Left for dead on Everest — and rescued

Beck Weathers continues:

I was 49, a pathologist from Dallas, Texas, and I had already climbed eight major mountains around the world. Climbing had become for me a personal test, a way to prove to myself that I was capable of facing the toughest challenges.

It all started following a difficult period of depression that struck me in my mid-thirties. During a family holiday in Colorado I was introduced to mountain climbing, and gradually the hobby became my escape from reality. When I was in the mountains, I could focus all my thoughts on one task: reaching the summit.

I convinced myself that conquering famous peaks testified to my willpower, my character and my ability to face any challenge. Over time, high-altitude climbing and the recognition I received for it became an empty obsession.

My wife, Peach, tried to warn me. She said my cold passion for mountains was destroying the centre of my life, and that I was systematically hurting my family. I heard her words, but I didn't really listen to them.

I even missed our twentieth wedding anniversary, because I chose to join the Everest expedition in 1996.

I didn't know then that the mountain I dreamed of conquering would become the arena where I would nearly lose my life, and that this very disaster would force me to confront the truth I had been running from for years.

Beck Weathers adds:

The crucial climb began on 9 May. The plan was to rise at dawn, climb all day and reach the high camp at the South Col in the late afternoon. After resting for three or four hours, we were supposed to set out again, climb through the night and reach Everest's summit by midday on 10 May, or at the latest by two in the afternoon.

We reached the camp according to schedule. The South Col sits on the ridge forming Everest's south-east shoulder, on the high watershed line between Nepal and Tibet.

That night four groups were positioned at the site, too many climbers as it turned out: our group, Scott Fischer's expedition, a team from Taiwan and a South African crew that didn't intend to attempt the summit that night.

In total, about a dozen tents were pitched at the site, surrounded by empty oxygen cylinders, equipment left from previous expeditions and sometimes frozen bodies.

Our group set out first. We advanced along the South Col towards the slope leading to the summit. Ostensibly, there was nothing particularly complicated about the climb: step, rest, another step and another rest, hour after hour. Midway up the slope we turned left and continued along the route.

And then I realised, to my great frustration, that I couldn't see the face of the mountain.

The reason was a medical problem I didn't know was so dangerous in these conditions. I was short-sighted, and for years I had struggled with glasses lenses that became covered in ice, contact lenses that stopped functioning and various means designed to keep my field of vision clear.

Nothing helped. A year and a half before I left for Everest I underwent eye surgery designed to improve my vision and make climbing safer. In the surgery, called radial keratotomy, tiny incisions are made in the cornea to change the focus of vision.

But at high altitude, in conditions of low atmospheric pressure, the cornea that has undergone the procedure can flatten and thicken, in a way that changes the focus of vision and severely impairs it. At that time I didn't know about this risk.

At first I wasn't alarmed. I assumed that when the sun rose fully, my pupils would contract even behind the dark sunglasses, and vision would sharpen.

But in the darkness before sunrise I was almost too blind to continue climbing. I was forced to step out of line and let the other climbers pass me. From fourth place out of more than thirty climbers, I found myself absolutely last.

As I had hoped, vision began to improve with the rising sun. I managed to plant the front spikes of my climbing boots in the ice and advance towards the ridge leading to the summit.

But then I worsened my condition. I raised my frozen glove to wipe my face, and a sharp ice crystal cut the cornea in my right eye. Vision in that eye became completely blurred, and I lost the ability to judge distances. The left eye remained slightly blurred, but still functioned.

I understood that I couldn't continue beyond the point where I was, a rock ledge called "the Balcony", at an altitude of about 450 metres below the summit, unless my vision improved.

At 7:30 in the morning I asked to continue climbing, because I believed vision would still clear. Rob Hall, my guide, gave me thirty minutes. If at the end of that time I still couldn't see properly, he instructed me to wait for him until he returned from the summit.

Around midday three climbers descended from the summit and offered me to join them and return to the high camp. I refused. I feared that if I left my position, Rob wouldn't know whether I had reached camp safely or fallen from the mountain on the way.

It didn't occur to me that he himself might not return from the summit.

I expected Rob to return at the latest at three in the afternoon. The hour passed, then four, then five. He didn't arrive.

The light grew dim, the temperature dropped and the wind strengthened. Snow began to move around me, and gradually I understood that I had stayed in place too long. I was trapped on the mountain.

