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Interview with David Breashears
Everest Base Camp
May 15, 1996
NOVA: How did you find out that an emergency was taking
place? Where were you and where were the climbers that were in
trouble?
BREASHEARS: It happened like this: the IMAX team had
gone up to Camp III at 24,000 feet, ahead of everybody. There
had been 4 unsuccessful attempts already from our side; not by
us but by other teams. Most of the teams had reached the South
Summit at 28,700 feet. So we went all the way up but Ed and I
didn't like the weather and equally disconcerting was when we
looked out our tents that morning, there were 35 people,
including Sherpas, guides and clients, heading up from Camp II
to III, who would be right behind us as we were going for the
summit they would moving to Camp IV. So between the weather
and the people, some of whom we felt were unprepared to be
climbing high on Everest, we decided to go back to Camp II,
and let events unfold.
The next morning at Camp II—which is our Advance Base
Camp—at 21,300 feet ... It's our staging area for the
upper climbing on the mountain. The next day at about 10:00
a.m. some of our Sherpas were coming down the
mountain—I'm going to tell you a little story
here—of the first person we recovered a week
ago—the Sherpas were passing through Camp III and they
found that a Taiwanese climber had fallen 60 feet into a
crevasse but apparently the leader of the team thought he was
okay and continued on, and left the fellow there to fend for
himself. He had begun to deteriorate and so the Sherpas began
to evacuate him down the Lhtose Face. We didn't think it was a
very serious injury, but at about 4 or 5 o'clock they radioed
that he was dead. He died as they were bringing him down, so
the Sherpas left him on the ropes—they are extremely
frightened and superstitious of dead bodies—and Ed and
Robert Schauer and I went out up the ropes in the late
afternoon in what became a mini-blizzard and brought him down,
got him off the ropes, and lowered him down, and put him in a
sleeping bag and then we put him in a place in the ice so he
would freeze up so we would be able to carry him down the next
day.
The evening of the day we rescued this man, at 10:30 and
11:00, the summit teams who had reached the South Col at
26,000 feet, the high camp at Everest, Rob Hall's team, Scott
Fisher's and a Taiwanese, Makalu Gau, began their summit
attempt. And we became alarmed the next day—they were
making okay progress—we heard radio reports: so and so
turned back so and so turned back below the South Summit. But
we became alarmed when we saw people—we're well
positioned at Advance Base Camp we have a good view of 300
feet below the summit, known as the Hillary Step. Well we saw
a line of people there, 6 or 7 people, waiting to climb the
Hillary Step at 1:00 in the afternoon. We calculated their
climbing rate, their use of oxygen and we thought they were
out too late. We became even more alarmed when we heard radio
calls from the summit that people had reached the top at 2:30
and 3:00. But the weather was reasonable at that time; it was
windy and cold up high, they all had down suits, ski goggles,
and in a properly run guided expedition, enough oxygen. It
wasn't until later in the evening that we heard, to our
absolute astonishment, that Rob Hall was still on the South
Summit. That's 27,700 feet. At dark with a client who was in
extremis, near death, Doug Hanson. And Rob had elected to stay
with him, knowing he couldn't get the man down but also
knowing he couldn't leave him there to die alone. Later in the
evening, a blizzard blew up between 4 and 6 p.m. higher on the
mountain, fierce winds, 60 and 80 mile an hour winds,
darkness, blowing snow, 20 foot visibility, and that's when we
knew there was a real big problem because between 10 and 16
people had not returned to their tents. In terrible
conditions, they would have been out of oxygen, they would
have had to take off their dard ski goggles to see in the
night, but, at the same time, if they took their goggles off
they would have to squint in 60 and 70 mile an hour
wind-driven snow particles. They would be disoriented, cold,
hungry, out of oxygen, dehydrated, probably partially
hypothermic, and all we could do that night was go to bed,
late in the evening and hope for the best in the morning.
NOVA: Can you back up for a second and describe for us
an ideal summit day? You said they left late in the evening
and our understanding is that they would need to leave earlier
in the day; why did they leave so late and can you describe
the summit day process?
