[From Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (Villard, 1997)] Not only during the ascent but also during the descent my will-power is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself My attention has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing-and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is-like death through freezing-a pleasant one. Reinhold Messner The Crystal Horizon In my backpack was a banner from Outside magazine, a small pennant emblazoned with a whimsical lizard that Linda, my wife, had sewn, and some other mementos with which I'd intended to pose for a series of triumphant photos. Cognizant of my dwindling oxygen reserves, however, I left everything in my pack and stayed on top of the world just'long enough to fire off four quick shots of Andy Harris and Anatoli Boukreev posing in front of the summit survey marker. Then I turned to descend. About twenty yards below the summit I passed Neal Beidleman and a client of Fischer's named Martin Adams -on their way up. After exchanging a high five with Neal, I grabbed a handful of small stones from a wind-scoured patch of exposed shale, zipped the souvenirs into the pocket of my down suit, and hastened down the ridge. A moment earlier I'd noticed that wispy clouds now filled the valleys to the south, obscuring all but the highest peaks. Adams-a small, pugnacious Texan who'd gotten rich selling bonds during the booming 1980s-is an experienced airplane pilot who'd spent many hours gazing down on the tops of clouds; later he told me that he recognized these innocent-looking puffs of water vapor to be the crowns of robust thunderheads immediately after reaching the top. "When you see a thunderhead in an airplane," he explained, "your first reaction is to get the fuck out of there. So that's what I did." But unlike Adams, I was unaccustomed to peering down at cu- mulonimbus cells from 29,000 feet, and I therefore remained ignorant of the storm that was even then bearing down. My concerns revolved instead around the diminishing supply of oxygen in my tank. Fifteen minutes after leaving the summit I reached the top of the Hillary Step, where I encountered a clot of climbers chuffing up the single strand of rope, and my descent came to an enforced halt. As I wafted for the crowd to pass, Andy arrived on his way down. "Jon," he asked, "I don't seem to be getting enough air. Can you tell if the intake valve to my mask is iced up?" A quick check revealed a fist-sized chunk of frozen drool blocking the rubber valve that admitted ambient air into the mask from the atmosphere. I chipped it off with the pick of my ice ax, then asked Andy to return the favor by turning off my regulator in order to conserve my gas until the Step cleared. He mistakenly opened the valve instead of closing it, however, and ten minutes later all my oxygen was gone. My cognitive functions, which had been marginal before, instantly went into a nosedive. I felt like I'd been slipped an overdose of a powerful sedative. I fuzzily remember Sandy Pittm'an climbing past as I waited, bound for the summit, followed an indeterminate time later by Charlotte Fox and then Lopsang jangbu. Yasuko materialized next, just below my precarious stance, but was flummoxed by the last and steepest portion of the Step. I watched helplessly for fifteen minutes as she struggled to haul herself up the uppermost brow of rock, too exhausted to manage it. Finally Tim Madsen, who was waiting impatiently directly below her, put his hands beneath her buttocks and pushed her to the top. Rob Hall appeared not long after that. Disguising my rising panic, I thanked him for getting me to the top of Everest. "Yeah, it's turned out to be a pretty good expedition," he replied, then mentioned that Frank Fischbeck, Beck Weathers, Lou Kasischke, Stuart Hutchison, and John Taske had all turned back. Even in my state ofhypoxic imbecility, it was obvious Hall was profoundly disappointed that five of his eight clients had packed it in-a sentiment that I sus- pected was heightened by the fact that Fischer's entire crew appeared to be plugging toward the summit. "I only wish we could have gotten more clients to the top," Rob lamented before continuing on his way. Soon thereafter, Adams and Boukreev arrived on their way down, stopping immediately above me to wait for the traffic to clear. A minute later the overcrowding atop the Step intensified further as, Makalu Gau, Ang Dorje, and several other Sherpas came up the rope, followed by Doug Hansen and Scott Fischer. Then, finally, the Hillary Step was clear-but only after I'd spent more than an hour at 28,900 feet without supplemental oxygen. By that point, entire sectors of my cerebral cortex seemed to have shut down altogether. Dizzy, fearing that I would black out, I was frantic to reach the South Summit, where my third bottle was waiting. I started tenuously down the fixed lines, stiff with dread. just below the step, Anatoli'and Martin scooted around me and hurried down. Exercising extreme caution, I continued descending the tightrope of the ridge, but fifty feet above the oxygen cache the rope ended, and I balked at going farther without gas. Over at the South Summit, I could see Andy Harris sorting through a pile of orange oxygen bottles. "Yo, Harold! " I yelled, "Could you bring me a fresh bottle?" "There's no oxygen here! " the guide shouted back. "These bottles are all empty! " This was disturbing news. My brain screamed for oxygen. I didn't know what to do. just then, Mike Groom caught up to me on his way down from the summit. Mike had climbed Everest in 1993 without gas, and he wasn't overly concerned about going without. He gave me his oxygen bottle, and we quickly scrambled over to the South Summit. When we got there, an examination of the oxygen cache immediately revealed that there were at least six full bottles. Andy, however, refused to believe it. He kept insisting that they were all empty, and nothing Mike or I said could convince him otherwise. The only way to know how much gas is in a canister is to attach it to your regulator and read the gauge; presumably this is how Andy had checked the bottles at the South Summit. After the expedition, Neal Beidleman pointed out that if Andy's regulator had become fouled with ice, the gauge might have registered empty even though the canisters were full, which would explain his bizarre obstinacy. And if his regulator was perhaps on the fritz and not delivering oxygen to his mask, that would also explain Andy's apparent lack of lucidity. This possibility-which now seems so