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Tragedy Not Confined to '96
Gorak Shep - Friday, May 5, 2000

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Berg

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Hey Mountain Zone, it's Wally Berg, I'm calling you from Gorak Shep. You probably remember from the dispatches on the last Everest Base Camp trek, I love it up here. The group certainly loves it up here. We're up on the moraine; we're feeling like we're very much in the shadow of Everest Base Camp. We look up to the this little bump above us, called Kala Pattar, of course, which we'll stroll up today, see what we can see. It's a great feeling being up here.

We, as a group... you know I have six Sherpa guides, in addition to Pasang Rita, the sirdar, and myself, as trek leader, so we take advantage of that and move at our own pace, in small groups, or sometimes even individually, during the trekking day. But today we decided to stick much closer, as we came up between Lobuche and Gorak Shep because I wanted to describe some of the features that I knew were of interest to people as we got close, and are special to me.

Of course, we walked right up underneath the wall of Nuptse, and we were looking down onto all of the features of the Khumbu Glacier and got a feeling for the mass of that. And, especially as we got closer, I enjoyed pointing out the Lho La and the region of Everest Base Camp, which of course we can't see yet, but I described to people how in 1922 George Mallory stood on the Lho La having come up the low-angle Rongbuk Glacier side of it in Tibet, and he spied the Western Cwm. Of course, being Welsh, he gave it that funny name, to us, c-w-m, and he saw the Khumbu Icefall and he knew that early on that that might be the great route, maybe the best route on Everest.

But of course, Nepal was closed to Westerners at that time, so it just remained speculation until 1950 when Nepal opened its borders. Right after than happened reconnaissance expeditions came in, most notably Shipton, and, a year later, Tilman, and they visited the homeland of the Sherpas that they'd been climbing with through contacts they'd made in Darjeeling for years, and they came up here and reconnoitered the Icefall and of course a short time later, in '53, Hillary and Tenzing were successful.

And also, when I think about the Lho La, which you know, looms right above Base Camp, I always remember that time in May of 1989 when, near the end of our climbing season, we had the really gripping situation of a group of six Polish climbers who we'd befriended, the best Polish climbers of the generation, I would say. They had, on the way down from successfully climbing the West Ridge of Everest — which in itself is a huge feat — all six were caught in an avalanche and slid down onto the Lho La. Four were killed instantly, one guy survived the first night, and one lone Polish climber sat up there, alone on the Lho La. He could see us, we could talk to him on the radio, but a route had not gone in up the Lho La that year because these guys had climbed it by going over Khumbutse which is a peak along the ridge on the other side of Lho La. Really gripping situation, we didn't know what to do. No time to put a route in, many of the teams were leaving. We mulled over about the problem at Base Camp, we talked to this guy, we kind of kicked our feet in the moraine and wondered what to do.

Fortunately, Gary Ball and Rob Hall — a rather dejected Gary Ball and Rob Hall, who had headed out to Lukla after failing on their fourth attempt to climb Everest, got word of this in Lukla and arrangements were made to get these guys picked up in Kathmandu and taken around to the border. You might be wondering why we went to all that trouble, but this was 1989. Tianenmen Square occurred just a couple weeks later. The Chinese had issued permits to climb on the north side of Everest that year, but they had pulled them all.

So there were absolutely no Base Camp, no climbers, no one on that north side. Hall and Ball were shuttled around to the Rongbuk Glacier by the Chinese army, ran up the glacier — of course, they were very fit, acclimatized, after the Everest expedition — and got up there and rescued this fellow just as the last of his fuel was running out, and just as he was getting into dire straits.

But of course, emotionally, it was hard on all of us, having lost friends. You could imagine in Poland what a big deal it was — still is. I talk to Polish climbing friends about it all the time. A lot of Americans, I feel, now believe that compelling stories and high drama and loss and terrible things like this on Everest begin and end in May of 1996, but that's far from true.

We had great geology lessons as we came up today. There's three, more or less professional, geologists on this trip. Robin and Denny Buchanan from the University of Mississippi are here, but in particular, Bob Skyler today stopped along the way, and I kept people together so I could tell stories, like the one I just told you, but Bob was giving us an excellent lesson on all the geology around us. I mean, it's just laid bare, it's textbook stuff, and we're all fascinated as we took our time walking up the glacier listening to Bob lecture and tell stories from a geologists standpoint. It really helped our appreciation on the area.

Well we're going to go stroll up Kala Pattar here, in a few minutes, and report to you maybe tomorrow on how that went. And of course tomorrow is our visit to Base Camp. It'll be a long day, probably four hours walk up and virtually that long coming back, but in the middle we're especially looking forward to hanging out with Ong Chu, having some tea and perhaps some treats from his kitchen and maybe more climbing Sherpas and climbing Western friends as we get up to Base Camp for a few hours tomorrow. I'll give you a report on that probably from Base Camp.

— Wally Berg, Alpine Ascents Guide and MountainZone.com Correspondent

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