BREASHEARS: Here's what happens on the summit day and
here's what makes the whole process of climbing Everest so
difficult. The day before you climb from Camp III to Camp IV.
You leave Camp III at 8:00 a.m., you're at 24,000 feet, and
it's a long, hard day up to the South Col at 26,000 feet. All
I can tell you is that climbing at 20,000 feet is twice as
hard as climbing at 15,000 feet, climbing at 22,000 feet is
twice as hard as climbing at 20,000 feet. It's almost
exponential. So here you have a group of people, some of them
relatively untrained in terms of a Himalayan veteran
mountaineer, who have gone from Camp III to IV, from 24,000 to
26,000 feet in a day. You arrive there between 2 and 5 p.m. In
order to make climbing Everest safer, it's standard to leave
anywhere between midnight and one a.m., and you wear a
headlamp over your wool or polypropylene hat. The reason we
leave so early is because we get to the top
earlier—between 10 and 12 a.m. the next day. It's about
a 12 hour climb, and you get down in generally good weather.
It's not unusual in spring to have conductive cloud cover and
mini snow storms and snow squalls between 4 and 7 p.m., it's
very common.
So, these people had climbed up, probably spent an
uncomfortable night at camp 3, then spent between 5 and 8
hours climbing at high altitudes, maybe had a quart of water
and a few snacks. They get to the high camp and you don't have
much of an appetite. Really what you do is you spend your time
there just flat on your back, taking oxygen at one liter a
minute, trying to eat something, trying to drink, and drying
out your clothes that have become wet from perspiration,
especially your double boots and your mittens, and you don't
really have a good sleep. No one really sleeps that night or
those few hours. Around ten thirty that night you wake up and
put ice in a pan and you start to `brew up,' because mostly
you want to rehydrate. You figure its going to take two hours
to get ready. If you're not already in your sleeping bag in
your down suit, then you get out of your sleeping bag and you
put on your down suit. You're at 26,000 feet and everything
takes ten times longer and ten times more effort than at sea
level. You put on your over boots, put an oxygen bottle in
your pack, check pressure on both oxygen bottles to make sure
they are full, make sure the oxygen regulators are working,
slowly, with cold fingers you put on your crampons, maybe have
a sip of fluid before you leave, put a quart of hot water in
your pack and off you go in the darkness and starlight between
12 and 1:00 a.m.
So you really haven't had sleep or nourishment for 24 hours or
much water and you start up the face; by dawn you reach the
southeast ridge at 27,500 feet and may be mostly through your
first oxygen bottle. You then turn up the southeast ridge
toward the south summit, and it's an enormous effort to climb
at those elevations even with oxygen. You are moving
continuously for almost 12 hours before you reach the south
summit.. Now you're only three hundred feet from the top, but
you have a treacherous traverse and you have to climb the
Hillary Step and the climbing becomes much more exposed.
You've finished your first bottle of oxygen and you're on your
second. Maybe you've managed to take your water bottle out
once or twice and sit some fluid that now has turned mostly to
slush and ice in your bottle. Maybe you can nibble on a candy
bar. And then, 300 more feet and you're on top. Great! It's 12
hours of effort and you're exhausted. The euphoria of making
the summit soon dissipates, hopefully you've been using oxygen
at the rate of 2 liters a minute instead of 3—or you're
now out of oxygen—where if you're lucky a Sherpa is
carrying a third oxygen bottle for you, and now you begin the
long, hard descent to the South Col, dehydrated, not having
slept now for 40 hours. And you begin your descent.
It's windy, one side of your body—facing the
wind—is colder than the other, even with a down suit on.
Typically the hand grasping the ice ax becomes cold because of
the metal; smart climbers tape foam to the head of the ice ax
which is better than gripping steel in -30 degree temperatures
and conducting the cold into your hand. You begin to stagger
down.
You get down to the Southeast Ridge and you're still a 1,000
or 1,500 feet above camp. You're on fixed ropes, and suddenly
it's dark, you're disoriented, you're hypoxic. And then you're
at the end of the fixed ropes and you don't know where to go.
