Mt. Everest 1996 — A Memoir

by Brad Ohlund

Shockingly weak, strained, and hoarse, a voice broke thru the dawn hours at Mt. Everest base camp at 18,000 feet. One of the highest spots on earth.

But the voice we heard was originating from two vertical miles above us. Assembled inside the large canvas walled tent, shocked out of a surreal, night-long vigil, everyone fixed their focus on the radio transceiver the voice was coming from.

“Help me! Help me! Isn’t someone coming to help me?!!” With
these dramatic words, Rob Hall’s weak, oxygen-starved voice broke the radio silence that we’d been suffering for the past 11 hours. It was 4:30 a.m., May 11, 1996. I was huddled around the radio with members of other climbing expeditions anxiously listening to Rob Hall calling us from one of the most dangerous places on earth, the summit of Mt. Everest. He was in serious trouble. And had been for far too long in that unforgiving environment.

As one of the premiere Everest mountaineers, Rob had led many less experienced climbers to that uniquely coveted peak. Now, after trying to save one of his clients, he himself was fighting for his own life on a stretch of real estate known locally as the “Dead Zone”.

Peaking over the western shoulder of Mt. Everest that morning, the first sharp beams of sunlight were beginning to reveal the cold, desolate, ice and rock-strewn patch of the Khumbu Glacier that had been home for the last six weeks. At 18,000 feet, Mt. Everest Base Camp is nestled in a dramatic cul de sac among such Himalayan giants as Nuptse, Pumori, Lhotse. It’s higher than any point in the contiguous United States. It’s higher than any point in Europe. If I’d simply been dropped off by helicopter, I’d have soon died from altitude sickness due to lack of acclimatization. The temperatures typically ranged from -20 to +20°. Some days the snow and wind would blow 60 mph and I’d worry the tent and I would get blown away, bouncing off rock and ice across the glacier. Other days the sun would shine harshly in a cobalt blue sky and tents would turn into saunas that were uncomfortably hot to be inside.

Nights were always cold to the bone.

Ten expeditions set up camp here as a base from which to support those members of the expeditions that would attempt to climb Mt. Everest. The population of Base Camp was about 300. The majority of these were Sherpa. The Sherpa people have lived in the Himalayas for hundreds of years. They have become naturally acclimatized and they are the engine that drives any expedition. Sherpas work at every level of an expedition, from cooks and porters to key members of the summit team. Other members include the expedition leader, the climbing leader, the Base Camp manager, various support people, and most often, as in Rob Hall’s expedition, clients.
Clients with a range of climbing backgrounds who have paid up to $65,000 to be guided to the summit of Mt. Everest.

Our expedition was there to film for an lMAX movie about Mount Everest being produced by MacGillivray Freeman Films of Laguna Beach, CA.

My job was to film scenes and to provide photographic and technical support for the high-altitude camera team.

As a cinematographer for MacGillivray Freeman, I’ve been lucky
enough to have been to some of the world’s great places. For our IMAX movies, I’ve filmed in the eye of a hurricane, on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, with former cannibals in the jungles of Indonesia and backstage at the Bolshoi Ballet among many other fascinating locations. It’s all part of a job that boils down to trying to get a heavy, awkward 65mm film camera in places it doesn’t really want to be so we can make movies that put the audience in places they usually don’t get to be.

But when I was called upon to go on an expedition to Mt. Everest for eight weeks, that gave me pause. I live at the beach in Southern California. Most of my favorite places have jungles and warm water. Plus I’m not all that fond of the cold.

And I’d also heard about the effects altitude can have on you. Some mildly uncomfortable, like constant headaches, others a bit more severe, like dying in your sleep from cerebral edema, Not to mention snow blindness and frostbite.

I was in reasonably good shape and had survived a few other tough jobs in remote locations, but I was also a few months shy of my 50th birthday. However, going to Mt. Everest would be quite an adventure and an opportunity to get some amazing footage for our film.

So the bottom line was, this is my job, I’d be going to Mt. Everest.

We were to document a team of climbers on a scientific mission to measure tectonic movement. A team of elite mountaineers was assembled. They’d be accompanied by a scientist a journalist and two additional climbers. Araceli Segara an accomplished climber from Catalonia would be making her 1st attempt at summiting. Also joining the expedition was Jamling Norgay, son of Tensing Norgay, who, along with Edmund Hillary, was the first to summit this highest of mountains. it would also be Jamling’s first attempt.

