Jon Krakauer · Into Thin Air · 1996 Everest Disaster Presentation

[Music] um thanks very much for coming thanks to jeff you guys don't know that but jeff was actually one of my main inspirations when i became a freelance writer he was actually one of the first writers i knew who actually wrote for living and he's a a wonderful writer and without further delay if we could turn the lights out as as almost everyone knows um everest was first climbed 44 years ago just 44 years ago just a few days ago in 1953 by sir edmund hillary and tenzing norgay that was a year before i was born so i missed it but 10 years later an event i remember well in 1963 americans climbed everest for the first time and this was a huge event all across america and it was in the cover of life magazine and national geographic and i made a huge impact on me these americans climbed out three times on that expedition and one of the ascents was the first descent of the west ridge which at the time was one of the hardest climbs ever done in the history of mountaineering and is still considered one of the greatest scents of all time perhaps one of the five greatest descents of all time the two guys who made that climb were willie unsold who's a professor of theology from oregon state university in corvallis oregon which was my hometown and tom hornbein who was a doctor from st louis and when they got back hornblind wrote this book everest the west ridge uh it's one of the classics of mountaineering literature it's a much better book than my book and anyone who hasn't read it i would urge you to it's still in print by the mountaineers i bet the boulder bookstore has a copy or could get you a copy um this is a copy i bought probably the second copy i bought one as a teenager cost 3.95 back then books were cheaper it's all dog-eared in coffee sting because i've read it more than a dozen times made a huge impact on me um one of the reasons it had made such an impact was unsold the guy who made the first one of the guys who made the first incentive that climbed was a close friend of my father's and i grew up with his kids debbie and regan or year older and you're younger than me and my father taught me to climb when i was eight years old in the cascade range of oregon the first summit i ever reached was with my father and unsold on his son regan so that's where the seeds of my dream to climb everest began ever when i was nine years old and it was a you know as i say it it really lodged hard in my imagination now my father there's five kids in my family you can see my siblings this uh is my brother andrew affectionately knows porco is here tonight with his wife and daughter by the way and my father taught all of us to climb um but for some reason my siblings like it well enough but it never really got under their skin like it did mine and they went on to lead normal productive lives and uh i grew up to be a climber this is a picture taken when i was i think i was 20. this is 1974. [Music] and by this point um climbing was all i cared about i mean everything else was a distant second and in that same year that this picture was taken in 74 i went to alaska for the first time and this is what really pushed me over the edge as far as climbing went this is where i went this is the arage peaks in the high arctic it's in it's what's now gates of the arctic national park but then in 74 there was no national park hadn't been created yet it was just wilderness and uh i would you know i was amazed and dumbstruck to realize that alaska is full of beautiful on climb mountains like this these almost every mountain in this picture with the exception of that one had been had been hadn't been climbed and a friend bill bullard and i made the first descent of this mountain it's called officially known as 7190 climbers call it xanadu and the route begins there's a lower part of the face you can't see then across these ledges and climbs this skyline ridge now i've been climbing since i was eight 12 years when i did this but most of that climate had been on easy volcanoes in the west and i'd only been rock climbing for two years so i wasn't a good climber i could for those of you are climbers i could when i went to alaska i could only climb five eight five nine on a good day which goes to show you that you don't have to be a great climber to have cool adventures you just sort of have to have the desire and imagination this route is no harder than five 8 if that this but it's beautiful it hasn't it's never been this mountain's never been climbed since in those whatever 25 years 23 years so um this is the summit of that mountain to xanadu two in the morning um it's the arctic so in the summer the sun never sets it just circles the horizon and you get this amazing light it's like a narcotic and i remember this moment vividly it was as happy as i'd ever been in my life you know after this there was nothing with you know climbing was everything there was no going back i mean nothing could touch this so i came back to this to the lower 48 and i worked hard on my rock climbing um i decided to try to become as good as i could get at rock climbing in the mid 70s when i lived in boulder i lived here for four years from 76 until 80. i taught myself to ice climb this is on the designator in rigid designator in vail probably in 77 and this was those of you around then this is a real exciting time to be an ice climber because you know shannar ivan chinard the guy who owns patagonia now had just not that many years earlier revolutionized the sport by putting a curve in the ice axe and so everything was wide open people you know jeff lowe had just climbed broadway falls for the first time he and whis two years earlier so people were just learning how to do vertical and overhanging ice so it was exciting time to be ice climbing every chance i went to canada this is my friend pam brown who lives in boulder now on the suburb of i think pigeon spire in the bugaboos in british columbia better yet i went to alaska every summer that i could this is 75. um this is the alaska range mount mckinley denali the highest mountain the continent this is a ridge of denali it rises off the picture there this is mount huntington not dickey we're on the summit of a mountain this is my friend tom davies on the summit of mountain wheat christian mount cosmic debris we just made the first descent no one's heard of it or cares about it but it was a it was a good climb um in 76 i moved to boulder and um because of the climbing and uh i met a guy in the aristocrat restaurant and gave me a job as a carpet as a carpenter and i had there was no tables empty and he had a spot so i sat down and by the end of breakfast uh he talked me to spending 300 bucks on tools and he gave me a job and for the next eight years i was a carpenter it was a good job for a climber because you could i could build a house down in broomfield or later here in boulder and take about three months and then i could earn enough money to climb for four or five months and i'd build another house and uh you know i work for mike kintzing here in boulder i work for markel homes some of my guys i work with are still here um in 77 when i was living in boulder i was living in a construction trailer down on spruce street when i was building three street town houses um i got into my head to attempt this mountain this is the devil's thumb on the border between southeast alaska and british columbia this is the northwest face of the devil sun that's six thousand vertical feet that's twice the height of el cap in yosemite it had never been climbed it's still never been climbed it's been attempted a lot um mike biarzi here in boulder uh has attempted this he's sort of the this is his wall and he's tried it before and if it ever gets climbed he's gonna be the guy who tries it just last month in april it was attempted by alex lowe who it was probably the best climb in the world right now and and randy ratcliff was another superb climber from jackson new hampshire randy in addition to being a great climber is the guy who made those wood cuts in my book and into thin air i think they're amazing wood cuts and he's a remarkable artist but i didn't i decided not to attempt this space i was going to attempt this rib a considerably easier route and for reasons that were seem very clear at the time but are no longer clear i decided to do this alone so in the spring of 77 i drove my i drove my pontiac star chief uh 100 pontiac from boulder to seattle area puget sound i left it by the side of the road and i hitched north on this boat this is the ocean queen a 58-foot salmon stainer um just took turns at the wheel and they gave me a free ride three days later they dropped me off in petersburg alaska a little fishing village from salt water i skied up this glacier alone 30 miles up to the horizon that's this the keen ice cap um big ice sheet and there i was at the base of the thumb now the devil's thumb is it's bad weather in this part of alaska most of the time which means the walls plastered with ice which is what allows you to climb it but you have to pick your days to climb and i hadn't been there long before i got a clear day so i started to i went for it started to climb it's hard to tell what's going on in this picture but this is vertical ice right to the left of that rib i showed you i'm hanging off one axe and shooting down between my legs with a camera this is my left boot this is the rope hanging down into space that i carried to rappel down with i didn't belay i just third plastic because that was good ice it was soft and thick here and it was actually quite reasonable i felt good on this but five or six hundred feet higher the ice got thin and weird and funky and i got frightened turned into rhyme and i came down i tried it again a few days later in a slightly different place didn't even get as high i came down again but i really wanted to climb this peak because it's a beautiful mountain anyway you get to the top so i skied around to the other side the southeast face which is this side and on a nice afternoon again i waited for the weather and i climbed halfway up and i pitched my tent right here on this promontory which is a spectacular place to camp i had to stop there because uh because the ice it was afternoon and it was the sunny side of the mountain so it the ice was getting soft and coming down so i waited i spent the night there next morning i got up at dawn and the climbing was much easier on this side it's not as steep and these ice it's south facing so it freezes and thaws and the ice is really good here so i didn't even carry a rope this attempt i just third class left these uh connected these ice patches and uh very short order i didn't have a watch but it must have been a couple hours because it was easy i got to the summit and i knew my buddy specter in boulder would never believe that actually quantum the thumb if i didn't take this picture this is the actual summit it's a very it's a very narrow ridge and it's sort of scary the last little bit but um this is the summit now this by the way is mount burkett another beautiful mountain in the stakine hardly ever been climbed this is briquette needle which is the cover of climbing magazine this month um and it's a wonderful some friends