self-evident-didn't occur to either Mike or me at the time, however. In hindsight, Andy was acting irrationally and had plainly slipped well beyond routine hypoxia, but I was so mentally impeded myself that it simply didn't register. My inability to discern the obvious was exacerbated to some degree by the guide-client protocol. Andy and I were very sirnflar in terms of physical ability and technical expertise; had we been climbing together in a nonguided situation as equal partners, it's inconceivable to me that-I would have neglected to recognize his plight. But on this expedition ; he had been cast in the role of invincible guide, there to look after me' and the other clients; we had been specifically indoctrinated not to question our guides' judgment. The thought never entered my crippled mind that Andy might in fact be in terrible straits-that a guide might urgently need help from me. As Andy continued to assert that there were no full bottles at the South Summit, Mike looked at me quizzically. I looked back and shrugged. Turning to Andy, I said, "No big deal, Harold. Much ado about nothing." Then I grabbed a new oxygen canister, screwed it onto my regulator, and headed down the mountain. Given what unfolded over the hours that followed, the ease with which I abdicated responsibflity-my utter failure to consider that Andy might have been in serious trouble-was a lapse that's likely to haunt me for the rest of my life. Around 3:30 Pm. I left the South Summit ahead of Mike, Yasuko, and Andy, and almost immediately descended into a dense layer of clouds. Light snow started to fall. I could scarcely tell where the mountain ended and where the sky began in the flat, diminishing light; it would have been very easy to blunder off the edge of the ridge and never be heard from again.And the conditions only worsened as I moved down the peak. At the bottom of the rock steps on the Southeast Ridge I stopped with Mike to wait for Yasuko, who has having difficulty negotiating the fixed ropes. He attempted to call Rob on the radio, but Mike's transmitter was working only intermittently and he couldn't raise anybody. With Mike looking after Yasuko, and both Rob and Andy accompanying Doug Hansen-the only other client still above us-I assumed the situation was under control. So as Yasuko caught up to us I asked Mike's permission to continue down alone. "Fine," he replied. "Just don't walk off any cornices." About 4:45 Pm., when I reached the Balcony-the promontory at 27,600 feet on the Southeast Ridge where I'd sat watching the sunrise with Ang Dorje-I was shocked to encounter Beck Weathers, standing alone in the snow, shivering violently. I'd assumed that he'd descended to Camp Four hours earlier. "Beck! " I exclaimed, "what the fuck are you stilldoing up here?" Years earlier, Beck had undergone a radial keratotomy* 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 feU, and the worse his vision became. The previous afternoon as he was ascending from Camp Three to Camp Four, Beck later confessed to me, "my vision had gotten so bad that I couldn't see more than a few feet. So I just tucked right behind John Taske and when he'd lift a foot I'd place my foot right in his bootprint. " Beck had spoken openly of his vision problem earlier, but with the summit in reach he neglected to mention its increasing severity to Rob or anyone else. His bad eyes notwithstanding, he was climbing well and feeling stronger than he had since the beginning of the expedition, and, he explained, "I didn't want to bail out prematurely." I sat down to rest on a broad, sloping ledge, but after a few minutes a deafening BOOM! frightened me back to my feet. Enough new snow had accumulated that I feared a massive slab avalanche had released on the slopes above, but when I spun around to look I saw nothing. Then there was another BOOM!, accompanied by a flash that momentarily lit up the sky, and I realized I was hearing the crash of thunder. In the morning, on the way up, I'd made a point of continually studying the route on this part of the mountain, frequently looking down to pick out landmarks that would be helpful on the descent, compulsively memorizing the terrain: "Remember to turn left at the buttress that looks like a ship's prow. Then follow that skinny line of snow until it curves sharply to the right." This was something I'd trained myself to do many years earlier, a drill I forced myself to go through every time I climbed, and on Everest it may have saved my life. By 6:00 P.M., as the storm escalated into a fullscale blizzard with driving snow and winds gusting in excess of 60 knots, I came upon the rope that had been fixed by the Montenegrins on the snow slope 600 feet above the Col. Sobered by the force of the rising tempest, I realized that I'd gotten down the trickiest ground just in the nick of time. Wrapping the fixed line around my arms to rappel, I continued down through the blizzard. Some minutes later I was overwhelmed by a disturbingly familiar feeling of suffocation, and I realized that my oxygen had once again run out. Three hours earlier when I'd attached my regulator to my third and last oxygen canister, I'd noticed that the gauge indicated that the bottle was only half full. I'd figured that would be enough to get me most of the way down, though, so I hadn't bothered exchanging it for a full one. And now the gas was gone. I pulled the mask from my face, left it hanging around my neck, and pressed onward, surprisingly unconcerned. However, without supplemental oxygen, I moved more slowly, and I had to stop and rest more often. The literature of Everest is rife with accounts of hallucinatory experiences attributable to hypoxia and fatigue. In 1933, the noted English climber Frank Smythe observed "two curious looking objects floating in the sky" directly above him at 27,000 feet: " [One] possessed what appeared to be squat underdeveloped wings, and the other a protuberance suggestive of a beak. They hovered motionless but seemed slowly to pulsate." In 1980, during his solo ascent, Reinhold Messner imagined that an invisible companion was climbing be- side him. Gradually, I became aware that my mind had gone haywire in a similar fashion, and I observed my own slide from reality with a blend of fascination and horror. I was so far beyond ordinary exhaustion that I experienced a: queer detachment from my body, as if I were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined that I was dressed in a green cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a windchill in excess of seventy