Left for Dead on Everest · Beck Weathers

all right shall we begin on the 10th of may 1996 high in the death zone on everest in a terrible storm some nine individuals gonna perish the following day one of those individuals was quite literally granted a second chance at life that individual was myself and this is the story of those people and those few days it takes about a week to get there as you walk in as part of that acclimatization process and as you do so every once in a while you're going to come around and turn in the trail and there off in the distance is this enormous giant and it thrusts it sum it up dwarfing everything that surrounds it and blowing off the downstream side for a mile or a mile and a half is a plume of snow and ice that reminds you that this mountain summoned at 29 000 now 35 feet exists at an altitude the jet airliners normally fly and that for almost all of the year the jet stream with its winds of 150 200 miles an hour is going to sit squarely down on the hill and one time in the spring and one time in the fall they're just going to briefly lift up provide you a window of opportunity so you can tag it then try to get back down alive ironically though by the time that you get to everest base at seventeen thousand six hundred feet you cannot see the mountain at all it is completely hidden from your view and kind of a climber shangri-la but lies before you beginning right at the edge of the camp and going almost straight up for two thousand feet the great khumbu ice fall there to meet a precipice edge where hidden from your view gradually slopes away rising another two thousand feet the valley of the western comb will then be embraced by an amphitheater a horseshoe these big eight thousand meter mountains with everest on the left lotsy in the middle noopsie on the right and rising to the upper reaches is a four thousand foot blue ice wall and all of the snow in all of the ice it descends there upon is going to flow as a river down that valley until it hits that precipice edge there to tumble the 2000 feet the glacier below and the ice fall is made of blocks of ice the size of multi-story buildings separated by crevasses some so vast you cannot see the bottom and the whole thing moves three to four feet a day now that is a point of some concern to you you're going to be standing inside for about 20 hours of climbing and every once in a while one of these blocks or cerax is just going to lean over and as it does so its thousands of tons of weight would just crash down that hill instantly crushing anything beneath it in fact we were all too tragically reminded of in the spring of 2014 with the death of 16 sherpa in the upper ice fall if we were to take anyone from this room today including myself and were to instantly magically transport you to that summit you would have to deal with the medical fact that in the first few moments that you were there you'd be unconscious in the next few moments that you were there you'd be dead your body simply will not withstand the enormous physiologic shock of being suddenly praised into such an oxygen deprived environment but you can do as we have done over the preceding weeks by starting all the way down and climbing up and all the way back down and up higher and back down each time pushing that envelope you basically say to your body i am going to climb this thing and i'm taking you with me so get ready by way of introduction two groups are going to meet on that fateful day ours is headed by rob hall who is a tall gentle humorous enormously experienced climber out of new zealand he's backed up by mike groom in australian and by young andy harris who's going to be climbing and guiding for the first time in one of these big 8 000 meter mountains if you were to go into any of these high altitude camps you would rapidly discover that this is not a beautiful body sport in fact we pretty much look like a bunch of homeless trying to find a subway but andy is the antithesis of that because he's a big handsome athletic kid who looks like he can play pro quarterback for any team in the nfl so he's going to be our photo opportunity and once you get past the level of the pro the certified mountain monster you get down to the level of the grunt that's where i exist as does john cracker i think you all know that john's written a pretty good book into thin air chronicling this story through his eyes and voice actually my wife peach and i wrote our own book writing it wasn't all that hard but when it came to naming it i was seriously bereft in the idea department it had not entirely escaped my attention that when john released into thin air he seriously shifted his tax bracket so i thought i'd fall back on my college skills that is plagiarism and i was going to steal some of john's thunder and so about two point type on the bottom of the book that say this book was written by beckwithers who's a friend of john kerr by the time you got home and realized you've been had you'd be too embarrassed to bring it back john's first book was into the wild he followed that up with into thin air so we decided we'd call ours into the icu with the emphasis on that icy part also in our group we have yasko namba she is a 47 year old japanese female climber who on this outing will come the oldest woman to summit everest the second japanese woman to do so and the first japanese woman to complete that seven summits quest for this she will pay an enormous price as will doug hansen 46 year old postal worker from seattle and rounding up our cast of characters the baby of our group stewart hutchison he's 35 canadian cardiologists we get pretty old pretty fast after that john's next he's 42 then we're 46 