Left For Dead Twice on Everest, and Walked Down

Beck Weathers was forty-nine in May 1996, a successful Dallas-based clinical pathologist with two grown children and a long marriage to his wife Peach that had, by his own subsequent admission, been quietly deteriorating for years. He had, since his early forties, taken up high-altitude mountaineering in what he later described in his memoir Left For Dead as a deliberate attempt to outpace a depression he had been managing, with mixed success, since his late thirties. He had climbed, in the four years before Everest, six of the seven summits, including a 1994 ascent of Aconcagua and a 1995 ascent of Denali. The Everest trip, in May 1996, was the seventh and final summit. He had paid sixty-five thousand US dollars to join the commercial expedition led by the experienced New Zealand guide Rob Hall, founder of the company Adventure Consultants, which at that point was considered one of the most reputable commercial Everest operators in the industry. The trip was, by every measure, the culmination of his amateur mountaineering career. He arrived at Everest base camp in late March 1996. The summit attempt was scheduled for 10 May.

The events of 10 to 11 May 1996, in which a sudden and exceptionally violent storm caught multiple commercial expeditions on the upper sections of Everest above the South Col, have been documented in detail in several books, most famously Jon Krakauer's 1997 Into Thin Air. The short version is that eight climbers died across the two days, including Rob Hall himself and the experienced American guide Scott Fischer, and that a number of other climbers, including Weathers, were left in the snow at various points across the upper mountain in the assumption that they were either dead or beyond any possible rescue. Weathers had, on the morning of 10 May, made the summit attempt in conditions of progressively decreasing eyesight caused by a previous experimental eye surgery he had undergone two years earlier that had left his vision intolerant to the bright high-altitude UV at oxygen levels below half of sea level. He had, on the upper slopes, gone effectively snow-blind. He had agreed with Rob Hall, at approximately the Hillary Step at eight thousand seven hundred and ninety metres, that he would wait for Hall and the rest of the team on the descent rather than continue to the summit. He had sat down at a small flat platform on the south summit area to wait. The storm caught him, sitting on the platform, in the late afternoon of 10 May. By dusk, his vision had reduced to functional zero and the temperature had dropped to roughly minus forty degrees Celsius.

He was found, eventually, by a small group of descending climbers from a different expedition, who managed to half-carry, half-drag him down the long traverse to the South Col camp at around eight thousand metres. He arrived at the South Col, by the subsequent reconstruction of the survivors, at approximately one in the morning on 11 May. He was, on arrival, completely unable to see. He was, on arrival, suffering from severe hypothermia and from frostbite that had already, on his exposed hands and face, progressed to the third degree. He was placed in a small tent. The other climbers in the tent, by the assessment of the senior guides on site, were also in extremis and did not have the resources or the available strength to evacuate Weathers any further. By the morning of 11 May, when the storm temporarily moderated and a small rescue helicopter from Kathmandu was able to fly briefly into the lower camp, the climbers at the South Col made the medically reasonable decision that Weathers was not going to survive and that the helicopter, which could only carry one or two climbers, should be used to extract climbers who still had a realistic chance of survival. Weathers was left, semi-conscious, in the snow outside the tent. He was, by every assessment of every guide at the South Col that morning, dead, or so close to it as to make no operational difference.

He was not dead. At approximately three in the afternoon on 11 May, almost twenty-two hours after the storm had first caught him, he woke up. He was alone. He could see, with substantial limitation, with his left eye. He could not see with his right eye. His right hand was, by his own visual assessment in the small remaining sunlight, frozen solid into the position in which it had been when he had collapsed. His face was, in places, peeling off in small chunks of frozen skin. He was wearing a single down jacket and one boot. The other boot had been removed by other climbers in the assumption that he was beyond any further need of footwear. He stood up. He has said in interviews many times, with the quiet Texan understatement that characterises everything he has subsequently said about the climb, that he stood up not because he had any particular plan but because lying down in the snow had begun to bore him. He was, by every available clinical measure, in the process of dying. He had decided, for reasons he has never been able to fully explain, that the dying was, on the whole, less interesting than the alternative. He began to walk.

He walked the four hundred metres back to the small group of tents at the South Col, mostly by tracking the small dark shape of the tents through the limited vision of his left eye. He arrived at the entrance of the largest tent at approximately four in the afternoon. He stood at the entrance. He attempted to call out. The remaining climbers in the tent, who had been quietly processing the assumed deaths of Weathers and several others throughout the afternoon, looked up to see, against every reasonable expectation of human survival, the apparently dead man standing at the door of the tent. The senior guide present, the experienced American mountaineer Pete Athans, has said in many interviews since that the appearance of Weathers at the tent entrance was, by some considerable margin, the single most physically and psychologically shocking thing he has ever experienced in thirty years of high-altitude guiding. The climbers in the tent half-carried, half-walked Weathers inside. They began the slow process of warming his core temperature with hot tea and an electric heat pack. They radioed down the mountain for the helicopter.