below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm. At 6:30, as the last of the daylight seeped from the sky, I'd descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four. Only one obstacle now stood between me and safety: a bulging incline of hard, glassy ice that I would have to descend without a rope. Snow pellets bome by 70-knot gusts stung my face; any exposed flesh was instantly frozen. The tents, no more than 650 horizontal feet away, were only intermittenty visible through the whiteout. There was no margin for error. Worried about making a critical blunder, I sat down to marshal my energy before descending further. Once I was off my feet, inertia took hold. It was so much easier to remain at rest than to summon the initiative to tackle the dangerous ice slope; so I just sat there as the storm 'roared around me, letting my mind drift, doing nothing for perhaps forty-five minutes. I'd tightened the drawstrings on my hood until only a tiny opening remained around my eyes, and I was removing the useless, frozen oxygen mask from beneath my chin when Andy Harris suddenly appeared out of the gloom beside me. Shining my headlamp in his direction, I reflexively recoiled when I saw the appalling condition of his face. His cheeks were coated with an armor of frost, one eye was frozen shut, and he was slurring his words badly. He looked in serious trouble. "Which way to the tents?" Andy blurted, frantic to reach shelter. Climbing above the South Col through the night, 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 inad- vertently rubbed some ice crystals into his eyes, lacerating both corneas. "At that point," Beck revealed, "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 what was going on." "Sorry pal," Rob immediately announced, "you're going down. I'll send one of the Sherpas down with you." But Beck wasn't quite ready to give up his summit hopes: "I explained to Rob that I thought there was a pretty good chance my vision would improve once the sun got higher and my pupfls contracted. I said I 'wanted to wait a little while, and then boogie on up after everybody else if I started seeing more clearly." Rob considered Beck's proposal, then decreed, "O.K., fair enough. I'll give you half an hour to find out. But I can't have you going down to Camp Four on your own. 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. I'm very serious about this: either you go down right now, or youpromise me you'll sit right here until I return.' "So I crossed my heart and hoped to die," Beck told me goodnaturedly as we stood in the blowing snow and waning light. "And I've kept my word. Which is why I'm still standing here." Shortly after noon, Stuart Hutchison, John Taske, and Lou Kasischke had gone past on their way down with Lhakpa and Kami, but Weathers elected not to accompany them. "The weather was still good," he explains, "and I saw no reason to break my promise to Rob at that point." Now, however, it was getting dark and conditions were turning grim. "Come down with me," I implored. "It will be at least another two or three hours before Rob shows up. I'll be your eyes. I'll get you down, no problem." Beck was nearly persuaded to descend with me when I made the mistake of mentioning that Mike Groom was on his way down with Yasuko, a few minutes behind me. 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." "O,K,, Beck," I replied. "It's your call. I guess I'll see you in camp, then. " Secretly, I was relieved that I wouldn't have to deal with getting Beck down the problematic slopes to come, most of which were not protected by fixed lines. Daylight was waning, the weather was worsening, my reserves of strength were nearly gone. Yet I still didn't have any sense that calamity was around the comer. Indeed, after talking with Beck I even took the time to find a spent oxygen canister that I'd stashed in the snow on the way up some ten hours earlier. Wanting to remove all my trash from the mountain, I stuffed it into my pack with my other two bottles (one empty, one partially full) and then hurried toward the South Col, 1,600 feet below. From the Balcony I descended a few hundred feet down a broad, gentle snow gully without incident, but then things began to get sketchy. The route meandered through outcroppings of broken shale blanketed with six inches of fresh snow. Negotiating the puzzling, infirm terrain demanded unceasing concentration, an all-but-impossible feat in my punch-drunk state. Because the wind had erased the tracks of the climbers who'd gone down before me, I had difficulty determining the correct route. In 1993, Mike Groom's partner-Lopsang Tshering Bhutia, a skilled Himalayan climber who was a nephew of Tenzing Norgay's-had taken a wrong turn in this area and fallen to his death. Fighting to maintain a grip on reality, I started talking to myself out loud. "Keep it together, keep it together, keep it together," I chanted over and over, mantra-like. "You can't afford to fuck things up here. This is way serious. Keep it together." I pointed in the direction of Camp Four, then warned him about the ice just below us. "It's steeper than it looks! " I yelled, straining to make myself heard over the tempest. "Maybe I should go down first and get a rope from camp-" As I was in midsentence, Andy abruptly turned away and moved over the lip of the ice slope, leaving me sitting there dumbfounded. Scooting on his butt, he started down the steepest part of the incline. 'Andy," I shouted after him, 'it's crazy to try it like that! You're going to blow it for sure! " He yelled something back, but his words were carried off by the screaming wind. A second later he lost his purchase, flipped ass over teakettle, and was suddenly rocketing headfirst down the ice. Two hundred feet below, I could just make out Andy's motionless form slumped at the foot of the incline. I was sure he'd broken at least a leg, maybe his neck. But then, incredibly, he stood up, waved that he was O.K., and started lurching toward Camp Four, which, at the moment was in plain sight, 500 feet beyond. I could see the shadowy forms of three or four people standing outside the tents; their headlamps flickered through curtains of blowing snow. I watched Harris walk toward them across the flats, a distance he covered in less than ten minutes. Men the clouds closed in a moment later, cutting off my view, he was within sixty feet of the tents, maybe closer. I didn't see him again after that, but I was certain that he'd reached the security of camp, where Chuldum and Arita would doubtless be waiting with hot tea. Sitting out in the storm, with the