of mine climbed that face just a couple years ago so after i took this picture i turned around and i down climbed because i never got back to my skis skied back to the ocean and uh after a day or two a boat came by and i flagged it down and i went home now in many ways this was the start of my writing career um these clients i never studied writing and i was a very bad student i barely graduated from college i very barely graduated from high school i actually didn't really graduate from high school and um but climbing magazine started asking me to write about them and um this was actually the first article i ever got paid for a client a magazine called mountain that's now defunct unfortunately it's kind of a cool magazine paid me 35 pounds about 70 bucks and i was off and running and i was i was so excited i mean i don't think i've ever been more excited on any check i've gotten since except since i got this now i had some real close scrapes on the thumb i mean i'd almost gotten killed a couple times three four times and i'd wait over the next few years i wake up in the middle of night in a cold sweat thinking about that i looked around at my friends who went to college with and they were you know they were becoming lawyers and doctors and having families and buying furniture and stuff and i was i was living in a construction trailer on spruce street you know so i decided it was time to get serious about life and i decided to quit climbing um in 1980 i took a job on the boat did give me a ride to alaska in 77 ocean clean on the back deck it was good money um i was going to make a steak and get on with life and that summer my girlfriend at the time linda moore came up on the boat this is her on on the ocean queen and it was a romantic thing to do and we got along and when i told her i was going to quit climbing and get serious about life she agreed to marry me this was a big factor in the decision to marry unfortunately i didn't unders i didn't appreciate the the pull the mountains had on me um places like this patagonia this is you know fitzroy down in patagonia and so i started climbing again i make light of it but it's actually as many of you know who climb it's not easy to have a partner who doesn't climb if you do but we've been married now almost 17 years so we've worked it out it's still an issue but the thing that really the thing that really uh the thing that really we almost got divorced over this climb this is this is in 1984 i went to the north face of the argo with mark twight who lives here in town he's a friend of mine this is mark uh at the end of the interstate traverse coming up after me and this climb almost cost me my marriage we didn't get up to climb but my marriage held on and after that i started writing full time actually just before that in 83 and i was inspired by i knew a couple writers jeff long and dave roberts um were doing this jim baylog was doing this as a photographer he lives in town this this is a boulder connection because jeff lives here jim lives here dave roberts pictured here who was my main mentor grew up in boulder his mother and sister here in the audience tonight his mother uh had a lot to do with the creation of this library so david became my friend and mentor and he convinced me you can make a living at writing so i started writing full time in 83 and now i was getting paid to do stuff like climb the salafi on el cap you know it was i thought i'd gone to heaven outside magazine said you know this is what i want you to do i got to climb with some of my heroes this is ivan uh the father of you know ice climbing in a certain sense and you know chanard is never going to climb with the likes of me unless i'm writing about him but i got to uh climb with him because i was writing about this is in highlight canyon up in bozeman in 1984 one of the best assignments i ever got was i went to what was in east germany dressed in east germany here these amazing sanskrit towers and i went with this guy this is fritz visner fritz is one of the great climbers of all time reinhold messner if you ask him who are his heroes who are his role models fritz is first on the list fritz and walter bennati um you know fritz passed the torch from from visner to bernardi to messner and this is visner he's a he's a legend when he took me to dresden he was 84 years old and his photo was 84. he could climb as good or better than me at the age of 84 and i was 30. he's a real inspiration to me he died two years later sadly but i was i was honored that i got to climb with him and i never would have if i wasn't a writer i was writing full time now i couldn't make a living just writing about climbing the outdoors so half the stuff i wrote was about art or political science or whatever culture for smithsonian or rolling stone whoever would pay me but the outdoor stuff was always the nearest and dearest to my heart and no article has affected me more than the one i wrote about this kid this is chris mccandless i wrote a book about him later into the wild and mccandless grew up in the suburbs of washington dc he was every parent's dream kid a brilliant student a gifted athlete he was real idealistic though and real kind of cocky and he thought he knew everything like many young people do and um his idealism was such um he read too much he read way too much tolstoy he in high school in high school he had he seriously wanted to go to south africa and join the armed struggle and apartheid which is still in effect then and he had to be talked out of it he wanted to smuggle arms this is an intense kid you know and his parents were concerned but he seemed to he didn't get in trouble and he went to emory university in atlanta it was an honor student there he graduated in june of 1990 and his parents came down to atlanta for the graduation everything seemed fine he told him he'd see him again in a couple months well then they didn't hear from him so in august they drove back down to atlanta to visit him and they found a four rent sign in the window and he was gone he dropped completely off the radar it turned out to their horror that he'd given away a 25 000 trust fund to charity he changed his name from chris mccandless to alexander supertramp he had driven out west and abandoned his car and then in a gesture that his hero tolstoy would have understood and appreciated he took after giving away this trust fund he took the last cash in his wallet here put it on the desert floor beside lake mead in arizona and lit it on fire and burned it up and he took this picture of it july 10 1990 you can see the date on his little minolta um he took a lot of pictures and journals which is why how we know much of what we know about chris after he burned up his money the next two years he wandered around the west living on nothing sleeping in the dirt having a great adventure hanging out with drifters and winos and bombs all of which was preparation for what he considered his greatest adventure in um april of 1992 he hitchhiked a lot to alaska to live off the land completely off the land he wanted to hike into the wilderness and live off the land for six seven eight months right before he left for alaska he'd been down in south dakota madison and carthage south dakota working at a grain elevator to get a little grub stake for this guy wayne westerberg a guy he met on the road and when he got to fairbanks he wrote westerberg this postcard it reads greetings from fairbanks this is the last you shall hear from me wayne arrived here two days ago it was very difficult to catch rides in the yukon territory but i finally got here please return all mail i received to the sender it might be a very long time before i return south if this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again i want you to know you are a great man i now walk into the wild alex the day after he sent that postcard he hit south out of fairbanks on the george parks highway to the edge of denali national park um the guy gave mirai jim galley and took this picture of him on on mccandless camera now mccandless is going to be living off the land for seven or eight months and he's not caring much he's an idealist he's looking for a real challenge he really wants to test himself and in his mind in his idealism any challenge that you know you're going to succeed at isn't really a challenge at all you know what's the point so the only food he's carrying is a 10 pound bag of rice for backup in his pack all he's got is a sleeping bag and about a dozen paperback books tolstoy dostoevsky henry david thoreau he's got a 22 caliber rifle over his shoulder five boxes of shells then after he got his camera back from gallon he turned around and hiked to these mountains in the background the outer ranges of the alaska range um 40s down the trail he arrived at this bus now i took this picture the first time i visited the bus in july but when the canvas got there the first of may or the second of may it was still wintry and snow on the ground and it's it's yeah i knew the bus was there and still a total freak out to come across it it's so incongruous it doesn't have an engine or anything had been towed back there one winter behind a d5 caterpillar by a bunch of hunters now these are alaskans so they thought it'd be a cool idea to tow this bus back there to use as a shelter they were moose hunters and they wanted a shelter so they towed this bus 30 miles from the highway so they could use it every fall when moose season opened and mccandless was thrilled to find it uh in his journal he called it the magic bus it had a stove inside there wood stove and a couple of bunks and he moved in and made it his base camp you can tell how excited he was to be there by this graffito he wrote this on a piece of plywood covering one of the broken windows in the bus and it begins he wrote this probably a day or two after he got there maybe the first day it begins with an ode to a roger miller song that he liked king of the road he begins two years he walks the earth no phone no pool no pets no cigarettes ultimate freedom an extremist an aesthetic voyager whose home is the road escape from atlanta thou shalt not return because the west is the best and now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure the climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude this spiritual revolution ten days and nights of freight trains and hitching brings them to the great white north no longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild alexander supertramp may 1992. i've been to the bus three times now most recently last fall i i can't get the kid out of my head even after the book's done i'm still fascinated with him and his his presence is still all over that bus on the first time i went there i found this this is a crown to his molar he i know it's what it is because in his journal he mentions losing it and it must been really painful when that thing popped off this raw nerve exposed because he's chewing on roots and stuff that's what he's living on and must have hurt like hell but he there's no complaint in his journal he was a stoic if nothing else and his journal simply reads lost crown climbed mountain now this is it's is resting on a grizzly bear skull um this grizzly bear had been shot by someone way before