Free Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Page A

expeditions, German trekkers, herds of emaciated yaks—all bound for Everest Base Camp, still a day’s travel up the valley. The bottleneck, Rob explained, was due to the unusually late and heavy snowpack, which until just yesterday had kept any yaks at all from reaching Base Camp. The hamlet’s half dozen lodges were completely full. Tents were jammed side by side on the few patches of muddy earth not covered with snow. Scores of Rai and Tamang porters from the low foothills—dressed in thin rags and flip-flops, they were working as load bearers for various expeditions—were bivouacked in caves and under boulders on the surrounding slopes.
    The three or four stone toilets in the village were literally overflowing with excrement. The latrines were so abhorrent that most people, Nepalese and Westerners alike, evacuated their bowels outside on the open ground, wherever the urge struck. Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible not to walk in it. The river of snowmelt meandering through the center of the settlement was an open sewer.
    The main room of the lodge where we stayed was furnished with wooden bunk platforms for some thirty people. I found an unoccupied bunk on the upper level, shook as many fleas and lice as possible from the soiled mattress, and spread out my sleeping bag. Against the near wall was a small iron stove that supplied heat by burning dried yak dung. After sunset the temperature dropped well below freezing, and porters flocked in from the cruel night to warm themselves around the stove. Because dung burns poorly under the best of circumstances, and especially so in the oxygen-depleted air of 16,200 feet, the lodge filled with dense, acrid smoke, as if the exhaust from a diesel bus were being piped directly into the room. Twice during the night, coughing uncontrollably, I had to flee outside for air. By morning my eyes were burning and bloodshot, my nostrils were clogged with black soot, and I’d developed a dry, persistent hack that would stay with me until the end of the expedition.
    Rob had intended for us to spend just one day acclimatizing in Lobuje before traveling the final six or seven miles to Base Camp, which our Sherpas had reached some days earlier in order to ready the site for our arrival and begin establishing a route up the lower slopes of Everest itself. On the evening of April 7, however, a breathless runner arrived in Lobuje with a disturbing message from Base Camp: Tenzing, a young Sherpa employed by Rob, had fallen 150 feet into a crevasse—a gaping crack in the glacier. Four other Sherpas had hauled him out alive, but he was seriously injured, possibly with a broken femur. Rob, ashen-faced, announced that he and Mike Groom would hurry to Base Camp at dawn to coordinate Tenzing’s rescue. “I regret to have to tell you this,” he continued, “but the rest of you will need to wait here in Lobuje with Harold until we get the situation under control.”
    Tenzing, we later learned, had been scouting the route above Camp One, climbing a relatively gentle section of the Khumbu Glacier with four other Sherpas. The five men were walking single file, which was smart, but they weren’t using a rope—a serious violation of mountaineering protocol. Tenzing was moving closely behind the other four, stepping exactly where they had stepped, when he broke through a thin veneer of snow spanning a deep crevasse. Before he even had time to yell, he dropped like a rock into the Cimmerian bowels of the glacier.
    At 20,500 feet, the altitude was deemed too high for safe evacuation by helicopter—the air was too insubstantial to provide much lift for a helicopter’s rotors, making landing, taking off, or merely hovering unreasonably hazardous—so he would have to be carried 3,000 vertical feet to Base Camp down the Khumbu Icefall, some of the steepest, most treacherous ground on the entire mountain. Getting Tenzing down alive would require a massive effort.
    Rob was