ice bulge still standing between me and the tents, I felt a pang of envy. I was angry that my guide hadn't waited for me. My backpack held little more than three empty oxygen canisters and a pint of frozen lemonade; it probably weighed no more than sixteen or eighteen pounds. But I was tired, and worried about getting down the incline without breaking a leg, so I tossed the pack over the edge and hoped it would come to rest where I could retrieve it. Then I stood up and started down the ice, which was as smooth and hard as the surface of a bowling ball. Fifteen minutes of dicey, fatiguing crampon work brought me safely to the bottom of the incline, where I easily located my pack, and another ten minutes after that I was in camp myself. I lunged into my tent with my crampons stifl on, zipped the door tight, and sprawled across the frost-covered floor too tired to even sit upright. For the first time I had a sense of how wasted I really was: I was more exhausted than I'd ever been in my life. But I was safe. Andy was safe. The others would be coming into camp soon. We'd fucking done it. We'd climbed Everest. It had been a little sketchy there for a while, but in the end everything had turned out great. It would be many hours before I learned that everything had not in fact turned out great-that nineteen men and women were stranded up on the mountain by the storm, caught in a desperate struggle for their lives. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on thefac'e offacts a sinister violence of intention-that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength heyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and fear, the pain of his fatigue and the longingfor rest.- which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary-the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life. Joseph Conrad Lord Jim Neal Beidleman reached the summit at 1:25 P.M. with client Martin Adarns. When they got there, Andy Harris and Anatoh Boukreev were already on top; I had departed eight minutes earlier. Assuming that the rest of his team would be appearing shortly, Beidleman snapped some photos, bantered with Boukreev, and sat down to wait. At 1:45, client Klev Schoening ascended the final rise, Pulled out a photo of his wife and children, and commenced a tearful celebration of his arrival on top of the world. From the summit, a bump in the ridge blocks one's view of the rest of the route, and by 2:00-the designated turn around timethere was still no sign of Fischer or any other clients. Beidleman began to grow concerned about the lateness of the hour. Thirty-six years old, an aerospace engineer by training, he was a quiet, thoughtful, extremely conscientious guide who was well liked by most members of his team and Hall's. Beidleman was also on of the strongest climbers on the mountain. Two years earlier he and Boukreev-whom he considered a good friend-had climbed 27,824foot Makalu together in near-record time, without supplemental oxygen or Sherpa support. He first met Fischer and Hall on the slopes of K2 in 1992, where his competence and easygoing demeanor left a favorable impression on both men. But because Beidleman's highaltitude experience was relatively limited (Makalu was his only major Himalayan summit), his station in the Mountain Madness chain, of command was below Fischer and Boukreev. And his pay reflected his junior status: he'd agreed to guide Everest for $10,000, compared to the $25,000 Fischer paid Boukreev. Beidleman, sensitive by nature, was quite conscious of his place in the expedition pecking order. "I was definitely considered the third guide," he acknowledged after the expedition, "so I tried not to be too pushy. As a consequence, I didn't always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it." Beidleman said that according to Fischer's loosely formulated plan for the summit day, Lopsang jangbu was supposed to be at the front of the line, carrying a radio and two coils of rope to install ahead of the clients; Boukreev and Beidleman-neither of whom was given a radio-were to be "in the middle or near the front, depending on how the clients were moving; and Scott, carrying a second radio, was going to be 'sweep.' At Rob's suggestion, we'd decided to enforce a two o'clock turnaround time: anybody who wasn't within spitting distance of the summit by two pm. had to turn around and go down. "It was supposed to be Scott's job to turn clients around," Beidleman explained. "We'd talked about it. I'd told him that as the third guide, I didn't feel comfortable telling clients who'd paid sixty-five thousand dollars that they had to go down. So Scott agreed that would be his responsibility. But for whatever reason, it didn't happen." In fact, the only people to reach the summit before 2:00 Pm. were Boukreev, Harris, Beidleman, Adams, Schoening, and me; if Fischer and Hall had been true to their pre-arranged rules, everyone else would have turned back before the top. Despite Beidleman's growing anxiety about the advancing clock, he didn't have a radio, so there was no way to discuss the situation with Fischer. Lopsang-who did have a radio-was still somewhere out of sight below. Early that morning, when Beidleman had encountered Lopsang on the Balcony, vomiting between his knees into the snow,'he'd taken the Sherpa's two coils of rope to fix on the steep rock steps above. As he now laments, however, 'It didn't even occur to me to grab his radio, too." The upshot, Beidleman recalled, is that 'I ended up sitting on the summit for a very long time, looking at my watch and waiting for Scott to show, thinking about heading down-but every time I stood up to leave, another one of our clients would roll over the crest of the ridge, and I'd sit back down to wait for them." Sandy Pittman appeared over the final rise about 2:10, slightly ahead of Charlotte Fox, Lopsang jangbu, Tim Madsen, and Lene Gammelgaard. But Pittman was moving very slowly, and shortly below the summit she abruptly dropped to her knees in the snow. When Lopsang came to her assistance he discovered that her. third oxygen canister had run out. Early in the morning, when he'd started short-roping Pittman, he'd also cranked her oxygen flow as high as it would go-four liters per minute-and consequently she'd used up all her gas relatively quickl Fortunately, Lopsang-who wasn't using oxygen himself-was carrying a spare oxygen canister in his pack. He attached Pittman's mask and regulator to the fresh bottle, and then they ascended the last few meters to the top and joined the celebration in progress. Rob -Hall, Mike