mccandless tenure um he found it when he got there but he left his mark on it this is his handwriting all hail the phantom bear the beast within us all this is a picture mccandless took after being in a couple months and you can tell this isn't some angst-ridden suicidal guy who's on a death trip i don't see that in this picture anyway i mean he had some hard days when he first got there he got pretty hungry the rice ran out right away you know lasted maybe three days but then eventually after a week or two he figured out how to gather plants forage how to shoot porcupines and squirrels and birds and he was fat and happy i mean look at this picture the guy's having a good time but he he was as i said he was the kind of kid who thought he knew everything he didn't take advice well and he didn't like to do his homework and he made a grave error now it's hot in this picture it's probably 80 degrees when he took this picture there's almost 24 hours of daylight at this latitude in the summer and he's got his shirts rolled sleeves rolled down his collar button because there's really horrendous mosquitoes here it's not that it's cool and in this summer heat like this well i'll go into that later we'll just leave that for now um mccandless he was doing so well that he decided the challenge wasn't a challenge anymore it was easy so he decided he'd accomplish what he set out to do and he uh decided it was time to go home so he packed up his stuff and headed back to civilization problem was um he didn't know that the heat and the heat the rivers come up big time um the river that he'd crossed in uh in april was a needy trickle when he crossed it because it was just after breakup and it was still really cold and now that same river was you know this big raging river um it's like the upper colorado or the middle colorado this is rapids ice icy glacier melt that would have been suicidal to try to cross it so he did the smart thing he um he didn't try to cross it he returned to the bus and to wait for the river to go down he was prepared to wait three four months whatever it took it was a smart thing to do now um much of what we know about mccandless is from these paperback books these dozen books um his sister got them back and i read them and he scribbled all these margin notes which are pretty interesting he took five or six rolls of film and that was interesting but the most important thing was this journal this is his whole journal little more than a page in a book in the back of a book of edible plants and you can tell he was preoccupied like anyone living off the land food is his main concern so mostly his whole journal is a catalog of the food he's killing and gathering day 37 another porcupine four squirrel two grey bird ash bird a third porcupine squirrel grey bird goose that's his journal but some of the entries are more interesting if you read through the cryptic and telegraphic but there's stuff behind the basic stuff and day 43 moose he shot a moose which is like hitting the jackpot for a guy living off the land hundreds of pounds of meat all of a sudden he's in fat city and problem was um he didn't know how to preserve it and in south dakota before coming up here hunters had told him the way you preserve your game is you smoke it that's great in south dakota if you have a smoker and the whole rig but he didn't have any of that so he tried to smoke he tried to improvise and in the heat the meat started to go bad right away it got blown with flies spoiled maggots alaskans know that the way you preserve game is you cut it into really thin strips and you build a little rack and you air dry it's foolproof works great but he didn't know this so he tried to smoke it bad consequences day 48 five days later maggots already smoking appears ineffective don't know looks like disaster i now wish i'd never shot the moose one of the greatest tragedies of my life he was a self-serious guy he took he was melodramatic he took stuff way too seriously but this really bothered him because in his idealism he thought it was unconscionable he thought it was completely immoral to kill an animal and then not use it use every bit of it for food and now he's just wasted hundreds of pounds of meat it's all rotted and he's had to leave it out for the wolves and so he got bombed and you can tell how bummed he was because for about a week he didn't even write anything in his journal he was seriously depressed then if you follow his entries you see he recovers and he he remarks upon the books he finished he finished the rose walden and and the kreutzer sonata and family happiness and and the death of evan eliach and he seemed to be doing good again uh but there then there's some ominous entries day 78 he remarks about some potato seeds he started eating potato seeds they were growing all over the seeds of a plant called eskimo potato started gathering them and eating them and then a little later a month later day 94 he's been in three months now and it begins entry begins woodpecker frog those are the animals he killed that day and then extremely weak false of potato seed much trouble just to stand up starving great jeopardy six days later and even more ominous entry day 100 made it he was proud of making it to this important milestone but in weakest condition of life death looms is a serious threat too weak to walk out have literally become trapped in the wild no game he knew he was trapped by the high water he knew he'd eaten something that had apparently poisoned him and i speculated about this in the book into the wild but at one point he realized he was going to die and no one could save him and he faced death very bravely he tore a page out of one of one of his treasured novels and he wrote this note on the back of it i've had a happy life and thank the lord goodbye and may god bless all and then must have been the last of his strength he walked outside he propped up his minolta and he took this picture of himself holding up that sign that farewell note waving goodbye you can see how emaciated and gaunt he is then he went back into the bus crawled into a sleeping bag his mother had made for him and lay down 19 days later september 1st moose season opened these hunters came in and they found the canvas in the back of the bus he perished i wrote about this for outside magazine and then went on to write into the wild the book and both the article in the mail and the magazine generated a lot of mail the magazine article generated more mail than any article in the magazine's history and much of this mail was not positive it was highly critical in the canvas for being an idiot for being reckless and arrogant and stupid suicidal it was critical of me for glorifying what many saw as a pointless death um his critics cited many things they cited his lack of preparation and his cockiness and you know they also cited it's amazing how many of them cited his photographs he left behind these five or six rolls of film and a lot of them were a lot of pictures were self-portraits like this where he's striking these exuberant poses and his his critics said you know what kind of apple takes all these pictures of himself like this um what kind of jerk takes a picture of himself like this and i know exactly what kind of jerk takes a picture of himself like that have i done i've done the same thing on the on the devil's thumb now mccandless was 24 when he died i was 23 when i went to the devil stone by myself had my alaskan adventure and as far as i could tell the only difference between me and chris mccandless was that i'd been very very lucky and i'd survived my close scrapes and the canvas had been very unlucky and have not so i was pretty convinced that unlike his critics i didn't think mccandless was suicidal i didn't think he was mentally ill i thought he was just young and suffered the ordinary heedlessness and stupidity of youth which i knew a lot about so i went on to write into the wild and it almost didn't get published i was just talking to jeff before the show this is this publishing is a weird business and this book almost it got bought and then the editor bought it for the publishing house was fired and no one else wanted to publish it and it was just by luck it was published at all and no one thought it would sell very much i didn't i just wrote it because i was fascinated with this guy and um then people started reading it and i they sent me on tour and the tour was extended and when i went on the book tour and i'd sign books afterwards people come up to me and say you know i did something like that when i was a kid or my brother did something like that or i always wanted to do something like that and it turns out there's a lot of people out there who identify with the candles and i was gratified to hear this and i left this book tour early a year ago march of 96 to go to mount everest outside magazine asked me to to go there as a journalist they were concerned about this recent trend over the last oh it's only been the last four or five years really since this really started in a big way that everest has been opened up to ordinary amateur climbers inexperienced relatively inexperienced climbers who pay 65 000 bucks to be guided up the mountain um the magazine wasn't sure this was such a good idea so they sent me along on one of these trips to observe it and and write about it so in march 27th of last year i flew off to kathmandu which is an amazing place i mean i know many of you have been there and and it's like another planet and you could spend months and months there but we had a mountain to climb so after a day and a half we boarded this weird russian helicopter and flew off to the himalaya now this is rob hall he was the leader of my guided expedition he was the most respected guide in everest business he'd already gotten 39 people to the summit of the mountain previous to this he was considered the safest most conservative most meticulous guide in the business and i was really happy that the magazine had sent me on his trip two hours later we landed in lukla nine thousand feet in the mountains um in this village here and now i there's eight clients and three guides on this trip and i didn't know any of them beforehand none of us clients knew each other this was very troubling to me i was used to climbing with trusted friends you know one or two trusted friends and hearing with all these strangers so we all made a big effort to get to know each other as soon as we met and this is one of my clients this is beck weathers a doctor from dallas texas base camps at 17 600 feet um half the oxygen there is at sea level sherpas regularly cover the distance between this village local and base camp in two days but they're acclimatized and they're tough and if if you tried to do that or i tried to do it coming from sea level where i live or even boulder you'd probably die or get really really sick a lot of trekkers die at these altitudes because they go too high too fast it's really altitude is a scary thing but if you go slow there's no problem rob paul knew this so he allotted 10 days for this truck to base camp which made it really really nice just one of the most fun things i've ever done because we never walked more than three hours a day it was completely leisurely second day