PRE-COURSE READING
EXTRACTS FROM INTO THIN AIR – JON KRAKAUER (1997)
In the early 1990’s Rob Hall made a considerable name for himself in the mountaineering fraternity by summitting the highest mountains on each of the seven continents in only seven months.
In an attempt to capitalise on this and generate long term prospects in professional climbing, he and a partner established a company called Adventure Consultants. This company would specialise in high altitude guiding – taking paying clients up and back down the ‘seven-summits’. Convinced that there would be enough potential clients with ‘ample cash,’ but insufficient experience, Adventure Consultants was born.
About the same time, a nu`mber of other climbers had similar ideas. Several companies specialising in high altitude guiding were launched. Amongst these was Mountain Madness, headed by Scott Fischer. In 1994 Fischer ascended Everest without supplemental oxygen, and a couple of years later he led a high profile ascent of Kilimanjaro that netted half a million dollars for the charity CARE.
Most of the companies in the high-altitude guiding market were only barely making a profit. In 1995 Fischer took home only about $12,000. Future profitability depended on the ability to attract high profile clients, who would spend large amounts to join an expedition, and then to get them safely up and down the mountain.
With both Hall and Fischer mounting expeditions to Everest in the spring of 1996, the scene was set for some friendly competition between the two. Jon Krakauer, a journalist and experienced mountain climber approached both organisations to discuss joining their teams as a client. In return for a discount, he would write a number of high profile articles in ‘Outside Magazine’ – a publication widely read by climbing enthusiasts in North America. He eventually decided to climb with Rob Hall and Adventure Consultants.
On May 9th 1996, five expeditions launched an assault on the summit of Mount Everest. The conditions seemed perfect. Twenty-four hours later one climber had died and 23 other men and women were caught in a desperate struggle for their lives as they battled against a ferocious storm that threatened to tear them from the mountain. In all eight climbers died that day in the worst tragedy Everest has ever seen.
Jon Krakauer, an accomplished climber, joined a commercial expenditure run by guides for paying clients, many of whom had little or no climbing experience. In Into Thin Air he gives a thorough and chilling account of the ill-fated climb and reveals the complex web of decisions and circumstances that left a group of amateurs fighting for their lives in the thin air and sub-zero cold above 26,000 feet – a place climbers call ‘The Death Zone’. Into Thin Air reveals the hard realities of mountaineering and echoes with the frantic calls of climbers lost high on the mountain and way beyond help.
The following extracts are taken from the book Krakauer eventually wrote about the expedition, entitled Into thin Air.
On the morning of March 31, two days after arriving in Kathmandu the assembled members of the 1996 Adventure Consultants Everest Expedition crossed the tarmac of Tribhuvan International Airport and climbed aboard a Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter operated by Asian Airlines. A dented relic of the Afghan war, it was as big as a school bus, seated twenty-six passengers, and looked like it had been riveted together in somebody’s backyard. The flight engineer latched the door and handed out wads of cotton to stuff in our ears, and the behemoth chopper lumbered into the air with a head-splitting roar. The floor was piled high with duffels, backpacks, and cardboard boxes. Jammed into jump seats around the perimeter of the aircraft was the human cargo, facing inward, knees wedged against chests. The deafening whine of the turbines made conversation out of the question. It wasn’t a comfortable ride, but nobody complained.
Glancing around the helicopter’s capacious interior, I tried to fix the names of my team-mates in my memory. In addition to guides Rob Hall and Andy Harris there was Helen Wilton, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of four, who was returning for her third season as Base Camp Manager. Caroline Mackenzie – an accomplished climber and physician in her late twenties – was the expedition doctor and, like Helen, would be going no higher than Base Camp. Lou Kasischke, a gentlemanly lawyer I’d met at the airport, had climbed six of the Seven Summits – as had Yasuko Namba, forty-seven, a taciturn personnel director who worked at the Tokyo branch of Federal Express. Beck Weathers, forty-nine, was a garrulous pathologist from Dallas. Stuart Hutchinson, thirty-four, attired in a Ren and Stimpy T-shirt, was a cerebral, somewhat wonkish Canadian cardiologist on leave from a research fellowship. John Taske, at fifty-six the oldest member of our group, was an anaesthesiologist from Brisbane who’d taken up climbing after retiring from the Australian army. Frank Fischbeck, fifty-three, a dapper genteel publisher from Hong Kong, had attempted Everest three times with one of Hall’s competitors; in 1994 he’d gotten all the way to the South Summit, just 300 vertical feet below the top. Doug Hansen, forty-six, was an American postal worker who’d gone to Everest with Hall in 1995 and, like Fischbeck, had reached the South Summit before turning back.
