Discovery Channel - Everest: Beyond the Limit

Going Home

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It's fitting that I write the last blog from a hotel near LAX on my way home. I've just been in the piano bar, and coincidentally, a Nepali couple who were on my flight also turned up for a nightcap. One of them asked the Cuban bartender for a "hot meal" but he brought them hot milk instead. They're arguing about it right now, neither side able to penetrate the other's accent. It's the Babel factor.

The days since we departed base camp have been a frenzy of travel: a tooth-rattling, two-day dirt-road journey through Tibet and over the Friendship Bridge into Nepal, then a lounge-lizard feeding frenzy in Kathmandu restaurants like Kilroys and Fire and Ice, then a hurried session of goodbyes as we taxied off to jostle onto flights home.

I've spent this time thinking about the season that was and what it means. It was a lucky season, blessed by good weather. Sure, there were tragedies, but expeditions got off lightly given the enormous numbers of people who stood on top.

Fewer tragedies don't alleviate the burden of any single tragedy, though. In the last days at base camp there was a forlorn Italian woman visiting the Himex camp, hoping that Russell's Sherpa crew might locate a missing member from the Italian team who I'd originally heard had made it off the mountain. It turns out that one climber named Marco (see the blog "Babel") had survived, but another, Pierangelo Maurizio, was still unaccounted for.

As we left, Russell's Sherpas and any climbers left on the mountain were looking in abandoned tents for the climber and keeping an eye out on the ridge. More than 10 days have passed since the man was last seen. No one holds much hope for his survival now, but his friends wonder…

In Kathmandu our oldest team member, 71-year-old schoolteacher-turned-farmer Yanagasawa from Japan, became a celebrity when it was confirmed that he was indeed the oldest man to climb Everest. Last I saw him, a Japanese film crew were pursuing him around the Hotel Tibet.

And last I saw of Tim he was holding an X-ray that clearly showed two broken bones in his hand. A local clinic recommended surgery. More metal into the big boy's body it looks like.

Darius will remain in Tibet and Nepal with his wife and friends; Fred will be back doctoring in no time; and Rod has been splashed around in the press for his cell phone call from the summit. One publication, taking journalistic license to the typical extreme, reported that he asked his family if he should "pick anything up" on the way home; he did no such thing. He had just enough battery power (he taped the batteries to his chest to keep them warm) to make a half-minute call to a preapproved voicemail box that registered his GPS location to prove he was on Everest.

The film crew took off as one, returning to England to edit the Discovery Channel series, Everest: Beyond the Limit. Russell remained at Everest with Conrad Anker's crew, hoping to make a summit bid if the jet stream ebbs again.

I'm looking forward to getting home to a Utah summer, to mundane house repairs, to feeding my cat and most of all, back to watching my daughter grow up.

So how many people climbed the mountain this year? Russell says he's got no idea. He thinks it's impossible to know anymore because there are so many folks on both sides that no one can tally the numbers accurately – maybe not even the redoubtable Elizabeth Hawley of Kathmandu, who has kept score for decades.

Unofficially, people are saying 300, with a death toll of about eight. But what if the score is 2,700, 3,000 or 3,001? It won't be long before the summit count on Everest is 5,000, then 10,000. Will that make the mountain less interesting, less appealing to climb, less a pinnacle of human endeavor, less a keystone (or tarnished keystone) in climbing's identity myth?

At the outset of this trip, I wondered if a bunch of strangers who'd paid a fee to buy onto an expedition could find the necessary camaraderie to climb the mountain. It did seem to come together by the end, with some people finding that "certain thang" more than others.

A lot of the climbers on the trip say they'll never do another high mountain again; they've ticked off Everest and they're moving on. Others hint that the bug has bitten them and they might pursue more Himalayan adventures.

What is certain is that without Phurba and his Sherpa friends, as well as the Sherpas on other teams, few of the Western summiters would get there. This year, Phurba's crew fixed ropes from the foot of Everest to the tippy top of the summit. They made it as safe as possible. They and other Sherpas carried up the tents and pitched them, humped up countless oxygen tanks, took most of them down and otherwise tailored this mountain for their clientele. That's the way it is, and that's why the Sherpas own the mountain.