The trek to Base Camp entailed some moderate to intense hiking. There was the comfort of some hot tea in small village tea shops on the way, and then the challenge of finding foot or handholds on a steep, cold, barely discernable rocky trail followed by trudging along narrow tracks in waist-high snow. To acclimatize properly we’d stop every two to three days and rest a day or so.

We stayed in unheated Sherpa lodges most of the way. They were rustic at best and usually, but not always, better than a cold tent on hard snow and ice. All along the way, we filmed scenes with the climbers and the spectacular Himalayan landscape.

I found I was slower than the more experienced mountaineers, but that I wasn’t doing badly.

There a no roads or cars in the Khumbu. Everything is carried on the backs of people or yaks. All along the way, we would encounter yaks trains; Single file groups of yaks being driven up or down the trail by a few Sharpa. They moved at a moderate and consistent pace. I discovered that if I just trailed along behind one of them, I would still not be that far behind the other members of the team.

There were a couple of drawbacks though. You have to be mindful not to slip in yak poop and to not get knocked off the trail by a yak wanting to get closer to his buddies. They aren’t very cuddly animals and we were sure they considered us a nuisance and would purposely try to knock us off the trail.

It was a nice pace though and I could take in all that was around me. The dramatic high altitude scenery, sherpa hamlets and villages, Buddhist temples and shrines, and the Sherpa themselves, alone with my thoughts, the clanging of yak bells, and the hoots and whistles of the drivers. Pretty cool actually.

However, at about 14,000’, near the sacred Tengboche Monastary, I started experiencing a wonderful thing called Cheyne-Stokes. With it, my sleep was disrupted by periods of heavy breathing and then I’d just stop breathing altogether. Then I’d be shocked, gasping, back into hyperventilation. This would occur just as I had was falling asleep in my already claustrophobic sleeping bag. Suddenly, I’d jerk awake gasping for breath. But a complete breath is impossible at that altitude. Suffocation seemed eminent. Finally, I’d calm down. I’d wipe off the cold sweat, curse a bit, and start back to sleep. And … , it would start again. Not fun.

Fortunately, modern medicine has drugs for such things. Dr. Bill Anderson at the Sleepy Hollow Clinic back in Laguna Beach had thoughtfully provided me with just the thing. Diamox, a drug used to treat altitude sickness. I soon had that little inconvenience under control.

We spent our last night trekking in the desolate, barren, weirdly unpleasant outpost of Gorak Shep. It’s the last semblance of a village in the Khumbu. No one lives here year round. We climbed the last 1,500 feet to Base Camp in about six hours. There was a noticeable shift at about 17,000 feet. Surrounded by rock and ice, we trudged through the often waist-high snow on narrow paths the preceding yaks had created. The temperature dropped sharply and it became much harder to breathe. Human beings cannot survive permanently up here.

Nevertheless, In the late afternoon light, there it was, Mount Everest Base Camp. As I looked around, I was reminded of the landscape surrounding Superman’s Ice Palace. Himalayan giants towered above me as I gazed back down the glacier. It dropped away distinctly. It was difficult to grasp that was where I’d come from. It was also difficult to grasp where I was and that I’d be here for the next two months. As it turned out it would be a bit longer than that and the coming events much more difficult to even imagine.

We spent the next two weeks filming key scenes with our characters around base camp under the direction of my MacGillivray Freeman colleague and dear friend, Steve Judson. But Steve was only scheduled to be there for those two weeks. It was a lonely day as I watched Steve head back down the glacier accompanied by a yak train loaded with cases full of the film we’d shot up to then. I wondered what the chances were that those rolls would ever make it to the lab in Los Angeles. Remarkably, magically, through the Sherpa network of the Khumbu, they wound their way down to Katmandu and on to Los Angeles. And they always made it. And that might have been the second greatest accomplishment of the trip.

Now the serious work of getting the climbers ready for their summit attempt began. They’d make multiple trips up and back to establish camps and to acclimatize to the higher altitudes, coming back to rest in between trips. All the time filming. It was not easy.

