I still felt strong, but I knew that as we stood in line, unable to move, the chances of joining George Mallory up here for eternity increased with every minute. We’d crossed into the Death Zone eighteen hours earlier. We’d begun this final ascent shortly after midnight, when the thunder and lightning below stopped terrorizing our climb. The only difference between our bodies and the frozen corpses on the mountainside were the flickers of light coming from our foreheads.Ī nudge on the rope from the South African at my back encouraged me to take one more step closer to the peak, but the traffic jam ahead still left me with nowhere to go. We were like statues slowly disappearing under the snow. It was just us and the mountain and the ghost of the previous year.īut now we were stuck in a traffic jam of climbers. There was no fame to be had this time, no media interest in my ascent. We’d crossed into Tibet to follow in my own footsteps and then push beyond the place where I’d acknowledged defeat. Lhakpa, the Nepalese Sherpa with whom I’d climbed many times, stood in the falling snow lit up by my headlamp. I was three hundred metres into the Death Zone, yet still hours away from my goal. My blood was turning to sludge my brain and lungs were slowly swelling as my heart pounded against my chest. I was just a few hours shy of the Earth’s summit and feeling deceptively strong. S tanding motionless in a cloud 8,300 metres above Tibet, setting out from Camp 3, an oxygen mask pressed to my face, I took a deep breath of compressed gas and wondered how many more steps it would take before I’d poke my head above the storm and begin seeing stars. And though neither of them was with me now, I had been drawn back. A year had passed since I lost my crampon in the snow and forced myself to turn around, exactly one year since I was last here with Elia and Richard. There, on the North Col, that frozen ridge that divides your world from mine, I found myself caught in yet another snowstorm in the dark of night. To that place high in the sky where man was not built to survive. And I can’t not climb.Īnd so I dragged myself back. On some level, I climb for the same reason an otherwise fully functioning man steps outside his office to fill his lungs with the smoke he knows could one day kill him. In order to understand what I’m trying to say, you have to believe that I have never climbed a mountain in order to stroke my ego or to say that I did it. Before I tell the story of that friend and his small place in the larger narrative of my life, let me explain that it’s because of that man that I now have a different definition than most people of what is commonly referred to as the Death Zone.
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