Chapter 12 Chapter 10 Lhotse Mountain Wall

△Elevation 7132 meters, April 29, 1996 * Unlike the Continental Alpine countries or the United Kingdom, which invented mountaineering, the United States lacks an innate empathy for the sport.People in the above countries have a similar attitude towards mountaineering. Although generally speaking a passer-by may think that mountaineering is reckless, he will admit that it is a must.Americans don't think so. Unsworth's Mount Everest Walt Unsworth, Everset □□□ For the first time we made our way to Camp No. 3, but were held back by the wind and the bitter cold.Except for Han Sen who stayed in the second battalion to treat his injured throat, everyone on Hall's team tried again the next day.I climbed three hundred meters up the steep slope of the Lhotse Face, climbing a seemingly endless stretch of faded nylon rope, the higher I climbed, the slower I went.I used my gloved hand to slide the Jumar ascender up along the fixed rope. I hung my whole body weight on the ascender and took two mouthfuls of scorching air with great effort. Then I moved my left foot upwards, Stepping on the ice with the crampons, he sucked in two big mouthfuls of air regardless of his own body, put his right foot next to his left foot, inhaled and exhaled from the bottom of the chest cavity, inhaled and exhaled again, and then slid the ascender up the rope again.For three hours I worked my ass off and hoped to work at least another hour before resting.In this way, I climbed very hard towards a pile of tents that were said to be pitched somewhere on the cliff above, and my progress could only be measured by inches.

People who don't climb mountains, that is, most human beings, often think that this is just a daring sport, just a crazy pursuit of higher and higher thrills.But it would be a mistake to think that climbers simply treat mountaineering like a legal drug and get hooked on the adrenaline rush, at least not on Everest.What I do in the mountains is very different from bungee jumping, skydiving, or motorcycle racing at 190+ kilometers an hour. Leaving the comforts of base camp, the expedition had in fact become an almost Calvinistic ascetic.There is more suffering than happiness, and the disparity in proportion is far greater than any mountain I have climbed.I quickly learned that climbing Everest is basically suffering.With all the trudge, boredom, and misery week after week, I think what most of us most crave may be something like grace.

Of course, the motives of some Everest climbers are not so noble and pure, such as the pursuit of small fame, career advancement, self-esteem comfort, legitimate boasting, and low-level financial interests.But these unrefined incentives are not as influential as many critics believe.Seriously, what I've seen and heard over the past few weeks has made me significantly revise my stereotypes about some of my teammates. Take Withers, for example. He was a hundred and fifty meters below, behind the long line, and looked like a little red spot on the ice.I didn't have a good impression when I first met Withers. He is a pathologist in Dallas, USA. He likes to shoot people's backs. His climbing skills are not even mediocre.At first glance, he is just a rich Republican who likes to brag and wants to spend money on the top of Mount Everest as a trophy.But the more I got to know him, the more I respected him.Even with his new, inflexible boots pinching his feet into patties, he limped up every day, barely mentioning the excruciating pain.He is tenacious, positive, and hard-working.What I thought was arrogance at first, now looks more like energy.The man seems to have no ill will towards anyone in the world (though he doesn't like Hillary).His energy and boundless optimism are so overwhelming that I can't help but admire him more and more.

Withers, the son of a career Air Force officer, moved from base to base as a child before eventually settling in Wichita Falls for college.He married after graduating from medical school, has two children, and has a stable business in Dallas with a good income.In 1986, when he was nearly forty, he went on vacation in Colorado. He was attracted by the mountains, so he signed up for the elementary mountaineering course in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Physicians are often in constant pursuit of superior achievement, and Withers is not the first doctor to fall for a new hobby.But mountaineering was not like golf, tennis, or the various pastimes his buddies pursued.Mountaineering is a physical and emotional struggle, with real dangers, and it's not just a game.Mountaineering was like life, only more intense, more distinct, and nothing had ever made Withers so obsessed.He is addicted to mountaineering, and often cannot accompany his family because of mountaineering, and his wife is very worried.She wasn't at all pleased that Withers, soon after he got hooked on climbing, announced that he was going to climb the Seven Summits of the World.