The South Col is a broad flat place. You take your goggles off
because it's dark but you can't look into the wind to look for
your tent because 60-70 mile an hour snow particles will be
stinging your face and eyes. Many of the people who made it
down had minor frostbite on their noses and faces.
You reach the South Col, which is as large as many football
fields, its flat, and have no idea of which way to turn. You
can hardly communicate with your companion who is 10 feet
away. Your feet and hands start to get cold, you're
hypothermic—your body starts to shunt the blood away
from the extremities and save it for the organs—and for
the unfortunate ones you just lay down and die, and freeze to
death.
And if you're lucky, there's a gap in the storm. A few hundred
feet away you see the tents and stagger into them at 3 in the
morning. If you're Beck Weathers you lay down to die; you've
wandered in the wrong direction several hundred yards away
from the tents you'll never find; you've lost your gloves
because you tried to take them off to warm your hands inside
your jacket. Incredibly, two people pass you over for dead the
next day, but in the afternoon you wake up, decide you want to
live, remarkably you've survived this horrible night of cold
and snow and howling wind, and stagger into camp. And that's
the way it went.
NOVA: How was Beck Weathers found?
BREASHEARS: First of all, if you're Rob Hall, you're
stuck out in the dark at 28,700 feet trying to save a client
who's too tired and maybe out of oxygen and has collapsed.
You're facing a horrible night in the wind with no protection,
in a down suit not designed for bivouacking at night, and it's
all too terrible for all of us to think about what he went
through because he was still alive the next morning and
through next day making radio calls, as we tried to encourage
him to get moving.
If you're Namsuko the Japanese woman you are too tired. You've
reached the Col, you have not one molecule of energy left, and
you lay down and freeze to death in this fierce wind alone
without anyone to help you.
Beck—as he told the story to me—if you're Beck
Weathers, you're lost, there were people with you, suddenly
they see tents and they're gone and you were unable to keep up
or maybe you lost your way, but suddenly you're alone in a
howling wind, and you don't know up from down, left from
right, so you lay down maybe on the ice to stay warm, maybe,
because you're too tired, maybe you're just collapsed, and lay
down to die because there is nothing else left to do. You
tried to warm your hands and you've lost your gloves.
At 9:00 a.m. the next morning its clear, the clouds have
parted and the snow is gone, but the wind is stronger than
ever. A Sherpa walks out and looks at you, and you're lying
there on the ground white, ashen-white, frozen-face. You're
lying there and you're dead. No one could survive that night.
So the Sherpa walks by and they radio down: "Beck Weathers is
dead."
Todd Burleson and Pete Athans who were at Camp III,
experienced mountaineers, had come up to help at Camp IV.
They're pointed out there's a figure 150 yards away, Beck
Weathers, who is frozen to death. They go to work and try to
help other people on the Col. Remarkably, if you are Todd
Burleson, you're climbing out of your tent later that
afternoon, and there is an apparition that can't be true: this
person who has been pronounced dead by two people has stood
up, his arms are askew from frostbite, sticking out like a
scarecrow, his eyes are swollen shut, his whole face is
swollen, he can't see, but he's staggering towards camp. It's
a ghost, it has to be, this person is dead!
But he staggers into camp with a white face and you put him in
a tent (Todd Burleson and Pete Athans) sure he's going to die
within the next half hour. When you rewarm a hypothermic
person they often fibrillate and die. We hear on the radio
that there's no way this guy will survive the night, but
Weathers has an incredible will to live, he's a pathologist
from Dallas, he knows he's lost most of his hands, but he's
decided he wants to live, he's a heavy set guy maybe that's
what got him through the night.
But in the morning he's starting to drink liquids and he's
eating something and you've given him some drugs and he's
actually walking. Todd and Pete are astounded. I mean he's our
miracle, it's the one great inspirational story in the
tragedy. You get him down to Camp III, one step at a time
because he can't see very well. And then we meet him at Camp
III and he's taken to Camp II and he's telling jokes now and
he's in thicker air and knows he's going to live. He's
uncomplaining, he says " I know I'm going to lose my hands,
I'm happy to be alive. I want to live. I woke up on the Col
that afternoon and I said I am going to live."
