Survival on Everest

By Alistair Paton

Published in Outdoor Australia magazine Aug-Sept 2006

Author's note: This article itself was produced in extreme conditions - in journalism terms; the subject was the magazine's editor, Lincoln Hall, who was reported dead, then alive, as the edition was going to press. Special thanks to acting editor Louise Southerden for her help and for literally stopping the presses until the last possible moment.

DEATH is the uninvited extra member of every climbing team on Mt Everest. Although in recent years climbers have reached the 8848m summit in ever-increasing numbers, reminders that the mountain still holds the final card are never far away. Frozen bodies litter the peak’s upper reaches, where the line between life and death can be as thin as the oxygen-depleted air. Climbing at that altitude requires a mix of respect and indifference. 

Some deaths, however, cut deeper than others, as renowned Australian climber Lincoln Hall discovered on the slopes of Everest in May. 

Hall was 6500m up the mountain, with his mind fixed on the summit, when news arrived of another climber who had suddenly, and mysteriously, fallen ill and died 400m below. Igor Plyushkin had climbed to within 100m of the summit and descended to Camp 2 without apparent difficulty before dropping dead. “You shouldn’t die at 7700m,” Hall said afterwards. His disquiet was heightened by the fact Plyushkin was part of the same Russian-based climbing outfit to which Hall had entrusted his summit ambitions.

Plyushkin’s death was still in Hall’s mind on May 25 when he passed the body of British climber David Sharp, who had died days earlier and had become the centre of a storm over climbers putting summit ambitions before saving one of their own. Sharp was identifiable by his new climbing boots that extended across the trail from a small cave at 8400m. Next to Sharp’s body was another corpse, of an Indian climber who died years ago but still lies frozen in the fetal position.

But if those encounters with death troubled Hall, they didn’t stop him reaching the summit seven hours later, joining an eleite club of Australian to stand on the highest point on the planet.

On his descent it was news of another death that Hall believes contributed to his name being listed for 24 hours among those who had perished on the mountain. Arriving to help with Hall’s descent, Pemba Sherpa told the 50-year-old Australian that German climber Thomas Weber had just died. Hall had left Camp 6 at midnight on May 24 with five Sherpas, a guide and Weber, who suffered vision problems after the removal of a brain tumour. With Hall forging ahead, Weber had reached 8800m before his guide, Harry Kikstra, decided Weber’s vision had deteriorated to a point it was no longer safe to continue. Weber had some problems descending the metal ladder that clings precariously to a sheer cliff face at the Second Step, but nothing that prepared Kikstra for his sudden collapse at its base. The news was like a kick in the stomach for Hall. “(On my descent) everything went OK for a while. Somehow we got a bit off course but there was a rope there, so we got down anyway,” Hall said. “Then another Sherpa, Pemba, came up and what had happened was Harry had sent him up to me because Thomas had died. Pemba came up and told me this, and I think this really somehow knocked me sideways. I mean I was stunned, I was actually in tears, but I think somehow it had a deeper effect than that, and that’s when I started not remembering what was going on.”

The 28 hours from that moment until Hall returned to Camp 6 remain something of a blur. What is known is he spent a freezing night out alone at about the cruising altitude of a passenger jet. In the so-called Death Zone, above 7600m, the air holds only a third as much oxygen as at sea level, dramatically increasing the risks of hypothermia, frostbite, high-altitude pulmonary edema (when the lungs fatally fill with fluid) and high-altitude cerebral edema (swelling of the oxygen-starved brain). Not that any of that was of great concern that night to his climbing team, because in their minds Hall was already dead.

The world’s biggest mountain has a way of nagging away at climbers. Especially those who have been to within 500m of the summit before turning back, as Hall had in 1984 when climbing with Greg Mortimer and Tim Macartney-Snape, who went on to become the first Australians to reach the top of the world. Hall says the desire to go back and make it to the top didn’t burn inside him, but he never completely gave up on the idea either. So when Richard Harris asked Lincoln to help his 15-year-old on Christopher scale Everest as part of his bid to become the youngest person to complete the Seven Summits, the dormant embers flared again. “There’d be times when I’d think, wow, I would really love to give Everest another go … there’d be other times when I’d think, no, it would be too cold and too hard and too dangerous and there’s too much else in life. Over the 20 years between expeditions I would be in either one of those states of mind,” Hall says. When opportunity knocked this time, it was in the former. The trip was confirmed in late February and six weeks later Hall, the Harrises and documentary maker Michael Dillon were standing on the tarmac in Kathmandu. “I was hoping I would get high enough for us to summit,” Hall says. “I was expecting that probably what was going to happen was Christopher and I would (have a chance to get to the top).”

At base camp on the north side of the mountain, the Christopher’s Climb expedition joined forces with the Russian-backed 7summits-club, led by Alexander Abramov, an Everest veteran listed on the company’s website as “Master of Sports of the USSR in Mountaineering”. 

