Inside the 1996 Everest Disaster - Ken Kamler

fora tv' the world is thinking where is ken nothing is come on up and tell us what you're gonna tell us Ken camera thanks Mike okay this morning I thought I would take you on a climb up Mount Everest and show you what it was like to be there when Everest had the worst disaster in human history there was a two-day storm that raged on and on and during that time I was the only doctor on the mountain it was it was awesome to see the power of the mountain but it was even more awesome to see one human being and his ability to withstand that that storm this Mount Everest is 29,035 feet high if you think about it that's the height at which some transatlantic Jets fly cruising altitude it's an extreme environment at the summit there's only 1/3 as much oxygen as there is at sea level the temperatures could be 40 degrees below zero with winds 20 miles an hour or more it's the kind of condition that you'd find on a summer day on Mars and yet that climbers are exposed out there for 16 to 20 hours and the conditions are so severe I remember on one of my own summit attempts I reached inside my down jacket for a drink from my water bottle only to find that the water bottle which was against my chest had frozen solid this is the route up ever since the South Col route it's starts of Basecamp mounts through four camps takes three months to build our camps and then get ready for the summit attempt so this is a view of Basecamp this is where we start with our supplies and run them up the mountain trip after trip kind of leapfrogging up the mountain Here I am setting up my medical base camp for yak loads of supplies were dumped in the tent and it was my job to organize them into a medical unit and this was our expedition there were three main expeditions on the mountain it was one from Scotch fissures American team one with Rob holes New Zealand team and our team which was run by National Geographic but organized by the Explorers Club this is a view from base camp starting up the climb it's the first 2,000 feet of through what's called the Icefall and this is a picture taken in the ice but it's literally a frozen waterfall which actually moves very slowly when you're in this it's like being a rat in a maze you can't even see over the top and you climb 2,000 feet through the ice floe there's a picture taken near the top of the ice fall we always climb through at night because there's always a risk of these blocks of ice falling on you as it melts so during the night it's the coldest times least likely to to have any tumbling of ice blocks this picture of me crossing a crevasse on the way up through the Icefall with cross on aluminum ladders which are bolted together and I have a harness on with safety ropes which are tied independently on either side of the crevasse this is one of the crevasses we cross a lot of them were ten stories deep or even more one of my climbing friends says that the real reason we climb through with night is because we don't want to look down and see what we're climbing over ok this camp one the first flat spot where you can set up your tents after the first day of climbing and then we move on up the mountain this is a view taken looking back down the mountain we're climbing on fixed ropes here these are 250 foot pitches which we anchor into the ice so that if you fall you don't fall 5,000 feet you're for 250 feet that's quite enough ok this is a view looking up toward the summit of Everest you can see over here you really get an idea of the slope that you're climbing there's a relentless slope that we climb up and notice here that that's up toward the summit of Everest there's no snow everest is in black face and that's because it's so high it's in the jet stream and the winds are constantly scouring the face of Everest so the snow doesn't get a chance to accumulate what looks like a cloud behind the summit ridge is in fact just snow being blown off the top so we climb on up toward the summit up into the clouds and it's the thin air and stop at camp for the highest camp everyone's on oxygen in camp four and optional supplies are limited so you only have a few hours really to decide if the weather is good enough to go for the summit or not so here's a couple of climbers resting on oxygen here's a picture of Rob Hall he was a leader of the New Zealand team here he is on using his radio this actually was a radio that he used to call his wife later on in the story these are some climbers up at Camp four waiting to see if they can make it an attempt for the summit if the summit's up here this is actually too much of a snow plume this means too much wind and that would not be conditionally be able to go for the summit you'd have to back down if that stayed that way but for us up near the summit we waited a while and actually the weather cleared and you see the snow plume disappeared it looked quite calm it looked like a good chance to go for the summit so team started out at midnight we always started midnight on summit day to give us as much time as possible to make it up and back here are some climbers just starting up toward the summit summit ridge and here's a climber on the summit erases the last 1,500 feet of Everest is a longer sheer bridge that you see here this climb is moving up toward the summit but what happened that fateful season was that the storm unexpectedly picked up and here you see some really ferocious wind blowing up off the top of the summit climbers were already up on the southeast Ridge when this storm hit this is a picture of taken up near the on the southeast Ridge up near the summit this is me I've got completely covered over with with gear I've got a face mask on with a rebreather you can see in this climber he's got two oxygen tanks in his backpack with a hose leading up to his oxygen we carried two two titanium oxygen tanks and not much else maybe a chocolate bar and a pair of gloves and a water bottle this is a picture taken along the southeast Ridge this is the final approach toward the summit of Everest this is where these climbers were caught in the storm and if you notice the climbers are all unroped that's because this area is such a sheer drop-off that if you will rub to another climber you would likely just pull that climber off the mountain with you so you're sort of on your own if you're going to fall is no need to take somebody else with you if you fall to your left you fall 8,000 feet into the POW if it falls you're right you fall 12,000 