Into Thin Air – Beck Weathers



Into Thin Air – Beck Weathers

By Jon Krakauer

Above the South Col, up in the Death Zone, survival is to no small degree a race against the clock. Electing to descend instead of climbing the summit is a difficult decision. Mountaineering tends to draw men and women not easily deflected from their goals. To get this far one had to have an uncommonly stubborn personality.

Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. Each client had spent as much as $70,000 and endured weeks of agony to be granted this one shot at the summit. All were ambitious, unaccustomed to losing and even less to quitting. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you are too driven you're likely to die. Thus, the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

About 4:45 P.M., when Krakauer, the author, reached the Balcony – the promontory at 27,600 feet on the Southeast Ridge, he was shocked to encounter Beck Weathers, standing alone in the snow, shivering violently. He’d assumed that Beck had descended to Camp Four hours earlier.

Years earlier, Beck had undergone surgery to correct his vision. A side effect of the surgery, he discovered early in the Everest climb, was that the low barometric pressure that exists at high altitude caused his eyesight to fail. The higher he climbed, the lower the barometric pressure fell, and the worse his vision became. With the summit in reach he neglected to mention its increasing severity to Rob or anyone else.

On that Friday to ascend to summit, Beck managed to keep up with the group by employing the same strategy he'd used the previous afternoon – stepping in the footsteps of the person directly in front of him. But by the time he reached the Balcony and the sun came up, he realized his vision was worse than ever. In addition, he'd inadvertently rubbed some ice crystals into his eyes, lacerating both corneas.

"At that point one eye was completely blurred over, I could barely see out of the other, and I'd lost all depth perception. I felt that I couldn't see well enough to climb higher without being a danger to myself or a burden to someone else, so I told Rob Hall, the expedition leader, what was going on."

Rob then decreed, "if your vision isn't better in thirty minutes I want you to stay here so I know exactly where you are until I come back from the summit, then we can go down together. Either you go down with a Sherpa right now, or you promise me you'll sit right here until I return."

Now, however, it was getting dark and conditions were turning grim. "Come down with me," Krakauer implored. "It will be at least another two or three hours before Rob will show up. I'll be your eyes. I'll get you down, no problem." Beck was nearly persuaded to descend when Krakauer made the mistake of mentioning that Mike Groom was on his way down with another team member, a few minutes behind him. In a day of many mistakes, this would turn out to be one of the larger ones.

"Thanks anyway," Beck said. "I think I'll just wait for Mike. He's got a rope; he'll be able to short-rope me down."

Mike Groom was just as surprised to see Beck as Krakauer had been and got out his rope and began short roping the Texan down toward the South Col. “Beck was so hopelessly blind,” Groom reports, “that every ten meters he’d take a step into thin air and I’d have to catch him with the rope. I was worried he was going to pull me off many times. It was bloody nerve-racking. I had to make sure I had a good ax belay and that all my points were clean and sticking into something solid at all times.”

It was now 6:45 and Weathers found himself in a group of two sherpas, two guides and 6 other clients. Although they were moving slowly they had descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four, but the storm abruptly turned into a full-blown hurricane, and visibility dropped into less than 20 feet.

Wanting to avoid a dangerous and steep ice patch, Beidleman led the group on an indirect route where the slope was much less steep and around 7:30 they safely reached the broad, gently rolling expanse of the South Col, but everyone was on the brink of physical collapse. Weathers and another team member were unable to walk without being supported. The lead guide knew the tents lay somewhere to the west, but to move in that direction was to walk directly upwind into the teeth of the storm. Wind-whipped granules of ice and snow struck the climbers’ faces with violent force, lacerating their eyes and making it impossible to see where they were going. “It was difficult and painful,” one of the group members explains, “that there was a tendency to bear off the wind, to keep angling away from it to the left and that’s how we went wrong.

For the next two hours, the group of 11 staggered blindly in the storm hoping to blunder across the camp. By around 10:00 p.m. the group walked over a little rise had a guide sensed a huge void just beyond. The group had unwittingly strayed to the easternmost edge of the Col, at the lip of a 7,000 foot drop. They were at the same elevation as Camp Four, just 1000 horizontal feet from safety. Since the distance was more or less on flat terrain, the group would have been able to walk into camp in about 15 minutes if they had known where they were. A guide screamed at everyone to huddle up right there and wait for a break in the storm.

The guides searched for a protected place to escape the wind, but there was nowhere to hide. Everyone’s oxygen had long since run out, making the group more vulnerable to the windchill, which exceeded a hundred below zero. Huddling beside a boulder the size of dishwasher, the climbers hunkered down in a pathetic row on a patch of gale-scoured ice. One of the group remembers that, “My eyes were frozen. I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive. The cold was so painful, I didn’t think I could endure it anymore. I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.” Weathers remembers that “We tried to keep warm by pummeling each other and moving our arms and legs. One person was hysterical; she kept yelling over and over, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!

Just before midnight, the wind was still whipping up a furious ground blizzard at the surface, but far above, the sky had begun to clear revealing the mountain summits. From these reference points, a client had figured out where the group was in relation to the tents and convinced a guide he knew the way to Base Camp. The guide coaxed everyone to their feet to get them moving to camp, but four, including Weathers, were too feeble to walk. By then it was obvious to the guide that if somebody from the group didn’t make it to the tents and summon a rescue party, they were all going to die. So he assembled all those that could walk and stumbled off into the storm to get help. Twenty minutes later they limped into camp.