After two weeks of acclimatising on the mountain, Hall, Richard and Christopher Harris and Dillon spent several days in the township of Shegar to recuperate for their summit push. “When we went back up Christopher found, to his huge surprise, that when he had a rest he couldn’t breathe … it was obvious he wasn’t right,” Hall says. Christopher was treated at Advanced Base Camp for very low blood pressure in the hope it was a one-off setback. “But it happened again the next day, so it was pretty obvious that was the end of the story for Christopher this time around.”

Dillon and Richard Harris, who had suffered some medical problems of his own, also pulled out of the summit push. “So there was me with the summit up there,” Hall says. He was feeling good and chances like that come along, in his experience, once in about every 20 years – which meant he would be 70 the next time. “So I headed on up.”

Fresh snow made for easy progress and at 9am on May 25 there was nowhere else to climb. “Everything went well, the weather was perfect … no one else was there,” says Hall, who estimates he rested at the top of the world for 20 minutes. “There was a real satisfaction on looking down on Makalu – it’s the fifth highest mountain in the world and we were looking down on it from a significant margin … there was a feeling of, ‘Yes, this is it’. But it’s a bit of a circuitous route to get up the last part of it so it actually takes longer than you think it’s going to, so by the time we got there I was already nervous about how long a descent we had to have. But I was feeling pretty good – not hugely energetic, because (at that altitude) you don’t – but I felt fine.”

But soon after leaving the summit it became obvious Hall wasn’t fine. In a phone call from ABC, Abramov said: “Lincoln started to move downwards very bad, co-ordination was lost. At 10.30 Lincoln has lain on snow and could not go down independently any more.” Abramov had just learned that Weber, another member of his team, had died, and had sent Pemba Sherpa up to help Hall down. A dream summit day was quickly turning into a nightmare.

Jamie McGuinness was head of Project-Himalaya team that was also heading to the summit on May 25, and was listening to Abramov’s radio conversations at ABC. He says he heard there was “some issue up there” but wasn’t overly concerned. “The reason I wasn’t worried was that Lincoln was climbing with three Sherpas and Pemba Sherpa, who had been with Thomas and was a particularly good Sherpa, if you can put it like that, was asked to help. That made at least four people helping and it was the sort of thing they should have been able to cope with. But we didn’t realise Lincoln was being so obstructive. We thought everything was under control.”

Over the next eight hours the four Sherpas tried to help Hall down the mountain, but succeeded in descending only a few hundred metres, to the base of the Second Step. During his descend Hall twice spoke by radio with Richard Harris, who urged him down, but Abramov says the conversations betrayed “an obvious loss of orientation in time and space”. Hall had now been out of camp for 18 hours. By 7pm the Sherpas were exhausted. With darkness falling, Abramov instructed them to return to Camp 6 without Hall.

 “There is a cold logic to it,” McGuinness says. “Either one person dies or four. It was getting dark and I remember the doctor asking how many breaths Lincoln was making, and it was six a minute, he was sleeping and they were holding his head. Lincoln was in the process of dying. How long it would take him to die was anyone’s guess, but the decision had to be made.”

McGuinness says the ability to make tough decisions such as this is “what makes a good expedition leader”. But he believes Abramov acted hastily in officially declaring Hall dead, news which was quickly broadcast to the world.

“He is quick in that situation to do the right thing, to tell the family and get the news out. In this case I believe he was a little too quick to tell the truth, because in this case it wasn’t quite the truth because Lincoln’s death hadn’t been confirmed yet.”

As his teammates and family digested news of his death, Lincoln lay alone at 8700m, barely alive – but alive. His memories of the night are scattered. “I have some vivid memories of bits and pieces, and that’s about it, really.” He remembers snow falling, but by Everest standards the night was relatively warm; the mercury dropped to about -15C, David Sharp spent a night out in temperatures closer to -30C.

Meanwhile, a commercial SummitClimb team led by American Dan Mazur was climbing by torch-light through the darkness, making its way up from Camp 6, headed for the summit. “I’d been told that we would find his body up there,” Mazur says. The group approached 8600m as the rising sun hit the ridge about 7.30am on May 26. And there, sitting on a narrow ledge, in the lotus position and changing his shirt, was Lincoln Hall. His first words have already become part of mountaineering lore: “I imagine you’re surprised to find me here.” Hall was wearing no hat and no gloves, had no oxygen mask, regulator, ice axe, oxygen, sleeping bag, food or water. He was also balanced precariously on the edge of a 2000m drop. “We didn’t expect to find anyone alive up there,” Mazur says, “especially at that time of day.” 

While Hall was able to tell the climbers who he was, it quickly became apparent he was only clinging to life. He was suffering severe frostbite and the effects of lack of oxygen to the brain. “He was hallucinating – he thought he was on a boat ride,” Mazur says. “He looked like he was in serious trouble and needed help right away.” Mazur’s team gave Hall oxygen – despite his objections – and food and water. The next challenge was finding someone from Hall’s team who would believe he was alive and launch a rescue mission. “As soon as we strapped the oxygen to him and gave him some food he started coming round, and we got on the radio and called his team and we had to convince them he was still alive. We had to do a real sales job on them – that took an hour or two. We had people from our team going over to their team and shouting at tents: ‘You’ve got to save this guy.’ We had to get someone on the radio who would listen to us … they were very convinced he was dead.”