I wasn’t sure what to make of my fellow clients. In outlook and experience they were nothing like the hard-core climbers with whom I usually went into the mountains. But they seemed like nice, decent folks, and there wasn’t a certifiable asshole in the entire group – at least not one who was showing his true colors at this early stage of the proceedings.
For the most part I attributed my growing unease to the fact that I’d never climbed as a member of such a large group – a group of complete strangers, no less. Aside from one Alaska trip I’d done twenty-one years earlier, all my previous expeditions had been undertaken with one or two trusted friends, or alone.
In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber’s actions can affect the welfare of the entire team.
The consequences of a poorly tied knot, a stumble, a dislodged rock, or some other careless deed are as likely to be felt by the perpetrator’s colleagues as the perpetrator. Hence it’s not surprising that climbers are typically wary of joining forces with those who bona fides are unknown to them.
But trust in one’s partners is a luxury denied those who sign on as clients on a guided ascent; one must put one’s faith in the guide instead. As the helicopter droned toward Lukla, I suspected that each of my teammates hoped as fervently as I that Hall had been careful to weed out clients of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another’s shortcomings.
Once the team landed at the Nepalese village where the hike to Base Camp would begin, they met their team of Sherpas. Sherpas remain an enigma to most foreigners, who tend to regard them through a romantic screen. People unfamiliar with the demography of the Himalaya often assume that all Nepalese are Sherpas, when in fact there are no more than 20,000 Sherpas in all of Nepal, a nation the size of North Carolina that has some 20 million residents and more than fifty distinct ethnic groups. Sherpas are a mountain people, devoutly Buddhist, whose forebears migrated south from Tibet four or five centuries ago. There are Sherpa villages scattered throughout the Himalaya of eastern Nepal, and sizeable Sherpa communities can be found in Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, but the heart of Sherpa country is the Kumbu, a handful of valleys draining the southern slopes of Mount Everest – a small, astonishingly rugged region completely devoid of roads, cars, or wheeled vehicles of any kind.
For better and worse, over the past two decades the economy and culture of the Khumbu has become increasingly and irrevocably tied to the seasonal influx of trekkers and climbers, some 15,000 of whom visit the region annually. Sherpas who learn technical climbing skills and work high on the peaks – especially those who have summitted Everest – enjoy great esteem in their communities. Those who become climbing stars, alas, also stand a fair chance of losing their lives: ever since 1922, when seven Sherpas were killed in an avalanche during the second British expedition, a disproportionate number of Sherpas have died on Everest – fifty-three all told. Indeed, they account for more than a third of all Everest fatalities.
Despite the hazards, there is stiff competition among Sherpas for the twelve to eighteen staff positions on the typical Everest expedition. The most sought-after jobs are the half dozen openings for skilled climbing Sherpas, who can expect to earn $1,400 to $2,500 for two months of hazardous work – attractive pay in a nation mired in grinding poverty and with an annual per capita income of around $160.
Rob was always especially concerned about the welfare of the Sherpas who worked for him. Before our group departed Kathmandu, he had sat all of us down and given us an uncommonly stern lecture about the need to show our Sherpa staff gratitude and proper respect. “The Sherpas we’ve hired are the best in the business,” he told us. “They work incredibly hard for not very much money by Western standards. I want you all to remember we would have absolutely no chance of getting to the summit of Everest without the support of our Sherpas.”
In a subsequent conversation, Rob confessed that in past years he’d been critical of some expedition leaders for being careless with their Sherpa staff. In 1995 a young Sherpa had died on Everest; Hall speculated that the accident might have occurred because the Sherpa had been “allowed to climb high on the mountain without proper training. I believe that it’s the responsibility of those of us who run these trips to prevent that sort of thing from happening.”