47 49 53 53 56 this crowd is old enough to apply for the aarp discount i don't think i ever got a check back but i can go out the mailbox occasionally and look you don't know the other team is headed by scott fisher now scott is a charismatic ponytailed hollywood kind of guy and he runs a group called mountain madness which pretty much sums up scott's idea of how you climb and he's backed up with neil heidelman who's not normally a guide but is an aerospace engineer as well as by anatoly nikolaevich bukriff a russian one of the world's premier high altitude climbers and a physical force in their grunt section we have sandy hill pittman now sandy is a new york socialite and she goes to everest that year seeking fame and achieving notoriety there is a difference you got to be careful that which you see cause you may get it tim madsen climber and boyfriend one of my favorite people charlotte fox now charlotte is a big strong raw bone-strapping handsome gal who gives a lie to the idea that high-altitude mountaineering is strictly a male-dominated adrenaline-driven macho sport i generally say at this point that charlotte could easily clean this room in a fair bar fight but in deference to the august nature of this group she could easily clean this room in a fair wine and cheese fight we're going to begin our story on the 9th of may we're halfway up that 4000 foot wall at 24 000 feet and because there is no place which is flat behind which you can place a tent you take an axe and you carve out a platform big enough to put the tent upon it so you can rest that night remembering a couple of fairly simple rules one of which is you don't sleepwalk in the other is that when you get up the very first thing you've got to do without fail is to put the 12 knives back on each foot the crampons that they're gonna stick you to this hill failure to do so can be somewhat catastrophic as one of the taiwanese fellows is gonna get to learn that morning he gets out of his tent and his inner boots takes two steps to relieve himself then goes down that hill into a crevasse leading to his death fortunately we didn't know it so it didn't affect our spirits our plan that day was pretty simple we're going to get up with the sun start climbing climb all day to get to the high camp late that afternoon rest three or four hours get back up start climbing again climb all through the night through the next day to hit the summit by noon but absolutely no later than two and this is a point which has been drilled into you absolutely no later than two because if you're not moving fast enough to get there by two you are not moving fast enough to get back down before darkness traps you on the mountain and as you begin to ascend into the death zone that part of the mountain above 25 000 feet the stresses on your body are incredible you're burning 12 000 calories a day this means you're gonna drop three pounds of solid body weight every day that you're up there in the water waiter jenny craig like i lost 30 pounds the last couple of weeks that's not considered to be excessive the thought of food is completely repugnant to you and if you're able to force yourself to put food in your mouth to it and swallow it your body will not digest it the work of breathing is so great you blow off up to six liters of water a day through respiration alone and the effort it takes to melt ice back down into water at low barometric pressures is such that you never catch up and you are constantly dehydrated you no longer can sleep the air hunger the gasping the drive to breathe is so great you can rest but you can never sleep we get to the high camp late that afternoon it's extremely cold the wind is blowing very hard and at some visceral level i'm grateful because i know we can't climb in these conditions and i am hammered and i think to myself if i can just rest tonight i am bound to feel better tomorrow than i feel right now intellectually i know this is completely false because the whole point of the moment is arrive here with just enough left to hit it and get out of this place every second that you are up there your body is literally dying beneath you hi camp on everest exists at 26 000 feet in a saddle or a call that lies between everest and lots of it's the south call same route that hillary took in 53 and of course the mountain hadn't changed at all and because of the shape of this narrow area those jet stream winds that normally exist are compressed as they funnel through here and it leaves a boiler plate of rock and ice and the only thing that exists year to year are the discarded canisters of oxygen and the scattered bodies of the climbers who preceded you makes it pretty easy to give directions go up that third body on the left shoot a right and go over you not have to get lost we lie down in the tents and mother nature being the perverse gal that she is and about three hours caused those winds to completely cease and rob sticks his head and the tent says guys saddle up we're going for it and i start to get my little things together and i think well maybe i have time that's okay yeah i feel pretty crummy but i feel better than i thought i was going to feel but i am concerned and it turns out prophetically so we're two members of our group and the sleeping bag to my immediate left is doug he looks like somebody's taken that ax and just worked him over he's been sick he's not been climbing well and even more so than the rest of us he's not been feeding and watering and resting the machine that has to carry you up there doug had climbed this same hill the year before with rob and he got within 300 vertical feet of that summit and he had to be turned around and he came back this year