Groom, and Yasuko Namba reached the summit around this time, too, and Hall radioed Helen Wilton at Base Camp to give her the good news. "Rob said it was cold and windy up there, Wilton recalled, "but he sounded good. He said, 'Doug is just coming up over the horizon; right after that I'll be heading down.... If you don't hear from me again, it means everyth'mg's fine.' " Wilton noti- fied the Adventure Consultants office in New Zealand, and a flurry of faxes went out to friends and families around the world, announcing the expedition's triumphant culmination. But Doug Hansen wasn't just below the summit at that point, as Hall believed, nor was Fischer. It would in fact be 3:40 before Fischer reached the top, and Hansen wouldn't get there untfl after 4:00 Pm. The previous afternoon-Thursday, May 9-when all of us had climbed from Camp Three to Camp Four, Fischer hadn't reached the tents on the South Col until after 5:00 Pm., and he was visibly tired when he'd finally gotten there, although he did his best to disguise his fatigue from his clients. "That evening," recalled his tent-mate Charlotte Fox, "I couldn't tell that Scott might have been sick. He was act- ing like Mr. Gung Ho, getting everyone psyched up like a football coach before the big game." In truth Fischer was exhausted from the physical and mental strain of the preceding weeks. Although he possessed extraordinary reserves of energy, he'd been profligate with those reserves, and by the time he got to Camp Four they were nearly depleted. "Scott strong person," Boukreev acknowledged after the expedition, "but before summit attempt is tired, has many problems, spend lots of power. Worry, worry, worry, worry. Scott nervous, but he keep inside." Fischer hid the fact from everyone, as well, that he may have been clinically ill during the summit attempt. In 1984, during an expedition to Nepal's Annapurna Massif, he'd been stricken with a mysterious disease that had degenerated into a chronic liver condition. Over the years he'd consulted numerous doctors and undergone batteries of medical tests, but a definitive diagnosis was never forth- coming. Fischer simply referred to his affliction as a "liver cyst," told few people about it, and tried to pretend that it was nothing to worry about. "Wnatever it was," says Jane Bromet, one of the handful of intimates who knew about the aflment, "it produced malaria-like symptoms, even though it wasn't malaria. He would break into these intense sweating spells and get the shakes. The spells would lay him low, but they would only last for ten or fifteen minutes and then pass. In Seattle he'd get the attacks maybe once a week or so, but when he was stressed they'd occur more frequently. At Base Camp he was getting them more often-every other day, sometimes every day." If Fischer suffered such attacks at Camp Four or above, he never mentioned it. Fox reported that soon after he crawled into their tent Thursday evening, 'Scott conked out and slept really hard for about two hours." When he woke up at 10: 00 P.M. he was slow getting ready and,he remained in camp long after the last of his clients, guides, and Sherpas departed for the summit. It's unclear when Fischer actually left Camp Four; perhaps as late as 1:00 A.M. on Friday, May 10. He dragged far behind everyone else through most of the summit day, and he didn't arrive at the South Summit until around 1:00 Pm. I first saw him at about 2:45, on my way down from the top, while I waited on the Hillary Step with Andy Harris for the crowd to clear out. Fischer was the last climber up the rope, and he looked extremely wasted. After we exchanged pleasantries, he spoke briefly with Martin Adams and Anatoli Boukreev, who were standing just above Harris and me, waiting to descend the Step. "Hey, Martin," Fischer bantered through his oxygen mask, trying to affect a jocular tone. "Do you think you can summit Mount Everest?" "Hey, Scott," Adams replied, sounding annoyed that Fischer hadn't offered any congratulations, "I'just did." Next Fischer had a few words with Boukreev. As Adams remembered the conversation, Boukreev told Fischer, "I am going down with Martin." Then Fischer plodded slowly on toward the summit, while Harris, Boukreev, Adams, and I turned to rapper down the Step. Nobody discussed Fischer's exhausted appearance. It didn't occur to any of us that he might be in trouble. At 3:10 Friday afternoon Fischer still hadn't arrived on top, says Beidleman, adding, "I decided it was time to get the hell out of there, even though Scott hadn't showed up yet." He gathered up Pittman, Gammelgaard, Fox, and Madsen and started leading them down the summit ridge. Twenty minutes later, just above the Hillary Step, they ran into Fischer. "I didn't really say anything to him," Beidleman recalls. "He just sort of raised his hand. He looked like he was having a hard time, but he was Scott, so I wasn't particularly worried. I figured he'd tag the summit and catch up to us pretty quick to help bring the clients down." Beidleman's primary concern at the time was Pittman: "Everybody was pretty messed up by that point, but Sandy looked especially shaky. I thought that if I didn't keep real close tabs on her, there was a good chance she'd peel right off the ridge. So I made sure she was clipped into the fixed line, and in the places where there was no rope I grabbed her harness from behind and kept a tight hold on her until she could clip into the next section of rope. She was so out of it that I'm not sure she even knew I was there." A short distance below the South Summit, as the climbers descended into thick clouds and falling snow, Pittman collapsed again and asked Fox to give her an injection of a powerful steroid called dexamethasone. "Dex," as it is known, can temporarily negate the deleterious effects of altitude; each member of Fischer's team carried a preprepared syringe of the drug in a plastic toothbrush case inside his or her down suit, where it wouldn't freeze, for emergencies. "I pulled aside Sandy's pants a little," Fox recalls, "and jammed the needle into her hip, right through her long underwear and everything." Beidleman, who had lingered at the South Summit to inventory oxygen, arrived on the scene to see Fox plunging the syringe into Pittman, stretched out face down on the snow. "When I came over the rise and saw Sandy lying there, with Charlotte standing over her waving a hypodermic needle, I thought, 'Oh fuck, this looks bad.' So I asked Sandy what was going on, and when she tried to answer all that came out of her mouth was a bunch of garbled