Withers' obsession may be a little selfish and exaggerated, but it's not frivolous.It can also be seen in Kasiske, a lawyer from Bloomfield, Yasuko, a quiet Japanese woman who eats noodles for breakfast every morning, and Tusk, a 56-year-old anesthetist from Brisbane, Australia, who started climbing mountains after retiring from the army. To the same seriousness and fortitude. Tusk said in a thick Australian accent: After I left the army, I was a little dazed.He plays an important role in the military. He is a colonel in the Australian Special Air Force, which is equivalent to the Green Berets of the United States.He served two tours at the height of the Vietnam War and was unprepared for the mundane life after retirement.He continued: "I found that I couldn't really talk to civilians.My marriage fell apart.I can only foresee the long dark tunnel gradually narrowing, ending in sickness, old age, and death.That's when I started mountaineering, and the sport provided most of the things I'd been missing in civilian life—challenge, passion, a sense of purpose, and so on.

The more I understood Tusk, Withers, and a few teammates, the more uncomfortable I became with my role as a reporter.I have no qualms about reporting honestly on people like Hall, Fisher or Sandy who are aggressively chasing the media page, but dealing with teammates who are also clients is another matter.They signed up to join Hall's expedition, unaware that there would be journalists among them, constantly taking notes, silently recording their words and deeds, ready to push their vulnerabilities to the eyes of a society that might not understand. After the expedition, Withers was interviewed by the television show "Turning Point."In an interview that aired unedited, ABC news anchor Shaye asked Withers how it felt to have reporters with him.Withers replied:

The pressure increased.I always kind of mind when I think about it.You know, this guy will come back and write a story for two million people.I mean, making a fool of yourself at that height is bad enough, even if it's just you and the climbing team.Someone will write about you as a clown and a star in a magazine. This matter will cause psychological pressure on how you should behave and how hard you should work.I worry that this will force people to be more active than they would otherwise like to be.Even the guide is the same.I mean, because someone is going to describe them, judge them, they're going to want to push people to the top of the mountain even more.

☆☆ After a while, Saya asked, did you feel that fellow journalists were putting pressure on Hall?Withers replied: Impossible not.Hall does this for a living, and if a client gets hurt, it's the worst thing for a guide. He was really successful in the first two years, taking every client to the top, which is amazing.I think he thought we were a strong team and could do another good thing so I think there was a push, you want to be on the news and in the magazines again, it's all positive. I finally walked into the No. 3 Camp with my back hunched. It was almost noon in the morning. On the halfway up the dizzying Lhotse Mountain, Sherpa’s assistant cut out a platform on the ice slope and built three seats crowded side by side. Small yellow tents together.When I arrived, Keshiri and Alita were still hard at work cutting another platform for a fourth tent, so I unloaded my pack and helped them chop the ice.At an altitude of 7315 meters, I had to stop to catch my breath and rest for more than a minute after I cut seven or eight times with the ice axe.Needless to say, my contribution to this work was negligible and the whole thing took almost an hour to complete.

Our small camp was thirty meters higher than the tents of the other expeditions and was completely exposed.We've been trekking through canyons and the like for weeks now, and for the first time since our expedition, we're looking at the sky instead of the earth.Massive piles of cumulus clouds race against the sun, printing shifting reliefs of shadow and light across the landscape.I sat waiting for my teammates to arrive, with my feet hanging over the abyss, looking behind the clouds and looking down at the 6,700-meter peaks that hung majestically above us a month ago.Looks like I'm finally getting really close to the roof of the world.

However, the top of the mountain wrapped in surging rain clouds is still more than one and a half kilometers vertically away from here.However, even though the higher peaks were being hit by a 200-kilometer-per-hour wind, the air in the No. 3 Battalion was almost motionless.As the afternoon passed by, I was gradually getting dizzy from the intense solar radiation. At least I hope it was the heat that made me dizzy, not cerebral edema. Alpine cerebral edema is less common than alpine pulmonary edema, but it is more deadly and difficult to treat.Symptoms occur when fluid leaks from blood vessels in the brain that are starved of oxygen, causing severe brain swelling, often with few or no signs.Once brain pressure increases, mobility and mental skills deteriorate at an alarming rate, often in a few hours or less, and patients are often unaware of these changes.A coma followed, and unless the patient was quickly evacuated to a lower altitude, it was fatal.