vowing that no one is going to turn him around again going to any summit is optional getting back down is mandatory and one of the things you got to know really as a moral obligation to those with whom you climb is with this step how much do i have left with this step can i still turn and get back down to safety i didn't think doug knew it and frankly i didn't think he cared the other individual for whom i was concerned was yasko she is an itty-bitty waif of a person she cannot weigh more than 90 pounds dripping wet and even though she is an individual of enormous drive the gear that you carry up there weighs exactly the same whether you weigh that 90 pounds you weigh 200 pounds i just didn't think that little tiny body of hers had the horses to catch the checks her mind was writing we get out of the tents we put on our oxygen mask these are big fighter pilot masks so we stand around looks like a bunch of deranged fighter pilots he got on these enormous down suits the kind of thing mom sends you out to play in the snow you can't do much more than waddle back and forth but that night as we begin to move across the flat expanse of the call leading to the summit face it is an exquisite evening the wind is absolutely still it's about 10 below zero which is really very warm for a big mountain and because there is no man-made light anywhere the stars above you shine with such an incredible brilliance that you can see them reflected in that cold blue ice beneath your feet and they are so close to you that you can just reach up pluck them one at a time from the heavens place them in your pocket and save them for later and as you begin to move your body assumes that slow rhythmic almost metronome like fashion of movement which is ingrained between the frame of your being through the years of prior climbing with each step those knives bite into that surface with a distinctive and as you move you shift your weight in the cold the metal in your boots in your pack squeak in response you start across start up the summit face and there's just nothing to it it's just straight up and all you got to do is step and rest and step and rest hour after hour after endless hour and about halfway up the face you've got to move and a traverse to the left and this is an inherently more dangerous kind of move in mountaineering it's harder to protect the traverse you've got to be able to see where you're putting your feet when i get here i realize i can't see the face of this mountain at all some year and a half before i had my eyes operated on in dallas radial keratotomy done so that i would be safer in the mountains mountain weather and eyeglasses simply do not mix at all but unbeknownst to me and virtually every ophthalmologist in this country there are individuals if you do that and then take them to extreme altitude the shape of the front of their eye changes dramatically they get huge vision shifts and they go effectively blind but i'm not worried about it because i know coming to me in the next couple of hours is a solution to this problem which is the sun that exists on one of these mountains is not a sun you have ever seen before it is an enormous radiant powerful ball of light and energy so great it will burn the inside of your mouth it will burn the inside of your nose you take off those protective lenses with moments your retinas are seared to total blindness and i know that once that sun is fully out even behind those jet black lenses my pupils are going down to a pinpoint and when they do so everything's going to be infinitely in focus it's just like the pinhole cameras some of us had his kids i know it's going to happen but i am forced to stand and wait and go from fourth in line to some 30-something climbers to absolutely dead last well everybody traipses past me it's not unpleasant actually it's kind of social you got a chance to see some folks you hadn't seen in a while i thought hey ed how's the wife and kids and you're pretty much handshaking and networking and exchanging business cards and acting like the walmart greeter so the sun begins to light that face you can see where to put your feet you take the front point knives you dig them into the hill you move across you achieve the vertical line and you go up to the summit ridge by the time i get there my right eye is completely blurred which means that i don't have any depth perception not good in this environment my left eye a little blurry but it's basically okay but i know i can't climb above this point my vision improves i believe it will but i'm forced to go to rob and tell him this whole sad tale and i say rob you guys go ahead and boogie on up the hill at the point that i can see i'll just wander up after you bet i don't like that idea you got 30 minutes if you can see in 30 minutes climb on if you can't see in 30 minutes so i don't want you climbing and even though it has taken me years of work to reach this moment i can understand the wisdom of that decision so i say okay i'll accept that and then i do something really stupid if i can't see in that 30-minute window you're giving me at the point that i can i'm just going to head down to the high camp but i don't like that any better than the last one you just had because if i come down off the top and you're not standing here i'm not gonna have any idea whether you've gone safely down to that camp you're just gone for an 8 000 foot whipper i want you to promise me and i am serious about this i want you to promise me that you're going to stay here till i come back i said rob cross my heart hoped it died i'm sticking it never once crossed my mind that he would never come back i waited through that morning and it was a glorious