babble." Extremely concerned, Beidleman ordered Gammelgaard to exchange her full oxygen canister with Pittman's nearly empty one, made sure her regulator was turned to full flow, then grabbed the semicomatose Pittman by her harness and started dragging her down the steep snow of the Southeast Ridge. "Once I got her sliding," he explains, "I'd let go and glissade down in front of her. Every fifty meters I'd stop, wrap my hands around the fixed rope, and brace myself to arrest her slide with a body block. The first time Sandy came barreling into me, the points of her crampons shced through my down suit, Feathers went flying everywhere." To everyone's relief, after about twenty minutes the injection and extra oxygen revived Pittman and she was able to resume the descent under her own power. Around 5:00 P.M., as Beidleman accompanied his clients down the ridge, Mike Groom and Yasuko Namba were arriving at the Balcony some 500 feet below them. From this promontory at 27,600 feet, the route veers sharply off the ridge to the south toward Camp Four. When Groom looked in the other direction, however-down the north side of the ridge-through the billowing snow and faltering light he noticed a lone climber badly off route: it was Martin Adams, who'd become disoriented in the storm and mistakenly started to descend the Kangshung Face into Tibet. As soon as Adams saw Groom and Namba above him, he realized his mistake and climbed slowly back toward the Balcony. "Martin was out of it by the time he got back up to Yasuko and me," Groom recalls. "His oxygen mask was off and his face was encrusted in snow. He asked, 'Which way to the tents?"' Groom pointed, and Adams immediately started down the corre'ct side of the ridge, following the trail I'd blazed perhaps ten minutes earlier. While Groom was waiting for Adams to climb back up to the ridge, he sent Namba down ahead and busied himself trying to find a camera case he'd left on the way up. As he was looking around, for the first time he noticed another person on the Balcony with him. "Because he was sort of camouflaged in the snow, I took him to be one of Fischer's group, and I ignored him. Then this person was standing in front of me saying, 'Hi, Mike,' and I realized it was Beck." Groom, just as surprised to see Beck as I had been, 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 tirnes. It was bloody nerve-racking. I had to make sure I had a good ice-ax belay and that all my points were clean and sticking into something solid at all times." One by one, following the tracks I'd made ffteen or twenty minutes earlier, Beidleman and the remainder of Fischer's clients filed down through the worsening blizzard. Adams was behind me, ahead of the others; then came Namba, Groom and Weathers, -Schoening and Gammelgaard, Beidleman, and finally Pittman, Fox, and Madsen. Five hundred feet above the South Col, where the steep.shale gave way to a gentler slope of snow, Namba's oxygen ran ou't, and the diminutive Japanese woman sat down, refusing to move. "When I tried to take her oxygen mask off so she could breathe more easfly," says Groom, "she'd insist on putting it right back on. No amount of persuasion could convince her that she was out of oxygen, that the mask was actually suffocating her. By now, Beck had weakened to the point where he wasn't able to walk on his own, and I had to support him on my shoulder. Fortunately, right about then Neal caught up to US." Beidleman, seeing that Groom had his hands full with Weathers, started dragging Na-mba down toward Camp 'Four, even though she wasn)t on Fischer's team. It was now about 6:45 Pm. and almost completely dark. Beidleman, Groom, their clients, and two Sherpas from Fischer's team who had belatedly materialized out of the mist-Tashi Tshering and Ngawang Dorje-had coalesced into a single group. Although they were moving slowly, they had descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four. At that moment I was just arriving at the tents-probably no more than fifteen minutes in front of the first members of Beidleman's group. But in that brief span the storm abruptly metastasized into a full-blown hurricane, and the visibility dropped to less than twenty feet. Wanting to avoid the dangerous ice pitch, Beidleman led his group on an indirect route that looped far to the east, where the slope was much less steep, and around 7:30 they safely reached the broad, gently rolling expanse of the South Col. By then, however, only threeor four people had headlamps with batteries that hadn't run down, and everyone was on the brink of physical collapse. Fox was increasingly relying on Madsen for assistance. Weathers and Namba were unable to walk without being supported by Groom and Beidleman, respectively. Beidleman knew they were on the eastern, Tibetan side of the Col and that the tents lay somewhere to the west. But to move in that direction it was necessary 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 so difficult and painful," Schoening explains, "that there was an inevitable tendency to bear off the wind, to keep angling away from it to the left, and that's how we went wrong. "At times you couldn't even see your own feet, it was blowing so hard," he continues. "I was worried somebody would sit down or get separated from the group and we'd never see them again. But once we got to the flats of the Col we started following the Sherpas, and I figured they knew where camp was. Then they suddenly stopped and doubled back, and it quickly became obvious they didn't have any idea where we were. At that point I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. That's when I first knew we were in trouble. For the next two hours, Beidleman, Groom, the two Sherpas, and the seven clients staggered blindly around in the storm, growing ever more exhausted and hypothermic, hoping to blunder across the camp. Once they came across a couple of discarded oxygen bottles, suggesting that the tents were near, but the climbers couldn't locate them. "It was total chaos, " says Beidleman. "People are wandering all over the place; I'm yelling at everyone, trying to get them to follow a single leader. Finally, probably around ten o'clock ' I walked over this little rise, and it felt like I was standing on the edge of the earth. I could sense 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 down the Kangshung Face. They were at the same elevation as Camp Four, just 1,000 horizontal feet from safety,* but, says Beidleman, "I knew that if we kept wandering in the storm, pretty soon we were going to lose somebody. I was exhausted from