After hearing the survivor’s story, one guide resolved to bring back the group by himself. Overcoming his own crippling exhaustion, he plunged into the hurricane and searched for the remaining four for nearly an hour. It was an incredible display of strength and courage, but he was unable to find any of the missing climbers. But, the guide didn’t give up. He returned to camp, obtained more detailed directions and went out into the storm again. This time he saw a faint glow of a fading headlamp and found the missing climbers.

It became obvious to the guide that he could only bring one climber into camp at a time. The guide indicated he’d be back as soon as possible and left. Beck was crumpled into a fetal position, not moving a whole lot when all of sudden he mumbles, “Hey, I’ve got this all figured out.” Then he kind of rolls a little distance away, crouches on a big rock and stands up facing the wind with his arms stretched out to either side. A second later a gust comes up and just blows Beck over backward into the night, beyond the beam of a headlamp and that was the last he was seen by the remaining group.

When the guide came back and grabbed another client, the remaining walking group member packed up his stuff and started waddling after them trying to follow the light of the bobbing headlamps. He assumed that the one remaining client was dead and that Weathers was a lost cause.

At 4:35 p.m. the next day, an IMAX team member helping with the rescue was standing outside the tents when he noticed someone walking slowly toward the camp with a peculiar stiff-kneed gait. The person’s bare right hand, naked to the frigid wind and grotesquely frostbitten, was outstretched in a kind of odd, frozen salute. Whoever it was reminded the observer of a mummy in a low-budget horror film. As the mummy lurched into camp, Burleson realized that it was none other than Beck Weathers somehow risen from the dead.

The previous night, Weathers had felt himself "growing colder and colder. I'd lost my right glove. My face was freezing. My hands were freezing. I felt myself growing really numb. It got really hard to stay focused, and finally I just sort of slid off into oblivion."

Beck lay out on the ice, exposed to the merciless wind and barely alive. He remained comatose for more than twelve hours. Then, late Saturday afternoon, for some unknowable reason a light went on in the reptilian core of Beck's inanimate brain and he floated back to consciousness.

Although Beck 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 directly into the wind, deducing correctly that camp lay in that direction. Had he been mistaken, he would have stumbled immediately down the Kangshung Face, the edge of which lay just thirty feet in the opposite direction.

Beck just walked into camp. Nobody in base camp thought Beck was going to survive the night. He was critically ill. And even if he did live until morning, they couldn't imagine how they were going to get him down.

The wind that struck on Saturday evening was even more powerful than the one that lashed the Col the night before. As the survivors started to leave camp the next morning, Krakauer made one last visit to Beck, whom he assumed had died in the night. He located his tent, which had been blasted flat by the hurricane, and saw that both doors were wide open. When he peered inside, however, he was shocked to discover that Beck was still alive.

Beck was lying on his back across the floor of the collapsed shelter, shivering convulsively. His face was hideously swollen; splotches of deep, ink-black frostbite covered his nose and cheeks. The storm had blown both sleeping bags from his body, leaving him exposed to the subzero wind, and with his frozen hands he'd been powerless to pull the bags back over himself or zip the tent closed. "What's a guy have to do to get a little help around here!" He'd been screaming for help for two or three hours, but the storm had smothered his cries. .

Beck had awakened in the middle of the night to find that "the storm had collapsed the tent and was blowing it apart. The wind was pressing the tent wall so hard against my face that I couldn't breathe. It would let up for a second, then come slamming back down into my face and chest, knocking the wind out of me. On top of everything else, my right arm was swelling up, and I had this stupid wristwatch on, so as my arm got bigger and bigger, the watch got tighter and tighter until it was cutting off most of the blood supply to my hand. But with my hands messed up so badly, there was no way I could get the damn thing off. I yelled for help, but nobody came. It was one hell of a long night. Man, I was glad to see your face when you stuck your head inside the door."

Upon first finding Beck in the tent, Krakauer was shocked by Beck’s hideous condition and by the unforgivable way that they’d let him down yet again. "Everything's going to be O.K., Krakauer lied, choking back sobs as he pulled the sleeping bags over Beck, zipped the tent doors shut, and tried to re-erect the damaged shelter. "Don't worry, pal. Everything's under control now."

Krakauer got on the radio to the doctor at Base Camp, begging hysterically, “What should I do about Beck? He’s still alive, but I don’t think he can survive much longer. He’s in really bad shape!”

The doctor told him to rouse the IMAX team, ask them to look after Beck and then start down the mountain. The IMAX team rushed to Beck’s tent with a canteen of hot tea and injected a drug to help negate the effects of high altitude. These were praiseworthy gestures, but it was hard to imagine that they would do him much good.

Given up for dead again, Beck simply refused to succumb. After being injected with the drug, Beck experienced an astonishing recovery. The IMAX team got him dressed, put his harness on, and discovered he was actually able to stand up and walk. They started descending from the Col with an IMAX member telling Beck where to place his feet. With Beck draping an arm over one man’s shoulder and Beck’s harness in the grasp of another, they shuffled down the mountain moving amazingly well.

Beck was placed in the hospital tent and began to gingerly thaw his frozen limbs in a pot of lukewarm water. Because of his extreme frostbitten hand, Beck began the wait to leave the mountain by helicopter. On Monday, Beck was flown to a Kathmandu hospital where he received treatment. Back in the state, Beck had is right arm amputated halfway below the elbow. All four fingers and the thumb on the left hand were removed. His nose was amputated and reconstructed with tissue from his ear and forehead. Although disabled for life and wondering if he could ever practice medicine again, Beck accepted his fate and is moving on. Beck doesn’t play the blame game and has only nice things to say about everyone at Everest. He is conquering this. He will be victorious.

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