Everest Rescues Chill Climber’s Zeal

The summit was so crowded it made him wonder, “Isn’t climbing Everest supposed to be hard?”

From the highest point on Earth, Chris Warner took in the view, left behind some mementos and, after just a few short minutes, headed back down.

An hour and a half into his descent from the 29,035-foot summit, he saw something that concerned him: three climbers from his team who, after 10 hours of climbing, were still on their way up the mountain.

They were about 5 1/2 miles above sea level, roughly the altitude of a cross-country airline flight, a place where thin air, physical exhaustion and indomitable bravado can prove a fatal mix. The three climbers would have at least another 1 1/2 hours before they reached the summit. And their oxygen was running low.

Warner was concerned, he said, recalling the incident in a telephone interview from his hotel room in Katmandu, Nepal.

“Are you sure you want to be going on?” he asked them.

They said they did.

One climber smiled at Warner--a sign, he thought, that they “were intellectually stable. They were all fired up and totally excited. They kept saying this was the chance of a lifetime.”

The weather was good. Their spirits were high, and Warner watched them move slowly up the mountain away from him, step after methodical step.

Still, he was worried. So he left an oxygen bottle behind in the snow in case they needed it on the way down.

They would.

A few hours later, Warner, 36, of Oella, Md., would witness one of the highest rescues ever on Mt. Everest.

He had been there before.

A year ago, wind and snow pinned him and six members of his team to a ledge near the summit for 28 grueling, sleepless hours. The wind was gusting, dislodging softball-size rocks and sheets of ice bigger than manhole covers. They couldn’t go up or down, and they took turns digging out their tents to keep from being buried alive.

When the weather finally broke, they gave up their trek to the summit and made it safely back down the mountain. Warner went home to Maryland, where he owns the Earth Treks climbing gym in Columbia.

He vowed to return.

At 11:30 a.m. May 23, a sunshine-filled day, Warner was back on Everest, watching the three members of his team climb up the mountain, wondering whether they would make it.

He was standing on a steep ledge so crowded with climbers that he had to wait 40 minutes to get down. He also had a client he was guiding to worry about and a Spanish climber from another expedition who Warner said was in trouble.

As Warner was struggling to clamber down with the weakened Spanish climber, the three men on Warner’s team finally made it to the summit. But one, Jaime Vinals, of Guatemala, said his contact lenses were fogging up.

Warner, listening in on the radio, knew Vinals’ problem was much more serious: The altitude was getting to him, and his brain was shutting off his eyesight.

The two other climbers with him, Andy Lapkass, a guide from Colorado who had reached Everest’s summit twice before, and Asmuss Norreslet, a guide from Denmark, were trying to help. But soon Vinals had trouble walking, and Lapkass and Norreslet were too tired to haul him down.

By now most of the climbers on the mountain were back safely in their camps and had gathered in an impromptu vigil. They could see the stranded climbers above them through the telescope. And they could hear expedition leader Russell Brice talking to them over the radio, begging them to keep moving.

Norreslet retrieved the oxygen bottle Warner had left and handed it to Vinals and Lapkass, whose vision and motivation were also starting to fade.

Brice begged Lapkass to leave Vinals and save himself. “We didn’t want two victims,” Warner said.

There were problems with the radios, and although Warner knew Norreslet was returning to camp, it wasn’t clear if Lapkass had managed to go with him.

Hoping for the best, Warner prepared two spots in the tent.

But when Norreslet stumbled into camp, 22 hours after he had left for the top, he was alone. Lapkass had stayed behind with Vinals, digging a trench to protect them from the wind 500 feet below the summit. The climbers below thought it would be their grave.

“We were half blind,” Vinals said by telephone. “We were so tired. So we decided to stay because it would be too dangerous to try to go down.”

They weren’t the only ones stuck on the mountain that night. Below them, three Russians also were stranded.

Warner couldn’t make the grueling climb to the summit again so soon, so he woke up members of an American-led expedition bound for the summit and asked for help.

In the middle of the night, three Americans and two Nepalese abandoned their bid for the summit to save the stranded climbers, who were holding each other against the cold, trying to stay awake.

“We were waking up each other,” Vinals said. “Andy would talk to me. . . . Our brains were not working so well. It was cold and totally dark. I was waiting for the sunrise.”

Finally the sun peeked over the snow-covered mountains. “It was the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen in my life,” Vinals said.

Soon rescuers reached them with fresh supplies of oxygen and drugs to combat cerebral edema, a swelling of the brain caused by high altitude. About 12 hours later they made it back to camp, cold and frostbitten but, to everyone’s amazement, OK.

The American-led team would also save two of the Russians. The third died on the mountain.

Warner greeted Lapkass and Vinals when they returned. Lapkass called his girlfriend and asked her to marry him. She said yes.

“Finally everything seemed OK,” Warner said. “It was a moment when we were no longer fighting for our lives. The sun was out. Jaime and Andy were safe.”

And then Warner looked back up toward the peak of the mountain he had climbed the day before. He saw a flash of yellow. It was the jacket of the Russian who had died.

“He was lying on a section of trail that was all icy and incredibly steep,” Warner said. “I don’t know if it was the wind or what, but all of a sudden he just slipped down. And you could see his backpack tumbling after him.”

After watching the climber fall off the mountain, Warner vowed he wouldn’t go back to Everest again.

At least not next year.