For about ten hours I had barely moved. I breathed oxygen from cylinders, so I didn't suffer from severe oxygen deprivation, but the cold began to impair my ability to think. It acted like an anaesthetic on the brain, and I started to hallucinate and imagine I was seeing people.

After about half an hour, guide Mike Groom and Yasuko Namba arrived. She looked like the walking dead, exhausted to the point where she could barely stand.

Neal Beidleman and other climbers from Scott Fischer's group also arrived at the site, among them Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fox and Tim Madsen. All had already reached the summit, and all were close to the edge of their capacity.

Yasuko and I were in the worst condition. Neal took her and began descending the slope called "the Triangle". Mike tied me to him with a short rope, so he could stabilise me with his strength during the descent.

We were only about 400 metres from the safe camp, but the storm turned that short distance into an almost impossible obstacle.

Guide Neal Beidleman later described the situation as if everyone was lost inside a milk bottle.

Throughout all that time, my wife Peach knew nothing about the crisis unfolding on the mountain.

We tried to advance together, with none of us wanting to separate from the others. We groped our way down the slope hoping to identify some sign of the camp. Within minutes we completely lost our sense of direction. We didn't know which way we were facing in the wind, noise and flying ice.

Suddenly Neal sensed something was wrong.

"Something's not right here," he shouted above the roar of the storm. "We're stopping!"

It turned out we were standing less than eight metres from the enormous abyss at the edge of the Kangshung Face, which plunges more than 2,000 metres. The ground beneath our feet sloped at a sharp angle. A few more steps, and the entire group could have slid into the abyss.

Life and death became in those moments the immediate question for all of us.

We quickly formed a plan. The strongest climbers (I stayed behind) would try to reach the camp quickly, and if they succeeded in finding the blue tents, they could summon help for all of us.

If they failed, we had no chance.

Neal, Mike and another climber managed to reach camp that night, but did so crawling on their hands and knees. They weren't capable of coming back for us. They simply couldn't.

The only person still capable of trying was Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian guide who was part of Fischer's expedition.

Boukreev went out into the storm three times. He searched for Scott Fischer, who remained frozen to death on the mountain at an altitude of about 365 metres above the South Col, and also for us. Twice he was forced to retreat to camp because of the wind and cold. On the third attempt he found the three climbers from Fischer's group, Tim, Charlotte and Sandy, and managed to bring them to camp.

He couldn't rescue Yasuko and me.

On the morning of 11 May the storm weakened and the winds dropped to a speed of about 55 kilometres per hour. Stuart Hutchison and three Sherpas set out to search for Yasuko and me.

They found us lying side by side, almost completely covered in snow and ice.

Hutchison approached Yasuko first. He pulled her by her jacket, and discovered her face was covered with a layer of ice about eight centimetres thick. He removed the layer of ice. Her skin was white as porcelain and her pupils dilated, but she was still breathing.

Then he approached me, lifted me and cleaned the ice from my eyes and beard so he could look at my face. I too, like Yasuko, was barely clinging to life.

Hutchison and the Sherpas faced a cruel decision. They understood our chances of survival were slim, and that attempting to bring us back to camp could endanger their lives as well. They returned to camp and informed everyone we were dead.

The message was relayed to Base Camp, from there to Rob Hall's company offices in Christchurch, New Zealand, and from there to Dallas, Texas.

On a warm, sunny Saturday morning the telephone rang at our house. Peach answered the call. Madeleine David, the office manager of Hall's company, informed her I had been killed in the descent from the ridge leading to the summit.

"Is there any chance?" Peach asked.

"No," David replied. "There was positive identification of the body."

Peach was devastated.

"My greatest nightmare came true," she recounted later. "I felt like someone who had broken their leg. Everything was numb. I couldn't cry. I just thought: dear G-d, what will I do now?"

She didn't want to tell our two children their father was dead, so she tried to postpone the moment when she would be forced to do so. In moments of disaster, she explained, instinct takes over. Her instinct was to gather her strength. She called her brother Howie in Atlanta and friends in Dallas.

But while his family dealt with the terrible news, on the mountain something happened that no one expected.

Beck Weathers continues to describe:

I lay in the ice, abandoned and considered dead. And then, unexpectedly, I regained consciousness.

I got to my feet, and at first even thought I was at home in Texas. Then came a moment I describe as a revelation: before my eyes there clearly arose an image of my family.

I began to walk towards the blue tents of the high camp.

"You won't believe who's walking into camp now," the crew members reported over the radio to Base Camp.

