Chapter 3 Chapter One

△8848 meters above sea level, May 10, 1996 * The upper part of these towering peaks seems to draw a warning line, which no one can cross.The crux of the problem is that when the altitude is above 7,600 meters, the impact of low pressure on the human body is extremely severe, and it is impossible to carry out really difficult mountaineering activities. A slight snowstorm may bring fatal consequences. Only the most perfect Climate and snow conditions offer a slight chance of success, and no one can pick a day on the final stage of the climb No, it's no surprise that Everest didn't let things go so easily in the first place.Seriously, it would be surprising if Everest surrendered so easily, and it would be very sad and out of touch with the mountains.Maybe we're getting a little arrogant, with good new technology like crampons and rubber slippers, and a long history of conquering everything with mechanical ease.We forget that Takayama still holds the trump card, and only hand out medals for success when we feel it is appropriate.Otherwise, how can mountaineering be deeply demagogic?

Shipton, 1938, "On That Hill" Eric Shipton, in 1938, Upon That Mountain □□□ I straddled the top of the world, with one foot on China and the other on Nepal, I reached out to clear the ice and snow from the oxygen mask, arched my shoulders to block the wind, and looked down at the vast Tibet in a daze, realizing in a trance that there was an extremely magnificent landscape under my feet. landscape.I had imagined this moment and the excitement that would follow for many months.However, when I was finally here and actually stood on the top of Mount Everest, I just couldn't exert my strength to feel anything.

It was the afternoon of May 10, 1996, and I hadn't slept for fifty-seven hours.For the first three days I couldn't eat anything but a bowl of ramen soup and a handful of peanut m&ms.After a few weeks of severe coughing, I had two ribs separated and even breathing was a horrific ordeal.In the troposphere at an altitude of 8,848 meters, the oxygen sent to the brain is too little, and my intelligence is only as good as that of a retarded child.In this situation, I really can't feel anything other than cold and tired. I arrived at the summit a few minutes behind Pokrief, the Russian mountain guide of another expedition, and a little earlier than Harris, the guide of my New Zealand team.I didn't know Porkleaf very well, but I got to know Harris well for the first six weeks and liked him a lot.I snapped four photos of Harris and Pokliffe's heroic pose on the summit, and immediately turned around and went down the mountain.At this time, my watch pointed to 1:17 in the afternoon, which means that I stayed on the roof of the world for less than five minutes in total.

Not long after, I stopped to take another photo, this time overlooking the southeast rim route we had taken up the mountain.I pointed the camera at the two climbers who were walking towards the summit, and found a phenomenon that I hadn’t noticed before: the southern sky was extremely blue an hour ago, and now thick clouds have covered Pumori Peak, Armada Mont Bran and other smaller peaks that surround Everest. Later (after six bodies were recovered, the search was abandoned for two others, and my teammate Withers' gangrene right hand was surgically removed), people would ask: Now that the weather is starting to turn bad, why aren't climbers on the mountain seeing the signs?Why does an experienced Himalayan guide continue to climb, leading a group of relatively inexperienced amateur mountaineers (people who paid $65,000 each to take them safely to Mount Everest) into an obvious death trap ?

No one can speak for the leaders of the two teams involved because both died in the mountain disaster.But I can attest that from what I saw in the early afternoon of May 10, there was absolutely nothing in the way of a deadly snowstorm approaching.According to the judgment made by my oxygen-deprived head, what floated up along the famous big ice cirque called West Cirque 1 was just wisps of thin clouds, which were not threatening.Glittering in the brilliant midday sun, the clouds looked like the harmless wisps of convective vapor that rose from the valley nearly every afternoon. Note 1: Western Cwm, named after George Leigh Mallory.He first saw this valley in 1921 from the Lho La high pass on the Tibet-Nepal border on his expedition to Mount Everest. Cwm means valley or round valley in Welsh.author note

I was very anxious as I lifted my feet and walked down, but my worry had nothing to do with the weather.I checked the flow gauge on my oxygen tank and it was almost empty.I must go down the mountain as soon as possible. The highest section on the southeast ridge of Mount Everest is bare rock covered with thick snow cornices and wind-eroded snowfields, winding about 400 meters between the summit and the affiliated South Peak.It doesn't take too much skill to get over the jagged ridge, but the route is not covered at all and is completely exposed to the air.After leaving the summit, I carefully moved fifteen minutes above the 2,000-meter abyss to the infamous Hillary Step (The Hillary Step), which is an obvious narrow passage on the ridge that requires some rock climbing technology.As I was hanging myself on the fixed rope and preparing to descend along the edge, I suddenly saw a terrifying scene.

