At the last second, he saw in the light of his helmet lamp the icy rock outcropping that swung up to meet him. The torch shattered. The universe went dark.
www.summathletic.com/everest/southeastridge
From the Balcony at 27,600 feet, the route to the summit follows the treacherous southeast ridge, a knife-edge of sloped rock more than five miles in the sky. It is one of the most lethal places on Earth. Huge snow cornices follow the line of the ridge, making each step a life-or-death gamble. Is there solid mountain underneath the drift, or are you stepping off into thin air? CLICK HERE to see fourteen-year-old Tilt Crowley breaking trail for his teammates to follow. A quarter mile above him, the summit waits….
Sneezy slung the camera back over his shoulder and stumbled forward to catch up to Tilt. The guide had climbed Himalayan peaks before, but never had he experienced the hammer-blow effects of altitude like here on Everest. At twenty-eight thousand feet, they were higher than all but three of the world’s mountains. Even with bottled oxygen, it was almost impossible to breathe. Panting, wheezing gasps were the best he could manage. His legs weighed forty tons each.
In spite of this, Tilt was moving onward and upward at an astounding pace. The teenager’s strength was unbelievable. He must smell it, the guide thought to himself. He knows he’s going to the top. Sneezy couldn’t see anything standing in Tilt’s way — certainly not Mount Everest.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey!”
Tilt held up, and a burst of tortured steps brought Sneezy alongside his charge.
“Slow down,” he rasped. “If you summit without me, who’s going to prove you got there?”
Behind the goggles, Tilt’s eyes burned as if with fever. “Sorry. I’m just pumped! We’re making great time, right? It isn’t even sunrise yet.”
Sneezy nodded. “If all goes well, it’ll happen. What’s going on in your mind, kid?”
Tilt grinned. “You have no idea.”
The truth was that Tilt’s thoughts were not with himself, but with Dominic. By the time the shrimp reached this altitude, he would be out of oxygen and forced to turn back.
The record would belong to Tilt.
* * *
Dominic lost track of time on the wall. It seemed endless, a vertical marathon that could only be tackled a single agonizing handhold at a time. Once he caught a glimpse of his watch and realized in dismay that four and a half hours had gone by.
Where’s the ridge? he thought desperately. Could they be squandering their summit chances on this miserable cliff?
Fifteen feet above and to his left, he heard Ethan screaming with frustration — an almost unforgivable waste of energy and oxygen. Such was the anguished anxiety of feeling their bid slipping through their fingers.
The top of the wall never came. Instead, it rounded infuriatingly slowly into a mammoth buttress up against the upper mountain.
Weak and disoriented, Ethan and Dominic crawled atop the rock shoulder and took stock of their position. The ridge was nowhere to be found. Had they wasted this gargantuan effort?
Then Dominic saw it in the beam of his helmet lamp — a narrow arête carved into the mountain itself, a gently rising ramp perhaps eight inches wide.
Their eyes locked. It was a big risk. What would happen if they followed this path for hours only to have it disappear into the mountain? But the alternative was even less appetizing. The only other direction was down.
Ethan took the lead, walking the tightrope of the arête by gingerly placing one foot in front of the other. Half an hour later, they were unable to see anything that looked like the southeast ridge.
Up until that point, Dominic had thought only of how this detour might affect their chances of getting to the top. Now his mind began to fill with a deeper dread. Were they getting themselves lost high on mighty Everest?
All at once, their path cut sharply to the left, rounding a notch in the mountain’s bulk. The arête widened into a ledge, and they stepped onto —
“The Balcony!” they chorused, weak with relief.
Above them stretched the ridge. Dominic squinted at the trail plowed through the shin-deep snow. Were these tracks left by Tilt and Sneezy? Probably. But what about Cicero and the rest of the team? Surely, they were ahead by now. And yet the new powder didn’t seem to be trampled enough to indicate the passage of so many climbers.
Where was everybody? Had something gone wrong?
In the Death Zone, there was no time to keep tabs on anyone else. Just staying alive was a full-time job up here.