Signing off,
Greg Child

Escape to Old Tibet

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Yesterday, some of us escaped the crushing boredom of base camp by hopping in the back of a truck and going for an hour-long, spine-jarring drive down the Tingri Road to a place of grassy meadows and a village called Tashi Dum.

It was Russell's idea to get us out of base camp to a lower altitude and warmer climate because his weather data showed a sudden bout of wind and snow that would keep us base camp-bound for an additional couple of days. Bad weather seemed to be engulfing the whole mountain — he heard from the south side that some teams there had been driven back from their summit attempts.

So, with faces covered in dust masks and scarves, we crammed into the back of the truck and made the journey down the Rongbuk Valley past Shanty Town, the monastery and the Chinese guard posts, then turned off the main road into a valley of tan hills and grazing country.

It sounded funny to hear a tough-shelled guy like Russell Brice call this outing a picnic, but that's precisely what it was — a spread of snacks laid out on a warm field of grass beside a clear stream. The U.K.-based film crew played cricket with a makeshift bat made from a plank and a tennis ball; others dozed in the sun while a cloud loaded with spring snow pellets gathered overhead. A few others hiked to a tiny village called Tashi Dum, population 200.

This village occupies a special place in the Russell Brice Everest agenda. He sponsors a school here, where he plans to install solar panels and lights soon, and he hosts a cleanup campaign here and in another nearby village.

One of Russell's key camp staff, a Tibetan named Karsang, is from this village. Karsang began working as a yak driver, but he quickly rose through the ranks of the Brice empire, learning to speak English and then summiting on Everest with Russell's clients.

Karsang's son Tashi guided us past the picnic site to Tashi Dum. We passed a waterwheel-driven mill grinding barley on a huge millstone in the same way old Tibetans have ground their meal for centuries. Yaks and goats grazed blissfully on the greenery. On the edge of the village, horse carts drove alongside SUVs on the dirt road. Narrow alleyways snaked past prayer flags tied to an incongruously placed satellite dish. Curious kids followed us everywhere. Then we slipped away to bounce back up the road to base camp.

Signing off,
Greg Child

Camp Two Trial Run

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The Himex team's first big acclimatization test is complete. Starting from the North Col on the morning of May 3, most of the team began the grueling plod up to Camp Two at 24,500 feet (7,500 meters).

This is a painful part of climbing Everest's North Ridge, and I recall it well from my time here in 1995. From the North Col the route looks easy; you can see the entire path, which on the morning of May 3 was lined with scores of Sherpas and climbers following the arrow-straight line of ropes up the moderately angled spur to a series of terraces where tents are crammed.

Everyone sat around the circular fringe, plump in their down suits, enjoying the closeness. The fumes from the cookers made us all a bit heady. Fred Ziel, usually a straight shooter who keeps to himself, sat laughing like a college kid when someone hooked him up to an iPod loaded with Frank Zappa tunes. Dinner consisted of pre-cooked meals in foil packs.

The next morning was clear, after nighttime snow flurries left the north face of Everest frosty white. I, personally, felt like crap as I crawled out of my tent, which I'd inhabited with four film crew members — Ed Wardle, Mark Whetu, Phil Coates and Ed Venner. Dehydration had started to set in after my first night at 23,000 feet, leaving the interior of my head feeling like a balloon and my body drained of energy. I was glad I didn't have to go any higher for the sake of this assignment.

By 9.30 a.m. the climbers, along with cameramen Ed Wardle and Mark Whetu, began the uphill grind. Soon the sun beat down with a vengeance. Normally this stretch of ridge is a wind-lashed, cold place, but this day it was hot and breathless. For survival reasons, anyone going up from Camp One must wear a life-preserving down suit, but on this uncommonly hot day it was torture to be encased in the feather-filled coveralls.

After one final visit to the big dome to melt enough water for me, Phil and Ed Venner to make the roasting descent to ABC (in which I nearly fainted due to the by-now toxic fumes that had gathered inside there), we descended, leaving the Camp Two candidates to their arduous slog. Once back at ABC we'd monitor their progress from there.

