It wasn’t only the South African duo, Ian Woodall and Kathy O’Dowd, who came home to controversy after climbing Everest. Now the horror of the storms of May 1996 has been captured on the giant Imax screen, writes Ed Douglas
Even though it fills only a fraction of the gigantic screen, the huge image of Beck Weathers’s head is still 4,5m high, making it difficult to ignore the recent and heavy scarring on his cheeks. It’s also obvious to the audience, despite the concealment offered by a crisp white dressing, that most of the end of his nose is missing. The picture changes and Weathers is seen before the surgery to reconstruct his face, the black, necrotic flesh of severe frostbite like giant birthmarks.
These are the least of his injuries. His right arm has been amputated just below the elbow and all the fingers and most of the thumb of his left hand have gone.
He doesn’t mention it on screen, but Weathers endured skin grafts to reconstruct his hand. Surgeons also took cartilage from his ear and grew it in under the skin of his forehead before repositioning it where his nose was.
”It’s not as good as Mother Nature intended,” he said afterwards, ”but it’s a heck of a lot better than what I had.” I have to keep reminding myself that Beck Weathers is a lucky man.
David Breashears, who shot the images of Weathers recovering from the worst climbing season ever on Everest’s frozen slopes, is sitting happily on a sofa on the 18th floor of an exclusive Park Avenue, New York, hotel. For a man more used to the thin air of the Himalayas, he seems surprisingly happy to be cornered by the press in Manhattan.
Everest has dominated his life. From his ascetic days as an impoverished young climber to the suited impresario of middle age, he has returned again and again to the highest point on earth, mesmerised by its appeal. When he talks about the new self-help group he calls ”Everest Anonymous”, you sense he’s only half-joking.
He has climbed the mountain four times in the past 15 years and seen an exclusive, elite club of summiteers, men like Ed Hillary and Doug Scott, swamped by ordinary and occasionally incompetent climbers buying a place on commercially organised expeditions. With professional guides offering the ultimate adventure holiday, the numbers climbing on Everest have risen dramatically.
”You know, one of the things about my film is that Everest almost looks too easy,” he says. ”We included the shots of Beck so that people would know what can happen.”
Breashears has spent three years filming a documentary about the mountain in the vast Imax format, dragging the huge and heavy camera all the way to the summit. The Imax screen is eight storeys high and 30m wide. More than one Himalayan veteran has said that watching the film is like seeing the mountain for real. The narrative may be schmaltzy, but the images are sublime.
When the film team and 10 other expeditions went to Everest in 1996, mountaineering in the United States was still an eccentric counter-culture. No American climber was as famous as Sir Chris Bonington; the sport’s ethos was barely understood by a nation more used to sports dominated by points and percentages. What changed all that was a sequence of events so tragic and poignant that the story seemed beyond imagining.
Late in the evening of May 9 1996, 33 people left the South Col of Everest hoping to reach the summit. Most were paying clients of Scott Fischer, an American, and the New Zealander Rob Hall, both highly experienced guides. Through a series of unconnected and apparently trivial misjudgments, most of them were far from camp when bad weather swept across the mountain. Hall was caught by the storm still almost at the summit with a Seattle postal worker called Doug Hansen.
Trapped and exhausted, Hansen perished quickly, but Hall was stronger. He stayed in radio contact throughout the next day, weakening slowly to an inevitable end, beyond rescue. His last words were to his wife, patched through on a satellite phone from their home in New Zealand. ”Sleep well my sweetheart,” he said after they had named their unborn child together. ”Please don’t worry too much.”
Hall and Breashears were good friends and while Neal Beidleman, one of the guides caught out in the bad weather, was fighting to bring his clients into camp, Breashears and his crew waited at a lower camp, powerless to help beyond offering the distressed climbers on the South Col their cache of supplies. Throughout May 10 he and other friends encouraged and bullied Hall to persuade him to move. ”And then there was this terrible calamity and the loss of people I cared about,” he says. ”It was like the years I’d been coming to this mountain and my feeling of kinship with it and all my experiences had been hijacked.”
If Hall’s plight was not enough, one of the clients left for dead on the wind-scoured rocks of the South Col staggered back into camp. Weathers, a pathologist from Dallas, had lost his right glove and his arm had frozen into a grisly salute. Blinded in his right eye, his face black and frozen, he reminded mountain guide Pete Athans of a mummy from a Hammer horror film. The Texan’s wife had already been told he was dead.
The whole story was being reported in real time on the Internet and on prime-time news bulletins. ”Most of the people who were tuning in at the start knew that it was adventurous but certainly none of the heroes were going to die,” says Beidleman. ”There’d be tears from those who did not make the top and joy from the people who did and that would be it. Then Scott and the others died and everything got all fucked up.”
Although Breashears’s $6-million movie budget is so much flotsam compared to Titanic, its release has generated huge interest in the US, where the fate of Weathers and the other climbers captured the imagination of millions of armchair adventurers. There are still very few screens in the US and only two in Britain, and its originators are hoping that the obsession with Everest will give the format a boost.
”We went out to make a film before any of that happened,” Breashears says. ”Now it looks like we’re on a bandwagon that already existed. In 1995, when we went to Nepal to test the camera, people wondered why we wanted to make an Imax film on Everest. They asked who would go and see it.”
Breashears knows he has an audience now, even if some of them are rubberneckers, come to find out more about Weathers and those of his companions who didn’t come back.
Two years on, Weathers has healed and gone back to work, but the mental scars are raw for many of the other survivors. Weathers had something physical to struggle against. For the others, the trauma hasn’t brought them closer; it’s led to a protracted controversy about what happened and who was to blame.
