PART THREE: Death, Drama, Storms, and Risk: The Expedition Takes a Turn

I’ll start this blog post with one of the biggest lessons I learned on this expedition:

You don’t need to be climbing Everest, K2, or any 8,000 meter / 26,000 ft peak to die on a mountain.

Of course, accidents can happen on any trek, but big mountains pose even bigger risks. Especially if they are extremely remote, require mountaineering skills, and are in an area where emergency resources are primitive and hours or days away.

In my view, if you are going above 16,000 ft under those types of conditions you need to accept that you are facing a tangible risk that you could die. That sounds dramatic, I know. You might even be giving me an eyeroll right now. But very few of us will be in a physical situation where we will confront our fragile mortality - and realize one decision, one weather shift, one gear failure, or one poorly developed skill could kill you instantly. If that doesn’t scare you, it should. Very few of us operate in a one decision equals death environment any time in our lives – and then have to bet we get that decision 100% correct.

High-Altitude Mountaineering operates on a camp model. Climbers move from camp to camp as they ascend the mountain. Sometimes moving up and down between camps, moving gear between camps, or using these camps in a straight ascension model to progress to the summit. For my expedition, we moved through 4 Camps. Base started at 10,000 ft, Camp 1 was 13,000 ft, Camp 2 was 16,000 ft, Camp 3 was 18,000 ft, Camp 4 was 19,000 ft, then summit day at 21,800 ft. Everything past Camp 1 was higher than I had ever been.

The beginning days of this expedition were full of what I would call normal expedition work. We covered a lot of miles, carried heavy gear, experienced the beauty of the Andes and the wildlife, and progressed through Camp 1 and Camp 2. The weather shifts were dramatic on those days, from damp bone-chilling cold to bright sunshine. We beat the standard split times to Camp One by over 90-minutes, and we beat the standard split times to Camp 2 by 60-minutes. The load carry was 74 lbs. for me, so even with that load I was doing well, experiencing no altitude impact, and sleeping a solid 8-hours each night. Our speed earned us some buzz at Camp 1, where we met up with a Swiss team, an Argentine team, and a German team. We learned that there could be others scattered above us on the mountain, and all these teams were focused on doing their own thing. I was the only American and by far the smallest person on the mountain.

The next morning, we woke up to climb to Camp 3, and the trip started to change.

All through the night before, I was awakened by the constant sound of tents zipping and unzipping followed by vomiting all around me. So, I wasn’t surprised when my guide, Matias, told me that the other teams had decided to stay at Camp 2 or descend back to Camp 1. They were all experiencing either dysentery or altitude impact - both relatively severe. This meant we were the only two climbers heading onto Camp 3 at 18,000 ft.

That day was another beauty. We did some roped climbing again, and again we made excellent time. I was overjoyed that my conditioning was proving out, and my legs were strong, blood oxygen saturation was 97% at 18,000 ft, and I felt great. The only impact I saw from altitude was my loss of appetite. As we ascended, the temperatures had been steadily dropping, and it was around 8 degrees F. This camp location was a small rock ledge with piles of stones lying about and a straight 20-story drop off the front of the ledge onto jagged razor-sharp outcropping. The landscape looked eerie and desolate and there were no sounds of life except us.

At approximately 1am that all changed. The wind woke me up from a dead sleep. It started by shaking the tent walls. Then over about 30 minutes it progressed to violently tearing at the tent, lifting the floor up, and starting to compress the side walls onto each other. Bear in mind this is North Face Summit Series Tent built to withstand extreme weather on mountains around the world, and we are pitched accordingly. We found ourselves in a freak and un-forecasted windstorm at 18,000 ft in tents that were about 4 feet from a 20-story drop. The sound as the wind whipped off the summit, and hit us unabated, was deafening and terrifying. It was becoming a critical situation rapidly. And there was nowhere to go and nothing else on this ledge. My tent was rapidly failing.

As I would learn later, it was below -20 degrees F, and these winds were consistently gusting over 80mph with the strongest nearing 110mph.

