A Beautiful Place To Find Madness - The Stories Of Mount Everest

Dear Bryan,

A long time ago, my mother told me a story about Summit Fever – actually I prefer the German word “Höhenrausch” much more, which can be translated to “high altitude drunkenness or intoxication”. It seems to be more accurate. Back in the day, when she still followed my mountaineering father up the mountains, she encountered it with a companion. She described, how unpredictable the person got and quite dangerous when you are tied together by rope. And my father told me, that you have to bring that person down immediately. That is the decision you make. Turn around and safe that person. The stories of these highest mountains rarely contain such decisions. When you follow them you get the impression that everyone up there is mad. And after all I read, I think this is exactly what happens there. I think that high up, everyone gets at least a bit of summit fever. Even the ones, who use oxygen. It is a mad place up there. I don’t know about which movie or book I am thinking of, but it reminds me of how artists sometimes imagine hell. A place full of madness and cruelty.

The most disturbing stories are the ones where people die, but the other climbers just move on. Up to the summit. I found a lot of stories full of tragedy, they all throw a shadow over the achievement of reaching summits, a shadow too dark and too cold to outshine. Pictures of people on summits happily smiling, whilst you can read that just two hours before some of their companions had fallen to death. That is highly irritating. There are stories of people unhooking themselves out of safety ropes, leaving the path, stepping over the edge, disappearing forever. People go up to the summit, when they clearly shouldn’t, they take off clothes not knowing why, they leave important gear behind. Sometimes they don’t help others, although they still could (often enough, they really can not help), sometimes they attack people, who want to help them. It is a savage place, where you might not find the help you need, when things don’t go according to plan. But you can also end up not helping others, because you are out of your mind, and then having to live with that guilt for the rest of your life.

There is the very famous story of the Everest disaster from 1996 – there is even a Hollywood movie about it - where a blizzard led to very tragic incidents and up to that point to the highest death rate in one day on Mount Everest (tragically surpassed by a horrible earthquake in Nepal, where avalanches wiped out the basecamp leading to 22 deaths and 60 injured people). I heard this story from different perspectives, what made it even more confusing up to a point, where I have the feeling that the people, who survived the storm are themselves unsure, who was where and what was happening around them. And of course not everyone might be willing to tell their story in detail. But basically it evolves around two teams of commercial expeditions. So, mountain guides with their paying clients. There is a New Zealand team led by an experienced mountaineer named Rob Hall and an American team led by a guy called Scott Fisher. Scott Fisher’s company had the name Mountain Madness and to be honest, his clients got what the name promised. In an interview right before the events, he stated how psyched he is to bring his clients firstly safe down from the mountain, but secondly and with a louder voice up to the summit. This is how he maintains his lifestyle, he said.

There was a calculated turnaround time that should be taken serious, because you need to be back at camp 4, before your oxygen and your energy runs out. That turnaround time was 1:30pm. Everything took longer than planned, but some of the climbers made it to the summit at around that time. Getting them to leave the summit again seems to be a hard challenge. So, they are already late. At that point Rob Hall was still on the way towards the summit with a struggling client. And that story is heartbreaking. The climber in trouble was not a rich man. He had been on that mountain some years before with Rob Hall. He had to turn around at the south summit and had needed assistance to even do that. After that, he worked two jobs to get the money he would need for a second try. A premise for dangerous summit fever, no doubt. Rob Hall obviously felt very responsible for that client. He hadn’t managed to bring him to the summit the first time, he clearly wanted to help him fulfill his dream this time. Other climbers going down asked the client, if he wants to go down with them, because it is late. He only shook his head and pointed at the summit. I can’t remember, if he made it actually. I guess, he did. It was very late. And then came the blizzard. No one had seen that coming. The weather forecast is now better, I heard, making Everest a bit more safe. But that storm came up that mountain in only a few minutes. And it entrapped all the climbers up there, unable to get down to safer places. Rob Hall was sending out messages, refused to leave his still conscient, but immobile client behind. He survived the night, but the porters sent out to safe him, also had just survived the night. They came close, but in the end, they needed to turn around to save themselves. Rob Hall made a last call to his pregnant wife. They gave their unborn child a name. That is where his story ends. Is the dream of reaching the summit really more important than coming down safely? I have the feeling, that if they had’t been up that high, both would have made different decisions. The exhausted client – maybe he just would have said: “Today is not the day. It is not worth it, I will turn around now.” At least one other climber did that. He made it back to camp 4 before the storm hit. He had trouble to understand, why he was alone there. He also thought he would die in that storm, he had no idea, what the others were going through. Would have Rob Hall just said: “I know it is hard, mate, but today is not the day”, if the madness of high altitudes hasn’t been an issue? “I have a pregnant wife, I really need to go back.” Maybe his client had just answered easily: “You are right, I don’t want to be the reason, your child will never know its father.”