Nine meters below, a dozen people lined up at the bottom of the Hillary Step.Three people had already climbed the rope I was about to descend.I had no choice but to unhook the carabiner, step away from the shared anchor, and step aside. The jam was caused by climbers from three expeditions: one was the team I belonged to, led by the famous New Zealand guide Hall, a group of paying customers; one was another commercial team led by American Fisher; One is a non-commercial Taiwan mountaineering team.At altitudes above 7,900 meters, a snail’s pace has become the norm. Climbers struggled to climb the Hillary Step, while I nervously waited for the opportunity to descend. .

Harris, who left the summit later than I did, quickly caught up and stopped behind me.Wanting to save as much oxygen as possible in the tank, I asked him to reach into my pack and turn off the valve on the regulator, which he did.For the next ten minutes, I was surprisingly comfortable and refreshed.In fact, my spirits seemed to be better than when the oxygen was on.Then I was suddenly out of breath, dizzy, and on the verge of losing consciousness. It turned out that Harris was delirious due to lack of oxygen. Not only did he not turn off my oxygen, but he mistakenly opened the valve to the maximum flow rate, and the oxygen tank was emptied immediately.I wasted the last of my oxygen for no reason.There is another tank of oxygen waiting for me on the South Peak more than 70 meters below, but I have to climb down the most exposed part of the entire route without supplementary oxygen to reach the South Peak.

And I have to wait for the chaotic crowd to clear up first.I removed my now-useless oxygen mask, plunged my ice ax into the hard ice high on the mountain, and crouched on the ridge.I exchanged the same congratulations with the hikers who filed past, but my heart was secretly mad: hurry up, hurry up!I begged silently, while you guys are dawdling here, my brain cells are dying by the millions! Most of the passing crowd belonged to Fisher's group, but two of my teammates, Hall and Yasuko Namba, finally emerged near the end of the line.The 47-year-old Yasuko is very reserved and reserved, only 40 minutes younger than the oldest female mountaineer ever to climb Mount Everest, and is the second Japanese to climb the highest peaks in all continents, the so-called Seven Summits 2 female.Although she weighs only forty-one kilograms, there is an invincible determination hidden in her sparrow-like figure.Kangzi was able to climb Mount Everest because of his unwavering and strong desire.

Note 2: Seven Summits refers to the seven highest peaks on the seven continents in the world.It was the American Richard Bass who first climbed and proposed the list of seven peaks. His list was Everest in Asia (8,848 meters), Aconcagua in South America (6,960 meters), and Maishan in North America. Mount Jinli (6,194 meters), Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa (5,895 meters), Mount Elbrus in Europe (5,642 meters), Mount Vinson in Antarctica (4,892 meters) ), Kosciuszko Mountain in Australia (2228 meters).The Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner proposed another list, thinking that from the point of view of mountaineers, Mount Jaya (4,884 meters) in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia should replace Mount Kosciuszko in Australia , becoming the highest peak in Oceania, because the climbing difficulty of Mount Chaya is much higher than that of Mount Kosciuszko.Editor's note

Later, Han Sen climbed to the top of Hillary's steps.He is another member of our expedition team and works as a post office employee in the suburbs of Seattle. This time he went up the mountain and became my closest friend.I roared in the wind, victory is in sight!Try to appear more upbeat and jovial than you really are.Han Sen was exhausted and muttered while wearing an oxygen mask, but I couldn't hear what he said clearly.He shook my hand weakly and continued to climb. Behind us on the fixed line was Fisher, who we both live in Seattle and have known several times.Fisher's strength and drive are amazing (he climbed Mount Everest without oxygen in 1994), so I was really surprised to see him move so slowly and look so depressed when he pushed off the oxygen mask to say hello.He reluctantly cheers in his trademark varsity fraternity greeting, Bruce!I asked him how he was doing and he insisted that he was feeling fine and that he was feeling weak today for some reason.no big deal.With the Hilary steps clear at last, I hooked the shackles to the orange rope, and as Fisher languished on the ice ax, I quickly circled him and rappelled down the edge. It was past three o'clock when I descended to the South Peak.At this time, wisps of fog are pouring up to the summit of Lhotse Peak, which is 8,510 meters above sea level, and inside the pyramid tip of Mount Everest.The weather doesn't look so balmy anymore.I grabbed a fresh oxygen tank, hooked up my regulator, and hurried down into the thickening cloud.Not long after I went down to the South Peak, light snow began to fall in the sky, and my vision was extremely bad. One hundred and twenty meters vertically above, the blue sky is flawless, and the peak is still bathed in bright sunlight. My companions are slowly commemorating their arrival at the highest point of the earth, unfurling flags and taking pictures, exhausting every minute of time.No one imagined that a terrible test was approaching.No one expected that at the end of a long day, every minute could mean life or death.