of the trek we got our first view of evers from the ground this is the highest point on earth four vertical miles overhead now we can't hear it because it's too far away but this is the jet stream everest pokes up into the jet stream you can see what happens it these 140 mile an hour winds hit the summit and it leaves this contrail of ice crystals that are actually blowing two miles into tibet now this is what this jet stream you know it's it's unthinkably harsh up there when it's blowing like this and it blows like this almost all the time sometimes it lets off and sometimes it comes back this is what killed five climbers a few weeks ago on the north side they were up there when the jet stream came back and they didn't have a chance they were strong climbers um it was sobering to look at that same day we arrived in namche bazaar which is the cultural center sort of the capital of the kumbu the sherpa homeland the center of their culture and we spent a day here to acclimatize and the next day we resumed our trek now this country the kumbu around mount everest these these valleys and mountains around everest is some of the most spectacularly rugged country i've ever seen but it's not wilderness and hasn't been for hundreds of years the sherpa moved south here from tibet about 400 years ago or something and they're devout buddhists and they adorn the landscape with artifacts the religion is they build these altars these stone altars called shortens on ridge's crests and hilltops they put up prayer flags every flap of the wind sends prayer to god prayer flags and all these boulders and it's it makes it real somehow it adds a lot to the track these one of the things that makes the trek so nice is we didn't have to carry anything this yak here is carrying all our stuff and so you all you have to carry us a date pack with a rain jacket and it was nice i liked it and it got spoiled um we did get to know each other as we hiked in this is mike groom a plumber from brisbane australia who is one of rob hall's guides and he's a very very accomplished high-altitude climber he had climbed everest without bottled oxygen in 93. now this is something only a handful of people have done or capable of doing you have to just very gifted a certain kind of athlete to do it i mean i couldn't begin to i wouldn't even consider it i would i would die right away um mike had also climbed k2 the second highest amount in the world kenshin junga the third highest on his descent from kenshin junga he'd been caught out after dark in a storm no shelter he'd frozen his feet very very badly he'd actually had to have all his toes amputated and parts of each foot and most people this would have crippled but not mike he was a very graceful athlete and he couldn't he didn't even walk with a limp this is doug hansen now a lot of the media after the after the tragedy you know has reported that all these clients are are novices and the the word that's used a lot is tour groups it's sort of like we all sort of it was either should we take the cruise to barbados or should we go climb everest but you know a lot of us didn't belong there but it's more complicated like life this is more complicated than the media usually presents it and doug hansen here's a fellow client being a really close friend of mine doug was neither inexperienced nor rich he was a postal worker from the seattle area from kent washington he had been climbing for 15 years he paid for his dream of climbing everest by working nights in the post office and doing construction by day he'd actually been to everest once before the year before in 1995 rob paul had gone with rob hall and he'd gotten all the way to the south summit just 300 feet below the top but it was 1 30 in the afternoon then when they got there and rob hall is a strict rule if you're not on top by 2 o'clock you have to turn around for safety's sake and he turned dug around at 1 30 because he wasn't going to make the top by two and he felt bad about this so he invited doug back in 96 actually talked doug into coming back he gave him a really steep discount rob was actually losing money by having doug come back but rob was a big-hearted guy and he wanted doug to realize his dream so doug was back for a second try every few miles there's one of these tea houses you pull in for some chong the local brew or some tea this is beck weathers helen wilton from christchurch new zealand our base camp manager andy harris who became my closest friend on the trip um 31 years old a very strong guide from queenstown new zealand let's see april 8th of last year we arrived at the kumbu glacier 12 mile tongue of ice that flows down from the foot of everest day after that we got to base camp itself these tents here pitched on rubble but the rubble is on the glacier and you know it's right under your tent at night you hear the glacier moving beneath you it cracks and creaks and groans it's very eerie it's actually kind of mesmerizing and nice um it's not a good picture but there's there's about 60 tenths in this photo now this is only a small fraction of the tenths of base camp they continued down glacier for a half a mile there's more than 300 tents on the glacier actually it was a full-blown city um and the mayor of that city was rob hall our leader um he was the most respected guy in the mountain and anytime there was a dispute people would come to him to solve but even his rivals and there were plenty of rivals there were other guided groups competing with him directly for clients but rob was so respected that they came to him and even for advice his rivals would come to him for advice and no one came to him more often than this guy scott fisher a guide scott was from seattle i knew scott before the trip scott was a is a legend in seattle he's an amazingly strong climber he's an aerobic animal he'd climbed everest without gas in 94 to become one of the elite to do that he'd also climb k2 and many other things highly respected climber but he never guided everest before so he came to rob hall a lot for advice and rob gave it freely because even though they were competitors they were also friends and rob you know that's just what they did and scott hung out a lot with us and he was camped only a few miles a few minutes away so we socialized a lot with his group we got to know his team we got to know his guides this is anatoly buchrev who many of you know he spends a lot of time in boulder he's a legendary kazakh russian speaking guide one of the greatest himalayan climbers of the era he's he's climbed more than 20 years at high altitude he climbed every three times before last year without bottled oxygen um you know he's he's amazing he's in a he's in a league of zone um this is lopsang jungwoo sherpa lopsang was 23 years old very young scott fisher had hired him as his serdar his head climbing sherpa and he deserved that responsibility because he was an amazing climber he'd only been climbing three years but he'd already made three oxygen-less descents of everest scott told me that he thought lobstering was the second coming of ronald messen with the greatest climb of all time lopsin was a remarkable guy he was very very popular now most sherpas around westerners tend to be shy reserved not among themselves but they can keep to themselves but not love son he was really flashy and outgoing gary's he reminded me of deon sanders he was cocky and he thought he was the equal of any western climber he was but he didn't mind telling you that and he was really popular i mean everyone liked bobson this is neil bidelman who used to live here in town he organized he's one of the organizers of the infamous boulder marathon he now lives back in aspen where he's from originally he's an aerospace engineer a rocket scientist great athlete great long distance runner enters all these marathon races and does well at them and he'd climb macklew a very very responsible guide has become a good friend we also got to know some of scott's clients on the bottom there's charlotte fox ski patroller from aspen um charlotte charlotte's a very strong athlete hasn't been climbed that long but already done a lot now there's 14 the 14 highest mountains in the world are known as the 8 000 meter peaks because they're each above 8000 meters 26 thousand 200 feet about and charlotte had already climbed two of these 14 peaks before everest she's getting a back rub here by sandy hill pittman from new york sandy had climbed six of the so-called seven summits the highest points in each of the seven continents all she had left was everest she already tried con evers twice unsuccessfully and she was taking it very seriously this time she she was very determined to climb it everest the tibetans call everest jomo um which roughly translates as goddess mother of the earth and to the buddhists to the sherpas uh this in the pantheon of deities they're pantheon of deities perhaps no none no god is more important than than sagar mata or john alumni as it's called and before you can walk on her sacred flanks you have to be purified with a religious ceremony known as a puja um so the sherpas for each expedition at base camp i don't know there's a dozen of us dozens of these expeditions they built one of these beautiful chortens these stone altars and then they erect this pine pole and string prayer flags from it and then you have this puja you wait for an auspicious day when the stars are right and then you hang your ice axes and carabiners to be blessed from the chorten and this priest comes up from the valley and the sherpas bring out their pictures of the dalai lama who's in town today i understand and you make offerings of uh of ram and um sampa and snickers bars and other food and uh and then then then the priest chants scripture for two hours while everyone else gets drunk and it's not an option you have to you have to drink i mean this is nothing nothing is more serious no no i mean this is a very serious ceremony um you have to do this it's very important so when when no one can stand anymore you take fistfuls of barley flour and you hurl it all over each other and then you're ready to climb this this whole ceremony says a lot to me about the sherpas because it's a very important ceremony you wouldn't think of not doing this but they have fun at it and they take it you know it's a celebration and everyone laughs and giggles even while the priest is chanting and that somehow this is sort of says a lot to me with the sherpa so at the end of the puja you string these prayer flags over the whole camp sort of like a force field to protect the tents from harm and then hung over the next day you tackle the first obstacle the which is the kumbu ice ball which rises directly above camp now the ice ball is really scary this is base camp down here this is camp one two thousand feet higher in between the glacier spills over this 2000 foot drop it's really steep so when it spills over it shatters into these huge ice blocks many of them are much bigger than this library size of 8 and 10 story buildings and the glacier in here moves between three and four feet a day so as it moves these huge blocks are always shifting and tumbling and you've got to weave your way up around them you know and not just once you've got to do this we did this eight