As Charlotte Fox, one of Fischer’s clients who reached the summit on May 10, half jokingly said a year after her ascent, ”Everybody hates everybody.” Even before she and the others were back in the country, America’s biggest media players were racing to get their version of the tragedy on to the newsstands. Time, Newsweek, Life and Vanity Fair all ran extensive features detailing every frozen moment and searching for whoever was to blame.
Blasted by the storm and then overwhelmed by the ceaseless media attention, most of the climbers suffered nightmares and failed to adjust back to their old selves. ”A constant replay of the events was screwing up my life,” Klev Schoening, another of Fischer’s clients, said afterwards.
Most of the controversy centred on the role of two climbers, the Manhattan socialite Sandy Hill, who was trying the mountain for the third time, and the Russian-born guide Anatole Boukreev. Hill was at the time married to America Online president Bob Pittman and wrote up her experience for Vogue. In a sustained piece of insouciance, she gave little impression of how out of control she had been, nor of the strenuous efforts made by Beidleman and others to save her life.
”It’s incredibly disrespectful for her to think that it was her strength alone that got her out of there when stronger people died around her,” says Beidleman. ”It was a combination of partly her tenacity, but mostly good luck, good fortune and other people helping her that allowed her to live.”
Hill’s plans for a book celebrating her achievement came to nothing as her image as a rugged individualist was undermined. She is now divorced from Pittman, partly as a consequence of her love affair with Everest. Her ex-husband is in a relationship with the ex-wife of Breashears.
More divisive than the role of Hill has been the debate among mountain guides about the role of Fischer’s assistant, Boukreev. He reached the summit hours before most of his clients and immediately returned to the South Col in order, he claimed, to offer support if anyone needed it. But when bad weather came in he had to wait until Beidleman staggered into camp before he knew where his clients, including Hill, were. Only then could he rescue them.
No one doubts the immense effort the Russian made in going out again and again to bring back those too exhausted to cope. On the following day he climbed back towards the summit to help his friend, Fischer, who had collapsed the night before, exhausted from his efforts not just in climbing the mountain but in organising a successful expedition in the increasingly competitive market of guiding Everest. Boukreev found Fischer at 7pm, in weather almost as bad as the night before. The zipper of his down suit was open, one hand had lost a mitten and was frozen. The face mask of his oxygen set was warmer, but despite Boukreev’s efforts to revive him, Fischer was already dead. He tied his rucksack across Fischer’s face to protect it from birds and descended back to the South Col, without a torch and in terrible weather.
Jon Krakauer, in a magazine article for Outside and then a book, Into Thin Air, praised Boukreev’s efforts but also criticised him for leaving his clients behind in his rush to get down. He argued that by not taking bottled oxygen, the Russian had behaved irresponsibly.
Krakauer’s account, intense, bleak and brilliantly written, has been in the top 10 of The New York Times’s bestseller list for almost a year. Boukreev felt that his actions had been misrepresented and his career jeopardised by Krakauer’s huge success. He argued that Fischer had approved his actions and that the clients expected not only competence but a good measure of forelock-tugging for their $65 000 fee.
”I think,” he said in his own rather less elegant version, ”it is not necessary that a guide chat good, but that he can climb good.”
The acrimony between Krakauer, who had his own burden of survivor’s guilt to carry, and Boukreev intensified throughout 1997. At a mountaineering conference in the Rockies town of Banff, Krakauer refused to share a platform with the Russian to discuss the tragedy, choosing to argue his case from the audience. He has since refused to answer any more questions on the subject. Boukreev is in no position to. He perished in an avalanche on the Himalayan peak of Annapurna on Christmas Day last year.
Breashears has few doubts about what happened. ”I think every one of Jon’s criticisms of Anatole are right on,” he said, ”and I would have gone further. A guide of that strength and that skill has no place being at the high camp before anybody else.”
Beidleman, a gently spoken man who has avoided criticising Boukreev, isn’t surprised by the reaction to the Russian’s account of what happened. ”I think if Anatole had come back and said, ‘Man, I shouldn’t have come down, I didn’t realise the storm was coming, but it worked out because I was able to help some people,’ his critics would have applauded his honesty and his actions.”
Henry Todd, a British guide who hired Boukreev to work on Everest in 1995, acknowledges that the Russian may have been wrong to go without oxygen but says the difference in opinion is cultural. ”Anatole didn’t run off and leave people. That’s nonsense. It’s more likely that what Scott hired him for is not what Anatole was good at.”
It’s a point of view supported by a Geordie climber called Graham Ratcliffe who was on the South Col when the storm hit. Ratcliffe, who reached the summit of Everest with Boukreev in 1995 and says he has ”the greatest respect” for the dead Russian, was disappointed by Krakauer’s accusatory tone. ”Krakauer collapsed in his tent 30 yards away from us,” he says, ”but we didn’t know what was going on until the next morning, 12 hours after it started. By then it was too late to help. All Krakauer had to do was walk over and get us. If you’re going to start criticising other people then you’ve got to be careful.”
Beidleman is no longer guiding on Everest, although he thinks it’s a reasonable thing to be doing. ”When Everest is good,” he says, ”it’s easy. Your basic in-shape businessman can get up there with the right help. When Everest gets really bad, it doesn’t just get bad, it gets unsurvivable, for client and guide alike.”
Breashears is not so sure. ”Nothing would frighten me more on Everest than being in the company of 25 people, many of whom are not fully qualified. It defies logic to think you can really manage people on Everest in a way that you can safely get them up and down. We were only surprised once things fell apart that more people didn’t die. This will happen again.”