It was now six weeks later and I was watching one of the most dramatic moments in Mt. Everest history unfold in front of me.

A few days earlier our climbing team had left Base Camp for the summit. They had established the four higher camps that they would use during their ascent. They’d stashed food, fuel, and the precious oxygen bottles they’d use during the summit attempt. Now five climbers and five Sherpas would climb to the roof of the world hauling the 70mm lMAX camera with them.

Although the camera had been modified and lightened for this mission, it was still awkward and considered impossibly heavy at 45 pounds in this high altitude environment where climbers cut their toothbrushes in half to save weight and space. We hoped against hope that the weather would cooperate, the climbers would persevere, and the camera would run. We were completely aware that our task bordered on the ridiculous, while simultaneously we were naively confident. Six hundred people had climbed Everest, 150 had died in the attempt. Many more have simply failed. But our climbing leader Ed Viesturs made it clear what our approach would be. “You don’t assault this mountain,” he said “You sneak up on it and then get the hell out of there.” Ed would be climbing Everest for the fourth time, his third without oxygen. “Getting to the top is optional,” he continued. “Getting back down is mandatory.” Expedition leader David Breashears, a three-time summiteer, shared this view.

On May 9th, the team decided the weather didn’t look good and aborted the attempt and moved from Camp III down to Camp II at 24,000' to wait for better weather. They also knew that two expeditions were right behind them and worried they would interfere with filming. “It was quite a sight passing those guys in the Western Cwm,” said David Breashears to me over the radio at Base Camp. He was talking about meeting the members of the two commercial expeditions led by New Zealander Rob Hall and American Scott Fischer. While our team was moving down, these two expeditions were moving up to attempt the summit. “They were clumsy and their gear was all hanging crooked and they just seemed out of place,” Breashears continued, sounding somewhat amazed.

The following day the first event of what would become an
incredible drama occurred. We received a report that a Taiwanese climber had stepped out of his tent at Camp III to answer the call of nature. He should have attached himself to a rope. He didn’t and fell 60 feet into a crevasse. He didn’t appear badly hurt but was going to return to Camp II escorted by a couple of our team’s Sherpas. A few hours later our Sherpas radioed they were halfway to Camp II and that the Taiwanese climber had died.

Sherpas call Everest “Mother Goddess of Earth” and believe the Himalayas are alive with many deities. They are afraid of the spirits that accompany a corpse. They refused to move the dead Taiwanese.

By now a local storm had moved in and blizzard conditions existed. Our climbing team reluctantly went out to retrieve the body. This event created a very somber mood in our team and those of us at Base camp. This mood was not shared or even known by the excited members of the expeditions that were now positioned at Camp Four waiting to set out for the summit that night.

The previous day, May 10th, we received word that most of the
climbers from other expeditions attempting the summit that day had been successful. We’d heard the hoots and hollers from their camps and shared their excitement. But as I looked down the Khumbu Glacier, I could see dark angry clouds building to the south. I was impressed enough to point out the storm to others but I had no reason to be concerned at the moment.
It was just another dramatic view in the Himalayas.

About 5 p.m. I was visited by a member of another expedition.
He’d just come from the New Zealand camp and had heard that Rob Hall and one of his clients, Doug Hansen, were still at the summit. The rule is, if you haven’t summited by 1 pm, turn around. That rule had clearly been ignored. Doug Hansen was exhausted and suffering from the altitude, but Rob Hall said he was “not going to leave his mate”. My visitor expressed the opinion that if Rob didn’t leave Doug, they were both going to die.

I relayed the news to our team at Camp II. Ed Viesturs and David Breashears were close friends and associates of Rob’s. The news only worsened their mood. A slow awareness was dawning. The reality of this mountain was breaking through. And that storm I’d seen forming was now raging above Camp Four at 28,000’.

And the reality on the morning of May 11th was that Rob Hall had spent the night completely exposed near the summit and was out of oxygen. Doug Hansen was dead, and 17 climbers were missing on the mountain.

0I stepped outside the New Zealand tent and looked up at the Khumbu Icefall, the gateway to the summit. Standing alone in that cold, isolated, desolate place I didn’t know how to feel or react. Could it be that all those people were really dead or dying or lost up there? I was numbed, more by my thoughts than from the cold.