dragging Yasuko. Charlotte and Sandy were barely able to stand. So I screamed at everyone to huddle up right there,and wait for a break in the storm," Beidleman and Schoening 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. In the lee of a boulder no larger than a dishwasher, the climbers hunkered in a pathetic row on a patch of gale-scoured ice. "By then the cold had about finished me off) )) says Charlotte Fox. "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." "We tried to keep warm by pummeling each other," Weathers remembers. "Someone yelled at us to keep moving our arms and legs. Sandy was hysterical; she kept yeuing over and over, 'I don't want to die! I don't want to die!' But nobody else was saying a whole lot." Three hundred yards to the west I was shivering uncontrollably in my tent-even though I was zipped into my sleeping bag, and wearing my down suit and every other stitch of clothing I had. The gale threatened to blow the tent apart. Every time the door was opened, the shelter would fill with blowing spindrift, so everything inside was covered with an inch-thick layer of snow. Oblivious to the tragedy unfolding outside in the storm, I drifted in and out of consciousness, delirious from exhaustion, dehydration, and the cumulative effects of oxygen depletion. At some point early in the evening, Stuart Hutchison, my tentmate, came in, shook me hard, and asked if I would go outside with him to bang on pots and shine lights into the sky in the hope of guiding the lost climbers in, but I was too weak and incoherent to respond. Hutchison-who had gotten back to camp at 2:00 P.M. and was thus considerably less debilitated than me-then tried to rouse clients and Sherpas from the other tents. Everybody was too cold or too exhausted. So Hutchison went out into the storm alone. He left our tent six times that night to look for the missing climbers, but the blizzard was so fierce that he never dared to venture more than a few yards beyond the margin of camp. "The winds were ballistically strong," he emphasizes. "The blowing spindrift felt like a sandblaster or something. I could only go out for fifteen minutes at a time before I became too cold and had to return to the tent." Out among the climbers hunkered on the eastern edge of the Col, Beidelman willed himself to stay alert for a sign that the storm might be blowing itself out. just before midnight, his vigilance was rewarded when he suddenly noticed a few stars overhead and shouted to the others to look. The wind was still whipping up a furious groundblizzard at the surface, but far above, the sky had begun to clear, re- vealing the hulking silhouettes of Everest and Lhotse. From these reference points, Klev Schoening thought he'd figured out where the group was in relation to Camp Four. After a shouting match with Beidleman, he convinced the guide that he knew the way to the tents. Beidleman tried to coax everyone to their feet and get them moving in the direction indicated by Schoening, but Pittman, Fox, Weathers, and Namba 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 Beidleman assembled those who were ambulatory, and then he, Schoening, Gam- melgaard, Groom, and the two Sherpas stumbled off into the storm to get help, leaving behind the four incapacitated clients with Tim Mad- sen. Reluctant to abandon his girlfriend, Fox, Madsen selflessly volunteered to stay and look after everybody until help arrived. Twenty minutes later, Beidleman's contingent limped into camp, where they had an emotional reunion with a very worried Anatoli Boukreev. Schoening and Beidleman, barely able to speak, told the Russian where to find the five clients who'd remained behind out in the elements and then collapsed in their respective tents, utterly spent. Boukreev had come down to the South Col hours in front of anyone else in Fischer's team. Indeed, by 5:00 Pm., while his teamnates were still struggling down through the clouds at 28,000 feet, Boukr 'eev was already in his tent resting and drinking tea. Experienced guides would later question his decision to descend so far ahead of his clients, extremely unorthodox behavior for a guide. One of the clients from that group has nothing but contempt for Boukreev, insisting that when it mattered most, the guide "cut and ran." Anatoli had left the summit around 2:00 Pm. and quickly became entangled in the traffic jam at the Hillary Step. As soon as the mob dispersed he moved very rapidly down the Southeast Ridge without waiting for any clients-despite telling Fischer atop the Step that he would be going down with Martin Adams. Boukreev thereby arrived at Camp Four well before the brunt of the storm. After the expedition, when I asked Anatoli why he had hurried down ahead of his group, he handed me the transcript of an interview he'd given a few days previously to Men's Journal through a Russian interpreter. Boukreev told me that he'd read the transcript and confirmed its accuracy. Reading it on the spot, I quickly came to a series of questions about the descent, to which he had replied: "I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour... It is very-cold, naturally, it takes your strength.... My position was that I would not be good if I stood around freezing, waiting. I would be more useful if I returned to Camp Four in order to be able to take oxygen up to the returning climbers or to go up to help them if some became weak during the descent. . . . If you are immobile at that altitude you lose strength in the cold, and then you are unable to do anything." Boukreev's susceptibility to the cold was doubtless greatly exacerbated by the fact that he wasn't using supplemental oxygen; in the absence of gas he simply couldn't stop to wait for slow clients on the summit ridge without courting frostbite and hypothermia. For whatever reason, he raced down ahead of the group-which in fact had been his pattern throughout the entire expedition, as Fischer's final letters and phone calls from Base Camp to Seattle made clear. When I questioned him about the wisdom of leaving his clients on the summit ridge, Anatoli insisted that it was for the good of the team: "It is much better for me to warm myself at South Col, be ready to carry up oxygen if clients run out." Indeed, shortly after dark, after Beidleman's group failed to return and the storm had risen to hurricane intensity, Boukreev realized they must be in trouble and made a courageous attempt to bring oxygen to them. But his stratagem had a serious flaw: because neither he nor Beidleman had a radio, Anatoli had no way of knowing the true nature