We get him to Camp 2 where he continues his recovery. His eyes
open up a bit, you can talk to him, he can recognize people,
and the next day we walk him down to Camp I, where a very
courageous and talented Nepalese colonel in the Air Force
lands a helicopter at nearly 20,000 feet. The first person we
evacuate is Makalu Gau who is not ambulatory, he's in a
stretcher on oxygen. He's going to lose his nose, many of his
fingers and most of his toes, and then the next flight is for
Beck. And Beck has left us all with something to cling to in
this tragedy, as well as Makalu, who spent the night out much
higher. They were two survivors who spent that entire night
out and they will pay a terrible price but they're alive and
that's all we have to say about that.
NOVA: Well, from what we hear they are alive thanks to
you. We are a little unclear about how he was brought down to
the lower camps. We heard from other sources that he literally
followed in your footsteps, holding on to you. Can you say
more about that?
BREASHEARS: Well, there's two stories here. There's
also Makalu Gau. And two very brave Sherpas went up to rescue
him from 27,500 and brought him down. Most of Gau's rescue was
left to Sherpas—there were 6 Sherpas with him when we
passed him at Camp III. Pete and Todd did a heroic job of
reviving Beck and getting him from Camp 4 to 3, which quite
honestly was all the real work. Robert Schauer from our team
and Ed Viesturs went up to the Yellow Band, which is near
25,000 feet, to meet them on the way down. A person would
stand behind Beck and hold on to his harness as he slid down
the fixed rope, to prevent him from just sliding down hundreds
of feet, and a person would be in front of him helping him,
guiding his feet because he couldn't see well. We reached Camp
III, we sat him down, he wanted black tea with sugar. And you
had to feed him, of course, because he couldn't clutch
anything because his mittens covered his frozen hands; I was
just so thankful I didn't have to see his hands. His face was
a mess. Then we started down to Camp II, we wanted to get him
out of there as fast as possible. People would took turns
holding him from behind on his harness to keep his balance.
And whoever went first would help guide his feet and he then
would lean with his forearms on that person.
Once we got to the base of the Lhotse face we just walked to
Camp II. The guy was just incredible. They put him in a tent
there, a little emergency hospital we set up, a field hospital
sort of, and undressed him and looked at the frostbite. I
think his toes are okay, that's the astonishing thing. But,
throughout it all, being a pathologist he knew intimately what
had happened to every cell in his body for the last three
days. He was not holding out any hope for his hands. And yet
it was just astonishing his optimism and his dignity and humor
in this situation. So, I don't want to take credit that I
don't deserve. Pete and Todd did the bulk of the work. We did
alot of the organizing of the rescue, the organizing of the
supplies, placement of people to help other people, organized
the helicopter pad with a quart of KoolAid from Araceli that
she happened to have—red KoolAid—to mark the
landing spot. It was a group effort.
We're so thankful he was ambulatory. He's a big heavy guy and
we never could have gotten him off the Col, even if he had
been alive, if we had to carry him. The terrain's too
difficult to move someone that heavy. It's hard enough work to
get someone down the lower mountain in the thick air of 19,000
feet; it took twelve people 8 hours to evacuate the dead
Taiwanese through the Icefall and there you're talking about
warm weather, working without mittens, and pile jackets.
NOVA: I know this is difficult for you to relive... Can
you explain for us what hypoxia is and what it feels like?