Jon Krakauer had some interesting views of his team mates, but they also had views on his presence on the team. When asked what they thought about having a journalist in the group, one of his team mates commented:
It added a lot of stress. I was always a little concerned with the idea – you know, this guy’s going to come back and write a story that’s going to be read by a couple of million people. And, I mean, it’s bad enough to go up there and make a fool of yourself if it’s just you and the climbing group. That somebody may have you written across the pages of some magazine as a buffoon and a clown has got to play upon your psyche as to how you perform, how hard you’ll push. And I was concerned that it might drive people further than they wanted to go. And it might even for the guides. I mean, they want to go get people on top of the mountain because, once again, they’re going to be written about, and they’re going to be judged.
Amongst the many stakeholders for the expedition a few stood out.
This was Doug’s second shot at Everest with Rob Hall. The year before, Rob had forced him and three other clients to turn back just 330 feet below the top because the hour was late and the summit ridge was buried beneath a mantle of deep, unstable snow. “The summit looked sooooo close” Doug recalled with a painful laugh. “Believe me, there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about it.” He’d been talked into returning this year by Hall, who felt sorry that Hansen had been denied the summit and had significantly discounted Hansen’s fee to entice him to give it another try.
Sandy Pittman was a member of Fischer’s team. A millionaire socialite-cum-climber, she was not only a key client, but also filing daily reports for NBC Interactive Media web site on route. Pittman assembled the sort of kit not commonly seen in climbers’ encampments. The day before departing for Nepal, in one of her first Web postings for NBC Interactive Media, she gushed.
All my personal stuff is packed …. It looks like I’ll have as much computer and electronic equipment as I will have climbing gear …. Two IBM laptops, a video camera, three 35mm cameras, one Kodak digital camera, two tape recorders, a CD-Rom player, a printer, and enough (I hope) solar panels and batteries to power the whole project …. I wouldn’t dream of leaving without an ample supply of Dean & DeLuca’s Near East blend and my expresso maker. Since we’ll be on Everest on Easter, I brought four wrapped chocolate eggs. An Easter egg hunt at 18,000 feet? We’ll see!
Upon arrival in the Himalaya, Pittman adhered as closely as possible to the priorities of high society. During the trek to Base Camp, a young Sherpa named Pemba would often roll up her sleeping bag and pack her rucksack for her. When she reached the foot of Everest with the rest of Fischer’s group in early April, her pile of luggage included stacks of press clippings about herself to hand out to the other denizens of Base Camp. Within a few days Sherpa runners began to arrive on a regular basis with packages for Pittman, shipped to Base Camp via DHL Worldwide Express; they included the latest issues of Vogue, Vanity Fair, People, Allure.
After seven Everest expeditions, Hall explained, he’d fine-tuned a remarkably effective acclimatisation plan that would enable us to adapt to the paucity of oxygen in the atmosphere. (At Base Camp there was approximately half as much oxygen as at sea level; at the summit only a third as much.) When confronted with an increase in altitude, the human body adjusted in manifold ways, from increasing respiration, to changing the pH of the blood, to radically boosting the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells – a conversion that takes weeks to complete. Hall insisted, however, that after just three trips above Base Camp, climbing 2,000 feet higher on the mountain each time, our bodies would adapt sufficiently to permit safe passage to the 29,028-foot summit. “It’s worked thirty-nine times so far, pal”, Hall assured me with a crooked grin when I confessed my doubts. “And a few of the blokes who’ve summitted with me were nearly as pathetic as you.”
Base Camp was to be the place to which the expedition teams could retreat if in trouble. It was the place where team medics would remain, and spare supplies would be kept – oxygen, medicines, food and climbing equipment. Nobody was expected to have the energy to move anything other than the bare minimum up or back down the mountain.
Ascending Everest is a long, tedious process, more like a mammoth construction project than climbing as I’d previously known it. Counting our Sherpa staff, there were twenty-six people on Hall’s team, and keeping everyone fed, sheltered and in good health at 17,600 feet, a hundred miles by foot from the nearest road head, was no mean feat.
Hall, however, was a quartermaster nonpareil, and he relished the challenge. At Base Camp he pored over reams of computer printouts detailing logistical minutiae: menus, spare parts, tools, medicines, communications hardware, load-hauling schedules, yak availability. A natural-born engineer, Rob loved infrastructure, electronics, and gadgets of all kinds; he spent his spare time endlessly tinkering with the solar electrical system or reading back issues of Popular Science.