And that is also what high altitude mountaineers want to point out and it is definitely true, up there that high, you make bad decisions. This is also how climbers defend themselves, when something goes wrong – and I think they are right. Up there, the mind is so clouded that you make indeed very bad decisions. You are not in control of yourself. But then again, is it really a good idea to bring people up there to a place, where everyone goes mad? Let’s switch to another story.

Let’s have a look at the story of Lincoln Hall. Lincoln Hall was also a paying customer of an adventure company. He had two personal porters assigned to him, to help him up and down. I saw him talking about how strong he felt on that day, completely sure, he will make it to the top. And so he did, he was on the summit and it was amazing, he said. He was completely in awe. And then it was time to go. He only managed 200 meters or so, before he collapsed into the snow, unable to move. The sherpas tried their best and they got him up again. They still were up there, were you can see Tibet and Nepal at the same time. One bad step and you are gone. Then they arrive at the so called second step. There they meet a sherpa, whose client had just died underneath the step. In Lincoln Hall’s brain, there reigns madness. He hears that news and completely loses it. He tries to jump of the step, the sherpas hold him back. He feels threatened, starts attacking them on that horribly narrow place, where nobody wants to be pushed around. They get him down in the snow and hold the radio to his ear. Down in basecamp his friend takes over the radio. He talks him down. It works, he is calm again. To get off the step, he needs to rappel on a rope. They manage to set him up, he is going down on his own. In the middle he feels suddenly high and unbelievably happy. Everything is beautiful. And he loses consciousness again. One of the sherpas needs to go down on a second rope to poke him, till he starts moving again. He is off. The next challenge involves walking. It is pretty clear that Lincoln suffers from a brain edema. The brain is swollen and filling up with liquid. That not only makes you hallucinate, it also let’s you struggle with your body coordination. He stumbles and falls a lot, somehow the others manage to keep him up. I am not sure how low they managed to bring him down, but at one point, he breaks down and falls into a coma. The sherpas stay with him still, but he looks less and less alive. They talk to basecamp. Lincoln Hall’s friend is the one who needs to give the command for them to leave him behind. They take his personal possessions to send it to his family. They say a last prayer to the dead man. Then they leave. But Lincoln Hall wasn’t dead. And in the night, he suddenly woke up again. What followed was a fight against Hypothermia. He manages to move around on his spot in a sitting position. He is hallucinating heavily. He even got the typical hypothermia-paradox of feeling too hot and starts undressing. But the next day, the last climbers of the season go up there. They were told that they would pass his body, but instead they found a mad man there talking about boat trips: “What a great day for a boat cruise”, he said to the climbers. They send for help. After four hours two porters arrive, somehow getting him up again. To get him to the camp is still far away from easy. He only wants to sit down and fall asleep. They poke him with ice axes to get him moving and I can only imagine what kind of language they used doing so. Lincoln Hall survived, he only lost one toe and a little bit of finger tips. His family had already been informed, that he was dead. His wife also spoke in that documentary. About how her life felt like ending as well. About how she heard one of her sons weeping in bed, unable to help him. Lincoln Hall promised his family to never ever do something that dangerous and stupid again.

My personal opinion to that story is, that I think, that the way he described how strong he felt going up to the summit, was already a sign of things going down for him. I think his feelings of euphoria were already a sign of the madness forming. Höhenpsychose, high altitude psychosis, is now an official condition – Höhenrausch, summit fever, mountain madness. He described that he had felt tired the days before, but not on summit day. I think, that should have been the sign to turn around and descent quickly. He was lucky that the sherpas did such a great job.

Back to our blizzard tragedy. There were a lot of people making strange decisions in that story. A Taiwanese climber for example, got informed that his friend had died after a fall in a crevasse. They were asking him to help to bring his body down to basecamp. But Chen said no. His friend was so eager to reach the summit, that he felt, he needed to do it for him. Only on Everest does that sound like a decent plan and a logical conclusion. “My friend wanted us to do this, but now he is dead. I will honor him, by not coming to bury him, but continue instead with the very thing that killed him.” Well, Chen later said, that if he had known the real price beforehand, he would never have tried to climb that mountain. He got caught in the storm that night and survived by not falling asleep, but thinking of disco dancing. He moved till the storm was over and could be saved. He lost his hands and nose, but not his life. Scott Fisher had made it to the same point as he did in the storm, but didn’t survive. Why he went that late to the summit, although his clients were already heading back might also be one of those examples for bad decisions in high altitudes.