of the missing climbers' predicament, or even where on the huge expanse of the upper mountain they might be. Around 7:30 P.M., Boukreev left Camp Four to search for the group, regardless. By then, he recalled, "Visibility was maybe a meter. It disappeared altogether. I had a lamp, and I began to use oxygen to speed up my ascent. I was carrying three bottles. I tried to go faster, but visibility was gone.... It is like being without eyes, without being able to see, it was impossible to see. That is very dangerous, because one can fall into a crevasse, one can fall toward the southern side of Lhotse, 3,000 meters straight down. I tried to go up, it was dark, I could not find the fixed line." Some six hundred feet above the Col, Boukreev recognized the futility of his effort and returned to the tents, but, he admits, he very nearly became lost himself. In any case, it was just as well that he abandoned this rescue effort, because at that point his teammates were no longer on the peak above, where Boukreev had been headed-by the time he gave up his search, Beidleman's group was actually wandering around on the Col six hundred feet below the Russian. When he arrived back at Camp Four around 9:00 Pm., Boukreev was worried about the nineteen climbers who were missing,. but because he had no idea where they might be, there was nothing he could do except bide his time.Then, at 12:45 A.M., Beidleman, Groom, Schoening, and Gammelgaard hobbled into camp. "Klev and Neal had lost all power and could barely talk," Boukreev recalls. "They told me Charlotte, Sandy, and Tim need help, Sandy is close to dying. Then they give me general location where to find them." Upon hearing the climbers arrive, Stuart Hutchison went out to assist Groom. "I got Mike into his tent," Hutchison recalled, " and saw that he was really, really exhausted. He was able to communicate clearly, but it required an agonal effort, like a dying man's last words. 'You have to get some Sherpas,' he told me. 'Send them out for Beck and Yasuko. And then he pointed toward the Kangshung side of the Col." Hutchison's efforts to organize a rescue team proved fruitless, however. Chuldum and Arita-Sherpas on Hall's team who hadn't accompanied the summit party and were wafting in reserve at Camp Four specifically for such an emergency-had been incapacitated with carbon monoxide poisoning from cooking in a poorly ventilated tent; Chuldum was actually vomiting blood. And the other four Sherpas on our team were too cold and debilitated from having gone to the summit. After the expedition, I asked Hutchison why, once he learned the whereabouts of the missing climbers, he didn't attempt to wake Frank Fischbeck, Lou Kasischke, or John Taske-or make a second attempt to wake me-in order to request our help with the rescue effort. "It was so obvious that all of you were completely exhausted that I didn't even consider asking. You were so far past the point of ordinary fatigue that I thought if you attempted to help with a rescue you were only going to make the situation worse-that you would get out there and have to be rescued yourself. " The upshot was that Stuart went out into the storm alone, but once again he turned around at the edge of camp when he became worried that he wouldn't be able to find his way back if he went farther. At the same time, Boukreev was also trying to organize a rescue team, but he didn't contact Hutchison or come to my tent, so the efforts of Hutchison and Boukreev remained uncoordinated, and I never learned of either rescue plan. In the end Boukreev discovered, like Hutchison, that everybody he managed to rouse was too sick or exhausted or frightened to help. So the Russian resolved to bring back the group on his own. Bravely plunging into the maw of the hurricane, he searched the Col for nearly an hour but was unable to find anybody. Boukreev didn't give up. He returned to camp, obtained a more detailed set of directions from Beidleman and Schoening, then went out into the storm again. This time he saw the faint glow of Madsen's fading headlamp and was thereby able to locate the missing chmbers. "They were lying on the ice, without movement," says Boukreev. "They could not talk." Madsen was still conscious and largely able to take care of himself, but Pittman, Fox, and Weathers were utterly helpless, and Namba appeared to be dead. After Beidleman and the others had set out from the huddle to get help, Madsen had gathered together the climbers who remained and hectored everybody to keep moving in order to stay warm. "I sat Yasuko down in Beck's lap," Madsen recalls, "but he was pretty unre- sponsive by that time, and Yasuko wasn't moving at all. A little later I saw that she'd laid down flat on her back, with snow blowing into her hood. Somehow she'd lost a glove-her right hand was bare, and her fingers were curled up so tightly you couldn't straighten them. It looked like they were pretty much frozen to the bone. "I assumed she was dead," Madsen continues. 'But then a while later she suddenly moved, and it freaked me out: she sort of arched her neck slightly, as if she was trying to sit up, and her right arm came up, then that was it. Yasuko lay back down and never moved again." As soon as Boukreev found the group, it became obvious to him that he could bring only one climber in at a time. He was carrying an oxygen bottle, which he and Madsen hooked up to Pittman's mask. Then Boukreev indicated to Madsen that he'd be back as soon as pos- sible and started helping Fox back toward the tents. "After they left," says Madsen, "Beck was crumpled in a fetal position, not moving a whole lot, and Sandy was curled up in my lap, not moving much, either. I screamed at her, 'Hey, keep wiggling your hands! Let me see your hands!' And when she sits up and pu.Us her hands out, I see she doesn't have any [mittens] on-that they were dangling from her wrists. "So I'm trying to shove her hands back into her [mittens] when all of a sudden Beck 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 him over backward into the night, beyond the beam of my headlamp. And that was the last I saw of him. "Toli came back a little bit after that and grabbed Sandy, so I just packed up my stuff and started waddling after them, trying to follow Toli's and Sandy's headlamps. By then I assumed Yasuko was dead and Beck was a lost cause." When they finally reached camp it was 4:30 A.M., and the sky was starting to brighten above the eastern horizon. Upon hearing from Madsen that Yasuko hadn't made it, Beidleman broke down in his tent and wept for forty-five minutes.