however, he was unwilling to match Hall’s offer to the magazine.
When I arrived in Base Camp as a member of the Adventure Consultants group, not Fischer’s Mountain Madness expedition, Scott didn’t appear to hold a grudge. When I went down to his camp to visit he poured me a mug of coffee, put an arm around my shoulder, and seemed genuinely happy to see me.
Despite the many trappings of civilization at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. Walking to the mess tent at mealtime left me wheezing for several minutes. If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. The deep, rasping cough I’d developed in Lobuje worsened day by day. Sleep became elusive, a common symptom of minor altitude illness. Most nights I’d wake up three or four times gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating. Cuts and scrapes refused to heal. My appetite vanished and my digestive system, which required abundant oxygen to metabolize food, failed to make use of much of what I forced myself to eat; instead my body began consuming itself for sustenance. My arms and legs gradually began to wither to sticklike proportions.
Some of my teammates fared even worse than I in the meager air and unhygenic environment. Andy, Mike, Caroline, Lou, Stuart, and John suffered attacks of gastrointestinal distress that kept them racing to the latrine. Helen and Doug were plagued by severe headaches. As Doug described it to me, “It feels like somebody’s driven a nail between my eyes.”
This was Doug’s second shot at Everest with Hall. The year before, Rob had forced him and three other clients to turn back just 330 feet below the top because the hour was late and the summit ridge was buried beneath a mantle of deep, unstable snow. “The summit looked sooooo close,” Doug recalled with a painful laugh. “Believe me, there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about it.” He’d been talked into returning this year by Hall, who felt sorry that Hansen had been denied the summit and had significantly discounted Hansen’s fee to entice him to give it another try.
Among my fellow clients, Doug was the only one who’d climbed extensively without relying on a professional guide; although he wasn’t an elite mountaineer, his fifteen years of experience made him fully capable of looking after himself on the heights. If anyone was going to reach the summit from our expedition, I assumed it would be Doug: he was strong, he was driven, and he had already been very high on Everest.
Less than two months shy of his forty-seventh birthday, divorced for seventeen years, Doug confided to me that he’d been involved with a succession of women, each of whom eventually left him after growing tired of competing with the mountains for his attention. A few weeks before leaving for Everest in 1996, Doug had met another woman while visiting a friend in Tucson, and they’d fallen in love. For a while they’d sent a flurry of faxes to each other, then several days passed without Doug hearing from her. “Guess she got smart and blew me off,” he sighed, looking despondent. “And she was really nice, too. I really thought this one might be a keeper.”
Later that afternoon he approached my tent waving a fresh fax in his hand. “Karen Marie says she’s moving to the Seattle area!” he blurted ecstatically. “Whoa! This could be serious. I better make the summit and get Everest out of my system before she changes her mind.”
In addition to corresponding with the new woman in his life, Doug filled his hours at Base Camp by writing countless postcards to the students of Sunrise Elementary School, a public institution in Kent, Washington, that had sold T-shirts to help fund his climb. He showed me many of the cards: “Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams,” he penned to a girl named Vanessa. “Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop
When I arrived in Base Camp as a member of the Adventure Consultants group, not Fischer’s Mountain Madness expedition, Scott didn’t appear to hold a grudge. When I went down to his camp to visit he poured me a mug of coffee, put an arm around my shoulder, and seemed genuinely happy to see me.
Despite the many trappings of civilization at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. Walking to the mess tent at mealtime left me wheezing for several minutes. If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. The deep, rasping cough I’d developed in Lobuje worsened day by day. Sleep became elusive, a common symptom of minor altitude illness. Most nights I’d wake up three or four times gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating. Cuts and scrapes refused to heal. My appetite vanished and my digestive system, which required abundant oxygen to metabolize food, failed to make use of much of what I forced myself to eat; instead my body began consuming itself for sustenance. My arms and legs gradually began to wither to sticklike proportions.
Some of my teammates fared even worse than I in the meager air and unhygenic environment. Andy, Mike, Caroline, Lou, Stuart, and John suffered attacks of gastrointestinal distress that kept them racing to the latrine. Helen and Doug were plagued by severe headaches. As Doug described it to me, “It feels like somebody’s driven a nail between my eyes.”
This was Doug’s second shot at Everest with Hall. The year before, Rob had forced him and three other clients to turn back just 330 feet below the top because the hour was late and the summit ridge was buried beneath a mantle of deep, unstable snow. “The summit looked sooooo close,” Doug recalled with a painful laugh. “Believe me, there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about it.” He’d been talked into returning this year by Hall, who felt sorry that Hansen had been denied the summit and had significantly discounted Hansen’s fee to entice him to give it another try.
Among my fellow clients, Doug was the only one who’d climbed extensively without relying on a professional guide; although he wasn’t an elite mountaineer, his fifteen years of experience made him fully capable of looking after himself on the heights. If anyone was going to reach the summit from our expedition, I assumed it would be Doug: he was strong, he was driven, and he had already been very high on Everest.
Less than two months shy of his forty-seventh birthday, divorced for seventeen years, Doug confided to me that he’d been involved with a succession of women, each of whom eventually left him after growing tired of competing with the mountains for his attention. A few weeks before leaving for Everest in 1996, Doug had met another woman while visiting a friend in Tucson, and they’d fallen in love. For a while they’d sent a flurry of faxes to each other, then several days passed without Doug hearing from her. “Guess she got smart and blew me off,” he sighed, looking despondent. “And she was really nice, too. I really thought this one might be a keeper.”
Later that afternoon he approached my tent waving a fresh fax in his hand. “Karen Marie says she’s moving to the Seattle area!” he blurted ecstatically. “Whoa! This could be serious. I better make the summit and get Everest out of my system before she changes her mind.”
In addition to corresponding with the new woman in his life, Doug filled his hours at Base Camp by writing countless postcards to the students of Sunrise Elementary School, a public institution in Kent, Washington, that had sold T-shirts to help fund his climb. He showed me many of the cards: “Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams,” he penned to a girl named Vanessa. “Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop
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