times because the summit of everest has only a third as much oxygen as sea level and if you went from boulder to the summit somehow you know in a in a magic carpet or something and we're dropping the summit you'd pass out in a couple minutes and you'd be dead probably inside of 15 or 20. but if you go up and down up and down slowly a little higher each time over the course of a month your body adapts in what are really miraculous ways and you can sort of function up there after a month not well but you can survive for a little while so you have to do go through the ice fall every time you go up to do an acclimatization trip you have to go through the ice wall we did it eight times um and it's scary i was gripped every time there's all these crevasse crossings they're all rigged with ropes and ladders doesn't take any technical skill but i i was a lot of times i crawled across these ladders on my hands and knees i had no pride i mean it's scary and sometimes next time next day you might come up and the glacier would have shifted and this ladder would be bent like a pretzel or it'd be dropped into the crevasse these huge ice blocks are always shifting you hear them collapsing around you every tip trip up the glacier looks different you just hope you're not under one or on top of one when it goes 19 people have died in this ice fall you start climbing at four in the morning before dawn um because it's five or ten degrees there and you wanna do it when it's cold because everest is just north of the tropical latitudes and it's intense ultraviolet radiation and when the sun hits about eight or eight thirty it gets hot and the glacier then gets even more active these guys aren't out of the woods and you know they're wishing they were up there the sun's hit camp one is 19 500 feet first trip up we just got to the tents turned right back around went down the same day um feeling pretty sick rested a few days came up again and felt better this time and spent a night here and then went on from here camp one up to camp two and you can see the route up to camp two from here from here the route gets sort of flat relatively flat and goes up the floor this deep canyon called the western comb cwm a welsh word sort of like being in the grand canyon at twenty thousand feet um and you start climbing again up this canyon floor before dawn because as soon as the sun hits the these icy walls of the canyon they reflect the radiation back at you and it turns the whole thing into this huge solar oven and you go from wearing your down jacket and being freezing cold shivering 20 minutes later you strip down your long underwear put these sun hats on and you're sweltering i had heat stroke i mean i you know i was it was grim the heat was as bad as the cold base camp you can't see the upper mountain at all it's kind of weird you just can't even see that whole upper half of the mountain is hidden behind the western shoulder so here you round to bend in the western comb and all of a sudden you see the summit for the first time and it's pretty sobering this is the top two vertical miles overhead and uh this just looks like a little cloud because it's hidden behind the interviewing ridge but that's the jet stream this huge contrail and now we're close enough so you can hear it and it sounds like a flock of 747s taking off and you can hear it all the time because it's blowing all the time and it's very sobering this is camp 2 21 500 feet another view of two it lies near the head of this valley this canyon the western coma from here the route suddenly gets a lot steeper um this is lotsy the fourth highest mountain in the world 27 900 feet the route ascends what's called the lotsy face the steep ice face crosses this limestone cliff called the yellow band then it descends as ridge the geneva spurred right here that's 26 000 feet that's the south call col word meaning pass it's a pass between lotsy and everest everest is right up here this is where our high camp would be camp four um from where we'd launch our summit push this is another view of the loti face um this is the face the ice face here is more than four thousand feet which is too high for most climbers to do in a day without exhausting themselves right before the summit you don't want to do that so the standard thing to do is put a camp up in the middle right here camp three twenty four thousand feet and it's not a good place to camp you gotta hack ledges out of the ice to put tents up but it's really the most practical way to do it and then from there it climbs this cliff the yellow band and up to geneva spur to the south call this is the base of the lots of face climbers up to fix ropes it starts out pretty steep of this bergstrom but from a technical climber's point of view it's really not very steep it's deceptively not steep i mean it deceives you it's only about 45 degrees or something um you're tempted not even to clip into this rope which is a big mistake because if you stumble or a rock comes down a lot of rock comes a lot of rocks come down here you're going to fall to your death just two weeks ago a sherpa was killed because he wasn't flipped into the road when he fell somehow a sherpa on a malaysian expedition a number of people have died here this is yasuko namba this woman in the foreground she was one of my teammates a client on rob hall's team she was a federal express personnel director from tokyo japan 47 years old hoping to become the oldest woman to climb everest yasuko was tiny she weighed 91 pounds she claimed i doubt she even weighed that much her wrists were like sparrows bones and this tiny woman i was in awe of her she was the most determined focused individual i've ever met she was inspiring this is andy harris pulling into camp three you can see they're just tents are just lined up here on this ledge that the sherpas have hacked out of the face this is the view from camp three looking down this is camp one this is camp two and now we're at three and it's exciting because before we've been laboring up the floor of this canyon and it's claustrophobic and you can't see much and it's hot and suddenly the view opens up and you feel like you're really getting up on the roof of the world now the summit is still a vertical mile overhead um but you feel like you're getting up there you also feel really shitty because you're at 24 000 feet for the first time and i mean it's like you have a bad hangover all the time you try to eat a candy bar and you i you throw it up i couldn't hold any food down um i'd take a step and i'd be you know i was exhausted so we spent a night here i didn't sleep i don't think anyone slept and then our climatization was over and we went down to base camp to rest for four five six days and then we're going to do our summit push base camp doesn't look like much but it's really quite comfortable there's showers here built out of stone the food is good and we're acclimatized now so the air actually starts to feel sort of thick here and the most amazing thing about base camp is these satellite phones uh there were four or five of them our expedition had one scott fisher's exhibition sandy pittman here brought one sandy's calling from her communication stand at base camp and it was very surreal i mean i've done a lot of expeditions and i never even had a radio before you know you go in and you're you're out of touch for a month or six weeks or whatever and now you know i'd be lying on my tent at base camp and i'd hear a phone ring in the next standover and someone would yell john it's your wife and i'd go running over and i talked to linda and it was i liked that but it was very discombobulating and uh one of the one of the strange things that i i never got used to because there's phones people were filing internet dispatches every day daily internet dispatches four or five expeditions had websites so people back home would often know more about what was going on in the mountain than we did on the mountain you'd call someone in the states and they'd tell yeah i hear the yugoslavs are going to camp four and you wouldn't even know that you know i was like wow really and it was very it was this weird information warp now the first really disturbing event happened right about this time before the summit push this guy in the basket is nawang topshay sherpa he's the uncle of lobsong that flashy head climbing shirt on scott's team lobsang and nowong were very close and how long well people think sherpas are invincible that they're supermen and women and they're really strong but they're not invincible um these the diseases of high altitude cerebral edema pulmonary edema strike everyone regardless of your fitness or your experience they strike randomly and now wong was at camp two twenty one thousand five hundred feet and he came down with high altitude public near edema this disease it comes on and you know suddenly without warning your lungs filled with fluid if you don't descend very very quickly you die it's that simple um the problem was nawang got this and he wouldn't admit he was sick he didn't tell anybody because if you're a sherpa these jobs on exhibitions are very competitive it's competitive to get these jobs this is a country where the annual per capita income is 160 dollars per year and you get a job like this as a climbing sherpa you're going to make 1500 bucks maybe 2 000 bucks for an expedition so people want these jobs and wong's got kids and schools in common do and he wants to keep sending in there and if he gets sick he's not going to get hired again there's other guys who don't get sick so he didn't tell anyone he was sick finally he collapsed and had to be dragged and hauled down through the ice ball very dangerous rescue performed by lobsong and neil bidelman very bold thing they did he should have gotten better at base camp but he didn't so he's loaded into this basket you can see he's wearing oxygen and he was carried down valley to the hospital at 14 000 feet uh we saw him go didn't think anything of it what we didn't know is that several hours after this picture was taken he stopped breathing for five minutes suffered permanent brain damage he was put into a kathmandu hospital a vegetable a month later after we'd all gone back to the states he died no one knows this nuang staff wasn't reported all these other deaths were reported but no one was just a sherpa and his death went unremarked we didn't even know about his death at base camp um hadn't happened yet but we didn't know he was gravely ill um even if we had it probably would have made a difference we were all so focused on the top we've got summit fever now we're going for it in a couple days so right before summit push we posed for this photo and you can see how confident and cheerful everyone was then this is at the base camp short and this is rob hall's team this is caroline mackenzie the base camp doctor she's from new zealand doug hanson the postal worker from the seattle area john taske uh anesthesiologist from brisbane australia suze allen an australian trekker who didn't go above base camp that's me that's stuart hutchinson a brilliant medical researcher from montreal carol or helen wilton base camp manager from new zealand andy harris my good buddy um guide from new zealand beck weathers from dallas