Beck Weathers had problems with his eyes, when he had reached the south summit. Basically one eye was blind. He wanted to turn around. Rob Hall told him to wait for him there (although waiting up there is not great). He surely thought he would be back in an hour, but as told already, that didn’t happen. Other climbers asked Beck, if he wanted to come down with them. He declined, because he felt too insecure without Rob and his rope. Only as the storm hit, he went with a late climber. He had gone almost completely blind by now, but made it further down by just holding the arm of his guide. They found the rest of the group, but the storm went too strong. They didn’t know anymore, where they were, so the mountain guide that was with them, had to make the decision to sit down. Always move in the death zone, but when you cannot see, where the edge is…. They huddled together in the storm, freezing, with oxygen running out. At some point in the night the guide recognized, where they were, he took the climbers, that could still get up and brought them to camp 4. He had realized, that it was really close. He didn’t manage to go back. But a Russian guide from the American team got up and followed the footsteps. He could only take one climber at a time, but he brought four of them to the tents. He couldn’t bring Beck Weathers and the Japanese climber. As the storm calmed down in the morning and the two sherpas headed out to save Rob Hall and another climber who went missing, they looked at the bodies. Beck Weathers face was frozen to the ground. They thought, he was dead. It is like a miracle that he woke up again. He made it to the tents himself. When you listen to the tales of the people involved, you get a very spooky image of their condition. One guide woke everyone up and told them, that they would leave for camp 3 in half an hour. He did look in Beck Weathers’ tent, but he thought that this was a dead body. He didn’t uncover his face to check, who it was – a completely weird thing, but it tells a lot about how exhausted and confused they all must have been. Beck Weathers was left alone for the third time, but he managed to shout out and the last climbers to leave the camp heard him. He was able to get up and they brought him down to camp 3 where a doctor tried to help him. He was eventually rescued in the highest helicopter rescue mission at that time. He lost one hand completely, but on his left, doctors built him a claw out of tissue from his thighs. He lost his nose, but got a new one made out of ceramics and tissue that was grown on his forehead. I am amazed by those things. The pictures of him with black nose and black cheeks are quite famous. But he gives now talks about his grim adventure and he looks alright. He also has really nice cats as I found out in an interview filmed at his home. When he was out of the hospital, his wife gave him an ultimatum. She said: You have one year to get your obsession with danger under control. One year, then she would leave him. She said, she could not live through another adventure like this. He made it, quite proudly. He says, that through this experience he learned to be happy with what he got. He says, he is so much more happy since. And I believe him. And this message is so much better than the “you have to take a high risk for success”-message that is fed to managers in talks of extreme mountaineers. Someone pointed out that in real life, managers taking high risks on their own – like extreme climbers do – ruin companies again and again. The message of challenging yourself without thinking of others is not that valuable in my eyes in general.

There is another story. It is so grim, that I haven’t managed to dig deeper. It is the story of David Sharp. I think he went up the summit alone. He had reached the summit, but he had not enough energy to descent. For hours and hours he sat down, beside an older frozen body. 33 people passed him. Some of them talked to him. He was still alive. 33 people passed him to go up to the summit. I had to stop the video, where one of these climbers was disheartened, because his idol Sir Edmund Hillary (you know, one of the guys who reached the top of Everest first) criticized him. “He must have been mad”, Hillary had said in an interview and to be honest, if I would be accused of letting someone die, because I thought my summit is worth more than helping a dying person, then I would gladly say: yes, I was mad. It might be true that David Sharp was beyond rescue. But the stories of Lincoln Hall and Beck Weathers show that there are chances for survival, even with hypothermia, brain edema, lung edema and so on. And David Sharp was still alive when the summit climbers returned 19 hours later, not much, but still a bit. Again, if it wasn’t up that high, no one would understand that story. Everyone would say, why on earth haven’t you tried to save that poor fellow? Why didn’t you at least stay with him? And I am sure those climbers will have asked themselves the same, when they were down again.

There are also stories about people almost unable to save themselves, because they want to stay with a dying person. Not everyone loses empathy up there in the cold. The story of a young Sherpa, who lost all his fingers, because he felt completely emotional towards his struggling client, touched me. The porters of Mount Everest have a much higher risk of dying, because they move much more around on that Mountain. Avalanches and crevasses are the biggest problems for them. They get paid, but not enough to outweigh the risk, if this is even possible. The poverty of the Sherpa people drive them to the job. But they are not adventure seekers. They don’t go up that mountain to challenge themselves. Those are normal people, often enough afraid of their dangerous job.

I will end with the story of a war veteran who went up Everest to find out of his darkness. On his way up, he heard someone scream and a sliding sound. He prepared himself and as he saw a woman sliding down the snow helplessly, he threw himself on top of her and stopped her fall. He gave her his oxygen mask and brought her down. He saved her life. He didn’t make it to the summit, but I swear of all the people I saw talking about their Everest experience, he for sure was the proudest of them all. And rightly so. He seemed the most happy mountaineer out of them all.

I will stay down here and leave the heights to the eagles and chamois and snow leopards. 😉

With best regards,

Sibylle