The general rule on this expedition is that candidates for the summit must reach each camp in a reasonable amount of time. The approximate time required to get from ABC to Camp One is five hours; from Camp One to Camp Two is also five hours. Flexibility is allowed, but it's clear that someone taking twice that time doesn't have a reasonable or safe chance of getting to the next camps. The effort it takes to move up becomes exponentially harder at higher altitudes.

So when Betsy had gotten only about a third of the way up in five hours, and had fallen asleep in the snow several times, guide Dean Staples told her to go down. By afternoon, Sherpas had escorted her back to ABC.

"There's no air up there!" Betsy told me on arrival at ABC. "I just wanted to go to sleep all the time, so I'd curl up and nap. I talked a lot to the man upstairs. And I realized there are more beautiful things than Everest — like my dog's face. I kept seeing his beautiful face in my dreams, and I realized how much I miss him."

Betsy never fails to find a unique angle on her Everest experience. I'm not sure where this leaves her in the running for the summit phase of the expedition. She has a lot to learn, for example, about the crucial need to fend off dehydration. As she left Camp One I watched her filling a half-liter bottle with water and suggested to her that her body would need lots more than that to stay hydrated. She shrugged it off and headed up.

My guess is that dehydration, heat and 7,200 meters of thin air lulled this sea-level-living California girl into a potentially deadly dream world. More than a few bodies on Everest have been left behind because someone drifted into that lethargic state of dehydration and altitude and never woke up. Back at ABC today, after a good night's sleep, Betsy seems entirely happy with the place she's in.

During the morning of May 4, the rest of the group returned to ABC. It had been a rough day for all of them.

David Tait was first. His partner for the double traverse, Phurba Tashi, greeted him at his tent. David mentioned how Phurba and his indefatigable Sherpa crew had rocketed ahead of the climbers, chopped platforms from the ice, erected tents, then filled them with sleeping bags, pads and stoves. (Phurba and crew had been on the summit only a couple of days earlier).

Shaking his head in admiration, David said, "We're not a team. We're a bunch of Westerners making individual statements on Everest. The Sherpas — they're a team."

Said Darius when he arrived: "You want to know what is hell? Up there is hell. It was hot, very hot."

Rod: "That was the hardest thing I've ever done. Everything physical is accentuated ten times up there."

Mogens had a particularly hard time. "My asthma went haywire. I think it was the fumes in the cook tent. I vomited near Camp Two, and that's a first.” On previous attempts on Everest, the triathlete had covered the same ground in three hours; this time it took him six.

Hardest hit of all was Li Yong, who, inching upwards and against advice from guides Woody and Dean, wouldn't turn back. After 10 hours, he arrived in Camp Two. Tim made the ascent in about seven hours. At the time of this writing he's still ambling down from the North Col, moving at his own speed. No one is concerned here because, well, it's Tim.

The days ahead: Everyone goes down to base camp for about a week of rest. Then, when the crew returns, the summit bids begin.

Signing off,
Greg Child

The scene at the North Co

l camp, at 23,000 feet (7,000 meters), the previous night was communal: Fifteen of us squeezed into a big yurt-shaped dome tent for dinner. In the middle of the tent sat two cook stoves melting snow in big pots to boiling .

A Hard Place to Live

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Climbers, guides, Sherpas and film crew are all now at advance base camp (ABC) at 21,000 feet (6,400 meters). During the two-day hike, Everest was nearly always in view, its summit adorned with a jet stream blast of cloud flowing from the southwest.

We shared the trail with hundreds of yaks. The valley echoed with the jangle of their bells and the coos and songs the Tibetan yak drivers sing to their docile beasts of burden. Russell figures that 2,500 yaks are involved in the business of shuttling expeditions up and down this glacier.

While the 9-mile hike isn't very steep, the altitude gain can be punishing. It's common to arrive, spend a night, and succumb to sleeplessness, headaches, lethargy and puking nausea. The best cure for altitude sickness is descent back to base camp, and a few members of this group have already had to go down to rest up.