rob hall leader luke kasich a 53 year old attorney from bloomfield hills michigan frank fischbeck a publisher from hong kong mike groom guide from brisbane australia and yasuko namba client from japan we've been at base camp for about a month now almost exactly a month the whole time we've been here jet stream's been ripping the summit like this this horizontal i mean that's that cloud storm to the summit's poking up into this 140 mile wind and that's the contrail and uh you know you can't climb when it's like that but every may if you're lucky in early may the monsoon starts pushing north out of the bengal and when it pushes north it moves the jet stream north too so you have this window before the monsoon arrives but after the jet stream leaves we have calm weather and this is when you have to climb this window of calm weather might last a few hours might last a few days it might last a few weeks so that's rare but you don't know how long it's going to last and you want to be at camp 4 ready to climb when it opens so you've got to gamble because it takes 4 days to get from base camp to camp 4. so you've got to start you've got to leave base camp you've got to try to guess when that window's going to open leave base camp and try to be there when it when it opens so rob hall had reached the summit four times and two of those days had been on may 10th he considered an auspicious day so he pegged may 10th for our summit attempt he invited scott fisher's team to join us um and so on may 6th so we'd be there to do it on may 10th we left base camp with the wind still blowing um there's base camp you can see the tents down here and went through the ice ball up at one last time it was i was as gripped as ever that's stuart and john taske and andy harris going through the ice ball again it's you know it's plain roulette when you go through that thing we were acclimatized now so we didn't even stop at camp one we went all the way to camp two in a day which was pretty exhausting so the next day we took a rest day at camp two this is andy harris um rested feeling confident beck weathers feeling confident at camp too my groom on the left guide and rob hall on the right the leader and they're not so they're a little nervous because rob's committed us to this may 10th summit day and it's a gamble above this camp three we go on oxygen we start using oxygen and it's there's only enough oxygen for one summit attempt by the time we get up to camp four we're in the death zone and we can only hang out there for a day 24 hours before we either have to go up or go down so if rob's guessed wrong about the weather you know that's our summit attempt we don't get to try the mountain may 8th we left camp 2 and started climbing the lotsy face now this isn't a very good picture but it's an instructive one this is the base of the lotsy face these guys are at the bottom of it you follow this line of climbers looks like a bunch of ants going all the way up to camp three there's probably 70 climbers in the southern tip of south america i went there with one friend dan cawthorne we climbed this route again you know this is we've skied six days across an ice cap to get here and in 100 mile an hour wind some of the worst weather in the world and no one knows we're here no one rest we don't have a radio or anything you know we're on our own there's no chance for rescue but we we're prepared for that and we accepted that and we're prepared to we climb conservatively and that's the way i thought climbing was supposed to be on everest it's really different um if you're a client on a guided trip you have to let the guide make decisions that's the way it's got to be you can't he can't have eight clients making decisions on their own so you give up that independence and that self-reliance and it's hard to do um he sherpas do a lot of the work and it's it makes a huge difference in helping you get to the summit they put up all the tents they make all the camps they do all the cooking which doesn't sound like much but anyone who's done anything around and earring is a huge amount of work on everest it's two three four hours a day of chipping ice and melting it for water and cooking and that saves you a lot of energy that you're going to need on summit day and we wouldn't nobody on the mountain would have a prayer of climbing up without the sherpa support these are some of the sherpas that went up the mountain with us this is tendi norbu kami this is ang dorje very remarkable young man he was rob hollis sirdar his head climbing sherpa um angerji had climbed the mountain climbed everest three times previously very very quiet shy hard to even engage in conversation he was a devout buddhist he saw the key he saw his purpose in life is looking after us and providing for welding it was the key he thought to for him to escaping this cycle of suffering and moving to the next level because if he did a good enough job at this so he he looked after us and took it very seriously this is his friend rita um perhaps the greatest help the sherpas provided was they hauled all the loads we never carried anything except our personal gear and we weren't alone in this it's not just guided trips people don't realize but the sherpas almost every expedition virtually every expedition relies on sherpas almost as much as we did i mean sherpas there's a lot of hauling that goes on this is a siege of the mountain hundreds of oxygen bottles have to be hauled up to the high camps stage by stage food fuel tents sleeping bags and the sherpas do all of that they fix the ropes most of them and uh these are our team sherpas heading up the lotsy face on may 8th we got got there in early afternoon to camp three twenty four thousand feet we're all kind of tense now because this is it this is our shot coming up and it's all or nothing at night i took this picture looking down from camp three and you can see all these clouds um every afternoon or most afternoons you get this convection condensation just like afternoon thunderstorms here the clouds would form and might snow for an hour or two and then they'd dissipate in the evening and it was no big deal we didn't worry indeed the next morning you can see this blue sky over nipsey i took this picture at 25 000 feet looking down from the base of the of the yellow band this is camp three you can see the tents again here's this line of 70 maybe more climbers coming up you know that's dangerous those rocks wasn't down there and you're stuck you can't get out of the way you're out they're all on the same road very very alarming but there's no way around if you want to climb everest by either the south side or the northeast ridge the two easy routes relatively easy routes that's what it's like these days this is the yellow band the steep limestone cliff um it's actually surprised how steep it was the top of the yellow band disturbing site this is the south summit the summit is hidden but it's just 300 feet behind that that's the jet stream and we're going to be going for the summit in a few hours we actually start climbing before midnight on may 9th we'll be there in just a few hours and it's still blowing like hell up there rob hall's saying don't worry mates he's going to quit trust me and we're not so sure um this is this picture is from that same spot a telephoto if you look closely right above the red dot there's a black speck right there there's three more black specks those are climbers may 9th four guys from montenegro we used to be part of yugoslavia going for the top of may 9th and we all watch them really closely because the wind's blowing you can see it blowing but if they make the top maybe we can too if they don't make the top it doesn't bode well for us well right after i took this picture i watched with dismay as they turned around and headed down short of the summer this is camp four twenty six thousand feet south call most god forsaken place i've ever been there's no snow in this photo because it's almost always windy here it's all blown into tibet it's either rock or ice here you're in the death zone now you're breathing oxygen even with oxygen you feel like your body's dying little by little minute by minute your brain cells are dying your body's falling apart you don't want to spend any more time here than you have to we're going to rest for a few hours and go to the summit and get the hell out of there it's blowing 40 knots when i got here you can see it's littered with oxygen bottles and shredded tents some of that stuff dates back to 1953 when serving hillary first climbed the mountain i was the first client to get there about one in the afternoon as i waited for my teammates to arrive they straggled in by four or five everyone was there but the wind picked up got stronger and stronger throughout the day by five when the last of them arrived it was blowing 70 knots at the south call at the tents it was probably blowing 150 up here and you can see that howling up there and um i thought this is it it's all over um you know i thought too bad not this year amazing thing happened 7 p.m all of a sudden the wind just died stone cold no wind rob hall acting like he knew this is going to happen all along calls over saddle up john oh you know we're climbing and so we got up and started to climb now camp 4 is right here the route begins by climbing the steep blue ice bolts which isn't so hard going up but our crampons are dull from a month of walking on rocks and stuff and i wondered how we're going to get back down this there wasn't a rope fixed and the route climbs these snow gullies it joins the southeast ridge right here at a place we call the balcony and it continues up the ridge on the upper ridge you get into these steep rock steps we had a plan to sherpas we're going to go out ahead of time and fix ropes over this to speed these soon and then here's the south summit and the summit's just 300 feet beyond that just before midnight we started to climb and it was one of those it was an it was a very memorable morning of climbing it was actually beautiful uh despite what people tell you about everest it was a beautiful one of the most beautiful mornings of climate ever had we started out climbing by headlamp but within an hour or two and this bright moon came up it was so bright that you could switch off your headlamp and just climb by moonlight you look off to the south and you can see the monsoon approaching these huge thunderheads towering to 40 000 feet this wall of thunderheads and continuous lightning this orange and blue lightning like i'd never seen anything like that spouting out of the top and within it and it was mesmerizing it was like this dream climbing through a dream i was out front with ang dorji and mike groom breaking trail about 5 a.m on georgina it moved a little ahead and we got just below the balcony and the sun began to come up and i'm sure this is the most amazing sunrise i've ever seen now we've we're looking down now at these twenty three twenty four thousand foot mountains this is ahmad oblong a very famous mountain in the kombu twenty three thousand four hundred feet and it's been towering over us the whole tri-can and the base camp and now we're looking down on it um it was amazing uh ahmed iblam uh kentega and temcerku these beautiful peaks