I was racking my brain for survival options, when I saw a flicker of light, and realized Matias was trying to get to me. He crawled his way to my tent, put his face up against the tent wall and screamed the question was I okay. The wind was so loud, I couldn’t even make that out. This is the kind of wind where you can scream at the top of your lungs but are not heard by someone next to you. Matias unzipped the front tent door while trying to hold down my tent and motioned me to come out. I couldn’t stand up in that wind, so I crawled. My tent was lifting off the ground tethered only by the guide ropes - even with all the gear inside. Even though we couldn’t communicate because of the wind, through hand signals in the dark, we agreed to drop the tents to the ground and pile rocks on top of them. We would create a little pocket just enough for us to crawl in and lay flat inside in our sleeping bags. That was our only chance. We had to move fast to avoid losing the tents entirely - and a critical layer of life-saving protection. It was chaos. We crawled to get rocks, getting bloody, fighting the sub-zero windchill, and knowing that those strong gusts could blow us off the ledge if we made a false move. At 110lbs, I was getting blown around like a ragdoll even while I crawled on my stomach. In my mind, I knew acutely that we were in a life-threatening situation.

We managed to get the tents to the ground with rocks strewn on them, and crawl back inside somehow. When I was inside, there was about 1 inch of clearance between my face at the tent fabric. My sleeping bag was rated to -20 degrees with an extra thermal layer getting me to a -30 degrees rating, and it was barely enough. The wind was tearing at the tent fabric that was covering me. I laid there and prayed it was all enough while I endured 12 hours of that weather. By hour 8 I was desensitized to the 80mph+ gusts, noise, and fear, so I decided to read the book I brought. Even though I had to contort myself to hold it up against my face in my sleeping bag. Historic Tales from The Ming Dynasty did not disappoint.

At 1pm the next day the wind disappeared. We crawled out and assessed the damage. Matias' fingers were swollen, grey, and bloody. We were both shaken but managed smiles. Matias has summited several of the highest mountains in the world, and he was thankful we made it through that night.

You would think that the aftermath of this windstorm would end here, but it didn’t.

Our tents were miraculously mostly undamaged - one broken pole and one tear, but serviceable for the rest of the trip. Unbelievably, we were still on schedule to move up to Camp 4. Our afternoon called for an acclimatization trek up to Camp 4 and back. We geared up and headed out.

About 15 minutes into this trek, I looked up and noticed a weird silver shape wedged under a giant two-story boulder in the distance. It looked so out of place in this desolate place. We climbed over for a closer look. The scene made my blood run cold.

As we approached, it became clear that it was a person, and the silver was one of those safety space blankets that we all pack for emergencies. I was 100% sure they were dead. But, somehow, they were still alive - albeit in our estimate - barely. They had no gear with them, but they were in their expedition suit, boots, gloves, and that blanket. Their face was grey, and their lips were purple. They couldn’t speak.

We managed to pull them out, not knowing what injuries they had. Finally identifying the poor soul as a male, Matias and I carried him back to our camp - which was no small feat especially in that terrain. We put him into Matias' sleeping bag, and my job was to try to assess injuries while Matias radioed for help. I’ve watched a lot of Everest movies where you see people in various stages of frost bite and hypothermia, but I had never seen black fingers, toes, and a black nose before. He still wasn’t able to speak, and his eyes were glassy and unfocused. His breath was shallow and ragged.

He was in really bad shape. I honestly wasn’t sure how long he had.

In this remote part of the mountains, they don’t do helicopter rescue, and there wouldn’t have been a spot for one to land anyway. They had to scramble a couple of EMT guides to come and get him, and it took about 5 hours to reach us by mule. The EMTs carried him off the mountain, and I have no idea if he survived. We hypothesized that he was hit by the windstorm like we were, had his tent and gear blow off the mountain, and then managed to wedge himself into the only spot he could find. He probably had a climbing partner because almost no one would be up there solo, and we fear that they perished in the night.

These are the lessons of the mountains. We walk around each day and run errands, go to work, and go to meetings like we are invincible. Yet, we are all incredibly fragile life forms. We are ill-adapted to the forces of nature on our planet.

The only difference is that we don’t have to confront that fragility each day.

The big mountains have a lot to teach. That is why I climb. That day stripped down everything to the basics. When you do that, you get to rebuild your thoughts and order them in a new way - what truly matters most, what principles or ideas are sharpened by the experience. I reflected on that for many days afterwards. But in that moment, we had to regroup because Camp 4 and the Summit Day were just ahead.