I’d already rigged a microphone on our own radio, but I thought
tape recordings of the radio communications with Rob Hall might be appreciated in the future. I didn’t know in what way, but it seemed worthwhile and it would give me something to do.

In the New Zealand camp was a fellow I’d not seen before talking with Rob Hall on the radio. He seemed very much the man in charge now. He turned out to be a senior guide with Rob’s company who had been leading another group on a nearby mountain. He’d come to Base Camp when he heard the radio transmissions the night before. His name was Guy Cotter. He was urging Rob to start down the mountain. He was intense.

From Camp II our team’s climbing leader, Ed Viesturs, was doing the same. “Come on Rob, get your butt moving, buddy. You’ve got to get moving. Come on buddy.” They implored, scolded, and begged Rob to keep moving. Finally, Rob admitted he’d not even started to move and wasn’t sure that he could.

It’s now around noon and Rob Hall has been up to
his eyeballs in the death zone for almost 24 hours. From Camp IV comes the news that the three Sherpa climbers that had set out to rescue Rob had been forced back due to severe weather and exhaustion. David Breashears radios back to me at Base Camp, “I think that’s it for Rob.”

It seemed impossible, but on Mt. Everest, we are all learning fast, it is very possible.

Through their satellite phone, a line of communication had been set up between the New Zealand camp, Rob Hall dying on the top of Mt. Everest, and his pregnant wife Jan back home. During that call, they named their unborn baby girl. It all seemed just too surrealistic.

Guy Cotter put down the radio, turned around, and saw me recording the communications. As he realized what I was doing, his feelings about it weren’t hard to decipher. “Oh great,” he said in his precise New Zealand accent. “The fucking media’s here already.” I told him that my intent was documentation, not exploitation. He wasn’t buying that, and as turned back to the radio he announced to no one in particular, except me, that he wasn’t going to have that fucking machine in his tent and to get the fuck out.

I had no desire to be a disruptive element. I thought I’d been doing a good and valuable thing, but if the New Zealand team didn’t want me recording in their tent, then I wouldn’t do it. Simple as that. I believe now that Guy Cotter regrets his actions. Rob’s wife, Jan, has
requested those tapes, and I know she definitely wishes they were more complete.

Maybe I should have been more assertive. How can you know? An experienced journalist might have continued recording or at least arguing his case. But that wasn’t who I was.

Our expedition had the most powerful radio transceiver, so for the next few days, my job was to pass on information and relay messages to and between those higher on the mountain. For 20 years I’d been using radios during the course of making films and I was now happy to use that expertise I’d acquired in efficient radio communication to assist in the rescue efforts.

As the hours clicked away, the big picture began to unfold and the news swung from good to bad and back again. After a few conflicting reports, there finally came the confirmation that Scott Fischer was dead. Another radio call announced that someone had appeared like an apparition at Camp IV. He was severely frostbitten and very weak. “Should we send up I.V. fluids?” “No need,” came the response from Pete Athens. “He’ll probably be dead by morning.” Well, that person was Beck Weathers, a climber that had been left for dead twice in the last 15 hours. He was now being given up on once again. His is a remarkable story of perseverance and survival. With the help of our expedition’s climbers, he was brought down to Camp I and airlifted to safety in one of the highest helicopter rescues ever. To mark the makeshift landing site, Arecceli Segara, from our team, emptied a bottle of red Kool-aid she had in her pack onto the snow.

This dramatic rescue served to offset the tragic news coming from the mountain. While many survivors were being located and brought down, others would never come down. It’s sadly ironic that the two most accomplished climbers would be among the losses. Rob Hall was so confident, so in charge, so much of an Everest veteran that he seemed larger than life. He visited our camp often and the image I have of this world-class mountaineer remains strong.

Scott Fischer also visited our camp often. As the leader of an
American commercial expedition, he was the kind of person movie characters are based upon. As much as I liked him, he wasn’t the kind of guy I’d be anxious for my girlfriend to meet. Like Rob Hall, his charisma, rugged good looks, and confidence were all natural. They both lie frozen now in the snow and ice of Mt. Everest.