In fact, I haven't felt so great since I got here. The last couple of days I've been dreamy and wooden-headed, but now that I've drunk enough water to fend off altitude-induced dehydration I'm much more alert. Consider that at ABC we're camping higher than any point in North America, Africa or Europe.

ABC is situated in a dead end of the East Rongbuk Glacier on a narrow strip of glacier occupied by many expeditions. We all sleep on a constantly moving ice river that cracks and pops beneath us. Everest's long Northeast Ridge rises left of the camp and the North Col (location of Camp 1) is a wall of ice and snow at the end of the valley. Right now I can see 60 people threading their way up the slope that leads to Camp 1. From my tent they look like a line of ants crossing a sugar bowl.

The mountain is a beehive of activity. Russell's crew of Sherpas has been busy carrying masses of supplies, including oxygen, which will be used from 26,000 feet (7,900 meters) on up. The plan is to pave the North Ridge with enough rope to allow the hundreds of this year's Everest contenders to reach the summit.

The first summiters will likely be Russell's well-trained Sherpa crew, who believe they'll summit by the end of April. Because Russell's team has been fixing ropes on Everest for so many years, most of the expeditions are content to let his crew do the hard work and set the lines in place. In return, they pay a minimal fee ($100 per person) to cover the enormous manpower, oxygen and rope that the job entails; those expeditions who don't wish to pay use the fixed ropes anyway.

Meanwhile, the climbers in this group are getting their personal gear in order and training on the ice cliffs beside camp before making the move onto the mountain. The next destination will be the North Col at around 23,000 feet (7,000 meters). The gnarly thing about climbing high peaks is that as soon as you adapt to one altitude, you have to move up and suffer at a higher altitude.

In the next few dispatches I'll be writing about the superhuman Sherpas who are the backbone of this expedition, as well as the ongoing adventures of the individuals who've signed up for Russell Brice's Everest expedition.

Signing off,
Greg Child

Base Camp and Beyond

In honor of the Everest blog Friday tradition, enjoy a little slice of base camp in pictures. More yaks!

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The Road to Everest

Today, Greg sent a big fat folder full of pictures from the teams' travels through Tibet. Click on an image for the large version. Enjoy!

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Welcome to Everestville

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Not far out of Shegar, the buses gear down and climb a 17,000-foot pass, then wind into the valley leading to base camp. A storm last night has dusted the rolling, tan hills and boulder-strewn river banks with snow. We share the road with occasional yaks, horse-drawn carts, motor bikes and SUVs.

At the Rongbuk monastery, the massive north wall of Everest suddenly appears out of a smoky haze of cloud. Everyone gets off the bus to take it in. Fred Ziel, one of the climbers riding on my bus, stares at the mountain. This expedition will be his third try at Everest. In 2003, on the Nepalese side, he climbed above the Hillary Step. That's maddeningly close to the summit, and he returned with a frostbitten nose. In 2005, Fred tried Everest's North Ridge and got as far as Camp 3.

Other than Everest, this 53-year-old California endocrinologist and family man has quietly racked up an impressive list of 26,000-foot (8,000-meter) peaks. He has summited three (Manaslu, Broad Peak and Shishapangma) and climbed high on K2, the second-highest peak on Earth, which makes Dr. Ziel the most experienced climber on the team.

Back on the bus we pass the infamous Shanty Town, a skid row of tents that Tibetan yak drivers have built up in recent seasons to cash in on the expedition trade. Rough and muddy as Deadwood, it boasts trinket shops and sometimes brawling pubs.

A couple of miles later we hit base camp, and what an extraordinary sight it is. This portable city sprawled in front of the Rongbuk Glacier houses who-knows-how-many expeditions, including a Chinese team of 70 climbers with a barracks of tents and two trucks sporting transmission towers. Base Camp is Wi-Fi live, and a cell tower ensures that everyone with a dual-band/Tri-mode cell phone can call home.

Russell's Himex camp, though, is the centerpiece of Everestville. After we offload our gear, Russell welcomes us into his high-altitude suburb, sending us to find vacancies in the 36 tents his Sherpas have pitched to accommodate the climbers and film team.

