We are back to Everest.
This one is written by a guy who was on Henry Todd's 1996 Everest expedition. They were a day behind the Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants expeditions and were on the South Col the night of May 10. The first half of this book is about his 1995 Everest summit, his experience on the 1996 expedition and then his two subsequent Everest attempts in 1998 (did not summit) and 1999 (summited). I found this part of the book very interesting and engaging. I'm not sure exactly where, the amount of time it would take me to find this one sentence would be ridiculous, but somewhere in the book he says that he spent the majority of his time on Everest alone. I think he may have even said 90% of his time. It is a completely different type of mountaineering from what Rob Hall and Scott Fischer were doing with their expeditions. His expeditions had Sherpas who set up camps and carried loads. And they had a team leader (Henry Todd) with whom they had daily scheduled radio calls. But largely, clients on these expeditions made their own decisions and climbed on their own. It was super interesting to read about.
The book then turns towards his efforts to reconcile the guilt of being up on the South Col on May 10, 1996. It had taken a few years and a few more expeditions to fully catch up with him. He spent a lot of time wondering about why he and his teammates weren't asked for help the night of May 10. They were up on the South Col and relatively fresh and able. It's often said in other accounts of that night that Anatoli and others went around to all the tents and were unable to rouse anyone to help. However, Henry Todd's climbers were completely unaware of the unfolding disaster until the next day. They were fast asleep a few meters away and no one woke them. After much research and searching, Ratcliffe came to the conclusion that Anatoli simply didn't know that they were up there. They left late from Camp 3 and arrived in the late evening (usually climbers would leave early and arrive at the South Col by mid afternoon). It is likely that it was simply that Anatoli (and others) thought they were coming the next day. Anatoli had seen one of their sherpas setting up their tents on the afternoon of May 10 and when he didn't see the climbers in the afternoon he assumed they were coming the next day. It's tragic really. Henry Todd's climbers were much more independent climbers than Rob or Scott's teams. Thus, they were likely more experienced and skilled climbers who would have been exceedingly useful in a rescue. On the morning of May 11, Graham Ratcliffe went down to Camp 2 and it wasn't until he arrived at Camp 2 that he heard about the deaths that had occurred the night before. Crazy.
This wasn't the only thing Ratcliffe struggled with in the years after though. There is a lot of information in this book and I won't go into it all. But basically he became convinced that the people who wrote about the 1996 tragedy all omitted the fact that the expeditions were getting daily weather forecast information that clearly predicted the storm that hit on May 10. He spent years trying to prove this. In the end, he does make a very good case and provides a lot of proof. However, I struggled to engage with this part of the book as much as the first half because it seemed like a moot point. We already know Fischer and Hall made questionable decisions that put their teams in danger. We already know that they shouldn't have been up there in the first place, or should have turned around earlier, and so many things. Without either one of them being alive to walk us through their decision making process it is all just speculation really.
But who am I to decide what warrants being researched and what is important. This seems to be how he dealt with some of his emotions and guilt regarding the event. And whether purposefully omitted or not, it seems like he was right.
Completely unrelated to these larger issues, here is my favourite anecdote from the book:
Apart from my stomach, I felt fine and offered to sleep without oxygen. I knew I could have used one of our Poisk bottles, but these in my mind were set aside for climbing. Soon everyone, including the Sherpas, was in their sleeping bags with their oxygen masks slowly hissing away. All, that is, except me. I lay curled up in my sleeping bag, grasping my stomach, listening to the wind hammering into the tent for hour after hour. The snow drummed against the nylon tent in driving gusts, the poles bent and strained as the wind tried its best to tear the tent from the ground.
It turned out to be fortunate for me that I was not wearing a mask and was next to the entrance of our tent, as all of a sudden my stomach started convulsing. With just enough time to sit up, and certainly not sufficient to open the tent, I leant over and vomited onto the tent floor. Wiping my hand across my dribbling mouth, I flopped back into my sleeping bag with the thought 'better out than in.' I decided to leave any attempt at cleaning up until dawn. Rid of my unwanted load, a feeling of relative normality returned as I drifted off to sleep.
I woke at first light, probably around 5 a.m. The deafening sound of the wind battering against the tent had subsided. I looked to my side to view the contents of my stomach, expecting to find an unpleasant mess. Instead, I found they'd neatly filled a dip in the tent floor about ten inches in diameter and had rather conveniently frozen solid into what looked like a particularly disgusting pizza. Easing this up from the plastic groundsheet, I was relieved when it came away in one piece. Unzipping the tent, I threw this solid vomit, as though it were some sort of Frisbee, out onto the South Col. This was one of the very few advantages of being at 26,000 feet.
(page 130-131)
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