In the tradition of George Leigh Mallory and most other Everesters, Hall’s strategy was to lay siege to the mountain. Sherpas would progressively establish a series of four camps above Base Camp – each approximately 2,000 feet higher than the last – by shuttling cumbersome loads of food, cooking fuel, and oxygen from encampment to encampment until the requisite materiel had been fully stocked at 26,000 feet on the South Col. If all went according to Hall’s grand plan, our summit assault would be launched from this highest camp – Camp Four – a month hence.
Even though we clients wouldn’t be asked to share in the load hauling, we would need to make repeated forays above Base Camp before the summit push in order to acclimatise.
At 21,300 feet, Camp Two consisted of some 120 tents scattered across the bare rocks to the lateral moraine along the glacier’s edge. The altitude here manifested itself as a malicious force, making me feel as though I were afflicted with a raging red-wind hangover.
Camp Three: a trio of small yellow tents, halfway up the vertiginous sprawl of the Lhotse Face, jammed side by side onto a platform that had been hewn from the icy slope by our Sherpas.
The summit, however, was still a vertical mile above, wreathed in a nimbus of gale-borne condensation. But even as the upper mountain was raked by winds in excess of hundred miles per hour, the air at Camp Three barely stirred.
“Even the summit of Everest is not beyond the capacity of an unassisted man. But the risks are enormous” – Sir Edmund Hillary
Apart from the obvious climbing risks of falling and breaking bones etc, even more likely risks with just as huge an impact are the effects of altitude and cold. These had to be meticulously managed.
Despite the many trappings of civilisation at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. Walking into the mess tent at mealtime left me wheezing for several minutes. If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. The deep rasping cough I’d developed worsened day by day. Sleep became elusive, a common symptom of minor altitude illness. Most nights I’d wake up three or four times gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating. Cuts and scrapes refused to heal. My appetite vanished and my digestive system, which required abundant oxygen to metabolise food, failed to make use of much of what I forced myself of eat; instead my body began consuming itself for sustenance. My arms and legs gradually began to wither to sticklike proportions.
Some of my teammates fared even worse than I in the meagre air and unhygienic environment, suffering attacks of gastrointestinal distress that kept them racing to the latrine. Helen and Doug were plagued by severe headaches. As Doug described it to me, “It feels like somebody’s driven a nail between my eyes.”
While thorough acclimatisation helped to mitigate the risks, even some of the most experienced members of the team succumbed to the altitude. This was an issue Hall’s and Fischer’s teams had to manage repeatedly.
One day, Fischer was descending from Camp Two to Base Camp when he encountered one of his Sherpas, Ngawang Topche, sitting on the glacier at 21,000 feet. A veteran thirty-eight-year-old climber from the Rolwaling Valley, gap-toothed and sweet-natured, Ngawang had been hauling loads and performing other duties above Base Camp for three days, but his Sherpa cohorts complained that he had been sitting around a lot and not doing his share of the work.
When Fischer questioned Ngawang, he admitted that he’d been feeling weak, groggy and short of breath for more than two days, so Fischer directed him to descend to Base Camp immediately. But there is an element of machismo in the Sherpa culture that makes many men extremely reluctant to acknowledge physical infirmities. Sherpas aren’t supposed to get altitude illness, especially those from Rolwaling, a region famous for its powerful climbers. Those who do become sick and openly acknowledge it, moreover, will often be blacklisted from future employment on expeditions. Thus it came to pass that Ngawang ignored Scott’s instructions and, instead of going down, went up to Camp Two to spend the night.
By the time he arrived at the tents late that afternoon Ngawang was delirious, stumbling like a drunk, and coughing up pink, blood-laced froth; symptoms indicating an advanced case of High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, or HAPE – a mysterious, potentially lethal illness typically brought on by climbing too high, too fast in which the lungs fill with fluid. The only real cure for HAPE is rapid descent; if the victim remains at high altitude very long, death is the most likely outcome.