They placed their spare oxygen bottles on the side of the path for pickup on the way down. Then they set out along the southeast ridge.
Had Dominic bothered to check the gauge on the cylinder that was hooked into his breathing system, he would have seen that his supply of gas was less than a quarter full.
* * *
Perry regained consciousness to find himself staring up into a ring of bright lights. Two thoughts occurred to him: 1) I’m not dead and 2) I’ve stopped falling.
He heard strange voices around him. They were speaking another language … German?
The German expedition!
“Where am I?”
Stupid question! If you’re alive, what difference does it make?
The Germans seemed amazed to see his eyes open. “You live?” said a heavily accented voice. “After such a fall?”
Perry looked at his watch. The altimeter read 26,718. He had slid and rolled the height of a fifty-story building! Now he lay on a narrow ledge of dark ice. Four inches to his left, the lower ramparts of the summit pyramid fell away into the Kangshung Face. Those few inches represented the difference between being here alive versus being eight thousand feet straight down in Tibet.
Another helmet lamp joined the group around him.
“Perry!” The voice was hoarse and breathless.
He focused on the man beneath the light. Even through the mask and goggles, he could see that Cicero’s face was gray.
The sight of someone who cared — really cared — disintegrated the last of his control. The emotion burst from him like the opening of floodgates. The tears poured out — for the years spent climbing when he’d hated and feared it; for the things he’d never had the courage to say to his uncle; for the months spent on Everest, and in boot camp before that, culminating in this latest mishap, which had almost cost him his life.
Cicero gathered him up in powerful arms and moved him back from the edge of the abyss. Still sobbing, Perry latched on to his team leader as if he would never let go.
“It’s over, kid,” Cicero soothed. “You’re going home.”
Breaking dawn flooded the summit pyramid with radiant sun. The effect was almost unreal. The top of the world was coming into day. Beneath them, the rest of the Himalayan range was still draped in the dark of night.
Tilt barely noticed the mountain’s light show. He stood with Sneezy just below the South Summit, where the fixed ropes ended. Their attention was focused on Everest’s lesser pinnacle, fifty feet above them.
“This is as high as anyone’s gotten this year,” Sneezy shouted over the howl of the wind. “We’ll have to fix line the rest of the way.”
Tilt shook his head vehemently. “It’ll take too much time.”
Sneezy was surprised. “We’re on point,” he argued. “What about the team coming up behind us?”
“We don’t even know they’ll get this far,” Tilt shot back. “I’m not risking my chance to lay rope for people who aren’t coming!”
The cameraman was disgusted. “Eighty years of tradition on this mountain, but that’s not as important as you getting your name in the paper! We made it this far because other people fixed routes for us. Now it’s our turn.”
“What do I look like — a Sherpa?” Tilt sneered. And he set himself to the steep snow slope.
“Come back!” Sneezy’s dilemma was clear. Yes, the boy was acting selfishly and with disregard for every unwritten rule of mountaineering.
But it was Sneezy’s responsibility as a guide to stay with the kid. He was only fourteen! “You can’t go alone!”
“Watch me!” Tilt tossed over his shoulder.
“Let me belay you at least!” Sneezy hurried up to join him. “That powder looks unstable.”
The two roped themselves together and began their attack on the rise. Tilt took the “sharp” end, leading the way up. He burrowed his crampons and ice ax deep into the snow to make solid contact with the husk of Everest. From Sneezy’s viewpoint below him, it looked more like swimming than climbing. But their progress was steady despite the dizzying altitude.
Twenty minutes later, the two heaved themselves through a natural half arch of rock and came to stand on the South Summit. The altitude was 28,700 feet: 450 feet higher than K2, the second-tallest mountain on Earth.
They were the first climbers this season to gaze up Everest’s summit ridge.