BREASHEARS: The problems with climbing at high altitude
are two things. There's wind and there's lack of oxygen
molecules available. Your body turns into a machine to process
whatever oxygen molecules it can find in the thin air. People
are chronically hypoxic, which means operating at an oxygen
deficit. Up higher your skin isn't red and pink, it's always
got a bluish cast to it. Your body very cloverly finds what
oxygen it can and delivers it to the places that need
it—your brain, your heart, your liver. Your skin isn't
necessarily a priority. You are always dehydrated. The air is
very dry here, you breathe very hard, your respiration rate is
high, your pulse rate is high, and maybe there's 1 or 2
percent humidity here so it's a constant struggle to drink
enough. On the one hand you know you should, on the other hand
you don't have the appetite to just gulp down the 4-6 liters
of fluid you need a day. Sometimes it's incredibly hot in the
Western Cwm in this great sun reflector and without a breeze,
you can hardly move. In a moment's notice the clouds cover the
sun and you're freezing and shivering. You don't sleep well at
higher elevations, its a very restless sleep; you wake up a
lot. If you're drinking enough fluid, to be very matter of
fact here, you have to get out and pee two or three times in a
night. You don't have much of an appetite sometimes. The food
in your tent gets cold quickly. You put food on your plate and
before you're half finished it's as cold as the ambient
temperature which may be 10 or 20 degrees F. You're always
changing clothes during the day. If a wind comes up you have
your wind jacket on, the next moment the sun's out and you're
too hot. It's very hard to move from camp to camp, it's a
struggle to keep your motivation.
Often times I find the hardest part of climbing at the higher
camps is this one moment when you go from the horizontal in a
warm cozy sleeping bag and you have to get up and get moving.
You have to put ice in the pot, light the stove, get out the
tea or cocoa or soup, the condensation starts to melt on your
tent, everything is wet. You don't want to move because when
you shake the tent it all falls off and gets down your neck
and in your boots and in your ears and some nights some nights
are spent wondering if your tent is going to collapse in a
high wind—the flapping and the flexing and the bending
of the poles and the fabric. You can't sleep. It's too noisy.
You have to be ready to put on your boots and get out if the
tent falls apart. lot of discomforts, but huge rewards.
You are always survival oriented. You're very introverted at
high altitudes. Did I have enough to drink, have I had enough
to eat, is my sleeping bag dry, is my part of the tent level,
am I warm enough?
The wind is very demoralizing. It's noisy, incessant, its just
annoying. You get so fed up hearing the wind and having it on
you and swirling around you, blowing snow in your face one
minute, coming from the other direction the next. Your feet
get cold your hands get cold . The most debilitating part of
climbing on Everest besides the lack of oxygen is probably the
wind.
NOVA: How cold can it get on Everest?
BREASHEARS: We have the reports here. It's averaging
around -40 on top, the middle camps lower down maybe -10, at
Base Camp we're generally eating dinner in 15 to 20 degree
temperatures. Just imagine if you spent the next month and a
half in a meat locker, and sit down to eat at night in your
down parka and hat, no place to put your plate down, before
you can finish your food it's cold.
NOVA: David, you talk about introversion on the
mountain. Do you typically climb with someone? How far apart
are the individuals in a given expedition, for example, on the
summit day?
BREASHEARS: You are together but you are not with
anyone emotionally. Our team, we always climb together.
Through the icefall, in between camps; some of our members
fall behind the other members but no one is left on their own.
Your pacing at altitude is so personal; you get into a rhythm,
whatever you can sustain. And that's it, you get locked into
it. If someone's faster or if someone's slower you don't
really notice it. Your body finds where it likes to be in
terms of the pulse rate, the movement of your legs, your
breathing. We're very very committed on the summit day to
staying together and people get strung out and everyone has a
different pace. Ed will be climbing without oxygen. We have
strong Sherpas who can climb twice as fast as us, we have
Sherpas who are climbing relatively slow due to the burden of
carrying the camera gear. What happened on the day of the
tragedy was that people were strung out all along that
mountain. Stronger were twice as fast as the slower people,
twice as fast to get down, twice as strong and having the
reserves to deal.
On summit day, you have your mask and your goggles, and you
get into this mantra, you're in a cocoon. Every bit of focus
and concentration and drive and ambition one has goes into
putting the next foot in front of the other. And you look up
and say oh, so and so is 200 feet above me. And you look down
and say so and so is 300 feet below me. And you look back and
you put the next foot in front of the other. That's all you're
thinking about for 12 hours, without food, mostly without
water. With 2 oxygen bottles, 15-20 lbs on your pack, camera,
spare mittens, spare goggles, those are all the things that we
carry. It's very hard to describe. You're just a machine that
`s trying to process whatever oxygen there is and just trying
to put one foot in front of the other. It's as simple as
that.