Unlike Hall, who insisted that our group stay together while climbing above Base Camp, under the close watch of the guides, Fischer believed in giving his clients free rein to go up and down the mountain independently during the acclimatization period. As a consequence, when it was recognised that Ngawang was seriously ill at Camp Two, four of Fischer’s clients were present, but no guides.
Unpredictable weather required the use of specialist high altitude clothing and equipment. Even so, the very unpredictability meant that issues also had to be managed in this dimension.
During one of the acclimatisation hikes above Base Camp, I was uncomfortably cold after leaving camp, having under-dressed in anticipation of the solar-oven effect that had occurred every other morning when the sun hit the Western Cwm. But on this morning the temperature was held in check by a biting wind that gusted down from the upper mountain, creating a windchill that dipped to perhaps forty below zero. I had an extra pile sweater in my backpack, but to put it on I would first have to remove my gloves, pack, and wind jacket while dangling from the fixed rope. Worrying that I was likely to drop something, I decided to wait until I reached a part of the face that was less steep, where I could stand in balance without hanging from the rope. So I continued climbing, and as I did so I grew colder and colder.
The wind kicked up huge swirling waves of powder snow that washed down the mountain like breaking surf, plastering my clothing with frost. A carapace of ice formed over my goggles making it difficult to see. I began to lose feeling in my feet. My fingers turned to wood. It seemed increasingly unsafe to keep going in these conditions. I was at the head of the line, at 23,000 feet, fifteen minutes in front of guide Mike Groom; I decided to wait for him and talk things over. But just before he reached me he grabbed for the radio inside his jacket, and he stopped climbing to answer the call. “Rob wants everybody to go down!” he declared, shouting to make him heard above the wind. “We’re getting out of here!”
It was noon by the time we arrived back at Camp Two and took stock of the damage. I was tired but otherwise fine. John Taske, the Australian doctor, had some minor frostnip on the tips of his fingers. Doug, on the other hand, had suffered some serious harm. When he removed his boots he discovered incipient frostbite on several toes.
Even worse, however, was the injury to Doug’s respiratory tract. Less than two weeks before departing for Nepal he had undergone minor throat surgery, leaving his trachea in an extremely sensitive condition. This morning, gasping lungfuls of caustic, snow-filled air, he had apparently frozen his larynx.
Despite the serious risks faced during the acclimatisation period, the biggest risks came towards the summit, when people were focused on the top and tended to pay less attention to risk management.
Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turn-around time on our summit day – in our case it would probably be 1:00pm, or 2:00 at the very latest – and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.”
Hall’s easygoing façade masked an intense desire to succeed – which he defined in the fairly simple terms of getting as many clients as possible to the summit. To ensure success, he paid meticulous attention to detail: the health of the Sherpas, the efficiency of the solar-powered electrical system, the sharpness of his clients’ crampons.
To ensure as many people summitted as possible, expedition teams had become accustomed to working together, expanding their responsibilities beyond their own teams.
The previous winter, as he had done in winters past, Hall had consulted with the leaders of all the expeditions planning to climb Everest in the spring, and together they’d agreed on one team among them who would be responsible for establishing and maintaining a route through the Khumbu Icefall. For its trouble, the designated team was to be paid $2,200 from each of the other expeditions on the mountain. In recent years this cooperative approach had been met with wide, if not universal, acceptance, but it wasn’t always so.
The bad humour was most apparent in the bickering that broke out between Hall and the leaders of the Taiwanese and South African teams over sharing responsibility of stringing more than a mile of rope that was needed to safeguard the route up the Lhotse Face. By late April, a line of ropes had already been fixed between the head of the Cwn and Camp Three, halfway up the face. To complete the job, Hall, Fischer, and the leaders of three other expeditions had agreed that on April 26 one or two members from each team would join forces and put ropes up the remainder of the face, the passage between Camp Three and 26,000-foot Camp Four. But it hadn’t happened as planned.
When Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri from Hall’s team, guide Anatoli Boukreev from Fischer’s team, and one Sherpa from a third team departed Camp Two on the morning of April 26, the Sherpas who were supposed to join them from the South African and Taiwanese teams stayed in their sleeping bags and refused to cooperate.
Despite having good support, an enthusiastic team trained to the best of their abilities, managing risk and scope and having a tried and tested project plan to get as many people up and down the mountain as possible, the 1996 expeditions from Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness and Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants ended in disaster.