The ridge was notorious in climbing circles. It was razor sharp and totally unforgiving. Your first wrong step would be your last. It was also unimaginably exposed — a daredevil’s tiptoe between the Kangshung Face to the right and the Southwest Face to the left. Across this blew triple-digit wind gusts. But this year there was yet an added wrinkle. Two weeks of blizzards had coated this airless catwalk with a thick blanket of unpredictable shifting snow.
The homestretch began — slow, careful steps along the heavily corniced ridge. They remained roped together, but on this terrain, a belay was virtually impossible. A fall by one meant they were both gone. They used their ice axes as walking sticks to support them against fatigue and the onslaught of the wind. They knew that only one major obstacle lay in their path — a deep notch in the summit ridge that created a forty-foot cliff in the sky. This was the infamous Hillary Step, named for Sir Edmund Hillary, Everest’s first conqueror.
Gradually, the snow-covered Step came into view. Hundreds of alpinists had faced it before. But to Tilt it was a message directed at him and no other: One last battle and the war is won.
The two climbers looked up. Dozens of ropes stretched up the rocky gash, some of them half buried in the snow.
Tilt looked questioningly at his guide, but Sneezy shook his head. They had to resist the temptation to use these old lines. Years earlier, a solo climber at the end of the season had become entangled in the spaghetti of ropes. The following spring, his body had been discovered dangling from the Hillary Step, frozen solid.
Their climb had gone extraordinarily smoothly so far. But here, only two hundred vertical feet below the summit, Everest chose not to yield so easily.
Tilt started out, still in the lead, but he was impatient, and exhausted himself quickly. Sneezy tried next, a more measured, experienced approach. But he, too, was spent and gasping in a matter of minutes.
Tilt sat on the soft snow, glaring up at the Step with genuine malice. His dream would not end here, foiled by a glorified divot in the summit ridge. You can’t beat me! I won’t be stopped! And he was back at the rise, climbing it, almost wrestling with it.
Far on the right side of the notch, he found, beneath the powder, snow packed hard enough to support the front points of his crampons. Soon the points hit bare rock. But Tilt would not be denied. Jamming his ice ax into a crack, he grabbed on and literally chinned himself to the next handhold.
Watching from below, Sneezy was bug-eyed. At this altitude, the tiniest movement was considered a triumph. Tilt’s display of arm strength was nothing short of miraculous. Fighting his own exhaustion, he brought out the camera. The world had to see this — the most storied obstacle in high-altitude mountaineering being conquered by raw power and sheer cussedness.
Roaring his defiance, Tilt scrambled atop the Step. Sneezy almost expected him to beat his chest and emit a Tarzan yell. But instead, he twisted an ice screw into the thick rime at the lip of the notch and dropped a length of nine-millimeter nylon line to Sneezy at the bottom. The guide tethered it to a second screw at the bottom. The Hillary Step was roped.
Slowly, but with growing excitement, Sneezy jumared up the rope. For him, too, this was a first ascent of Everest. The thrill was greater here than on any other mountain.
From here, the summit ridge looked like a gargantuan arrowhead of brilliant white rising above them. All detail disappeared in the gleam of the snow. Where was the top? Tilt couldn’t see, but the route was obvious: Follow the ridge higher and higher — until there was no such thing as higher anymore.
The sky was mostly clear, but Tilt could feel tiny bee stings of ice on his face, the crystallized moisture that made up Everest’s summit plume. The world was a different place up here near the edge of Earth’s troposphere. Energy and exhaustion seemed to melt into each other. Here, there was only purpose. Tilt kept moving, one foot in front of the other, as if the summit were a magnet, pulling him ever upward.
Sneezy cleared the frost off the dial of his climber’s watch. “Twenty-nine thousand feet!” he practically screamed. The number looked impossible, illogical, unreal.
They were almost there! They had to be! Tilt squinted into the glare. Where’s the peak? It should be right here! Is something wrong? Are we lost?
And then the next step … was down!
It didn’t register at first. What’s happening? The ridge goes up, not down!
At that moment, Sneezy threw his arms around the youngest climber ever to summit the world’s tallest mountain.
Tilt grabbed the guide’s wrist and checked the number on the altimeter: 29,028. It didn’t get any higher than that. Not on this planet.
