Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

The jagged horizon was limned with a coronalike glow that flickered and pulsed before my eyes. I wondered if I had begun the downward spiral into the nightmarish territory of the mad. After a night at 26,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, I was even weaker and more exhausted than I had been the previous evening after coming down from the summit. Unless we somehow acquired some more gas or descended to a lower camp, I knew that my teammates and I would continue to deteriorate rapidly.

As I went from tent to tent I tried to locate some oxygen, but all the canisters I found were empty. The ongoing hypoxia, coupled with my profound fatigue, exacerbated the sense of chaos and despair. Thanks to the relentless din of nylon flapping in the wind, it was impossible to communicate from tent to tent. The batteries in our one remaining radio were nearly depleted. An atmosphere of terminal entropy pervaded the camp, heightened by the fact that our team—which for the preceding six weeks had been encouraged to rely thoroughly on our guides—was now suddenly and utterly without leadership: Rob and Andy were gone, and although Groom was present, the ordeal of the previous night had taken a terrible toll on him. Seriously frostbitten, lying insensate in his tent, at least for the time being he was unable even to speak.

The first body he came to turned out to be Namba, but Hutchison couldn’t discern who it was until he knelt in the gale and chipped a three-inch-thick carapace of ice from her face. Stunned, he discovered that she was still breathing. Both her gloves were gone, and her bare hands appeared to be frozen solid. Her eyes were dilated. The skin on her face was the color of white porcelain. “It was terrible,” Hutchison recalls. “I was overwhelmed. She was very near death. I didn’t know what to do.”

Beck’s head was also caked with a thick armor of frost. Balls of ice the size of grapes were matted to his hair and eyelids. After clearing the frozen detritus from Beck’s face, Hutchison discovered that the Texan was still alive, too: “Beck was mumbling something, I think, but I couldn’t tell what he was trying to say. His right glove was missing and he had terrible frostbite. I tried to get him to sit up but he couldn’t. He was as close to death as a person can be and still be breathing.”

Hutchison decided that Lhakpa was right—there was only one choice, however difficult: let nature take its inevitable course with Beck and Yasuko, and save the group’s resources for those who could actually be helped. It was a classic act of triage.

At that point, says Beidleman, “Klev and I just stared at each other in disbelief. It was like, ‘What’s going on here? What have we done to make this mountain so angry?’”

Breashears immediately suspended filming in order to direct all of his expedition’s resources toward the rescue effort. First, he relayed a message to me that some spare batteries were stashed in one of the IMAX tents on the Col; by midafternoon I’d found them, allowing Hall’s team to re-establish radio contact with the lower camps. Then Breashears offered his expedition’s supply of oxygen—fifty canisters that had been laboriously carried to 26,000 feet—to the ailing climbers and would-be rescuers on the Col. Even though this threatened to put his $5.5 million film project in jeopardy, he made the crucial gas available without hesitation.

The person’s bare right hand, naked to the frigid wind and grotesquely frostbitten, was outstretched in a kind of odd, frozen salute. Whoever it was reminded Athans of a mummy in a low-budget horror film. As the mummy lurched into camp, Burleson realized that it was none other than Beck Weathers, somehow risen from the dead.

Through the rest of the night and most of the following day, Beck lay out on the ice, exposed to the merciless wind, cataleptic and barely alive. He has no recollection of Boukreev coming for Pittman, Fox, and Madsen. Nor does he remember Hutchison finding him in the morning and chipping the ice from his face. He remained comatose for more than twelve hours. Then, late Saturday afternoon, for some unknowable reason a light went on in the reptilian core of Beck’s inanimate brain and he floated back to consciousness. “Initially I thought I was in a dream,” Weathers recalls. “When I first came to, I thought I was laying in bed. I didn’t feel cold or uncomfortable. I sort of rolled onto my side, got my eyes open, and there was my right hand staring me in the face. Then I saw how badly frozen it was, and that helped bring me around to reality. Finally I woke up enough to recognize that I was in deep shit and the cavalry wasn’t coming so I better do something about it myself.”

Having just seen Beck walk into camp after being given up for dead, however, Anatoli Boukreev was unwilling to write Fischer off. At 5:00 P.M., as the storm intensified, the Russian headed up alone to attempt to save him. “I find Scott at seven o’clock, maybe it is seven-thirty or eight,” says Boukreev. “By then it is dark. Storm is very strong. His oxygen mask is around face, but bottle is empty. He is not wearing mittens; hands completely bare. Down suit is unzipped, pulled off his shoulder, one arm is outside clothing. There is nothing I can do. Scott is dead.”