feet into Tibet so it's probably better to fall is it svet because you live longer but either way you fall for the rest of your life so I don't know that really matters okay as those climbers were up there and that's in that storm up here in the other Ridge I was down here in camp 3 there's a tooth out 2,000 feet below them we were getting some radio information but the storm was bad enough that we were having a tough time just staying in our tents down 2,000 feet below where these guys were in a lot of trouble because of the exposure and the high winds and the cold the situation was really grave with radio contact we learned that Rob Hall was stuck up here break below the summit with another climber Doug Hansen Rob is a super climber but Doug was a weak climber and Rob was staying with Doug and Doug was unable to descend this part here which is called the Hillary step so they were stuck up in here another climb we heard about was Beck weathers Beck was unable to summit and had apparently collapsed in the snow some climbers had passed him and left him for dead and kept on descending besides those two climbers there was eight there were 18 other climbers whose whereabouts were unknown we had no idea going on with him we're getting always conflicting confusing reports in a lot of chaos two strongest are two strongest climbers Todd Burleson and Pete Athens determined to go up and try to effect a rescue I was struck by the fact that they started their conversation not with whether they should go but the first words were how quick can we get ready and the two of them got ready to go just before they left they gave a radio message out to rob Hall who was stuck high up on the mountain with the other climber I expected the message to be something like hold on Rob we're coming but in fact what they told Rob was that he should abandon Doug and save himself he said the situation was hopeless and there would be no point in two people dying he should just leave Doug and come on down himself and Rob got that message and his response was we're both listening okay Todd and Pete did make it up they went up the slope here up onto the ridge and did what they could to save anybody they could find there was scene of total chaos - a ripped tents people didn't know who was in the tent and who was not people were missing but with radio advice for me and just knowing a lot on their own they were able to to stabilize the situation get a lot of climbers back in shape and lead them or sort of send them back down the mountain toward me down here at Camp 3 but camp 3 is not a place where you can treat anybody it's a little notch cut into the ice slope on a 45 degree angle you can't even stand up straight in there the only medicines I had at that height was a plastic bag filled with some frozen syringes which I had to warm up under my arm and use the best I could the climbers came by me the ones who I thought needed medication I would give injections to sometimes even just putting the needle right through their clothes because it was just too difficult to to take any clothes off anybody give them some injections and send them back down the mountain as we were doing that robbing rob hall's condition just deteriorated more and more uh Pete and and Todd were unable to get anywhere near Rob he was way too high up on the mountain and he was still a radio contact and he was told that no rescue was going to happen he was just too high up and too exposed at that point Rob said that he liked to speak to his wife and he had a radio with him he was patched into his wife who was home in New Zealand seven months pregnant with their first child and he and his wife had a conversation as Rob lay in the snow there and they named their baby and then Rob signed off and that was the last he was ever heard from I was faced with treating a bunch of critically ill patients and these were my medical supplies is a fishing tackle box that I filled with my supplies and this was waiting just ahead at a lower camp there was no way I could treat people at camp three so I descended to camp two and the survivors were brought down to me at that camp where I could stage some kind of medical treatment so one of the climbers who arrived at at camp two into my medical tent it's very difficult to treat people in this kind of conditions temperatures are below zero the altitude is twenty-one thousand feet that's a height at which at which wounds won't heal and a height at which even sometimes get confused trying to tie your shoes but nevertheless I did what I could I had some help we tried to stabilize each of the climbers so you can see some really horrendous frostbite that I was taking care of more more frostbite patients were hypothermic being low and had low body temperature in frostbitten parts everywhere this climber had snow blindness and as I was stabilizing while he's trying to stabilize all these climbers we had had a previous report about Beck weathers he was left for dead up in the snow and we just assumed he was one of the unfortunate casualties but then lo and behold Baek stumbled into camp he just came in through the tent what's with some help and we laid him down on some sleeping bags and I prepared two for him out he was hypothermic and frostbitten could see this incredibly frostbitten hand he had hair his face and as I thought back out and as he warmed up he started telling me what had happened up there he said he had gotten lost up on the mountain in the whiteout lost all his energy collapsed in the snow and laid there he was aware that climbers were coming by him but he was totally powerless to even make a move he couldn't even signal that he was still alive so he laid the snow a day a night and another day and at the end of that time he said he didn't want to die and he started thinking about his family and how much he had to live for and that those thoughts propelled him and Bette told me that made him get up and actually stumble his way back into the camp when I heard that story it was I was absolutely stunned I couldn't imagine that any human being could withstand what he withstood and do that and if you think about it how does that really happen how does a thought an idea that you want to survive how does that get translated into actual physical motion how you get up based on the idea that you had a thought that you wanted to survive so to think about that you have to really think about what's going on inside the human brain it's a 2 and a half pound blob that generates