schauer
More on Ed Viesturs:
Podcast interview with Ed Viesturs: Download it now >>
Best of Adventure 2006: Ed Viesturs was named the magazine's first Adventurer of the Year >>
There+Back: Ed Viesturs became the first American to climb all the world's 8,000-meter (26,248-foot) peaks when he summited Annapurna >>
Q+A: 8,000-Meter Man: Contributing Editor Michael Shnayerson profiles Ed Viesturs >>
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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