Dave Hahn

Strange days have found us. Today we woke to about an inch of snow over the Rongbuk Valley. We've not yet seen the mountain today, although it is past lunch. Murky, damp clouds keep dumping out weird precip. A little hail here, some wet powder there. Clouds rolling from east to west of all things... that doesn't happen much here.

We thought we knew just what was up a few days back, now they say the jet stream is split, the Indians are blowing up nukes, and the monsoon is showing signs of life. So this might actually be a nice day with such oddness afoot. Good enough, in some ways. Little wind, so Panuru headed up from ABC with Danuru, Pinzo and Lhakpa to dig out the North Col camp and to be ready for the big push to get in high camp.

"That must have caused a few of my brain cells to rub together and I had a thought, 'Oh, I see, you're saving my life'..."

I made all the team come down to base camp for a few days for rest before our summit push. It is actually the first time since Kathmandu that we've all been in the same place. The wet, dark day has everyone hanging in our big dining dome. Even though there are some mountain goats wandering close to camp, the usual flock of chuff/crow/raven type blackbirds, and a couple of plain old pigeons, the gang is hanging out in our pride and joy — The Satellite Dome from Mountain Hardwear.

Got a billion poles and logos and windows and colorful rope all over. Alex, Craig, Richard and Jim are playing their 3rd or 4th game of Hearts for the day while Bob Dylan wails away on a tiny pair of speakers that I brought. The recordings proceed most of our birthdates but they seem to fit in just fine. Blues for Everest.

Alex might have the Bob songs by a year or two at age 37. He is proud as heck, having washed his hair and shaved his Dutch face in the past few days. He's been regaling us with stories of a Texas upbringing that included a lot of bad concerts. He has a bunch of great stories as he's been hitting the guiding and climbing pretty intensely since the mid-'80s. I can hear him throwing the Queen of Spades at poor Richard just now. Richard's voice is down to a weird croak that we hope to cure before this summit push. He has been carving one of those 27-year-old scraggle beards into Abe Lincoln shapes in an effort to keep his neck from itching. He is another Texas boy if you get right down to it, despite the three years at Rainier and the off seasons in Salt Lake. I hope the cough and throat heal up, but I'm not so worried about Richard. He's mighty strong for a third-year guide.

I remember going for the top of Cho Oyu with him last year when he and I only had partial bottles to plug into. Our client that day had plenty of Os, as did the third guide we were with. But Richard and I ran out a few hours and a thousand feet short of the top of the sixth highest mountain. Richard looked over at me with his mask on and said, full of worry, "I'm out of oxygen, what should I do?" I'd have laughed out loud if I hadn't been so hypoxic, there he was climbing like a locomotive, but unaware of the gift he had. "Set down that 15 pound bottle and pull the mask off so you can breathe, let's go to the top." That was a fun day, exactly a year ago now that I think of it, and we got rewarded with the big Everest view at the top. Good stuff.

The Hearts players are cursing each other loudly just now, you hear some weird conversation bits coming from such a game. Craig, our psychologist/mountain guide is probably putting together a thick file on his teammates. But we'll get one going on him too. He must be having a mid-life crisis or something (they're as common as down coats in a place like this). Forty-years-old, from Olympia, Washington, he can trade mountain stories with darn near anyone. Craig has cowboy tendencies and I suspect he scoots a boot pretty well when he doesn't have crampons on and fellow guides around to poke fun.

Now they're talking climbing gear again in that dome, as usual. Jim Findley is getting an earful. Since Bob Parzick went home, Jim has been seriously outnumbered at six guides to one client. I keep looking for his eyes to roll when the subject goes to Rainier guiding or gear evaluations, but he is hanging in there admirably. That is what I begin to remember about Jim from McKinley back in '93 and Cho Oyu in '95 when we were together. He rolls with the punches pretty well. I'm sure he knows that if he weighed in with some talk about software consulting we'd all just embarass ourselves trying to pretend we followed him. He may try with a bit about Beth and the kids back in Illinois every now and then, and even mountain guides are receptive to that. We let Alex talk all the time about how great his wife is.