NOVA: You've mentioned the rewards. What are the
rewards? Will this tragedy affect your love for climbing?
BREASHEARS: It's too soon to say. We knew a lot of
these people.
There's a couple of rewards. One of course is getting on top.
The other is coming down and feeling safe and warm and knowing
you don't have to go back up—that's a huge reward. We
have a lot more at stake here than some of the other teams,
but we're not letting it affect us. Probably the moment you
leave Base Camp, we've been camped here on rock and ice for 7
weeks, the day you leave this place and you walk down into the
trees and bushes and streams and flowers, and you're away from
the cold and the thin air and the cold food and the nagging
feeling that you always have to go back up the mountain until
you are done—that's my favorite day, that's the day I'm
looking forward to.
We've worked 2 or 3 times harder than any team here. This IMAX
camera is huge, it's a burden, and we have obligations. When
other people are lying in their tents resting, we're out with
this monstrous IMAX camera, putting it on a triped, trying to
get shots, using energy, precious energy that should be
devoted to the summit, and it's all been a bigger burden than
we thought, but at least from what we understand we've been
doing a good job. But we've had the wind taken out of our
sails here. It's not an easy thing to have rescued (a dead
climber's body), to be the ones to cover his face and bring
him down to his grieving companions. It's been really tough
here with all these people here dying and the impact on their
loved ones and companions down here.
We feel okay, and we're going to go back. And in the right
conditions we'll go up. But it's been a very sobering, few
days. It's frightening really.
NOVA: You just said, weather-pending, you'll make a bid
for the summit again. Have you received a forecast for the
next week and how does the jet stream play into that?
BREASHEARS: The jet stream has been sitting on top of
Everest because it's in a southern position. It's just fierce,
ferocious winds. No human in any condition could have gone up
to save Rob. Those days he was up there, we were up there at
Camp II and you could see the clouds just tearing across the
mountain at a terrifying speed. The sound is what's extremely
unsettling. It's a terrible roar. You think of the people up
there fighting for their lives, you think of what it would be
like to climb in it yourself. It's impossible. It's the great
force of nature that makes Everest the great challenge that it
is—people have been misled through several seasons of
good weather to think of Everest as a benevolent place. But it
can be a place were no one can move, tents are ripped apart.
All the special modern down and gortex gear in the world can't
save you, you cant move, you can't see, you can't hear. There
have been days where as mountaineers we could have climbed
Everest in the last two weeks, but as a film team, we need to
hold the camera steady and load it virtually
barehanded—the only way you can load this big camera and
thread this mechanism is barehanded—we need very calm
weather. Any three of us could have gone up and down the
mountain safely by now only as climbers.
But we're waiting for the right configuration of high and low
pressures which precede the onset of the monsoon in this
region, which will push the jet stream north. The stream does
not move north vertically in elevation it moves north and
south, and in the last few years it has been normal for the
jet stream to move north, leaving the mountain relatively calm
for a ten day period before the monsoon. We expect we'll get
it. We hope we'll get it. We're going up expecting to get it,
but if we don't we don't. The climbing permit is up June 1 and
probably our will to stay here will be up before then. We've
been up to Camp III now four times, that's 24,000 feet, and
each time we had to come back down... well.... for whatever
reason.
NOVA: Can you give us a brief look at your
communications center? Obviously you have a satellite phone.
What are your capabilities?
BREASHEARS: I am sitting here at Base Camp in the
dining tent at 17,500 feet. We have a briefcase-sized
satellite telephone which at the moment is being powered by a
generator, and when our batteries are charged enough we can
power the satellite phone by batteries which are charged by
solar power and by the generator. We have a fax machine which
is 120 volts, so the only way we can receive and transmit is
when the generator is running. For communications on the
mountain we have hand held 2 watt Motorola radios which are
supplemented by a 25 watt bay station, with antenna, which
allow us to communicate anywhere on the mountain.
NOVA: There are most likely going to be difficult
moments on your way back up the mountain. Is everyone else on
the expedition prepared for this added emotional challenge?