day a cloudless sky the wind is still this enormous cathedral of mountain stretching as far as the eye can see the curvature of the earth visible beneath your feet three climbers out of our group begin to descend toward me there's been a slow down a bottleneck on the uppermost reaches they realize there is no way they can hit that summit by two they make the decision to come down and as they come to me they say come down with us i have really put myself in a box we have no radio i have no way to tell hall that i've left it says if i've never honored that commitment at all i just don't think i can do that and they say goodbye that would turn out to be the single worst decision that i'd make that day because what never crossed my mind was what was going to happen when the sun started to go back down the pupils open back up and you go blind i expected them back by three it came it went has been four been five now the mountain is starting to put itself to bed it is not threatening it does what it does every day the light has gone flat the temperatures beginning to drop the wind to pick up the snow to move and i realize i have stayed too long at the party and i am trapped another half hour goes by and here comes mike he's got yes go with him but she's so tired she can barely stand she looks like a walking corpse the same time here comes neil he's got some of the fisher crowd with him so we take yasco and hand her off uh to and mike short roast me which is exactly what it sounds like you think about 20 feet worth of rope tied around the waist of the down climber and 20 feet back is mike and that's going to add his stance and stability to mine if you want to get yourself killed on a mountain you do it going down not going up it's a whole lot more dangerous it's a good thing we do this because since i can't see i move commit and plant my weight but i believe to be solid and i step instead on nothing but air i come flipping right off the face the rope snaps pulls mike off his feet we both start to slide down the face together you take the axes you jam them in the hill you roll your body weight up on top of them to arrest the fall we'll do this another two or three times we get all the way down and he will later describe this as somewhat unnerving but except for some tears in a down suit and a whole lot of wounded pride no harm no foul we get down to the call and we know we are home free there is no way that another 30 maybe 45 minutes of the absolute outside of easy traverse we're going to be in those tents in those sleeping bags drinking hot tea and putting the day to bed you cannot see the camp but it is palpably close it's just right over there and as you begin to move across to finish that day you hear what begins behind you as a low growl sound that moves surrounds crescendos till it sounds like a squadron of 747s where their engines on absolute full you see these clowns blow you on the face they rise up they hit the edge and a wall of white rolls across the space of two or three minutes you were standing in a complete white out you no longer can see your feet you put your hand out in front of you it disappears personally standing next to you is no longer there on the disembodied headlamps floating in a wall of white i grab hold of mike's arm he's my eyes i dare not lose contact with him the temperature is rapidly plunging it is quickly 30 below zero inside the tenth that night that will measure in excess of 50 below these are winds above 70 knots wind chills way beyond 100 below zero and it is incredibly cold we now have to feel the slope of this hill to discern where the camp is that we no longer can see and we move like a bunch of first graders trying to play soccer nobody wanting to be separated one from the other and you turn and that's not it and you turn again and that's not it in the space of a few moments you're so turned around you don't have any idea what direction you're facing the only thing that exists is a male stream of wind and noise and ice and cold but you continue to move and the hair on the back of neil's neck spins up i don't know if this is intuition experience all the above but he says something is wrong here we're stopping good decision we're now 25 yards from the 7 000 foot vertical plunge off the can shung face the ice is rapidly down sloping and a few more paces the whole group simply would have skidded right off the hill but as you stop the other thing that stops is the furnace that keeps you alive the only way you stay warm up there is through constant unremitting unrelenting never-ending work to stand is to freeze to death and i know it's beginning to happen i no longer can feel or move my right arm this is not that uncommon in extremely cold conditions therefore it's pretty simple take off two of the three gloves you've got on that side take your arms stick it up underneath your coat against the skin of your chest and you can move your hand again you know it's okay take it back out the gloves back on go about your business but even though i have been in extremely cold places before as i pull those outer gloves off i felt something that i have never felt before even beneath that third expedition weight glove the skin on my hand on my arm froze solid as a wave of ascending pain and it so startled me that i loosened a grip in my glove in my left hand off in outer space just that fast i've got another pair of gloves exactly like it on the pack on my back they might as well be on the face of the moon there is no way you can take that pack off put it down and rummage through it this wind is strong enough to pick you up and throw you for one moment clouds overhead open up and you can see directly overhead the