As Mazur and his companions tied Hall to the mountain, two Italian climbers passed on their way to the summit, muttering “no speak English”, even though an American had an hour-long conversation with them in English the night before. Mazur said he never considered not stopping to help. “He obviously needed help and the only thing we could do was help him.” But that doesn’t mean Mazur, who was leading two clients who had each paid more than $25,000 for a shot at the top, has no regrets. “We have a lot of regrets about not making the summit. I’d been to the summit of Everest before so for me it wasn’t the end of the world, but my two clients were extremely disappointed.” 

Mazur’s team stayed with Hall for four hours until Sherpas dispatched from lower camps reached him. By then time had run out to get to the top and back safely. “Storms come in on the peak in the early afternoon, and sure enough storms did come in that afternoon. We didn’t want to become another fatality.”

Helped by a team of 11 Sherpas, Hall’s descent to Camp 6 was slow and arduous, but he was able to walk most of the way and even covered the final snow slope without assistance. By that time he had been in the Death Zone for almost two days and without oxygen for at least 12 hours. After a rest at Camp 6 he continued to the North Col, where he was treated in a hastily-organised field hospital. He was, McGuinness says, “almost home”. On reaching Advanced Base Camp on May 27 Hall phoned his wife and discovered the world thought he was dead. “I was amazed,” Hall says.

So was the world. Hall quickly became known, at least in Australia’s popular press, as the Everest “miracle man”. He is not the first person to survive a night in the Death Zone – during the 1996 Everest disaster Beck Weathers, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer all survived a night out above high camp during a ferocious storm, although only Weathers made it off the mountain alive (those climbers were missing, presumed dead, and had not been prematurely verified as deceased, as Hall was). In 1999, Babu Chiri Sherpa spent 21 hours on the summit, 16 of them without oxygen. But Hall’s survival is unquestionably remarkable.

“I think the irony of this whole situation is that Lincoln was rescued because there’s a circus on Everest at the moment,” says distinguished Australian climber Andrew Lock, who summitted Everest in 2000. “In Ed Hillary’s day, there wouldn’t have been the numbers going up the following day to find him alive and effect a rescue. So he was actually incredibly lucky that there were so many people about, and there was more than a day (of good weather) and, unlike the night of David Sharp, Lincoln got a very warm night.”

McGuinness says the fact Hall was part of a large climbing team definitely helped. “He had plenty of back-up,” he says. “In all 17 Sherpas took part in the rescue. Asian Trekking, who David Sharp was booked through, didn’t have back-up. Definitely luck also plays a part. Certainly the fact that Dan Mazur was climbing the next morning and came across him and he stopped, that was lucky.”

For his part, Lincoln says the fact that he could stand on his own feet, even after such prolonged exposure to the elements, saved his life. “I was able to get down the mountain basically by myself – with the Sherpas that had been sent up, but I was actually compus mentus and was able to get down. I was bloody exhausted, but I managed to do it. Which is just as well because the terrain there, you couldn’t carry someone. It wasn’t that sort of place. I think that’s why I survived and others didn’t, because I was able to get down basically on my own.”

As for the “miracle” tag, Hall shrugs it off. “The understanding of what happens up there in those places, well, there isn’t one amongst the general populace, so any label is inappropriate.”

Kikstra agrees. “Miracles do not exist in my view, this was a combination of luck and perfect teamwork, going against regular accepted results of people staying at high altitude. Our Sherpas deserve all the credit as they are the only ones strong enough to perform the rescue.” He says Hall was lucky to receive good weather and he obviously had a strong will to survive, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough. “Do not forget he did not want to be rescued. Only the persistence of the Sherpas saved him in the end.”

McGuinness agrees the Sherpas deserve credit for the “miracle”, and Pemba Sherpa in particular. Pemba left camp at the same time as Lincoln and by the time he returned to camp he had been outside for 24 hours and without oxygen for at least eight. “Pemba was saying all day he didn’t have any oxygen and he was getting more and more tired. It’s amazing he stayed with Lincoln as long as he did. He is a total hero.”

Hall also gives credit to his rescuers, and says he doesn’t hold a grudge for being left to die. “I think the Sherpas who were with me did the right thing, which was to leave me because they would have been dead. Well, I should have been dead too, but they would have been dead for sure because I actually had oxygen, apparently, but they didn’t. I’m still not clear on that, but they were in a very bad way.”

He says the experience will change him, “but I don’t know how”. “It was just an extraordinary set of circumstances and I still don’t know what to make of it.” Whether he climbs again may depend on what the outcome of treatment on his frostbitten hands and foot, but twice on Everest is definitely enough. “I don’t know what will happen (with my climbing career), but certainly I’m not going to do anything like that again. It was just an opportunity that came along, and there I was, and … well, I certainly got my money’s worth.”