Heather MacDonald isn't into the cards. She has been using the basecamp time for some power-reading. It is kind of a race here that way. Read the available books before you hear their plots revealed in the dome. If they make Heather cry, they must be good. She is 28 now and back for a grudge match with Everest. Hard for me to believe she was only 24 when we were here last.

I remember being on a summit push on that '94 trip with Heather, Alex, Craig and Bob "Slowman" Sloezen among others. It all went awry just as we got into Camp V at 25,700 feet. We'd already had a hard day, carrying big packs, guiding and trudging up from the 23,000 foot North Col in a "no vis" snowstorm. But then we found out by radio that some of our Sherpa team had mistakenly removed gear from an Italian team's high camp. We felt terrible that our team was to blame for the possible failure of the Italian final bid. At BC, Eric Simonson, our leader on that climb, came up with a plan to help the Italians and we rushed to implement it. We'd bring them our regulators so they could use the oxygen we'd stockpiled at Camp VI. Craig and Alex selflessly surrendered their regulators and then had to scurry down from Camp V as darkness came on. That robbed them of a pretty good shot at the top. I went to Camp VI that night to deliver the goods.

My mission changed quickly as two of the Italian team came down to report that only one man remained at high camp but that he wanted to use oxygen and an American as a partner for a summit try the next day. To make a long, long story shorter, I met up with the Italian that night at 27,200 feet, climbed with him until he turned midway through a long (new snow) summit day, summitted myself at 5pm for the beginning of a new snowstorm, and then climbed through the night to get down.

I didn't get so far distance-wise, but I got past a lot of potentially lethal ground before sitting to await dawn at 3am and 28,000 feet. I was talking to my boss on the radio and Eric told me that Slowman was coming to help me. "Yeah sure, someone will help me out of this," I thought, so I didn't pay much attention to that as I settled down, sans oxygen at that point, to keep my fingers, toes and consciousness.

After about one-and-a-half hours, the day began to come on and dammit if I didn't spy Slowman coming out of the key gully through the yellow band. I hopped up and tried to look as if I knew what I was doing. I got my pack on, went toward Bob a bit and said something dumb and casual like "Hey Bob, what are you doing up here?" He looked at me kinda weird-like, took his oxygen mask off and shoved it over my mouth and nose. That must have caused a few of my brain cells to rub together and I had a thought, "Oh, I see, you're saving my life." It was a shocking thought because of course I had no intention of losing my life. Didn't have to find out what would have happened though, what did happen was that Bob and I climbed down for another twelve hours (I was slow and the mountain is big) and got to Camp V to find only Heather.

I'd been climbing for about 60 hours at that point, since we'd left the North Col, and I found myself ready for a rest. One of my fondest memories of mountain climbing was the way Heather put me in a tent, took off my spikes and placed a bottle of water in each of my hands. I then only had the pleasant task of contemplating my still happy fingers and toes, my luck with some crummy ropes on silly rappels in the dark and swirling snow, my amazing and unrepayable debt to Slowman and somewhere just before I passed out... the top, oh yeah... been there... someday again without an epic, but with my friends.

Ask any of those guys from 1994 what happened on those days and they'll give you completly different and equally true versions, life and the interpretation thereof is just subjective as all get-out above 8,000 meters. That is part of the fun, you get more good stories that way.

Slowman is one of those truly strange humans who seems to get stronger and sharper at altitude. He summitted just a week after coming to fetch me in 1994. Most people wouldn't be able to pull that off, climbing the big E twice in a week. Only gets credit for the one though, but with his 1991 summit that isn't such a problem. Slowman couldn't sit still for so much Rainier talk today, he was interested more in Everest, even on a bad day, and so charged off to ABC for nothing more than a test of his legs. A pre-summit tune up for 1998.

— Dave Hahn, International Mountain Guides' Expedition Leader

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