The full story and horror of what happened can only really be grasped by reading Into Thin Air, but the following extracts highlight some major events. Consider what you think the causes of the disaster were.
There were more than fifty people camped on the Col the night before we would climb to the top, huddled in shelters pitched side by side, yet an odd feeling of isolation hung in the air. The roar of the wind made it impossible to communicate from one tent to the next. In this godforsaken place, I felt disconnected from the climbers around me – emotionally, spiritually, physically – to a degree I hadn’t experienced on any previous expedition. We were a team in name only, I’d sadly come to realise although in a few hours we would leave camp as a group, we would ascend as individuals, linked to one another by neither rope nor any deep sense of loyalty. Each client was in it for himself or herself, pretty much. And I was not different: I sincerely hoped Doug got to the top, for instance, yet I would do everything in my power to keep pushing on if he turned around.
In another context this insight would have been depressing, but I was too preoccupied with the weather to dwell on it. If the wind didn’t abate – and soon – the summit would be out of the question for all of us. Over the preceding week, Hall’s Sherpas had stocked the Col with 363 pounds of bottled oxygen – 55 cylinders. Although that sounds like a lot, it was only enough to permit a single attempt for three guides, eight clients and four Sherpas. And the meter was running: even as we reclined in our tents, we were using up precious gas. If need be we could turn off our oxygen and safely remain up here for perhaps twenty-four hours; after that, however, we would need to either go up or go down.
Above the South Col, up in the Death Zone, survival is to no small degree a race against the clock. Upon setting out from Camp Four on May 10, each client carried two 6.6-pound oxygen bottles and would pick up a third bottle on the South Summit from a cache to be stocked by Sherpas. At a conservative flow rate of two litres per minute, each bottle would last between five and six hours. By 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., everyone’s gas would be gone. Depending on each person’s acclimatisation and physiological makeup, we would still be able to function above the South Col – but not well, and not for long. We would instantly become more vulnerable to HAPE, HACE, hypothermia, impaired judgement and frostbite. The risk of dying would skyrocket.
Hall, who had climbed Everest four times previously, understood as well as anybody the need to get up and down quickly. Recognising that the basic climbing skills of some of his clients were highly suspect, Hall intended to rely on fixed lines to safeguard and expedite both our group and Fischer’s group over the most difficult ground.
Before leaving Base Camp Hall and Fischer convened a meeting of guides from both teams, during which they agreed that each expedition would dispatch two Sherpas – including the climbing sirdars, Ang Dorje and Lopsang – from Camp Four ninety minutes ahead of the main groups. This would give the Sherpas time to install fixed lines on the most exposed sections of the upper mountain before the clients arrived. “Rob made it very clear how important it was to do this,” recalls Beidleman. “He wanted to avoid a time-consuming bottleneck at all costs.”
For some unknown reason, however, no Sherpas left the South Col ahead of us on the night of May 9. Perhaps the violent gale, which didn’t stop blowing until 7:30 p.m., prevented them from mobilising as early as they’d hoped.
As a consequence, I ran smack into the first bottleneck ninety minutes after moving beyond the Balcony, at 28,000 feet, where the intermingled teams encountered a series of massive rock stops that required ropes for safe passage. Clients huddled restlessly at the base of the rock for nearly an hour while Beidleman laboriously ran the rope out.
At Base Camp before our summit bid, Hall had contemplated two possible turn-around times – either 1:00 p.m.. or 2:00 p.m. He never declared which of these times we were to abide by, however – which was curious, considering how much he’d talked about the importance of designating a hard deadline and sticking to it no matter what. We were simply left with a vaguely articulated understanding that Hall would withhold making a final decision until summit day, after assessing the weather and other factors, and would then personally take responsibility for turning everyone around at the proper hour.
By mid-morning on May 10, Hall still hadn’t announced what our turnaround time would actually be. One expedition member, conservative by nature, was operating on the assumption that it would be 1:00 p.m. Around 11:00 a.m. Hall told two team members that the top was still three hours away. “It seemed increasingly unlikely that we would have any chance of summitting before the 1:00 p.m. turn-around time,” says one of these team members.
I nervously studied my watch and wondered whether I might run out of oxygen.