that seemed so big before now seems small on georgie and i sat down at the balcony at 5 30 to wait for the others and just spellbound the two of us sitting side by side not speaking we're looking at four of the five highest mountains in the world as the sun comes up you can look off to the east and there's kanchanjunga the third highest mountain in the world sun coming up on makalu just eight miles away one of the beautiful most beautiful mountains in the himalaya this i think mountain probably holds special this is a special mountain to jeff i think i know from his reading he's been there and it's it's an amazing beautiful mountain it's eight miles away fifth highest mountain in the world um lotzee right across from us fourth highest mountain in the world this is 27 900 feet and we're virtually as high as that now and it's really exciting so on georgie and i sat down to wait because rob hall had told us two things on summer day that were critically important the first of them was whoever's out in front when you get to the balcony i want you to wait until we've all assembled there because i can't have you guys scattered over the whole damn mountain so fine and guardian i sat down to wait um my groom arrived a few minutes later and it's cold now it's you know it's probably 40 below at it's coldest maybe colder you can see the icicles hanging off his auction mask it was bitter but the sun's coming up there's makalu this is that west face that has attracted so many and we waited there for an hour and a half while all these other climbers filed up and it was really frustrating because the second thing robert told us the second firm order is that at two o'clock you're all going to turn around no matter where you are this is the most important rule of climbing everest because rob told us your brain's not going to he told this is over and over again your brain is not going to work up there and he was right you know we're stupid already from hypoxia but you don't have to use your brain all you've got to do is use your watch and when it says 2 o'clock you turn around and that will probably save your life so this is frustrating because you know it's this very short block of time and we're wasting it sitting on our butts um waiting for the group to arrive but we couldn't do anything about it so we just i just bit my tongue and sat there now this photo is is worth looking at it's instructive um this is lotzee this is the south call that high pass between everest and lotsy it's a big flat area the size of three football fields we've come up the lotsy face this is a geneva spur this is the root up down this side drops away four thousand feet here even more down here down the keng shang facing to tibet this is the border between nepal and tibet um you can see the tents right here catching the first light of the morning sun they're on the western edge of the call right at this edge it would take you maybe 15 minutes on a good day like this to walk all the way across from one side and the others flat ground you couldn't fall off if you tried to show you how severe it gets on everest and how extreme it is up there later this same day 11 climbers including two of my teammates beck weathers and yaska namba made it all the way down here to safety apparent safety minutes away from the tents they're right here but they were the wind came up blowing so strong they couldn't see their own feet and they got lost and they wandered over here and they couldn't make it back to the tents they spent a night out and before the night was over one of my teammates was dead that's what everest is like that's how extreme it is up there this is the balcony 27 600 feet we've all assembled now rob's given us the okay to go ahead this is a this is a classic everest picture you know when you see the news reels and stuff the climbers are always striding briskly along but this is what it's really like these guys have just taken a step now they're leaning over their their ice axes for four or five breaths then they'll take another step then they'll rest for four or five more breaths and another step this is what it's really like to climb everest it's a huge ordeal it's not fun it's really it's grim it's work um this is i don't know a couple hours later maybe a thousand feet higher uh right beneath those rock steps on the southeast ridge another bottleneck the ropes we thought were going to be fixed weren't for a number of reasons the plan broke down plans break down are never thus to be expected but it was another delay of an hour while neil bidelman and ang dorji fixed the ropes above eventually um we started moving again this is well above 28 000 feet now mike groom on the upper ridge and i i felt like i was in outer space here i mean it's so this this environment is so harsh the margin of of surviving and not is very very slim and there's no forgetting it i i'm you're breathing oxygen you feel totally dependent on your life support systems you're in this big down suit like a spacesuit that's sort of cutting you off in the world your brain is even with oxygen your brain is operating on the level of a lower reptile it's all you can do to think about where you're gonna put your feet in you better think about that because there aren't fixed ropes for much of this and if you trip you know it's a long way down eleven o'clock despite these delays i arrived in the south summit neil bidelman and martin adams were already there they've been there since about 10 and i for the first time i began to think wow we might actually get up this hill blue sky the weather's looking great and from this point you look up and for the first time you see the summit and it's really really exciting it just sort of takes your breath away and it's deceiving i mean it looks so close looks like you spit and hit it all you've got to do is climb this knife edge ridge and climb this vertical 40 feet of vertical rock and snow this is the hillary step the most famous pitch on everest and then you're there now but in your in your brain damage state you don't think about that you just think it's close there's no way i'm not going to make it now and people wonder why didn't people heed these strict turnaround times but i understand because if i'm honest with myself and it's i'm right here at the south summit let's say it's 1 30 and rob hall tells me sorry john oh you got to turn around like he told doug doug hansen the year before if i'm honest with myself i'm probably going to tell rob to stuff it then i'm going up there because i've been i've suffered for a month and i'm not ever going to be back here and i look so close the temptation is to go go anyway and a lot of people did that and it's dangerous to yourself and your whole team not everyone was that stupid this is luke kasich the lawyer from michigan on my team and he was just below the south summit at 11 o'clock along with two other teammates stuart hutchison and john taske and they were stuck in traffic stuck behind a taiwanese team that was going really slow and they sat down and said you know we're probably not going to get to the top by two we should turn around and somehow they summoned the judgment to do that it was amazing it was amazing that they did and i applaud them for it they're alive today because of it they deserve a lot of credit the rest of us kept going um i should add that at the south summit we got there at 11 and we had a plan for ropes to be fixed ahead of time on this on the most exposed part of the upper ridge above this and they weren't so those of us who were there just sat down waiting for someone to fix them like we weren't thinking and we sat there for an hour just sort of gazing off stupidly at the sights until neil bidelman finally said gee maybe we should fix the ropes and so he grabbed a coil and i grabbed the coil and anatoly and neil and i and andy harris went out ahead to fix these two coils over the most exposed places and this is anatoly leading the the hillary step um now anatoly is not using oxygen which is controversial for a guide but he climbed it brilliantly he's an amazing climber leading this pitch slow even for anatoly it took him probably more than 40 minutes to climb this 40 feet this is anatoly a little higher this is the summit by the way and we can see it now and we've there's no turning back now i mean we got a you know locked in the crosshairs and indeed just after one o'clock first anatoly then me then andy reached the highest point on earth and this is andy who'd become a good friend by now standing on the summit this is the survey marker that put up been put up there in 93 by an italian team anatoly has draped it with prayer flags i think anatoly put them there there's an old oxygen bottle someone left from the year before so i took this picture of andy but i didn't i was in no mood to celebrate i hadn't slept in more than two days or eaten in more than two days and i was really frightened because i'd done something really stupid we each had three oxygen bottles on the summit day but when i got to the south summit i was into my second bottle but i thought i could get to the summit and back to the south summit without getting into my third so i left my third bottle behind because i weighed seven pounds didn't want to carry it i can't believe how stupid i was i sort of guessed oh it probably has got an hour and it probably won't be anymore or two hours probably won't be any more than two hours up and back well on the summit now i happen to check my gauge and i've got about 10 minutes at most left and so at least 20 minutes back down and i realized that i'm not one of these guys like anatoly or or mike groom or scott fisher i can't climb everest that oxygen i'm going to be in big trouble up here without gas and i don't know what i'm going to do um so i took this picture of andy then i anatoly was badgering me to take a bunch of pictures of him and andy holding out his kazakhstan flag so i did that and after less than five minutes i turned around and headed down this is from that same place just on the summit as i turned around to go down i saw neil bidelman and martin adams coming up so i said oh hell they'll want a souvenir photo too so i took my camera out one more time and snapped this picture it was only when i looked through the viewfinder that i noticed whoa what are all these clouds doing i mean we've been looking up the whole time as we're going up and it's blue sky still overhead but we turn around to go down and the valleys are all filled with clouds you know at the time it didn't really register because this is the day before those convection clouds no big deal afternoon clouds they'd burn off so i wasn't thinking you know i just wasn't thinking um what this really is is the is the crown the top of a huge thunderhead this even now boiling over the summit of lotsy 28 000 feet towards everest i've never seen a thunderhead from 29 000 feet didn't know what i was seeing so just none of us you know i just blew it off and was worried about my gas and so this is andy he and i got a couple minutes later we're back at the top of the hillary step right here is this this crest right here right below that it drops off for 40 feet so you clip into these ropes and you repel down this 40-foot vertical section so i clipped