How will you handle that as expedition leader?
BREASHEARS: My first time on this mountain was 1981, so
I've had 15 years of experiences from rescuing people to
recovering recently dead bodies to recovering bodies in pieces
all over the mountain.. We're not looking forward to and we
really don't know yet what we'll do yet if we're up there and
we have three or four bodies to pass, people who were our
friends and who were alive three or four days ago. They are
there, they're on the trail, there's no way we can avoid them.
There's Scott, there's Rob, there's Doug. Andy's missing, no
one can find his body. And the Japanese woman we probably
won't pass by her body, she's a 100 or 200 feet away from the
main climbing route.
The only thing I can say, is you go back to how I described
climbing on the summit. You don't have a lot of energy
emotional or otherwise available to you. You're almost in a
trance, in an oxygen-deprived hypoxic state, food deprived,
dehydrated, and I don't expect to have the emotional capacity
there to be too upset about it. But we do have some debate
here as to what to do with the bodies because we don't want
them to end up as slide number 21 in the next 50 people to
climb Mount Everest's slide shows.
NOVA: It sounds like it's an incredibly trying thing to
undertake in the best of conditions and there's no way that
you have the best of conditions anymore—given what
you've been going through physically and emotionally. What
keeps you going?
BREASHEARS: Well, we're professionals. We came here to
do a job, we still have the chance to do it. We like climbing.
I can't speak for Ed, it'll be his fourth time on top. It's
been 11 years since I've been on top of Everest and I'd really
like to get on top this time. The thought of doing it again
and recording it in IMAX, having some people be able to
experience that on the giant screen and maybe really feel it
and enjoy it, I guess that's what keeps me going.
NOVA: David, you once described what climbing means to
you—in terms of the rhythm and movement of ascending a
route. Does that still hold true or is it really just a job
for you here, making this film?
BREASHEARS: No, for some strange reason, against
everything we've just described, all the difficulties, it's
still a joy to be up here. It's still great to get to camp III
and look out and see Puo Mori and see clouds building and the
Western Cwm. There's still a lot of joy in it, it isn't just
work. We would have all gone home by now after this if it were
all just work. Plus we have three people here who haven't
climbed Everest—Araceli, Jamling, and Sumiyo—and
they are really excited about the chance to climb. They'd like
to climb Mt Evereest, all 3 of them. I can understand the
drive and desire they have. Seeing them and their desire,
they're young and enthusiastic, it helps Ed and me.
NOVA: Would you say this has been an extremely atypical
year on Everest?
BREASHEARS: Three or four deaths on the North and five
here—yes. And the fact that three or four people got by
by the skin of their teeth and should have probably frozen to
death. All of us, if you could call us veterans, have not seen
it remain so windy so late and a wind with such ferocity as
the one we saw during the accident. Everest is like this.
There will be three or four good years and there'll be 2 bad
years when no one has climbed Everest from any side. People
have very short memories. In the 80s there was a year and a
half when no one got up Everest because of wind. So I think
it's unusual in the context of the past 4 or 5 years, it's not
unusual in the last 25 years. We have cold winters in New
England we have snowy years, we have wet winters and we have
dry winters; it's no different. It's just the rhythm of nature
in this region. It's to be expected. I'm just damned mad and
frustrated that the year I come here to make this film I can't
get the weather that allows people to just walk up and down
the mountain unscathe. We need a break. And we'll get it.
NOVA: Well, good luck and get back here safely.
BREASHEARS: Well, keep your fingers crossed. All we
need is good weather. We're all very fit and very healthy and
none of us are afraid to come home without doing it. We feel
we've done enough already.
May 27, 1996: Interview with David Breashears
May 24, 1996: They Made It! (Update)
May 20, 1996: They Made It!
May 16, 1996: Emergency on Everest
May 10, 1996: Taiwanese Victim
May 9, 1996
May 5, 1996
May 2, 1996: Team Returns to Base Camp
April 26, 1996
April 25, 1996
April 21, 1996
April 19, 1996
Lost on Everest
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