The response they received was cold: "That's amazing, but it doesn't change anything. He's going to die. Don't bring him down from there."

They left me that night in Scott Fischer's tent, expecting me to die. From time to time I heard the others talking about "the dead guy" in the tent. I wondered to myself who that person was, without understanding they were talking about me.

At dawn almost everyone began packing their equipment and preparing to descend from the mountain. They did so quietly, and I heard nothing. Apart from me, only journalist Jon Krakauer and two guides, Todd Burleson and Pete Athans, remained in camp.

I heard noise from outside.

"Hello!" I shouted. "Is anyone out there?"

Krakauer, who was passing between the tents before he too would descend from the mountain, stuck his head inside. When he saw me, his jaw dropped in astonishment. I was supposed to be dead.

According to conventional wisdom, even in cases of severe hypothermia, a surprising recovery like mine doesn't necessarily change the final outcome. When they contacted Peach and informed her I wasn't dead as they had thought, but my condition was critical, they tried not to raise false hopes in her.

But she heard only one thing: I was still alive.

Peach knew that the person who had called her earlier had tried to prepare her for the worst possibility. But as far as she was concerned, from the moment she learned I was alive, all her attention focused on hope.

She had no idea how they would get me down from the mountain, how complicated the situation was or what was required to save me. She only knew I was in critical condition, and that I would probably need better medical care than could be obtained in Nepal.

From here began one of the most daring rescue operations in the history of mountaineering.

In camp I began to hear rumours about the possibility of rescuing me by helicopter. Behind the idea stood Peach, who wasn't prepared to accept the fact that her husband remained on the mountain with no possibility of rescue.

It sounded like a legend. A helicopter couldn't reach the altitude where the camp was located. The lowest point on the mountain was far higher than the approved flight ceiling of the helicopter designated for the mission, an American Eurocopter Squirrel belonging to the Nepalese army.

The air at that altitude is thin and unstable, and any mistake could cause the helicopter to crash.

But no one told Peach it was impossible.

Because she didn't know the mission couldn't be done, she simply set out to do it.

With the help of her friends from north Dallas, women with connections and influence, she began calling people across the United States. They enlisted the help of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Tom Daschle, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate. Daschle put pressure on the US State Department, which contacted the American mission in Kathmandu, Nepal's capital.

There worked David Schensted, a young man who worked in cooperation with a Nepalese woman named Inu K.C.

Inu told him she knew a man who believed he had a brave heart, but had never faced a challenge that would allow him to know if his belief was justified. She promised to approach him.

The man she meant was Lieutenant Colonel Madan K.C., 42, a helicopter pilot in the Nepalese army. They located him at the Royal Nepal Golf Club, just as he was about to make his second stroke on the first hole.

Instead of rejecting the dangerous mission, as many others had already done, he accepted it.

"I'll do it," he said. "I'll rescue Beck."

Thus, thanks to Peach's determination and the Nepalese pilot's courage, a rescue operation considered one of the most dangerous ever carried out in such conditions set out.

The helicopter succeeded in reaching me and extracting me from the mountain. After I had been so close to death, I received another chance to live.

The return to Dallas was painful in every possible sense. I was very weak physically, and my appearance had changed dramatically. The relationship between me and my wife and children was also no longer what it had been before the disaster.

Peach was agitated, but alongside the anger and fear she felt enormous relief.

"I felt tremendous relief that he was home," she recounted. "His appearance didn't bother me at all. He didn't look good, but Beck is Beck. I tried to deal with things in order, one crisis at a time."

When I arrived home that evening, I was forced to confront the question of who I was and what remained of my life. Peach told me that the years in which I had devoted myself to climbing and my obsession had distanced her and the children from me.

I understood I was responsible for what had happened to me, and that I had to bear the consequences.

I told her I understood my responsibility, and that if she wanted to leave me, I couldn't blame her. She wasn't obliged to stay with me out of pity.

But Peach didn't immediately give up on the marriage.

"No," she told me. "I'll give you one year. If at the end of the year you're truly a different person, we'll talk about it."

At that moment I decided to concentrate all the willpower, determination and perseverance I had invested for years in mountain climbing, and direct them to another task: to become a different person. I wanted to restore to myself not only Peach, but also the trust I had lost.

In those days I still didn't know how serious my medical condition was. For weeks I didn't understand the full extent of the damage to my body.

In the clinic in Kathmandu my hands were cold and grey, like a piece of meat forgotten for years in a leaking freezer. They didn't have the swelling and blisters I remembered from photographs of severe frostbite injuries. I also felt no pain.