big difference one of the group yells out i've seen the stars i know where the camp is we rapidly formulated a plan which is pretty simple that is the strongest amongst us we're going to make a high-speed run in the direction we believe the camp to exist get help come back and bring the others in i talk about there's a mic i can walk okay i just can't see and i've got to hold on to his arm and i'm going to slow him down he's one of the stronger guys up there so i agree to remain by this time charlotte sandy yasko can't walk so we're the four who'll remain they begin to move from us and tim so you guys can go but i am not going to leave charlotte here and i got to tell you that takes an enormous amount of guts to voluntarily place your health in a storm like that knowing that maybe a self-imposed death sentence they move from us we lie down on the ice back to back belly to belly trying to get out of that wind and you turn to the person next to you and you yell at them you hit them you kick them anything to remain awake because one thing that every mountaineer knows it is a given a truth a fact an icon that if you allow yourself to be taken down by that cold it is a one-way ticket there's no way to put a heat source upon you to bring you back your core temperature will plunge into your heart stops we continue to struggle now the pain of the cold is entirely through your body and charlotte says i don't care anymore all i want to do is die quickly tim tusser wrong answer charlotte move your legs move your hands come on now sandy does something that makes a heck of a lot of sense to me because she becomes completely and utterly hysterical i don't want to die i don't want my hands are freezing my face it's freezing i don't want that i didn't say anything in large part because she was covering it pretty well she certainly was expressing my sentiments the other individual who is silent was yasko and that is a point which has haunted me all this time she was exhausted and she was terrified and i don't even know that she knew where she was but as they started to move from us she desperately clung to neal's arm and he had to take his hand and strip hers so he could walk away from us we continue struggle and as i do so i realize i'm not so cold anymore and even in my befuddled state i know this is not a good thing and try though i do slowly gently inexorably the cold moves through you and darkness claims you by the time they get back to camp it is all they can do to crawl on their hands and knees across the threshold of those tents they're too exhausted to stand up they're not coming back the sherpa won't and there's not going to be any rescue that day anatoly had forsaken his duties as a guide he'd climb for himself by himself without oxygen going straight up straight back down he didn't say hi bye or kiss my grits to anybody he's been in his tent the last couple of hours recovering if that's where his story ended the climbing community would have stripped the flesh off of his bones they are not a particularly forgiving bunch but he did that night what no one else could or would alone he went into that storm three times finding no one in the first two attempts and the third locating our little huddle by the face where he would then bring in each of the three fisher climbers and leave the two hole climbers he's told at least three stories what occurred in that encounter and i believe all of them because it really doesn't matter by saving those three people who otherwise surely would have died anatoly redeemed himself and became a hero i think that many of you know that he will subsequently perish in an avalanche on annapurna on christmas day as a side part of this story because i think it is an interesting study in people choices morality doug that day was climbing poorly he went past the two o'clock the three o'clock the four o'clock i don't know why he did it i don't know why rob let him do it but the year before when he came so close he looked good going up but when he turned he lost it and he had to be helped down your body doesn't carry you up there your mind does your body has been exhausted countless hours ago and it is only through will and focus and drive and determination do you command your body to move and if you lose that your body is a dead and worthless thing beneath you this year doug made it all the way to the summit but as he turned he did exactly the same thing again and that's all he had that is all he brought with him now rob's got a heck of a problem on his hands he cannot rescue doug he cannot get dug down from this place he can yell at him he can encourage him he can stay with him but he cannot do it for him if he leaves doug doug is dead if he stays with him they both are probably going to die he gets on the radio he calls down the base they talk about this and they say rob i know this is hard but you can't save him save yourself it comes as no surprise to those of us who knew him to know he could ever do that and face himself again as a human being he was quite literally damned if he did and doomed if he did not he gets back on the radio said guys we're in desperate trouble and bless this sweet young heart young andy about a quarter of the way down he's pretty much gone he hears it and he once again turns and he slowly labors his way back up that hill gets the cash oxygen carries it all the way back to them and the next moment's trying to descend exhausted and he'll fall to his death that night trying to cross the knife edge that separates the north from the south summits doug is going to peel off and rob will slowly freeze to death over the next 24 hours in full view of the world he survived that night but the