In addition, there's a plywood shack for the Discovery TV crew to use as a camera workshop and edit suite, and 11 spacious 30x15-foot tents for Sherpa housing, dining quarters, storage, communications headquarters and bathrooms. Yes, we've got toilets and showers here (so long as a barrel with a toilet seat is your idea of a john).

Best of all is Russell's luxurious mushroom-shaped, 20-foot-tall, 25-foot-diameter pleasure dome. Years of Everest trips have taught Russ that the "key to success is to keep everyone comfortable." With this in mind he's brought along this insulated, carpeted shelter, with chairs and tables, a chrome wet bar, flat-screen TV and sound system, and a gas heater. Oh yeah, it's got a vinyl window facing the big E. I'm looking out that window right now as I type this dispatch.

Everest is in cloud and the sun is setting. My head feels like a hammer is gently tapping on it, as today we've driven 1,000 meters higher than Shegar — to a base camp height of 5,200 meters. Gazing out that window, I count about 120 other tents housing our fellow expeditioners, spread along the gray, gravely snout of the glacier.

A few other Everestville factoids before I sign off: Our water is siphoned out of a glacial lake by several hundred feet of pipe and fed into a 1,000-liter tank; the cook tent currently has a supply of about 100 bomb-shaped propane tanks; four generators and a host of solar panels will feed our battery chargers, lights and appliances.

As we lounge in the pleasure dome — which a member of the film crew has just dubbed "the most extreme night club in the world" — it's easy to forget that luxury and technology alone aren't enough to get a climber up Everest. That's up to the body and the mind.

Signing off,
Greg Child

Gaining Altitude

Shegar Town, Tibet

Hi Trisha,
This is an on-the-fly dispatch from the town of Shegar. Sorry, can't send pics today as there's no way to connect to this ancient computer in a dusty, grimy cafe.

The expedition is traveling in two busloads full of climbers, trekkers and film crew, and loaded to the gills with gear and six huge legs of yak (290 pounds worth). That’s just a three-week supply of meat; more will be trucked to base camp later.

Training and acclimatizing began today. Everyone slept pretty well at 16,000 feet (4,850 meters) in a roadside hotel in Shegar, though a few of us, including myself, felt the telltale throbbing in the head from the drive to higher altitude.

Nevertheless, we all hiked up the majestic, ruined hillside fortress of Shegar Dzong, a veritable castle destroyed in bygone wars that is now being restored. The climb up the steep trail was the first bit of testing at altitude for everyone, a 1,000-foot (300-meter) lung workout.

Everyone reached the summit — a prayer flag festooned, square-topped ruin that was once a stronghold for a Tibetan governor. Predictably, the climbers and guides sprinted up pretty fast, but kudos has to go to one of the trekkers (going only as far as base camp), a Texan named Eddie Rogers. There ain't too many tall peaks in the Lone Star State, but he toughed it out, urged on by Tim Medvetz, who coaxed him along to the top.

Below us sprawled the tan Tibetan plains. On a clear day, Everest is visible from here, but a storm brewing in the Himalayan Range denied us the view.

Walking back down a few of us stopped at the monastery, which today houses about 30 practicing Buddhist monks. A young monk welcomed us into a dark inner sanctum, in which yak butter lamps lit up the Buddha statues and paintings with an eerie yellow glow.

A visiting Tibetan who spoke English directed us to one of the strangest things I have seen in this wonderfully strange land: the dried heart and tongue of the former abbot of the monastery, preserved in a glass case. This enlightened being we were told sat in a meditative pose for a week after his death, and his heart and tongue survived his cremation.

I felt as if I had been transported back to ancient Tibet. This was quite a contrast to the modernization we'd been traveling through — of highways paved over ancient yak trade routes and sprawling cities rising up around traditional villages.

The team will arrive at base camp at the end of the day on April 11. Already Russell and his team have set up the camp. When we arrive, the climbers will begin in earnest the long, slow process of adjusting their bodies to high altitude and eventually hike two days further up the East Rongbuk Glacier to occupy Advanced Base Camp. It's a tough place to live, higher than the summit of Alaska's Mount McKinly, the highest point in North America. Painful days await.

