Free Dead Lucky by Lincoln Hall

facilities also meant minimal hygiene, and a number of our 7Summits-Club group fell ill with stomach upsets. During my years as a trekking guide, I had developed the habit of not rushing to secure the best room or tent site. In Nyalam, this habit meant that I slept with my head two feet from the squat toilet, which was directly beyond a plywood wall. I heard all sorts of ghastly noises as the local diarrhea bug notched up more victims.
    The weather the next morning was excellent, so Christopher, Richard, Mike, and I set off to climb as high as we could—and still get back for lunch. Nyalam consists of one street—the road through town—so we hiked down it to cross the bridge over the river. We headed diagonally across the hillside to reach a rocky spur, which yielded steep scrambling that was easy but fun. We caught up to Noel Hanna, Lorenzo Gariano, and his brother, Giuseppe, who were deliberately climbing slowly. Henrik Olsen had a more aggressive approach. We were still heading up when he passed us, descending. He paused only long enough to comment on the ferocity of the wind above. Sure enough, when we reached the small rocky knoll that we had identified as our goal, we found prayer flags that had fluttered themselves into rags. The mass of the hillside had protected us from the worst of the wind, but here, at well above 13,000 feet, we were out in the open. I tried without success to welcome the coldness of the wind on my cheeks, because soon enough the cold would be part of everything we did.
    Nyalam was in an undeniably beautiful setting, but the next morning everyone was happy to be on the road again. Before long the chain of Himalayan peaks that formed the border between Tibet and Nepal had disappeared behind us, and the valley ahead brought us onto the famous high plateau of Tibet.
    The themes of the Tibetan landscape persisted day after dusty day— long flat-bottomed valleys between vast, rolling hills, which had either the softness of grass cover or the starkness of exposed rock. In the distance, there was always a mountain range or two on the horizon, but in no particular direction. Sometimes there was a white-capped peak. The journey to the Everest Base Camp was punctuated by high passes of 17,000 feet or more, where the vehicles stopped and we clambered out, battered by the freezing wind as we snapped photographs, then scrambled back into the minibus for a return to our iPods or our own private reveries.
    As we drove, I was quite content to sit and stare out the window at the landscape passing by. Too many of my travels in recent years had been done in a hurry, and I was happy to take in the timelessness of the sparsely populated plateau. Of course, my thoughts did wander to the months ahead and to how I would cope with them. It had been seven years since I had worked as a cameraman on the world’s fifth highest peak, but this did not concern me as there was little to forget. The challenges of the job are few but significant. Fingers numbed by extreme cold make it difficult to use some camera controls and impossible to use others. Above 24,000 feet it is very hard to hold a camera motionless while your lungs are gasping convulsively for air, yet a tripod is a burden too heavy to consider. In such a place there is no room for fancy camera angles and mood lighting, but that is okay because the mountain provides the moods. Perhaps I would find it easier when oxygen was being delivered from a tank on my back.
    At least I could expect the Russians to have a good understanding of the oxygen system. The most popular system of oxygen equipment for high altitude is manufactured by Poisk in St. Petersburg. Russians and other Eastern European climbers have a reputation as being tough and fearless in the mountains. Polish mountaineer Wanda Rutkiewicz once said, “Each climber loses one finger or toe once in a while. This is a small but important reason for Polish climbers’ success. Western