next day his darkness began to descend and there was no longer any hope they contacted his wife jan in new zealand pregnant at seven months with their first child and they held that satellite phone up to the radio and everyone on that mountain with the radio more silent witness to their last moments together they named their child she to him rob hold on we'll get to you i don't care how you come back to me i'll take care of you he to her sleep well my darling i'll be okay and both of them knowing exactly what lay ahead and when those moments had passed rob no longer had to be strong and he didn't know the radio was still on and you could hear him quietly weeping as he had to face his own imminent death the following morning storm abated somewhat winds dropped to about 30 knots and stuart gets out of the tent and along with three sherpa he comes over to find our bodies yes go and i lie next to each other largely buried in snow and ice and he moves first to her and he reaches down he grabs her by the coat he pulls her up she has a three inch thick layer of ice across her face a mask which he peels back and her skin is porcelain her eyes are dilated but she is still breathing he moves to me pulls me up cleans the ice out of my eyes off of my beard so he can stare into my face and i like yes go and barely clinging to life you would later say you'd never seen a human being so close to death and still breathing and coming from a cardiologist i'll accept that at face value what do you do he turned to the lead sherpa the answer really was quite simple you leave them every mountaineer knows that once you go into hyperthermic coma in the high mountains you never ever ever wake up they are going to die anyway it will be more merciful to leave them and if we take them back it will only endanger our lives they move from us i don't begrudge that decision on my own behalf but how much would it have taken to take yes go back she was so tiny at least she could have died in the tent surrounded by people and not alone on the ice they get back to camp and they tell them we're dead radio down the base satellite link in the warm beautiful spring sunny saturday morning in dallas texas the phone in our house rings peach answers and they tell her that becca's been killed ascending from the summit ridge she asked them is there any hope no i'm sorry there's been a positive body identification i'm sorry she then must go and awaken our two children and tell them that their father will never come home again that afternoon 22 hours in the storm 15 hours frozen face down on the ice a miracle occurred and that miracle simply stated was that i opened my eyes that's it i opened my eyes not that i would stand and struggle alone back to the high camp the next day i would stand again and walk the four thousand vertical feet down that blue ice wall the next day the world's highest helicopter rescue would occur none of those big things i was given a chance to try and i lay there warm comfortable in my own bed the light streaming to me through the window and as i awakened directly in front of my face is my gloveless dead hand a gray marble lifeless thing and i took it and i hid it on the ice in front of me it bounced off make a sound like a block of wood and had the marvelous effect of focusing my attention and telling me i am not in my own bed i am somewhere on that mountain i don't know where and i know innately the calvary's not coming because if they were going to be there they already would have been there and i can see before me as clearly as i see you my family and i knew that if i did not stand i would spend an eternity on this spot i struggled with my feet took off the pack discarded it along with the axe one shot deal if i don't make that camp i'm not going to need them and they're going to slow me down that moment both symbolically and very much in reality those were the last things i owned on this earth someone that night had yelled above the storm what direction does the wind blow over the high camp and the answer was if the wind hadn't shifted at all the wind blows up the face across the camp across the call which would mean if the wind hadn't shifted at all the camp ought to be somewhere upwind and i decided that i would face into that wind because it was as good as the 359 other choices i had and i would walk into it if i fell down i would get up if i fell down again i would get up and i would keep walking until i walked into that camp fell down he could not stand or i walked off the face of that mountain began that journey both of my hands were completely frozen my face had been destroyed by the cold i was profoundly hypothermic i had not eaten in three days i had no water in two days i was lost and i was almost completely blind a lesser person could be discouraged but you continue to move in that oh so familiar fashion and as those moments pass i realized that i am not going to get to this alive and i look back with lucid recall because the thing that so surprised me was that i was not at all frightened and i am not a particularly brave individual i would have thought having to come to grips with that moment that i'd be terrified but that is not what i felt at all rather there was an enormous overwhelming encompassing sense of melancholy that i would not say goodbye that i would never again say i love you to my wife that i would never again all of my children was just not acceptable i tell you what you don't think about you do not say to yourself if only i bought that mercedes i had my eye on be a happy camper and if i had one more plaque certificate of appreciation on my loving me wall attesting to the fact that i am indeed a total stud muffin this