Signing off,
Greg Child

Why Climb?

By Greg Child

Lhasa at last. Flight delays out of Kathmandu have held up the 2007 Himalayan Experience (Himex) Everest climbing team, but now they’re in the fabled city of Lhasa, acclimatizing to the high Tibetan Plateau before heading by bus to base camp.

Expedition leader Russell Brice, along with his Sherpa staff, are driving a fleet of trucks overland from Nepal to establish base camp for our team of 13 climbers, four lead guides and 13 Discovery Channel TV crew members. It will take an operation numbering about 100 people for this team to climb Everest.

My role this year is as a reporter for Discovery.com. Back in 1995, I made a successful ascent of Everest’s North Ridge as a member of another Russell Brice expedition. I’ve still got that summit moment logged in my mind, and I can feel the emotions and trepidations of the members of the 2007 team as they zero in on the mountain. I won’t climb to the summit this time, but I will log the progress of the expedition as it evolves.

The team is a diverse group from seven countries — America, Britain, Denmark, Japan, Lithuania, Switzerland, Norway and China. Some are seasoned mountaineers; others are newcomers to mountain climbing; some have tried Everest in the past — one has even summited before. Whatever their experience, they’re driven people, drawn to Everest for very personal reasons. It will take time before they know each other — and for me to know them.

Take Tim Medvetz — or "Big Tim" as the 240-pound, Harley-riding Los Angelino is known. Last night over a dinner of yak steaks at the Snow Land Restaurant, Tim, a storyteller par excellence, recounted in a booming voice the painful past he surmounted to get to Everest.

The journey began with a high-speed motorcycle crash in 2001 and a bout of surgeries to reconstruct a mangled foot, install a titanium cage around his lower spine, and put metal plates in his head.

"I remember waking up in the hospital, slowly focusing on doctors and nurses standing with their backs to me. I wondered why they were ignoring me and then I looked at the [TV] screen and saw the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center falling down" he said.

Recovery was a long road, but Tim bought another Harley as soon as he got out of the hospital and rode it wearing a brace to protect his back and with a crutch secured to the fuel tank with a bungie cord.

His desire to climb Everest erupted out of the dark days of his recovery after reading Jon Krakauer’s seminal Everest account, Into Thin Air. He knew right away, he says, that it was either "sit on a couch in pain, popping pills and drinking whisky, or get off my butt and do something with my life."

A stint climbing mountains in South America and on small Nepalese peaks led Tim to sell everything – even his Harley — as a down payment on an Everest attempt. When he handed Russell Brice a backpack full of Nepalese rupees in 2006, he became a team member on the Himex North Ridge expedition chronicled in Discovery Channel’s 2006 series, Everest: Beyond the Limit.

Initially, Russell’s guides felt Tim was too heavy and unfit to climb the mountain and that his injuries left him too slow to be a summit contender. But late in the tragic and much-publicized 2006 season (11 people died on the mountain that year), he surprised everyone by reaching Camp 4 at 27,500 feet (8,400 meters) and then forcing himself up to about 100 yards from the summit. When he was forced to give up and descend, he had barely enough oxygen in his tank to get down safely and he was near his physical limit. Now he’s back, fitter and with a clearer idea of what the mountain will demand from him.

In the weeks ahead I hope to delve deeper into what drives Tim and his teammates, who, each in their own way, see Everest as a goal worth digging in to the very cores of their beings for.

Even though I’ve climbed Everest and a slew of other hard Himalayan peaks like K2, I don’t pretend to know the answer to the annoying question, "Why do you climb?" Maybe, by the end of this expedition and the blog that will grow out of it, I’ll have a better idea of what it is that attracts people to the risks and rewards of climbing a mountain like Everest.

View larger images in the slide show.

Photo Captions
1) The view of Lhasa from a mountain monastery
2) Lhasa's Potala Palace
3) "Big Tim" (right) rides a rickshaw in Lhasa with cameraman Ed Wardle.
4) Everest's Southwest face from the air
5) Climber David Tait hikes near one of Lhasa's monasteries.

Photos: Greg Child/DCI