With So Many Marginally Qualified Climbers Flocking to Everest These

hit two hours later, it's likely that nobody would have died. Con- versely, if it had arrived even one hour earlier, the storm could easily have killed eighteen or twenty climbers—me among With so many marginally qualified climbers flocking to Everest them. these days, a lot of people believe that a tragedy of this magnitude M-n Certainly time had as much to do with the tragedy as the was overdue. But nobody imagined that an expedition led by Rob weather, and ignoring the clock can't be passed off as an act of Hall would be at the center of it. Hall ran the tightest, safest God. Delays at the fixed lines were foreseeable and eminently operation on the mountain, bar none. A compulsively methodical preventable. Predetermined turn-around times were egregiously man, he had elaborate systems in place that were supposed to ignored. prevent such a catastrophe. So what happened? How can it be , r\g the turn-around times may have been influenced explained, not only to the loved ones left behind, but to a censo- to some degree by the rivalry between Fischer and Hall. Fischer rious public? had never guided Everest before 1996. From a business stand- (f) Hubris probably had something to do with it. Hall had be- point, there was tremendous pressure on him to be successful. He come so adept at running climbers of all abilities up and down was exceedingly motivated to get clients to the summit, especially Everest that he got a little cocky, perhaps. He'd bragged on more a celebrity client like Sandy Hill Pittman. than one occasion that he could get almost any reasonably fit Likewise, since he had failed to get anybody to the top in person to the summit, and his record seemed to support this. 1995, it would have been bad for Hall's business if he failed again He'd also demonstrated a remarkable ability to prevail over ad- in 1996—especially if Fischer succeeded. Scott had a charismatic versity. personality, and that charisma had been aggressively marketed by In 1995, for instance, Hall and his guides not only had to Jane Bromet. Fischer was trying very hard to eat Hall's lunch, and cope with Hansen's problems high on the peak, but they also had Rob knew it. Under the circumstances, the prospect of turning to deal with the complete collapse of another client named his clients around while his rival's clients were pushing toward Chantal Mauduit, a celebrated French alpinist, who was making the summit may have been sufficiently distasteful to cloud Hall's her seventh stab at Everest without oxygen. Mauduit passed out judgment. stone cold at 28,700 feet and had to be dragged and carried all It can't be stressed strongly enough, moreover, that Hall, the way down from the South Summit to the South Col "like a Fischer, and the rest of us were forced to make such critical sack of spuds," as Guy Cotter put it. After everybody came out of decisions while severely impaired with hypoxia. In pondering that summit attempt alive, Hall may well have thought there was how this disaster could have occurred, it is imperative to remem- little he couldn't handle. ber that lucid thought is all but impossible at 29,000 feet. Before this year, however, Hall had had uncommonly good Wisdom comes easily after the fact. Shocked by the toll in luck with the weather, and it might have skewed his judgment. human life, critics have been quick to suggest policies and proce- "Season after season," confirmed David Breashears, who has dures to ensure that the catastrophes of this season won't be been on more than a dozen Himalayan expeditions and has him- repeated. It has been proposed, for example, that a guide-to- self climbed Everest three times, "Rob had brilliant weather on client ratio of one to one be established as the standard on Ever- summit day. He'd never been caught by a storm high on the est—i.e., each client would climb with his or her own personal mountain." In fact, the gale of May 10, though violent, was noth- guide and remain roped to that guide at all times. ing extraordinary; it was a fairly typical Everest squall. If it had Perhaps the simplest way to reduce future carnage would be 28? was climbed some 630 times—a ratio of one in four. Last spring, to ban bottled oxygen except for emergency medical use. A few 12 climbers died and 84 reached the summit—a ratio of one in reckless souls might perish trying to reach the summit without seven. Compared to these historical standards, 1996 was actually gas, but the great bulk of marginally competent climbers would a safer-than-average year. be forced to turn back by their own physical limitations before Truth be told, climbing Everest has always been an extraordi- they ascended high enough to get into serious trouble. And a no- narily dangerous undertaking and doubtless always will be, gas regulation would have the corollary benefit of automatically whether the people involved are Himalayan neophytes being reducing trash and crowding because considerably fewer people guided up the peak or world-class mountaineers climbing with would attempt Everest if they knew supplemental oxygen was not their peers. It is worth noting that before the mountain claimed an option. the lives of Hall and Fischer, it had already wiped out a whole But guiding Everest is a very loosely regulated business, ad- corps of elite climbers, including Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker, ministered by byzantine Third World bureaucracies spectacularly Marty Hoey, Jake Breitenbach, Mick Burke, Michel Parmentier, ill-equipped to assess qualifications of guides or clients. More- Roger Marshall, Ray Genet, and George Leigh Mallory. over, the two nations that control access to the peak—Nepal and In the case of the guided ilk, it rapidly became clear to me in China—are staggeringly poor. Desperate for hard currency, the 1996 that few of the clients on the peak (myself included) truly governments of both countries have a vested interest in issuing as appreciated the gravity of the risks we faced—the thinness of the many expensive climbing permits as the market will support, and margin by which human life is sustained above 25,000 feet. Wal- both are unlikely to enact any policies that significantly limit their ter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when revenues. things go wrong up in the Death Zone—and sooner or later they Analyzing what went wrong on Everest is a useful enough always do—the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to enterprise; it might conceivably prevent some deaths down the save a client's life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, road. But to believe that dissecting the tragic events of 1996 in the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save minute detail will actually reduce the future death rate in any even their own lives. Four of my teammates died not so much meaningful way is wishful thinking. The urge to catalog the myr- because Rob Hall's systems were faulty—indeed, nobody's were iad blunders in order to "learn from the mistakes" is for the most better—but because on Everest it is the nature of systems to part an exercise in denial and self-deception. If you can convince break down with a vengeance. yourself that Rob Hall died because he made a string of stupid In the midst of all the postmortem ratiocination, it is easy to errors and that you are too clever to repeat those same errors, it lose sight of the fact that climbing mountains will never be a safe, makes it easier for you to attempt Everest in the face of some predictable, rule-bound enterprise. This is an activity that ideal- rather compelling evidence that doing so is injudicious. izes risk-taking; the sport's most celebrated figures have always In fact, the murderous outcome of 1996 was in many ways been those who stick their necks out the farthest and manage to simply business as usual. Although a record number of people get away with it. Climbers, as a species, are simply not distin- died in the spring climbing season on Everest, the 12 fatalities guished by an excess of prudence. And that holds especially true amounted to only 3 percent of the 398 climbers who ascended for Everest climbers: when presented with a chance to reach the higher than Base Camp—which is actually slightly below the his- planet's highest summit, history shows, people are surprisingly torical fatality rate of 3.3 percent. Or here's another way to look quick to abandon good judgment. "Eventually," warns Tom at it: between 1921 and May 1996, 144 people died and the peak Hornbein, thirty-three years after his ascent of the West Ridge, "what happened on Everest this season is certain to happen again." For evidence that few lessons were learned from the mistakes of May 10, one need look no farther than what happened on Everest in the weeks that immediately followed. On May 17, two days after Hall's team quit Base Camp, over on the Tibetan side of the mountain an Austrian named Reinhard Wlasich and a Hungarian teammate, climbing without supplemental oxygen, ascended to the high camp at 27,230 feet on the Northeast Ridge, where they occupied a tent abandoned by the ill-fated Ladakhi expedition. The following morning Wlasich complained that he felt ill and then lost consciousness; a Norwe- gian doctor who happened to be present determined that the Austrian was suffering from both pulmonary and cerebral edema.

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