The helicopter extraction that followed, conducted the next morning by a single Nepalese army pilot named Lieutenant Colonel Madan Khatri Chhetri, was, by every assessment of every subsequent investigator, the highest-altitude helicopter rescue ever attempted in the recorded history of mountaineering. Khatri Chhetri flew his small Aerospatiale Squirrel helicopter, on the morning of 12 May 1996, to an altitude of approximately six thousand four hundred metres on the long approach ridge from the Western Cwm to the South Col, to a small temporary landing zone that the surviving climbers had stamped out in the snow with their boots that morning. The helicopter, at that altitude, was operating at the absolute limit of its mechanical performance envelope. Khatri Chhetri made two flights. On the first he extracted Makalu Gau, a Taiwanese climber with frostbite injuries comparable to Weathers's. On the second flight, an hour later, he extracted Weathers. The second extraction, by Khatri Chhetri's own later account in a Nepalese military commendation, was the single most difficult piece of helicopter flying he had ever done. The thin air would not, on the second approach, support the helicopter at all at the landing zone, and he was forced to come in on a single high-speed pass, hover the helicopter four feet off the snow for less than thirty seconds, while the climbers on the ground threw Weathers bodily through the open passenger door, and then immediately drop the helicopter into the steep descending valley to regain flying speed. The entire approach took less than ninety seconds. Khatri Chhetri was, several months later, decorated by the Nepalese government for what is still considered the most technically difficult helicopter mountain rescue ever attempted.

Weathers was flown directly from Khatri Chhetri's helicopter to a small hospital in Kathmandu, then transferred to Dallas within seventy-two hours. The eventual medical aftermath, across the four months that followed, was the slow surgical reconstruction of what was, by clinical assessment, one of the most severe cases of frostbite ever to be presented at a civilian American hospital. He lost, in the eventual surgical decisions, both forearms below the elbows, his nose, and several toes. His nose was, in a small piece of plastic surgery that has since become quietly famous in the Texan reconstructive-surgery community, rebuilt from a graft of cartilage taken from his own ear and a flap of skin from his forehead. He spent the remainder of 1996 in a small Dallas rehabilitation facility, learning to use the two prosthetic hands that his surgeons had fitted him with. He returned, in early 1997, to the small Dallas medical practice in which he had been a senior pathologist for the previous twenty years, where his partners had agreed to keep him on staff in a permanent reduced-microscope-work consulting capacity. He has, with the patient slow professional adjustment of a man who has been given, by every available measure, a second life, continued in that capacity until the present day.

The single thing about Weathers's subsequent life that the journalists who interview him almost never expect, and that he discusses with the small Texan candour that has not changed since 1996, is the long quiet effect that the night on the South Col had on the marriage he had been quietly losing for the previous decade. He has said, in many interviews and in his memoir, that the single most important reason he stood up at three in the afternoon on 11 May 1996 was that, in the moments before he stood up, he had been, in a small lucid window between the long stretches of semi-conscious cold, picturing the face of his wife Peach and the faces of his two children. He has said that the standing up was, in the end, not for the climbing or for the seventh summit or for any of the small reasons he had told himself in the previous decade that he had been climbing the high mountains. The standing up was, in his quiet account, for the small specific people he had left in Dallas. He returned to Dallas, in October 1996, with no hands. He sat down with Peach in the small Dallas kitchen. He attempted, in the slow careful sentences of a man who had not, in twenty years of marriage, been particularly good at the sentences, to apologise for the long absences. Peach, who had filed for divorce in the weeks after the news of his presumed death and who had not yet, by the time of his return, withdrawn the filing, listened. She did not speak for a long time. She withdrew the filing the following week. The two of them have remained married, in the long quiet aftermath of the South Col, for the twenty-eight years since.

The single line from Weathers's memoir that the readers most often write to him about is the line near the end of the book, in the small final chapter on the long Dallas recovery, in which he describes the most important single thing he has come to understand about his own life in the years since the mountain. He had not, he insists, climbed Everest. He had, in any honest accounting, failed to summit, had been left in the snow to die, and had only by a series of small unearned accidents been returned to the small American suburban life that his climbing had been a slow attempt to escape. The mountain, he writes, had not, in any meaningful sense, been the achievement. The mountain had been, instead, the very expensive lecture in which the universe had taught him that the suburban life he had been trying to escape was, in fact, the only life he had ever had, and that the small people in it, the wife and the two children and the medical partners and the patients in the small Dallas pathology practice, were the only specific human beings whose presence in his life he was ever going to be in a position to value. The mountain, he writes, had been the small expensive way of finding that out. Almost everyone, he insists in the closing paragraph, had this same lecture available to them at a much lower price. He had, in his Texan view, simply been unusually slow to register the cheaper version, and the universe, in the spring of 1996, had been, by every available evidence, prepared to deliver the more expensive one.