would be a lot easier but you continue to move and it's getting awfully close now because things are really moving around on me and i see these two odd blue rocks in front of me and the thought flashes through my mind those might be the tense and as quickly as i think that i say to myself don't do that because when you walk up to them and they're nothing but rocks you may be discouraged you may stop and you cannot do that you can walk up to them you go right past them it makes no difference and i get within a hundred feet of my odd blue rocks todd burleson stands up and he looks at me this thing just come to him out of the mist he doesn't recognize me my face is so blackened and distorted but he does come to me takes me by the arm to the first tent it's scott's tent they know he's dead and he's not going to need it place me in two sleeping bags hot water bottles under each arm shot of steroids in the leg and they call down to the base camp doctor and say you are not going to believe what just walked into this camp and the response back is that's fascinating but it changes nothing he's going to die don't bring him down fortunately they didn't tell me that they called up peach and they told her that i was not as dead as they thought i was but i am critically injured now they're trying to tell her one thing but what she hears is an entirely different thing they do that night place me alone in that tent to finish the work that needs to be done and the storm comes back in with the same ferocities the night before because the tent is designed to give before the force the wind rather than be ripped asunder as those gusts come in it presses on your chest on your face so hard you can't breathe until you roll onto your side and leave a small space in front of your face my right hand my right forearm start to swell at the level of a wristwatch that i'm wearing which i try desperately to bite off but i will tell you seiko makes a darn good watch band and i was completely ineffectual doors on the tent blow out it fills with snow i come out of the bags and i am once again in the storm the following morning everybody in the camp leaves but three people remaining when i hear a noise outside hello any anybody out there and john krakauer comes over looks in his jaw dropped down to the middle of his chest and i said john if you don't mind would you ask pete athens there's a guy up there if he'd step over here i kind of like to talk to him he comes over looks in and i am in fact still alive i'm fully dressed got the boots on you don't take them off your feet swell so much you can't get back into them so it's a fairly simple thing stand up put the 12 knives back on each foot drink two liters of tea and with pete and todd's helping a quarter of the way down the help of the imax film crew my home movie guys we walked that four thousand vertical feet down into camp two where they dress my hands and as they do so we hear a rumor of a helicopter rescue now to those of us there those of us in the know this is a joke ain't happened ain't ever going to happen the lowest camp in this mountain is above the ceiling of their helicopter the air is so thin they simply fall out of the air we know that but nobody told peach and because she did not know it could not be done she did it along with a bunch of north dallas power moms any one of whom can run a fortune 500 company out of their kitchen they proceed to call everybody in the united states if you didn't personally receive a phone call you weren't home you had your machine turned off and in so doing they enlist the aid of kay bailey hutchinson and tom daschle and one of those rare bipartisan moments talked about but never seen they light a fire under the state department who contacts a fine young man in the embassy of kathmandu david shinstead who works with a beautiful nepalese woman in new kc and the k c stands for chetri and this is the warrior cast of depaul and this is something they take very seriously and she told him i know a man who believes that he has a brave heart but he has never been sufficiently challenged to know if this is true and i would ask him and they went to lieutenant colonel madon casey well as it turned this down yes completely foolhardy he said i will do this thing i will rescue. the back and we get up at 5 30 in the morning to walk the 2000 vertical feet down the valley we come to the precipice edge radio comes alive helicopter's here he's going to try it he's here for weathers one climber one climber only get ready and we receive this message coming down the valley toward us as a group of sherpa and they're dragging something between them and the thing they're dragging between them is michael gao he's a taiwanese climber his feet have been destroyed and he can't stand and we've got a problem we talk about this and i tell them i can't get on that helicopter that decision was not made because it was the right thing to do which i think it was it was made rather because i didn't want to ask myself that question every day for the rest of my life price was too dear helicopter rises into view moves up the valley begins to descend toward us and then just disappears off the face and i think this guy is not as stupid as i think he is because it's a supremely dumb idea if he puts this machine down here for any reason he can't take it off he's a dead man he's got to know that and he does know it he's not a climber he doesn't have the clothing the equipment the skills the experience and he's gonna be standing above two thousand most vicious feet of real estate on this planet and at this altitude the altitude alone can kill you before you get out of there once again helicopter rises into view