in and moved over the edge to repel down i was greeted with an alarming sight there was about a dozen climbers more almost 20 climbers coming up from below swarming up the ropes now they're not doing anything wrong they're just climbing the mountain like i did but there's only one rope on the step and there's a traffic jam and i have no choice but to unclip and wait for the parade to pass and i waited there at the top of the hillary step for more than an hour my auction ran out in a matter of minutes and so for at least an hour i was there at 29 000 feet trying not to pass out trying not to die i could feel whole sections of my brain shutting down the brain cells dying you know nothing i could do about it no one else knew i didn't tell anyone um this is neil got to the summit he's a conscientious guy and he waited there for almost two hours i think while the rest of his clients came up so much for the two o'clock turnaround rule no one really knew they never radio so he didn't know what was going on it wasn't his job to turn him around it was scott's and scott wasn't reachable so eventually the parade passed and andy and i andy harris and i started down again now i've got a this is the south summit we're looking down on the top of the south summit i've got my third bottle right there i've got to get from here to there without gas and i'm you know it's all i can do to remain conscious just standing there and this isn't hard climbing but there aren't ropes over much of it there's no ropes on much of it and it's 7000 feet down here and it's 11 000 feet down the other side and i can't afford to slip or pass out and i was really gripped this by the way this is it's it's horrible to think about but this is where rob hall spent the final two nights of his life right there in 150 below zero wind chill at least you know 100 plus mile an hour winds no shelter no oxygen not even a sleeping bag this is the south summit this is the hillary step this is the summit 3 30 i got my third bottle put it on my rig and headed down mike groom and yasuko number were the right right with me when i turned to go down there were about 20 climbers strung out behind me on the ridge i don't know this two o'clock turnaround time was ignored of this of the 24 people who summoned it that day only six of us got there before two o'clock rob hall himself didn't get to the summit until 3 10. scott fisher didn't get there until 3 40. doug hansen didn't get there till 4 o'clock so at 3 30 i left the south summit and as i turned to leave there was andy harris and he'd been acting really weird that the altitude had gotten to him and he wasn't making sense he was talking nonsense clear danger signs but i blew it off because i was the client and he was the guy in this situation and i figured hell it's his job to look after me not vice versa violated one of the central rules of climbing you don't leave your partner but i did and it was the last time i saw him this is camp four right here at the south call as soon as i left the south summit 3 30 i climbed down into that thunderstorm and immediately started to snow and blow by 6 pm i was right here right above camp and it was a full-blown blizzard well below zero 70 knot winds and i had to get down this steep blue ice and i didn't know how i was going to do it finally by seven i was down and when i got to the tents i could look back and there were about a dozen climbers strung out behind me the first of them was right here less than 15 minutes behind me i think well i made it down they won't have any problem either so i dove into my tent didn't account for anybody sort of violated another rule um what i didn't take into account was in the 15 minutes i got got to camp the storm picked up huge in a huge way and it went from being just a blizzard to blowing hurricane strength winds and 11 climbers got down to here and they coalesced under the leadership of neil bidelman from you know they're from two different expeditions from scott's group and rob's group including two of my teammates beck weathers and and yasuko namba and neil didn't know how he was gonna get him down the steep ice so he decided he did a smart thing he didn't think he'd get him down safely so he did an end run way around here but when he started to come back it was blowing too hard and they couldn't see their own feet and the blowing snow into their faces because they're facing the wind to get back felt like a sand blaster and then they got lost and didn't know where they were and almost walked off the kengshan face and um neil realized they were going to die he didn't they're going to get hurt so he sat him down where they were out on the other side of the call and they waited for the storm to clear they waited all night and they were out of oxygen by now growing colder and colder and weaker and weaker finally at 1 a.m it was still blowing like hell but the sky overhead cleared enough so cliff shoning one of the clients and neil figured out where they were and they headed back to camp with a couple others who could still walk but they had to leave behind five climbers four of them were too weak to move yasko namba beck weathers from my team sandy pittman and charlotte fox from scott's team and tim madsen another client from aspen who was feeling strong volunteered to stay with him so these five stayed behind and cleve and neal and the others staggered back to camp the last of their strength fairly alive and when they got there anatoly was waiting for him anatoly had come down hours earlier before anyone else which was also controversial but because of that he was here and he was arrested and he was able to go out into the storm now he was it's not just that he was rested it was an incredibly courageous thing for him to do um no one else had either the strength or the courage to do it and i totally tried to rouse people but none of the people he found would go out with him so he went out alone and he went out three times into the storm risking his own life and he brought back charlotte and sandy save their lives and tim came back too but he he thought that yasuko and back they appeared to be dead so he left him out there i didn't know any of this until the next morning i just you know lightly dove into my tent was delirious sort of didn't have any oxygen that night so it was half conscious all night and six am stuart my teammate shook me and said john something terrible has happened back in yasuko are dead scott fisher's up there above somewhere and he's dead rob hall spent the night right here at the south summit 3000 feet higher and now he's calling on the radio and we turn on the radio and rob was saying doug is gone and andy's missing they were with me last night but they're not with me now then he said that he was so cold he'd survived the night but he was so cold his legs didn't work and he couldn't walk and he needed help and we were all in shock we didn't know what to do none of us could barely crawl let alone climb the mountain all over again we thought it's all over we doesn't have a chance now ang dorji had climbed the mountain the day before too but he wasn't prepared to leave rob this he just couldn't do that he was so dedicated and loyal so he and another sherpa named lok pachiri loaded up with oxygen and tea and on the morning of may 11th they headed up to try to save rob for perspective this is an unthinkable thing that they've decided to do it's amazing it defies belief for perspective this is camp four where we all are the night before this is where they'd huddled neil and cleveland that group had been trapped out here and anatoly had risked his life and made three trips from here to here which in good weather is a 15-minute walk but had taken all of anatolia's considerable strength and skill to do that it was a monumental heroic effort for which he deserves the utmost credit but now as impressive as that was angerji and lokpa are proposing to climb the whole damn mountain rob is up here at 3000 feet higher it's there's no comparison this is infinitely harder but they did it they set out in worsening weather by 3 pm they were all the way up here and then this storm kicked into high gear again harder than ever and they almost died and they had to turn around they're going to save their own lives and it was a really horrible moment because we all knew that pretty much sealed rob's faith and we had to call up on the radio and tell them you know rob anderson lockport had to turn around and rob put on a brave face and said oh no big deal i can spend the night up here just send them up again in the morning with some tea and i'll be fine and then he was patched through on the satellite phone to new zealand where his wife jan arnold was she was seven months pregnant with our first child and and jan climbed the mountain in 93. she knows what it's like up there she knows that he might as well be on the moon it's like apollo 13. there's no rescues out of the question now but they pretended that everything was going to be fine and they had this wrenching conversation the whole mountain heard because it's broadcast over the radio you know she's telling them oh you know i'll fix you up when you get home and he's asking if she's comfortable back in new zealand and it was it was awful and then then he said well going to bed now you know talk to you in the morning next morning we called and called and there was no answer and it was clear what had happened may 11th the day after we summited um the group came in and reported that back in yaska were dead and a search team went out to confirm this when the wind died a little bit and when they found them just a short walk across the call to their horror they found that both yasuko and back were still breathing barely could barely detect a pulse but they were live unconscious and they didn't know what to do so they came back and we all talked it over and none of us had the strength to drag them so it was decided we had to leave them up out there an act of triage we all assumed they'd be dead within the hour seven hours later after leading them out there beck weathers somehow woke up he was blind to the point where he could only see in one eye about three feet he'd focus three feet he'd lost a glove so actually both his hands were frozen solid essentially somehow he summoned his incredible will to live and he blind and frozen he woke up and staggered into camp on his own he somehow found you

Channel: David Snow

Views: 277,012

Keywords: Everest Summit, Everest climbing expedition, everest expedition, everest climbing, best everest documentary, everest documentary, everest film, everest full length film, everest documentaries, best everest films, everest climbing footage, best everest stories, everest hiking, 1996 Everest, 1996 everest disaster, 1996 Mt Everest climb, 1996 Everest expedition, jon krakauer everest, into thin air, jon krakauer into thin air, jon krakauer, into thin air movie, everest movie

Id: q5LtdIwZF50

Length: 83min 47sec (5027 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Latin-Danzig]

Jon Krakauer Wrote a great book called “into the wild” which was then made into the film of the same name. Book is amazingly yet simply moving. A great story told well by a great who himself is a very interesting person.