The surge of joy that rose up in him reminded him of the depiction of a supernova that he’d once seen in a planetarium show — an explosion of white light growing in intensity as it radiated outward in waves.
He had done it! At this altitude, he had trouble wrapping his oxygen-deprived mind around the fact that he wasn’t the same person who had awoken at the Col eleven hours ago. He was now living the very first minute of the rest of his life — he scanned the panorama — with the whole world literally at his feet.
The old Tilt Crowley, that ninth-grade nobody from Cincinnati, the one who earned money by delivering papers — he didn’t exist anymore. Tilt was famous, a celebrity, a star. He was going to be rich.
Sneezy was shouting into the walkie-talkie. “We’re here, Cap! We’re on the summit! Right now!”
“How’s Tilt?” came Cicero’s voice.
“Strong — really strong! He led the Step like a pro! Where are you guys?”
“I’m at Camp Four,” Cicero reported. “Perry took a dive.”
“Is he okay?”
“Couple of broken ribs, Andrea says. Nothing serious. Sammi and Babu are on the southeast ridge. Let me talk to the kid.”
The fourteen-year-old was still wild with excitement. “Cap, it’s amazing! You’ve got to see it!”
“I’ve been,” came the amused reply. “Now listen up. Andrea’s already on the sat phone to Colorado. You’re going to be in all the papers tonight. You ate this mountain for breakfast.”
“Thanks, Cap.”
“I know you feel like you’re done for the day,” the team leader went on, “but here’s some advice you’d better take: A lot of climbers can get up that rock; the trick is to get yourself down again. So take your pictures, enjoy the view. Then get your butt back on the ridge, because you’re only halfway there.”
“Gotcha,” replied Tilt. Nothing, not even Cicero’s nagging, was going to spoil this moment for him.
He watched as Sneezy attempted to unfurl a Summit Athletic Corporation flag in the battering gale. From his apparently bottomless knapsack, the guide produced a telescoping aluminum flagpole. The two of them planted it in the snowpack next to the half-buried survey rod that marked the peak.
SummitQuest — Tilt had almost forgotten that he was part of an expedition. One that was an official success now that it had placed a member on the summit. A lot of credit would be claimed over this — by Perry’s uncle, w
hose brainchild it was; Tony Devlin, who handled the business end; Cap Cicero, who led the team.
Take your bows, guys. I’m at the top, and I don’t see any of you here.
This victory belonged to Tilt Crowley.
* * *
Babu put the walkie-talkie back in his wind-suit pocket and turned to Sammi, behind him on the ridge. “That was Cap. Lenny and Tilt are on the summit.”
Sammi was astonished. “Already?” The two had been delayed by Perry’s accident. They were barely beyond the Balcony. “Go, guys! They flew!”
“They made good time,” Babu agreed. “But mostly, we’re way behind schedule.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” She increased her pace and pushed past him, gasping into her mask.
“Sammi!” He had to scramble to keep up with her. “You know, Cap put a two o’clock turnaround on us.” The turnaround meant simply this: If you weren’t on the top by two P.M., it was too late to keep climbing. At that time, all team members had to head back down to Camp Four, regardless of their position on the mountain. If they did not, they would end up descending in the dark at a time when their headlamp batteries would be most likely to fail.
“It’s not two o’clock yet,” said Sammi, tight-lipped.
“If you climb too fast, you’ll burn yourself out,” he warned.
She tried to grin, but through the pain of her effort, it came out a grimace. “Come on, Babu. You know me. I’ve only got one speed.”
And Babu did know her. Over the past two months, he had come to admire the girl’s tenacity and fearlessness. But he also knew Everest. Perry’s accident had cost them a lot of time. To make up that time, they would need determination, skill, and luck.
Babu Pemba had been in this game long enough to realize that very few climbers could count on having all three at the same time.
* * *
Ethan and Dominic were approaching twenty-eight thousand feet when they first saw the two specks descending the southeast ridge above them.