Free Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Page B

always especially concerned about the welfare of the Sherpas who worked for him. Before our group departed Kathmandu, he had sat all of us down and given us an uncommonly stern lecture about the need to show our Sherpa staff gratitude and proper respect. “The Sherpas we’ve hired are the best in the business,” he told us. “They work incredibly hard for not very much money by Western standards. I want you all to remember we would have absolutely no chance of getting to the summit of Everest without their help. I’m going to repeat that: Without the support of our Sherpas none of us has any chance of climbing the mountain.”
    In a subsequent conversation, Rob confessed that in past years he’d been critical of some expedition leaders for being careless with their Sherpa staff. In 1995 a young Sherpa had died on Everest; Hall speculated that the accident may have occurred because the Sherpa had been “allowed to climb high on the mountain without proper training. I believe that it’s the responsibility of those of us who run these trips to prevent that sort of thing from happening.”
    The previous year a guided American expedition had hired a Sherpa named Kami Rita as a cook boy. Strong and ambitious, twenty-one or twenty-two years old, he lobbied hard to be allowed to work on the upper mountain as a climbing Sherpa. In appreciation for Kami’s enthusiasm and dedication, some weeks later his wish was granted—despite the fact that he had no climbing experience and had received no formal training in proper techniques.
    From 22,000 feet to 25,000 feet the standard route ascends a sheer, treacherous ice slope known as the Lhotse Face. As a safety measure, expeditions always attach a series of ropes to this slope from bottom to top, and climbers are supposed to protect themselves by clipping a short safety tether to the fixed ropes as they ascend. Kami, being young and cocky and inexperienced, didn’t think it was really necessary to clip into the rope. One afternoon as he was carrying a load up the Lhotse Face he lost his purchase on the rock-hard ice and fell more than 2,000 feet to the bottom of the wall.
    My teammate Frank Fischbeck had witnessed the whole episode. In 1995 he was making his third attempt on Everest as a client of the American company that had hired Kami. Frank was ascending the ropes on the upper Lhotse Face, he said in a troubled voice, “when I looked up and saw a person tumbling down from above, falling head over heels. He was screaming as he went past, and left a trail of blood.”
    Some climbers rushed to where Kami came to rest at the bottom of the face, but he had died from the extensive injuries he’d suffered on the way down. His body was brought down to Base Camp, where, in the Buddhist tradition, his friends brought meals to feed the corpse for three days. Then he was carried to a village near Tengboche and cremated. As the body was consumed by flames, Kami’s mother wailed inconsolably and struck her head with a sharp rock.
    Kami was very much in Rob’s mind at first light on April 8, when he and Mike hurried toward Base Camp to try and get Tenzing off Everest alive.
     
    * A chorten is a religious monument, usually made of rock and often containing sacred relics; it is also called a stupa.
    † Mani stones are small, flat rocks that have been meticulously carved with Sanskrit symbols denoting the Tibetan Buddhist invocation Om mani padme hum and are piled along the middle of trails to form long, low mani walls. Buddhist protocol dictates that travelers always pass mani walls on the left.
    ‡ Technically speaking, the great majority of the “yaks” one sees in the Himalaya are actually dzopkyo —male crossbreeds of yaks and cattle—or dzom , female crossbreeds. Additionally, female yaks, when purebred, are correctly termed naks . Most Westerners, however, have a hard time telling any of these shaggy beasts apart and refer to all of them as yaks.
    * Unlike Tibetan, to which it