this time it is one lone man he moves up the valley with slow deliberate movement and delicate precision he lays those kids on the surface he does not land he does not let the weight of this machine descend he has no idea this is solid or chiffon over air you never know when you're standing up there whether you're standing above the crevasse the power is full on his hands are frozen on the controls does not look left or right it changes your depth perception we grab mcaloo like a sack of potatoes we take him over there and we throw him in the back slam the door the tail comes up it does not rise but it does move toward that edge where he will then plunge out of sight as does my heart he's not coming back i've done a lot of stupid things in my life one time that i wouldn't do a second time and for him this clearly was in that category we stood there five ten minutes we didn't say anything because they just what do you think to say and then i heard most beautiful sound i have ever heard in my entire life that that distinctive chop of the helicopter and long before you can see it you can hear it as it claws its way up that face rising again that same lone man he moves up the valley with greater authority for the same delicate precision he lays those kids on the surface and i am not waiting i put it over there dive in the back door slam shut tail comes up and once again we're moving toward that precipice edge where he takes this machine screaming vertically down that face the blades are whipping around above you trying to grab hold which is there and cold and heavy and ditch provide lifted is alive beneath you it presses into your spine and pulls you back into the air and you know that you are safe he takes the machine puts it down at base we get mcleo put him back on get the co-pilot put him back on get all the gear stripped off this machine put it back on when he comes up to get me he's playing on 15 minutes of fuel to make this machine absolutely bone dry and i will tell you this man will never have to wonder again whether he has a brave heart he is to me the most extraordinary person in this story he doesn't know me he doesn't know my family and he has a family for whom he is the sole responsible individual we are separated by language by culture by religion by the entire breadth of this world but bound together by a bond of common humanity you learn a variety of lessons from such an experience one of the things that makes this story somewhat interesting is the common quality of the narrator i am not a person of any special gifts or strengths i am in the wrong place at the wrong time and except for walter mitty dreams i am an entirely ordinary individual and we are all of the same clay and if i can survive that which is unsurvivable so can you there exists within each of us an enormous well of strength if you will but believe it and reach out and grasp and embrace it and use it if you're going to come through something like this you have got to have within your life and anchor it can be your friends it can be your god can be as it was for me it is my family i learned that day that miracles do occur in fact i think they occur pretty commonly but if they're not the kind of miracle that reaches out and grabs you by the lapels and shoots you so hard your teeth come loose it's not big enough to be a miracle but my miracle was that i opened my eyes is that really any different than what you did this morning did you understand that do you know why you were granted one more day of life's most precious gift one of the things that happens to us as we age become more mature as we lose that sense of wonder and awe and astonishment in life it's just always there and the only time that you get to see it again is through the eyes of your own children when they see life for the very first time and you say yes i remember that that's how it was and then it's gone i get to see that every single day and it is an exquisite treasure the fellows that put me back together not much of this is original equipment you know remark you still got some scars there and we can buff those out of there and you'll never see them again and i say oh no you're not i want to get up every day for the rest of my life i want to look into that mirror and i want to be reminded of the lessons i've learned because i opened my eyes to more than that mountain i saw my own future and i didn't like it the path that i had chosen led to the same lonely end whether it was at that moment on the mountain or decades hence the relentless pursuit of success goals ambition without balance in my life was driving out of my life that which was most precious to me i traded my hands for my family and my future and it is a bargain i readily accept i have traveled the whole world over seeking that which would fulfill me make me whole and give me peace and it was in my own backyard in the final analysis that which matters really the only thing that matters are the people you hold in your heart and those who hold you in theirs thank you absolutely [Applause] oh you

Channel: David Snow

Views: 11,604

Rating: 4.8801498 out of 5

Keywords: beck weathers, dr beck weathers, everest, movie everest, Everest Summit, Summit of mt Everest;, Mt Everest Summit;, Everest climbing expedition, everest expedition, everest climbing, best everest documentary, everest documentary, climbing everest, everest film, everest deathzone, everest documentaries, best everest films, everest climbing footage, everest death rate, everest hiking, 1996 Everest, 1996 everest disaster, 1996 Mt Everest climb, 1996 Everest expedition

Id: 9u4iTBQNlrw

Length: 62min 36sec (3756 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021