Santa Fe climber conquers Everest during deadly expedition.
Slate Stern was having a bad day.
Not that there are many "good" days spent in the area of Mt. Everest above 26,000 feet known simply as the Death Zone. The hacking coughs. The burning lungs. The merciless wind. The freezing
***image1***
cold. All are par for the course when you've spent 40 sleepless hours making the final painstaking, hellish ascent into the heavens. But Stern was having a really bad day.
"At that altitude the brain doesn't function the way it normally does," Stern, a Santa Fe lawyer and veteran mountaineer, says. "Your brain plays tricks on you and you have to be very conscious of what you're doing because it is really easy to make a mistake and fall. And that fall could easily be your last."
Stern had fallen-without incident-during his climb to Camp 6, the point from which last gasp efforts to reach the Everest summit are launched. Stern was exhausted. He was violently ill. And he was uncertain he could go any further.
"That day was a really bad day for me," Stern says. "I was sick. I took a fall. I was totally exhausted. And I wasn't really sure I would be able to get to the summit or how I would feel once I got there."
Things were about to get a lot better for Stern. And a lot worse.
Just after sunrise on May 21, Stern joined the small and celebrated pantheon of climbers to summit Mt. Everest. But his triumph would be followed by tragedy mere hours later.
Two members of Stern's 30-member expedition-Igor Plyushkin of Russia and Thomas Weber of Germany-would later die and a third-Australian Lincoln Hall-was left for dead. The
short 2006 climbing season has since become the deadliest on Mt. Everest since the disastrous 1996 campaign chronicled in the Jon Krakauer book
Into Thin Air
.
"It was the most traumatic expedition that I've ever been on because there was so much death," Stern says. "Not only associated with my expedition but just on the mountain in general."
The tragedy has stoked anew the controversy that perpetually swirls around the tallest mountain in the world. Much has been said about the increased commercialization of Everest and the safety issues that have arisen as a result.
Stern-who has scaled all Seven Summits (the tallest peaks on each continent) except Vinson Massiff in Antarctica-had spent four years, if not a lifetime of climbing, preparing for Everest. He was dismayed to find Everest crowded with relative novices.
"It's become such a commercial thing," Stern says. "There are so many people who want to stand on top of the
***image2***
world, but it was my experience that many of the people on Everest didn't have the proper fitness or skills to be there."
In particular, Stern is frustrated by the death of Weber, a legally blind climber who had hired a professional guide to lead him to the summit.
"Thomas' death was very upsetting to me," Stern says. "I think it sort of exemplifies the worst of Everest. He was a very engaging, bright guy, but I don't think he had a real appreciation for the risk that he was taking. He was relying on his guide to get him up and down safely…It shouldn't have happened. Unfortunately, you see a lot of that on Everest."
But even experienced climbers are at peril on Everest, according to Dave Hahn-a member of the Taos Mountain ski patrol, a contributor to Outside magazine and one of the most accomplished mountain guides in the world.
"You could be a very experienced climber and have an accident on Everest or a very inexperienced climber and have an accident on Everest," Hahn says. "I think we all feel a little bit worse, or the public by way of the media feels a little bit worse, when it's the inexperienced climber that has the accident because you kind of figure they didn't know what they were getting into."
Stern was among the first of seven members of the 7 Summits Club Everest Expedition to reach the summit. On his descent, Stern encountered Plyushkin resting on the ground. Stern asked Plyushkin, in Russian, if he was OK. Plyushkin replied that he was.
"I thought that he had acknowledged that he was doing OK and that he was just resting," Stern says. "In retrospect, it was probably the beginning of him unwinding."
Stern made it all the way down to Advanced Base Camp on the evening of May 21 but many of his teammates only made it as far as Camp 5, still well within the Death Zone. An exhausted Plyushkin died inside his tent at Camp 5 that evening. The following day, after coming within 50 meters of the summit, Weber collapsed and died on his descent. Not long after, it was reported that Hall-who was among a second wave of 7 Summits Club climbers with Weber-was in serious trouble.
By that time, Stern had reached Everest base camp and monitored the radio as Sherpas tried for hours to rescue Hall, who Stern had befriended since arriving at Everest. Hall was unable to walk and-as night approached and the Sherpas who had come to his aid began to ail-the decision was reached to leave Hall behind. Word filtered down to base camp that Hall had died.
"We left him for dead at 28,000 feet," Stern says. "Lincoln was the last guy on the expedition that I would expect to have anything happen to because he was so confident and so skilled. That was the real low point for me on the expedition. I just couldn't believe that Lincoln had died.
"If I could have put on my boots and gone up there to help Lincoln I would have," Stern continues. "But at that point I was three days away from Lincoln had I started off immediately."
The rest of the expedition slowly filtered back to base camp and solemnly packed up for the trip back to civilization. Unbeknownst to Stern and the rest of the group, Hall was still alive. And, with the aid of climbers from another group, a massive rescue operation began. The heroism to get Hall down was in stark contrast to what reportedly happened to David Sharp, a British climber who died a week before Stern's summit after dozens of climbers reportedly passed by him without rendering aid. Stern questions whether or not the climbers really understood that Sharp was still alive if and when they passed his prone body.
"You see a lot of dead bodies," Stern says. "You basically have to step over them. Every time I saw what appeared to me to be a dead body, just out of a visceral reaction I would turn the other way just because it's a little freaky walking by a dead body. They're fully clothed and a lot of them look like they're just resting on the side of the mountain. They're frozen in time there. But if it's true that people consciously passed by and didn't help I think it's outrageous but it's not surprising to me."
Hahn says it's difficult for the average person to completely understand what it's like on Everest when they question the ethics of climbers making the ascent.
"I believe that there is a tendency to want to make Everest stand for everything," Hahn says. "I think [the controversy] is overblown in that I've seen lots of great acts of heroism up there. But people rarely hear about it when things go right."
Kim Rieman, a school teacher from Lamy who made her attempt at Everest in 2000, only to be turned away near the top when she went snow-blind, echoes that sentiment.
"No matter how experienced you are, you could be doing everything right and at any given time something can go wrong," Rieman says. "One thing I could never do in my life is judge somebody that has been up there who has gone through an accident. I just can't find it in me to judge them because there are so many different variables and so many different things that could occur when you're up there."
Stern was emboldened by Hall's miraculous recovery and rejoiced in sharing lunch with his friend at the Radisson hotel in Katmandu just days after he thought his friend was dead.
"It is miraculous what he went through and that he suffered as little injury as he incurred," Stern says. "I'm not really a religious person but there is no other way to describe it than miraculous."
But the experience has been sobering for Stern. He says he got an e-mail from Hall recently in which the veteran climber said he had decided to give up high-altitude mountaineering. Since returning home to Santa Fe, Stern says he has been grappling with the same question. The fact that he is one of only a handful of people to stand atop Everest is an afterthought.
"That has been diminished in the midst of all this tragedy," Stern says. "That's really been more the focus of my thoughts than having made the summit. It's distressing to see that attitude on Everest-this summit madness-where the summit becomes more important than human life. That's the worst side of Everest. You see the absolute best and the absolute worst in people."
Slate Stern wrote an online journal before, during and after his Mt. Everest expedition at
.
Santa Fe Reporter