On the 30th of May five Sherpas, Andy, Tony and I climbed to Camp II at 25,000 feet in a blizzard. We crawled into four tents and spent the night. Fighting the snow with shovels, trying to keep the tents from collapsing.
At 6 a.m. on the 31st Andy crawled from his tent into another. He had been a bit lower on the slope and his tent was destroyed by the 50 mph strong winds.
This was the second storm I had endured at Camp II. If you are a professional shoveler, this is heaven. But for us, with ambitions of climbing to the summit, the 18 hours of snow fall and the 50-60mph winds make Camp II a living hell.
In the back of my mind, I knew the summit chances were being torn to shreds by the high winds. If we couldn't move up on the 31st, we would never have the chance to summit.
We kept the radios buzzing all morning, making and breaking plans. It was a brittle string that held our hopes.
I dozed off around noon, lulled into a hypoxic sleep. The sounds of Andy and Russell talking on the radio woke me up. The message took a few seconds to make sense.
I was crying within seconds. Tony had one glove over each eye. Only because his breathing was erratic and pained did I know he too was listening.
The brittle string had broken. Our climb was over, the reasons obvious. It was physically impossible to move up or even down the mountain.
But even obvious reasons aren't easy to accept. At the moment I realized that our summit bid was over I also realized how badly I wanted to climb Everest. The tears were spontaneous and instantaneous. The disappointment was so powerful.
The winds continued to rage and all thoughts turned to retreating. On our first attempt, two of the Sherpas started down the fixed lines along the North Ridge. They triggered an avalanche, which carried them down for 100 feet. Covered in snow and scared, they climbed back to Camp II.
At 4 p.m. the winds decreased to 25 miles per hour. We quickly packed our gear. Assuming more avalanches, I led off, belayed by Andy. We had little choice but to trigger the avalanches as we descended.
Luckily we reached the North Col without incident, meeting up with Russell for the descent to ABC.
June 1, 2000
This morning the winds are ripping across the North Ridge at even greater speeds than yesterday. We are so glad we are not clutching tent poles and being buried by spindrifts at Camp II.
While we are packing up, the Sherpas are trying to rescue gear from higher on the mountain. Karsang and Phurba have been trapped in an abandoned tent at 7,800 meters for the last hour. It is desperate on Everest.
Tomorrow four of us will hike to Base Camp and will get back to Kathmandu on June 6th. The journey is far from over.
With temperatures hovering near freezing I am looking forward to the warm summer months. I will need plenty of time to look back on my Everest experience and put the high and low points into better perspective. One thing I've learned (and you have to keep this a secret from my mom) is that I will be coming back to Mount Everest.