Faced with this real life crisis on the mountain, our concerns about making a movie seemed a bit arrogant and pompous. Although we’d wanted dramatic footage of climbing Mt. Everest, we had no desire to exploit this situation. “Tell them to cut the locks, rip open the tents, and take whatever they need.” This was David Breashears authorizing me to tell those at Camp IV to use as much as was needed of our precious supply of oxygen. (Our team had earlier stored this supply at Camp IV to use in their summit attempt.) In doing so David knew he was jeopardizing our chances for success.

The rescue efforts were soon well-organized and running smoothly and efficiently. Within a few days everyone who could had made it back to Base Camp. The camps immediately started to break down.

No one wanted to stay any longer than necessary. A few days earlier the mood had been optimistic excitement as the expeditions left for their summit attempts. Suddenly I was attending a wake at 18,000 feet. At a somber ceremony at Base Camp, I vividly recall Lakba Sherpa, through anguished grief-stricken tears, telling those assembled, “ I did what Scott tells me to do. I do what he tells me.”

He knew he might have saved Scott, but instead, he’d gone to help an incompetent client try to get up the mountain, just as Scott had told him to do. He was inconsolable.

Soon it was a ghost town. Besides the South Africans at Camp Four, we were the only expedition left. But we’d come to do more than climb Mt. Everest. We’d come to film the experience in the world’s largest film format and to place a GPS transmitter above the South Col to enable scientists from the University of Colorado to study seismic activity. We all felt that despite the recent demoralizing events, we had to try and finish our job.

It was determined there was still enough oxygen and that our
climbers were, for the most part, up to the challenge. But the weather wasn’t looking good. Daily I’d radio up to Camp II the weather reports being faxed to us via SAT phone from a high tech weather center in London. The forecast was not good.

For three days my radio inquiries as to how the
climbers were doing were answered the same way. ‘We’re cold and tired. We just want to get this done and go home.” Depression was setting in.

I used the satellite phone to call the film’s producer, Greg MacGillivray, in Laguna Beach. “I think you should be prepared for the possibility that we won’t make it to the top,” I told him. He understood. It had always been a crapshoot. But to have come so far and gone through so much, it just didn’t seem fair.

The next day, however, the weather did change and two days later Ed Viesturs and David Breashears radioed from the
summit of Mt. Everest, “HOLA! We can’t go any higher!!!” Five climbers and five Sherpas had lugged that beast of an IMAX camera to the highest place on earth and got the shots.

I called my partner Kristi at home. “They’re on top!” I told her
with unbridled excitement. “That’s great,” she responded, “but I’ll be much happier to hear when they’re safely back in Base Camp.” Amen.

As I mentioned, we were privileged to have in our expedition Jamling Norgay, son of Tensing Norgay, who with Edmund Hillary had been the first to climb Mt. Everest in 1953. I’d come to really like Jamling. He is quiet, unassuming, and has a great sense of humor. He is also a devout Buddhist with great respect for the deities who live in the Himalayas.

He had never climbed Everest and would be the first in his family to follow in his father’s footsteps. He took this mission very seriously as he wasn’t one of our strongest climbers. When he radioed from the summit that he and Arecelli were, “standing on top of the world”, I felt with him his pride and relief. He’d struggled against the odds and a personal challenge to continue his family’s glory and the proud tradition of the Sherpa people. I doubt if anyone has ever been more grateful than Jamling Norgay to be on top of that mountain.

Our team finally made it safely back to Base Camp and we joyously welcomed them. But our joy was tempered a few days later when the South African expedition lost one of their climbers due to the same kind of stupid mistake that had just caused the greatest loss of life ever on Mt. Everest. We were pissed.

We’d come a bit naively to Mt. Everest with an impossible task in mind. Through hard work, good judgment, and a fair amount of luck, we’d persevered. But not without a stiff reminder of the delicate place man occupies in nature. But we also felt good about showing what an important role respect and humility play in that relationship.

We were more than ready to go home. With wings on our boots, we flew down the glacier only to get stuck in a small village for 5 days waiting for a helicopter to pick up us and our gear. They said it was because of the weather, but we found out, that even though we had ordered the helicopter, it was landing at lower villages and loading others on and taking them to Katmandu instead of us.

The helicopter finally picked us up and we all made it home safe and sound. We had fulfilled the two main objectives, we got the camera to the top of the mountain and the people back to the bottom