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We climbed the deadliest section of Everest at night. The jumbled icefall we struggled through rose more than two thousand vertical feet in a mile as we ascended from base camp to Camp One. PK Sherpa—Pasang Kami Sherpa lived in the village of Phortse, and everyone called him PK—and I threaded our way among thousands of leaning ice pillars as they crept downhill in an endless stream, tumbling and shattering as they went.
Darkness made it harder for us to pick our way through the shifting ice maze. But the deep nighttime cold slowed the Khumbu Glacier’s movement, which reduced the chances of frozen walls collapsing on us or avalanches burying us. At least, so we hoped.
I tried to hurry through the Khumbu Icefall but could only lumber uphill like a tired old yak. Whenever I stopped, my achy thigh muscles regained some strength, but after just a few more steps, my pace decreased once again. Even though I was in the best climbing shape of my life, my oxygen-starved legs just couldn’t move any faster in the low-density air at nineteen thousand feet.
It was my first day climbing Mount Everest, and already the chaotic landscape and self-doubt had me awash in uncertainty. With a few hours left until we reached Camp One, we pushed deeper into the icefall.
Light from our headlamps bounced off the gleaming ice walls. Dancing shadows sometimes made the glacial blocks look like they were moving. About half of the other fifteen climbers and fifteen Nepali guides, known as sherpas, on our team climbed above us in the tangled icefall; the rest followed behind. A guide moved along with each team member. Most of the climbing sherpas we hired were of actual Sherpa ancestry, but a few came from other ethnic groups, like Bhote.1 Including our two senior American guides, thirty-two of us ascended the dark icefall, along with people from other teams. Every few minutes, the jittery sweep of someone’s headlamp marked the way ahead.
Even though the night hid some of the danger, ominous evidence of glacial cracks surrounded us. My headlamp beam illuminated a slight sag in the snow that hinted at a crevasse lurking underneath. In many places snow bridges had crumbled into obvious open holes. We passed a few yawning gaps that went as deep as 120 feet into the glacier.
Twenty-three years earlier, when I was descending a glacier on Mount Rainier, in Washington State, a glacial snow bridge had collapsed beneath my feet. I got dropped deep inside an enormous crevasse. Now every glacial crack I stepped over, and every giant chasm we skirted, reminded me of what had happened back then. And what could happen now.
* * *
Dawn’s arrival converted the black-and-white world around us to color. First the Khumbu Glacier turned purple. Growing daylight shifted the dark clouds toward lighter shades of gray and revealed frosty blue tints inside the glacial ice. When I could make out the dark-red portions of PK’s pack, I shut off my headlamp. We kept following the thin climbing rope, which was anchored in place. This fixed line marked the path through the frozen labyrinth and served as a safety rope to clip our climbing harnesses into.
The route angled leftward, close to Everest’s west shoulder. PK started climbing faster, rushing when he clipped his harness into and out of the lines. After stepping across one open crevasse, he grabbed the fixed nylon rope, scrambled twenty feet up an ice ramp, and disappeared over the top. Instead of his usual momentary stop to make sure I was moving well, he didn’t even look back. I chased after him, my chest aching from sucking in the sparse air. Every breath contained less than half the oxygen it would have at sea level. I found PK two minutes later, waiting for me at an anchor point along the ropes. As soon as I arrived, he said, “Hurry. Very bad place.”
Still breathless, I couldn’t answer. Instead I nodded and pointed a gloved finger forward. PK took off even faster than before. I thought, We must be close to last year’s accident site.
One year and one week ago, on the morning of April 18, 2014, sixteen Nepali mountain workers died in this part of the icefall. A glacial block the size of a ten-story building sheared away from an ice ramp hanging a thousand feet above their heads. As the frozen bomb plummeted toward them, it shattered into a barrage of rock-hard shrapnel. All that ice debris collapsed into the icefall and buried the men.
A National Geographic cartographer later compared before-and-after satellite photos of the area. He determined that as much as 31 million pounds of frozen debris had fallen on them. Two days of risky search-and-rescue efforts recovered thirteen bodies but could not find the others: Three men remained entombed in the ice somewhere beneath our feet.
I glanced above my left shoulder and saw the white underbellies of several ice fields looming a hundred stories above us. One of them was the culprit.