As I struggled groggily up from the depths of my troubled reverie like a drowning man rising to the ocean’s surface, it took me a minute to notice why Stuart was so worried: the wind had flattened half our shelter, which rocked violently with each successive gust. Several of the poles were badly bent, and my headlamp revealed that two of the main seams were in imminent danger of being ripped asunder. Flurries of fine snow particles filled the air inside the tent, blanketing everything with frost. The wind was blowing harder than anything I’d ever experienced anywhere, even on the Patagonian Ice Cap, a place reputed to be the windiest on the planet.

Bracing our backs and shoulders against the damaged poles, for the next three hours we leaned into the hurricane, despite our surpassing fatigue, holding up the battered nylon dome as if our lives depended on it. I kept imagining Rob up on the South Summit at 28,700 feet, his oxygen gone, exposed to the full savagery of this storm with no shelter whatsoever—but it was so disturbing that I tried not to think about it.

I was shocked to discover that Beck was still alive. He was lying on his back across the floor of the collapsed shelter, shivering convulsively. His face was hideously swollen; splotches of deep, ink-black frostbite covered his nose and cheeks. The storm had blown both sleeping bags from his body, leaving him exposed to the subzero wind, and with his frozen hands he’d been powerless to pull the bags back over himself or zip the tent closed.

Devout Buddhists believe in sonam—an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.

Given up for dead yet again, Beck had simply refused to succumb. Later I learned from Pete Athans that shortly after he had injected Beck with dexamethasone, the Texan experienced an astonishing recovery. “Around ten-thirty we got him dressed, put his harness on, and discovered that he was actually able to stand up and walk. We were all pretty amazed.”

After the rescue team dispersed, I sat in the snow for a long while by myself, staring at my boots, endeavoring to get a grip on what had happened over the preceding seventy-two hours. How could things have gone so haywire? How could Andy and Rob and Scott and Doug and Yasuko really be dead? But try as I might, no answers were forthcoming. The magnitude of this calamity was so far beyond anything I’d ever imagined that my brain simply shorted out and went dark. Abandoning my hope of comprehending what had transpired, I shouldered my backpack and headed down into the frozen witchery of the Icefall, nervous as a cat, for one last trip through the maze of decaying seracs.

Guy handed me a beer, Caroline gave me a hug, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the ice with my face in my hands and tears streaking my cheeks, weeping like I hadn’t wept since I was a small boy. Safe now, the crushing strain of the preceding days lifted from my shoulders, I cried for my lost companions, I cried because I was grateful to be alive, I cried because I felt terrible for having survived while others had died.

Breathing thick marine air that carried the scent of a minus tide, I marveled at the fecundity of the Seattle spring, appreciating its damp, mossy charms as never before.

The ordinary pleasures of life at home—eating breakfast with my wife, watching the sun go down over Puget Sound, being able to get up in the middle of the night and walk barefoot to a warm bathroom—generated flashes of joy that bordered on rapture. But such moments were tempered by the long penumbra cast by Everest, which seemed to recede little with the passage of time.

Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them. Until I visited the Himalaya, however, I’d never actually seen death at close range. Hell, before I went to Everest, I’d never even been to a funeral. Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept, an idea to ponder in the abstract. Sooner or later the divestiture of such a privileged innocence was inevitable, but when it finally happened the shock was magnified by the sheer superfluity of the carnage: all told, Everest killed twelve men and women in the spring of 1996, the worst single-season death toll since climbers first set foot on the peak seventy-five years ago.

My actions—or failure to act—played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris. And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach.

“Out on the Col that night, I used up everything I had trying to save myself and the people with me. By the time we made it back to the tents I had absolutely nothing left. I’d frostbitten one cornea and was practically blind. I was hypothermic, delirious, and shivering uncontrollably. It was terrible losing Yasuko, but I’ve made peace with myself over it, because I know in my heart that there was nothing more I could have done to save her. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. It was a bad storm. In the condition you were in at the time, what could you have possibly done for her?” Perhaps nothing, I concurred. But in contrast to Schoening, I’ll never be sure. And the enviable peace of which he speaks eludes me.

But nobody imagined that an expedition led by Rob Hall would be at the center of it. Hall ran the tightest, safest operation on the mountain, bar none. A compulsively methodical man, he had elaborate systems in place that were supposed to prevent such a catastrophe. So what happened? How can it be explained, not only to the loved ones left behind, but to a censorious public? Hubris probably had something to do with it.

Before this year, however, Hall had had uncommonly good luck with the weather, and it might have skewed his judgment.