On the evening of May 10, 1996, a killer blizzard exploded
around the upper reaches of Mount Everest, trapping me and dozens of other
climbers high in the Death Zone of the Earth’s tallest mountain.
The storm began as low, distant growl, and then rapidly
formed into a howling white fog laced with ice pellets. It hurtled up Mount
Everest to engulf us in minutes. We couldn't see as far as our feet. A person
standing next to you just vanished in the roaring whiteout. Wind speeds that
night would exceed seventy knots. The ambient temperature fell to sixty below
zero.
The blizzard pounced on my group of climbers just as we’d
gingerly descended a sheer pitch known as the Triangle above Camp Four, or High
Camp, on Everest’s South Col, a desolate saddle of rock and ice about three
thousand feet below the mountain’s 29,035- foot summit.
Eighteen hours earlier, we had set out from the South Col
for the summit, heartened as we trudged along by a serene and cloudless night
sky that beckoned us ever upward until dawn, when it gave way to a spectacular
sunrise over the roof of the world.
Then confusion and calamity struck.
Of the eight clients and three guides in my group, five of
us, including myself, never made it to the top. Of the six who summited, four
were later killed in the storm. They included our thirty-five-year-old
expedition leader, Rob Hall, a gentle and humorous New Zealander of mythic
mountaineering prowess. Before he froze to death in a snow hole near the top of
Everest, Rob would radio a heartbreaking farewell to his pregnant wife, Jan
Arnold, at their home in Christchurch. Another sad fatality was diminutive
Yasuko Namba, forty-seven, whose final human contact was with me, the two of us
huddled together through that awful night, lost and freezing in the blizzard on
the South Col, just a quarter mile from the warmth and safety of camp.
Four other climbers also perished in the storm, making May
10, 1996, the deadliest day on Everest in the seventy-five years since the
intrepid British schoolmaster, George Leigh Mallory, first attempted to climb
the mountain.
 |
| Severely frostbitten Beck |
May 10 began auspiciously for me. I was battered and blowing
from the enormous effort to get that far, but I was also as strong and
clearheaded as any forty-nine-year-old amateur mountaineer can expect to be
under the severe physical and mental stresses at high altitude. I already had
climbed eight other major mountains around the world, and I had worked like an
animal to get to this point, hell-bent on testing myself against the ultimate
challenge.
I was aware that fewer than half the expeditions to climb
Everest ever put a single member– client or guide– on the summit. But I wanted
to join an even more select circle, the fifty or so people who had completed
the so-called Seven Summits Quest, scaling the highest peaks on all seven
continents. If I summited Everest, I would have only one more mountain to go.
I also knew that approximately 150 people had lost their
lives on the mountain, most of them in avalanches. Everest has swallowed up
several dozen of these victims, entombing them in its snowfields and glaciers.
As if to underscore its vast indifference to the whole mountain-climbing
enterprise, Everest mocks its dead. The glaciers, slowly grinding rivers of
ice, carry climbers’ shattered corpses downward like so much detritus, to be
deposited in pieces, decades later, far below.
Common as sudden, dramatic death is among mountain climbers,
no one actually expects to be killed at high altitude. I certainly didn’t, nor
did I ever give much thought to whether a middle-aged husband and father of two
ought to be risking his neck in that way. I positively loved mountain climbing:
the camaraderie, the adventure and danger, and–to a fault– the ego boost it
gave me.
I fell into climbing, so to speak, a willy-nilly response to
a crushing bout of depression that began in my mid-thirties. The disorder
reduced my chronic low self-regard to a bottomless pit of despair and misery. I
recoiled from myself and my life, and came very close to suicide.
Then, salvation. On a family vacation in Colorado I
discovered the rigors and rewards of mountain climbing, and gradually came to
see the sport and rewards of mountain climbing, and gradually came to see the
sport as my avenue of escape. I found that a punishing workout regimen held
back the darkness for hours each day. Blessed surcease. I also gained hard
muscle and vastly improved my endurance, two novel sources of pride.
Once in the mountains (the more barren and remote, the
better), I could fix my mind, undistracted, on climbing, convincing myself in
the process that conquering world-famous mountains was testimony to my grit and
manly character. I drank in the moments of genuine pleasure, satisfaction and
bonhomie out in the wilds with my fellow climbers.
But the cure eventually began to kill me. The black dog
slunk away at last, yet I persisted in training and climbing and training and
climbing. High-altitude mountaineering, and the recognition it bought me,
became my hollow obsession. When my wife, Peach, warned that his cold passion
of mine was destroying the centre of my life, and that I was systematically
betraying the love and loyalty of my family, I listened but did not hear her.
The pathology deepened. Increasingly self-absorbed, I
convinced myself that I was adequately expressing my love for my wife, daughter
and son by liberally seeing to their material needs, even as I emotionally
abandoned them. I’m eternally grateful that they did not, in turn, abandon me,
although with the mountain of insurance I’d taken out against the possibility
of an accident, I should have hired a food taster.
In fact, with each of my extended forays into the wild, it
became clearer, at least to Peach’s unquiet mind, that I probably was going to
get myself killed, the recurrent subtext of my life. In the end, that’s what it
took to break the spell. On May 10, 1996, the mountain began gathering me to
herself , and I slowly succumbed. The drift into unconsciousness was not
unpleasant as I sank into a profound coma on the South Col, where my fellow
climbers eventually would leave me for dead.
Peach received the news by telephones at 7:30 A.M. at our
home in Dallas.
Then, a miracle occurred at 26,000 feet. I opened my eyes.
My wife was hardly finished with the harrowing task of
telling our children their father was not coming home when a second call came
through, informing her that I wasn’t quite as dead as I had seemed.
Somehow I regained consciousness out on the South Col– I
don’t understand how– and was jolted to my senses, as well as to my feet, by a
vision powerful enough to rewire my mind. I am neither churchly nor a
particularly spiritual person, but I can tell you that some force within me
rejected death at the last moment and then guided me, blind and stumbling-literally
a dead am walking– into camp and the shaky start of my return to life.
Beck Weathers, the gregarious Texan climber went snow-blind in the Death Zone and spent a night out in the open during a blizzard that took the lives of nine colleagues in 1996. Miraculously he survived. Beck has become a much sought-after speaker before profession, corporate and academic audiences.
This excerpt is taken from Left For Dead: My Journey Home From Everest authored by Beck
Weathers with Stephen G. Michaud.
He lost
his house, land and fat bank account. Once he had threatened his kids, "Kotha basne ko chorachori sanga khelna
naja" (Don't play with homeless kids). Now, he
is threatened by his own threatening, "Kotha
basne ko chorachori sanga khelna naja". 
