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Dave Hahn: Strap on the Nitro
Near Miss in Everest's Khumbu Icefall
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Editor's Note: MountainZone.com columnist and sponsored athlete Dave Hahn has just returned from climbing Mount Everest for the fifth consecutive year. This season, Hahn was guiding a party of female climbers on an attempt via the South Col Route. The incident described below took place on the team's final trip down through the Khumbu Icefall, between Camp I and Base Camp.

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My first inclination was to describe the Khumbu Icefall collapse as "biblical," but this had less to do with my knowledge of the bible and a lot to do with my belief just then that I was going straight to hell. Not that heaven would have rejected my soon-to-be lifeless body, but after 50 cold days on Everest, hell had a certain tropical appeal.

Upon reflection, the ice avalanche that darn near killed us was not "biblical" at all. I'm now thinking "cinematic" or "theatrical" or "Hollywood" are more accurate analogies. I'm referring the curious to the movie Vertical Limit for examples of similar action.

I know there will be many who have problems with me mentioning the word theatrical in the same paragraph as Vertical Limit since theatrical has all those lingering connotations of acting and Shakespeare and all that. I did my own share of criticizing such movies as K2 and Cliffhanger and even the venerable Vertical Limit, but all of that was back when I saw those productions as unrealistic. It was Sly Stallone down in a crevasse dealing with the cold by pulling off his shirt to flex and rock and ice exploding with big thunderous fireballs and avalanches that came in with perfect dramatic timing that put me off.

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Khumbu Icefall

Khumbu Icefall

I believed that the reality of climbing big mountains was not being shown in American movie theaters. But again, this was all before that morning close to the end of our recent Everest Expedition. I now know that those portrayals are entirely truthful.

That fateful morning we started down through the Icefall for the last time, headed for Base Camp and a happy end to our non-Hollywood expedition. We were early in the day; it was still relatively cool and the bridges and ladders would still be nicely frozen. We were moving well after a month and a half on the mountain. Everybody knew which ropes to clip and which ones to avoid. Everybody knew to look at the anchors before trusting them. Everybody knew to watch out for each other and keep moving.

I'd given a final lecture as we left Camp I, telling Alison, Lynn, Kim and Jody, even my fellow guides Lisa and Ben, to keep on concentrating for just this last morning. No bad steps.

It was an unnecessary reminder. My team was doing a fine job of concentrating. They weren't, to my knowledge, dwelling on the fact that we'd turned 300 feet short of the summit just two days before. They weren't, as far as I could see, overly tired from the past week of continuously difficult days at altitude. They weren't, I hoped, focused on making airline reservations back to the world. They were climbing just fine and I was proud of them.

"But I didn't get to say all that and he didn't get to finish what he was saying. There was the strangest wind....."

Those first long and awkward ladder crossings were going as well as we could hope for. Some of the passages are time consuming for a team of seven careful people, and sure enough, we had a traffic jam going. It was at that spot where you had to go over the edge and straight down the ice wall for about 15 feet before you even got to put your feet on the top rung of a 12-foot vertically placed ladder that jammed us up. Nobody seized up on it or anything, it was just time-consuming to get all the ropework safe and correct.

Just then our full team of Sherpas caught up to us with their loads — 16 guys beginning to pull down our expedition tents and equipment. They had massive packs and they were moving pretty fast and that vertical wall and ladder was a tricky place to pass.

The two-man camera team from the National Geographic Expedition, Jim and Mike, had found the same difficulty. In an effort to spread out the crowd, I had asked Ben to hang at the base of the vertical ladder while Lisa acted as a sweep and I took our first two climbers, Jody and Alison, down toward the next bridges. We moved well, but I was careful to pull both of them aside to let a few of the Sherpas get by. In general, it is best not to hold up the working men (particularly when they have 100-pound packs and insist on wearing Levi's at 20,000 feet).

I remember quite clearly coming out to that crest where a small ladder spanned two narrow, yet deep, crevasses. From the ladder's end, on a "fin" of glacier that overlooked the lower Icefall, you had to clip yourself out of one rope, into the next, move right and down the slope a few feet, step across a little crevasse, clip past another anchor, move steeply left, down and over another crack and then down carefully to the top of a ladder on about a 45-degree slant.

Carefully, so as not to drop into the crevasse the ladder was spanning, you then turn around and pass the anchor with your safety clip back down the ladder, fitting your crampons neatly onto each rung while looking straight into the deep crevasse under you. Hop off at the other end, spin around, and reclip past the new anchors, take 10 more steps (just crossing one more minor crevasse in the process) and reach a little island of snow and ice where it was possible to gather and even step aside to let others pass.

Continued on PAGE 2 »

Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist