Excerpt from “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer

The first body turned out to be Namba, but Hutchison couldn’t tell who it was until he knelt in the howling wind and chipped a three-inch-thick carapace of ice from her face. To his shock, he discovered that she was still breathing. Both her gloves were gone, and her bare hands appeared to be frozen solid. Her eyes were dilated. The skin on her face was the color of porcelain. “It was terrible,” Hutchison recalls. “I was overwhelmed. She was very near death. I didn’t know what to do.”

He turned his attention to Weathers, who lay 20 feet away. His face was also caked with a thick armor of frost. Balls of ice the size of grapes were matted to his hair and eyelids. After clearing the frozen detritus from his face, Hutchison discovered that he, too, was still alive: “Beck was mumbling something, I think, but I couldn’t tell what he was trying to say. His right glove was missing and he had terrible frostbite. He was as close to death as a person can be and still be breathing.”

Badly shaken, Hutchison went over to the Sherpas and asked Lhakpa Chhiri’s advice. Lhakpa Chhiri, an Everest veteran respected by Sherpas and sahibs alike for his mountain savvy, urged Hutchison to leave Weathers and Namba where they lay. Even if they survived long enough to be dragged back to Camp Four, they would certainly die before they could be carried down to Base Camp, and attempting a rescue would needlessly jeopardize the lives of the other climbers on the Col, most of whom were going to have enough trouble getting themselves down safely.

Hutchison decided that Chhiri was right. There was only one choice, however difficult: Let nature take its inevitable course with Weathers and Namba, and save the group’s resources for those who could actually be helped. It was a classic act of triage. When Hutchison returned to camp at 8:30 A.M. and told the rest of us of his decision, nobody doubted that it was the correct thing to do.

Later that day a rescue team headed by two of Everest’s most experienced guides, Pete Athans and Todd Burleson, who were on the mountain with their own clients, arrived at Camp Four. Burleson was standing outside the tents about 4:30 P.M. when he noticed someone lurching slowly toward camp. The person’s bare right hand, naked to the wind and horribly frostbitten, was outstretched in a weird, frozen salute. Whoever it was reminded Athans of a mummy in a low-budget horror film. The mummy turned out to be none other than Beck Weathers, somehow risen from the dead.

A couple of hours earlier, a light must have gone on in the reptilian core of Weathers’s comatose brain, and he regained consciousness. “Initially I thought I was in a dream,” he recalls. “Then I saw how badly frozen my right hand was, and that helped bring me around to reality. Finally I woke up enough to recognize that I was in deep shit and the cavalry wasn’t coming so I better do something about it myself.”

Although Weathers was blind in his right eye and able to focus his left eye within a radius of only three or four feet, he started walking into the teeth of the wind, deducing correctly that camp lay in that direction. If he’d been wrong he would have stumbled immediately down the Kangshung Face, the edge of which was a few yards in the opposite direction. Ninety minutes later he encountered “some unnaturally smooth, bluish-looking rocks,” which turned out to be the tents of Camp Four.

– from Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

“I was in deep shit and the cavalry wasn’t coming so I better do something about it myself.“

I really like that quote. If only I could tap into that strength without putting my life in mortal danger… It’s uplifting to read about Beck’s survival. If he can survive becoming an ice cube on Everest for a night, then I should be able to handle my trivial problems.

Into Thin Air was a great read and should be a must read for anyone thinking about climbing one of these mountains. I climbed Rainier so I’m a bit of a mountaineer, but I don’t think I’m up for anything taller or any trip that takes much longer than those three days. Three days, maybe five days, possibly a week on a mountain trail… I think that’s enough for me.

The personality types that take mountaineering and climbing to dangerous extremes… I like to “get away” from time to time but what is it that they are running from?

I’m reminded of the girl on the Rainier trip who quit her corporate pharmaceutical job and then hiked the Pacific Crest Trail up to Rainier and joined our little expedition.

When I tell people that the reaction, and perhaps my initial reaction is: “Wow! Cool! She must have an adventurous spirit and a great personality!”

She did have a good personality and an adventurous spirit. But also there was an element of sadness to her personality. An “air of melancholy” that she hid well but sometimes… I don’t know, maybe my assessment is off.

But then what was she running from? Or should I say: what was she hiking from? 🙂

Back to Into Thin Air and Everest: it seems like a majority of people who go hike Everest write in their journals at some point something to the tune of: “What am I doing here? Why did I come here?” Hang on… let me find an excerpt.

“There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.”

– Thomas F. Horbein from “Everest: The West Ridge” by quote by Jon Krakauer in “Into Thin Air“