The reason I was thinking about alpine cerebral edema that afternoon was that a forty-four-year-old Colorado dentist named Crews, a member of Fisher's team, had suffered from it two days earlier in Camp Three, and it was quite serious.Cruise is a longtime friend of Fisher's and a strong and experienced climber.On April 26, he climbed from Camp No. 2 to Camp No. 3, made tea for himself and his teammates, and then lay down in the tent to take a nap."I fell asleep right away, sleeping for nearly twenty-four hours, and I didn't wake up until someone woke me up around 2:00 the next afternoon, at which point it was immediately obvious to others that I was insane," Cruise recalls. , I didn't notice it myself.Fisher told me we had to get you down immediately. Cruise had trouble even changing his own clothes.He had the mountaineering harness on backwards, through the windbreaker flap, and couldn't attach the belt buckle.Fortunately, Fisher and Beidleman discovered that Cruise was wearing the wrong clothes before he started down the mountain.If he had just descended the rope like this, the horse would have slipped from the harness and fallen to the bottom of the Lhotse Face, Beidleman said. "I was like, really, really drunk," Cruise recalls.Falls when walking and completely loses the ability to think or speak.That feeling is really strange.There is something to say in my head, but I can't think of how to bring it to my lips.Fisher and Beidleman had to dress me, make sure my harness was on properly, and then Fisher sent me down the fixed rope.After he arrived at Battalion 1, Cruise said, it took me another three or four days to walk from my tent to the mess tent without wrestling around. As soon as the sun set behind Pumori Peak, the temperature in Camp No. 3 dropped by more than 50 degrees.As the air cools, my head clears.My anxiety about alpine cerebral edema is pure nonsense, at least for now.We suffered from insomnia all night at an altitude of 7315 meters. The next morning we went down to Camp No. 2. A day later, on May 1, we continued down to Base Camp to nourish our energy Store up your energy to attack the top. Now that we've officially completed high-level adaptation, I'm both surprised and delighted that Hall's strategy seems to be working.After three weeks on the mountain, I found the air at the base camp to be thick and thick compared to the thin atmosphere of the two camps above, and a bit oversaturated with oxygen. However, something was wrong with my body.I lost nearly nine kilograms of muscle in my shoulders, back, and legs, and my subcutaneous fat was burned off, making me very vulnerable to cold.The most serious problem was the chest, which had worsened from the dry cough he had contracted in Lobuzaki in the previous weeks, and a particularly violent cough broke out in Camp 3, which tore several pieces of rib cage cartilage.I coughed endlessly, and each dry cough was like someone kicking me in the ribs. The rest of the base camp was probably just as miserable, as was staying on Everest.In five days, Hall and the members of Fisher's team will set off from the base camp to attack the summit. I hope that I will not decline any more, so I decide to take a good rest, swallow the ibuprofen anti-inflammatory painkiller, and seize the time to force myself to try my best. Eat more calories. Hall had planned from the start to reach the summit on May 10.He explained that I have summited four times, two of which were on May 10.According to the Sherpa people, the tenth day is my auspicious day.But there's a more practical reason for choosing this date: the most favorable weather of the year is likely to fall around May 10, due to the annual tides and ebbs of the Indian Ocean monsoon. Throughout April, jet streams are aimed at Everest like fire hoses, blasting the summit pinnacles with hurricane-like force.Even on a perfectly calm, sunny day at Base Camp, there are strong winds that blow a whole blanket of snow down from the summit.But we hope that the Indian Ocean monsoon blowing over the Bay of Bengal in early May will force the jet stream towards Tibet.If this year is anything like the past few years, we'll have a brief window of clarity and calm before the strong winds blow away and the monsoon rains set in, and we'll be on the verge of reaching the summit. Unfortunately, this year-to-year weather pattern is no secret, with every expeditionary force staring at the same window of clear skies.Hall, who didn't want a dangerous blockage on the ridge, held lengthy meetings with other expedition leaders at base camp.It was decided that Kropp (the Swedish youth who cycled from Stockholm to Nepal) would try a solo on May 3rd.Next came the team from Montenegro.Then on May 8 or 9 it's the turn of the IMAX Expedition. Hall and Fisher's expedition together reached the summit on May 10.The Norwegian solo climber Nibe has left after encountering falling rocks on the southwestern face and almost dying.He quietly left the base camp one morning and returned to the Nordic Peninsula.The American group led by Perryson and Yadance, the commercial team under Doof and another British commercial team all agreed to avoid May 10, and the Taiwanese team also agreed.However, Woodal announced that the South African team can attack the summit whenever they like, maybe on May 10th, and those who are unhappy can get out. Note 1: Although Hall and other team leaders clearly believed that the Taiwan team had agreed not to take the summit on this day, after the mountain disaster, Gao Minghe insisted that he did not know this commitment.It may be that Sherpa Tsering of the Taiwan team made this promise on behalf of Gao Minghe, but did not inform Gao Minghe.Notes for Business Edition Hall is usually not quick to lose his temper, but when he heard Woodall refused to cooperate, he flew into a rage.I don't want to be near those speculators when they're up there.he said angrily.