When I arrived in Dallas I was sent for examination to hand surgeon Mike Doyle. He asked me to spread my fingers, clench my hands into fists and interlace my fingers. I succeeded in performing all the actions.

However, after the examinations he informed me of the difficult news.

"You'll probably lose most of the fingers on your right hand and the tips of the fingers on your left hand. We need to do a test to see the blood vessels."

Later that day he called me again. Already from his voice I understood something serious had been discovered.

"I don't know how to tell you this," he began. "There's no blood supply to your right hand. Blood flow stops above the wrist. In the left hand there's very little blood supply. I don't know what to say."

This was a severe blow. My hands were effectively dead organs. Temporarily I still managed to operate them, because the tendons connecting the fingers to the muscles in the arms remained functional, but it was clear the hands themselves were lost.

Doyle referred me to reconstructive plastic surgeon Greg Anigian, who tried to save as much as possible of the function remaining in the left hand.

During the recovery period there were also moments that were hard to believe were real. I remember sitting in a chair when a large piece from my right eyebrow, together with the hair, simply fell into my hand. On another occasion I was walking in the corridor, and my big toe fell off and rolled away from me.

But the injuries didn't end with the hands and feet.

One of the most complex medical challenges was reconstructing my nose. The cold froze it deep into the cartilage and bone, and almost nothing remained to save.

Before the doctors removed the damaged tissue, they prepared a template of the original nose using a piece of chewing gum wrapper. This template later served the surgeon in the attempt to reconstruct the shape of the nose.

The doctors built me a new nose through a complex reconstruction procedure. First, skin tissue was taken from the centre of the forehead and shaped into an initial form of a nose. Then they used cartilage from the ears and skin from the neck to give it structure and shape.

For a certain period the new nose grew while attached to my forehead, upside down, until it could be transferred to its place.

I was careful not to allow the children to photograph me during that period. I feared they would sell the pictures to the American tabloid "National Enquirer".

In the end I was fairly satisfied with the result. The doctors succeeded in creating a reasonable reconstruction of the original nose, although one strange problem remained: the nerves in the area remained active even after the tissue was transferred. Every time I showered and the water hit my forehead, the new nose would start to itch.

I had to learn anew how to live in a body that had changed almost beyond recognition. But the greatest challenge wasn't just getting used to the damaged hands, the reconstructed nose and the rest of the injuries. It was understanding what I wanted to do with the life I had received back.

Many have asked me how the experience on Everest changed my spiritual outlook, and whether I prayed during the disaster.

I grew up in a religious home, but in my youth I distanced myself from the spiritual world. I didn't do this out of rebellion or opposition to the principles of faith, but mainly out of indifference. I thought I could return to deal with these questions when I was older.

Then I learned you can grow old very quickly.

I also learned that miracles do indeed happen, and in my opinion they happen quite often.

To survive an extreme experience like the one I went through, a person needs an anchor. For some it's friends, for others work colleagues, and there are those for whom the anchor is faith in G-d. For me, the anchor is my family.

People ask me if I would be willing to go through all this again.

My answer is yes. Even if I had known in advance exactly what would happen to me on Everest, I would have set out on that journey.

On that day on the mountain I exchanged my hands for my family and my future. It's a deal I accept willingly.

For the first time in my life I have inner peace. I'm no longer trying to define myself through external achievements, goals, successes and possessions. For the first time I feel comfortable in my own skin.

I searched all over the world for the thing that would fill me and give my life meaning, and in the end I discovered it had been in my own backyard all along.

Peach too understood that the relationship between us had changed profoundly. The years that preceded the disaster created between us a relationship that was full of anger, disappointment and fear of my obsession. After the disaster, the old connection could no longer return to what it had been.

"The old relationship between Beck and Peach disappeared, but I still don't know what will come in its place," she recounted.

She added that today she no longer sees our relationship as fragile, and doesn't fear that her anger will accumulate until it erupts. According to her, the anger has turned to sadness over all that wasn't between us over the years.

The Everest disaster exacted from me an enormous physical price. I lost my fingers, parts of my body were damaged beyond repair, and I was forced to undergo a long and painful medical journey. But from the struggle for my life I learned something I hadn't managed to understand for years: there is no real meaning to the greatest achievements in the world if on the way to them you lose the people who make your life worth living.

Everest didn't grant me the victory I had dreamed of. It granted me the opportunity to start again.