Thinking of those lost and their families, I wanted to pause and pay some brief respects. But stopping for even a second might give gravity an opening to drop an ice building on us. I hurried after PK as best I could, my pulse pounding in my temples.
Gauzy clouds parted enough to reveal the 25,000-foot-tall ridge ahead. That long rock wall had kept us in the freezing shade since sunrise. But with the sun now above the ridge crest and the clouds thinning, the morning sunlight cut through. With every passing minute, warm energy loosened up the ice fields hanging over our heads and seeped into the glacier flowing beneath our feet. I needed to move faster.
I traversed a snowy shelf by placing my feet into the bootprints of previous climbers. The metal spikes of my crampons squeaked as they bit into the firm snow. I pushed the snap-link carabiner2 of my safety leash along the fixed lines as I climbed. Those community ropes and anchors had been placed earlier in the month by a brave and dedicated sherpa team known as the Icefall Doctors. As I stepped across an open crevasse, the inky abyss underneath my feet plunged far inside the glacier. We clambered among the glacial blocks like ants crawling through a loose pile of ice cubes.
After following the fixed line into a narrow alleyway, I emerged at an alcove ringed on three sides by vertical ice faces. The smooth walls and angular shape of the nook struck me as odd. While earning my geology degrees, I had studied glaciology. When I examined the icy alcove closer, its floor seemed unusually flat, and a thick layer of ice shards covered the ground. I pushed my boot into the loose debris, and the sharp-edged remnants moved freely—they hadn’t frozen together yet. All this had just formed. We were standing in a spot that had recently caved in.
PK and two other climbers whom I didn’t know stood staring up a tall aluminum ladder. Following their gaze about thirty feet higher, I saw a climber from another team. He ascended the crooked ladder with slow, awkward movements. We were at a full stop in an active collapse zone.
I stood close behind PK. When he looked back at me, his brown cheeks showed a tinge of red sunburn from our past three weeks at high altitude. His face curled into a frown, and he shook his head in frustration. To ask PK if we had to go slowly, I said in broken Nepali: “Bistarai jane, ho?”
“Ho,” he confirmed.
Though anxious about standing there, I needed the rest. I breathed deeply and tried to slow my heart. The floundering climber finally cleared the ladder, and the next person started up. We waited.
I yanked my right glove off and shoved it inside my thick midlayer jacket to keep it warm. Then I pressed two bare fingers against my left wrist. The skin covering my artery bounced against my fingertips. Two beats per second. Even after a break, my heart still hammered at 120 beats per minute. My resting pulse raced three times faster than back home in Colorado.
Though I was thirsty, I didn’t want to be fiddling with gear when my turn came to climb. I unzipped the chest pocket of my outer jacket and pulled out a Hershey bar. Once I unwrapped the frozen chocolate, I broke off half and tried handing it to PK. As usual, he politely declined. But after I insisted the customary three times, he relented and took the candy.
“Thank you, Jim Dai.”
At twenty-five, PK was about half my age. When he addressed me, he often included the Nepali honorific for “older brother.” We munched away and kept looking up over our left shoulders at the ice cliffs shining brighter as more sunlight fell upon them.
When PK’s turn came, he clambered up. His rhythm made the flimsy ladder sway, so I tugged my right glove back on and grabbed the side rails to reduce the bouncing. As my father had taught me on painting jobs four decades earlier, I also pressed the toes of my boots against the ladder’s lower legs to stabilize it. PK slowed on the upper portion but soon cleared the wall and stepped onto flat ice. Then he spun around, waved me up, and grabbed the top rails.
With a glance, I detected the ladder leaning rightward to bypass an ice bulge. The ladder’s top did not sit directly above the base. To clear the wall, six mismatched ladder pieces had been lashed together end-to-end with old faded climbing cord.
I clamped my sliding rope ascender onto the vertical safety line. Climbing smooth instead of quick seemed like the best plan. First I slid my ascender up the rope with my right hand, then I grabbed the rung above my head with my left. I hefted one heavy boot onto a shin-high rung and started up.
After placing my other boot higher than the first, I paused and took two full breaths. I repeated the pattern and got an efficient rhythm going. Every few steps the stainless-steel crampons that were clamped onto my boots skated sideways along the aluminum rungs. The metal-on-metal screech echoed off the alcove walls.
Copyright © 2021 by Jim Davidson