a mere 25 watts of electricity that's hardly enough to even power a dim light bulb yet there's more that's the human brains is is the most complex machine in the universe and we really don't understand much about what's going on but to try to examine that mystery you have to take a look the human brain it's roughly in three parts the front part is where we think and have have a logical logical arguments conditions the middle part of the brain is is where we form images visual and auditory images it's where we have our emotions and our memories stored and the back part of the brain is like the maintenance centre this is we paste our heart in our lungs and control control motion so let's let's take a cut through the brain about like that and let's imagine that bet battling his for his life in the snow is hooked up to a SPECT scan this is a machine which gives you a dynamic blood flow and therefore the flow of energy within the brain can be very well traced this is a kind of a normal shot you can see there's blood and energy in the prefrontal cortex the thinking part the middle part where the emotions are and the images are is also lit up and the back part where is where people get there where the maintenance function is where they are able to pace heart and lungs and muscles that's in the back okay so now this is a normal shot this might be what we would have seen when Bette realized he was in danger all right the prefrontal cortex is lighting up much more vividly than you see you see the difference and the other parts here are quiet he's no longer thinking about these kind of images he's concentrating fully on staying alive but he's running out of energy it's too cold he's not really got enough to keep him going so this is what you see the brain is quieting down you see very little red where there's not much energy you see a lot of green and yellow Vic's brain is powering down he's dying but then as BEC related it he started thinking about his family and you see the mid portion of his brain here is lighting up again so he's going from that to that he's starting to get energy in the mid portion of his brain generated by emotion and by memory of his family and the energy is starting to move forward into this part of the cortex this is called the anterior cingulate it's a part of the cortex that a lot of neuroscientists believe is the seat of will they believe this is where willpower comes from so Beth is charging up that part of his brain by using emotional energy you can see it's getting more intense the more he thinks about his family the more thinks about what he has to go back to the more intense that area gets until finally generates enough energy to power his cortex is thinking part of his brain up in here so he's going from that to that and then that energy sparks his the rest of his cortex and what little energy he has it becomes distributed through his through his cortex he's able to think again and if you look back down here you see he's also charged up this posterior part of it the back part of his brain where he's got where he's got his maintenance Center he's able to pace his heart in lungs now this is what was before and this is what it is now it's brighter he's got better control over his heart and lungs better control of his muscle function Beck was able to get up turn around and stagger his way back into the tent where we found him after hearing that story about how Beck could bring about his own salvation I felt like what I was doing for him was pretty trivial actually but I took care of him that night as best I could with the medications I had in this freezing tent and in the morning we were able to get a helicopter rescue we never thought would be able to do that because the helicopter ceiling was 17,000 feet and we were 21,000 feet but this pilot risked his life to come in higher than the helicopter ceiling to try to affect the rescue as he came in he skidded up and down over the over the ice because he was depending on on ground wash he was depending on the rotors pushing down air and then have the air bouncing back up so have a double effect but each time he came over a crevasse he lost that effect because the air would just go right down so he was bumping up and down skidding across the ice and then one of the climbers got there literally brilliant idea to open a bottle of kool-aid and Mark a big X on the ice so that the pilot with nowhere to land and in fact he did come in landed safely and we loaded back into the helicopter and he took off with the pilot and what was the highest helicopter rescue in history well they were Beck was back in Katmandu in the capital before we even got back to base camp and at base camp we were all stunned by what had happened and we were we gathered together for a memorial service at one of the at one of the camp's at base camp the Sherpas lit a fire of juniper because they blew the Juniper smokeless holy and the climbers one by one stood up on the high rocks and said what they had to say about the climbers that they'd lost a lot of them turned toward the mountain spoke directly to some of the climbers who had died there there was Scott Fischer he he was leading the American expedition we always thought Scott with Scott he'd be okay but he mysteriously died up there Rob Hall most experienced Mountaineer in the world to my mind my friend for 10 years and he died because he refused to abandon a climber much weaker than him and I would have expected no less from Rob and and this was Doug Hansen the climber who died with Rob Andy Harris got lost in the storm and stepped off a cliff and Yasuko Namba she was she had summited was on her way down and collapsed in the snow another climber found her and she grabbed onto his back and he started to drag her to safety but then she fell off and the climber said he didn't have the strength to hold her anymore 12 climbers died on Everest that year the Sherpas believed that these Tibetan prayer flags if you string them up a base camp and then write prayers on them the wind will carry it up to the gods but that year at least for those 12 climbers Everest wasn't listening thank you

Channel: FORA.tv

Views: 3,529,265

Keywords: mount, everest, k2, mountain, climbers, climbing, outdoor, wilderness, survival, into, thin, air, john, jon, krakauer, winter, snow, ice, freezing, death, hypothermia, frostbite, adventure, travel, mountaineering, fora.tv, foratv, fora, tv

Id: Bgqc2m7aBzs

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 09 2009