Beck Weathers > Quotes

“Your body doesn’t carry you up there. Your mind does. Your body is exhausted hours before you reach the top; it is only through will and focus and drive that you continue to move. If you lose that focus, your body is a dead, worthless thing beneath you.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Madan is to me the most extraordinary person in this story, because he didn’t know me at all. He didn’t know my family, and he has his own family, for whom he is the sole provider. We were separated by language, by culture, by religion, by the entire breadth of this world, but bound together by a bond of common humanity.

This man will never have to wonder again whether he has a brave heart.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Studies seem to show that those of us who believe we must achieve in order to merit love and respect—not just be ourselves—are vulnerable to emotional troughs when our opportunities to excel are restricted.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“If you, the reader, were by some magic instantly transported to the top of Mount Everest, you would have to deal with the medical fact that in the first few minutes you’d be unconscious, and in the next few minutes you’d be dead. Your body simply cannot withstand the enormous physiologic shock of being suddenly placed in such an oxygen-deprived environment. What a climber must do, as we did over several weeks, is to start at Base Camp, climb up, and then climb back down again. Rest and repeat. You keep doing this over and over on Everest, always pushing a little higher each time until (you hope) your body begins to acclimatize. You basically say to your body, “I am going to climb this thing, and I’m taking you with me. So get ready.” But you must be patient. Climb too fast and you elevate your risk of high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), in which your lungs fill with water and you can die unless you get down the mountain very fast. Even deadlier is high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), which causes the brain to swell. HACE can induce a fatal coma unless you are quickly evacuated. There’s no way to know beforehand if you are susceptible to these medical conditions. Some people develop symptoms at altitudes as low as ten thousand feet. Moreover, veteran climbers who’ve never encountered either problem can develop HAPE or HACE without warning. Similarly unpredictable is a much more common menace, hypoxia, caused by reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. In its milder forms, hypoxia induces euphoria and renders the sufferer a little goofy. Severe hypoxia robs you of your judgment and common sense, not a welcome complication at high altitude. Climbers call the condition HAS, High-Altitude Stupid.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“The quality of the food on a mountain climb is usually a direct function of availability and the willingness of someone to lug it up there for you. Base Camp on Everest, for example, was a busy place and a big market for provisioners. As a result, we enjoyed eggs every morning. But the higher you go and the farther away from civilization you are, the more practical and less palatable the fare becomes. By the time you get really high (and have just about stopped caring about food altogether), all that you generally consume are simple carbohydrates and the occasional swallow of soup with cookies or crackers.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Our plan was simple. We were going to get up with the sun and climb all day to get to High Camp on the South Col late that afternoon. We would then rest for three or four hours, get up again and climb all night and through the next day to hit Everest’s summit by noon on May 10, and absolutely no later than two o’clock. This point had been drilled into us over the preceding week: Absolutely no later than two. If you’re not moving fast enough to get to the summit by two, you’re not moving fast enough to get back down before darkness traps you on the mountain.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Our climb began in earnest on May 9. By then we’d successfully negotiated the Khumbu Icefall, surmounted the Western Cwm, and now were halfway up a moderately steep, four-thousand-foot wall of blue ice called the Lhotse Face, which the prudent climber will traverse very carefully. This extreme care is a function of the physics involved. With hard ice such as that found on the Lhotse Face, there is no coefficient of friction; you are traction free. Fall into an uncontrolled slide, and your chances of stopping are nil. You’re history. A Taiwanese climber named Chen Yu-Nan would discover the truth of this, to his horror, on the morning of May 9. Because the Lhotse Face is a slope, you pitch Camp Three by carving out a little ice platform for your tent, which you crawl into exhausted, desperate for some rest. No matter how tired you are, however, you must remember a couple of fairly simple rules. One, don’t sleepwalk. Two, when you get up in the morning, the very first thing you’ve got to do, without fail, is put those twelve knives on each climbing boot, your crampons, because they are what stick you down to that hill. Chen Yu-Nan forgot. He got out of his tent wearing his inner boots, took two steps, and went zhoooooooop! down into a crevasse, leading to his death.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“We reached High Camp on schedule late that afternoon. The South Col (from the Latin collum, or “neck”) is part of the ridge that forms Everest’s southeast shoulder and sits astride the great Himalayan mountain divide between Nepal and Tibet. Four groups—too many people, as it turned out—would be bivouacked there in preparation for the final assault: us, Scott Fischer’s expedition, a Taiwanese group and a team of South Africans who would not make the summit attempt that night. Altogether, maybe a dozen tents were set up, surrounded by a litter of spent oxygen canisters, the occasional frozen body and the tattered remnants of previous climbing camps. If you wander too close to the South Col’s north rim, you’ll tumble seven thousand uninterrupted feet down Everest’s Kangshung Face into the People’s Republic of China. Make a similar misstep on the opposite side, and you zip to a crash landing approximately four thousand feet down the Lhotse Face.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Krakauer did the right thing. Although our guide Mike Groom was just twenty minutes behind him on the trail, he offered to help me down. I, in turn, was uncomfortable with inflicting myself on Jon. I declined with thanks, saying I’d wait for Groom. I think Jon heaved a little sigh of gratitude. Another half hour or so passed, and here came Mike Groom with Yasuko. She looked like a walking corpse, so exhausted she could barely stand. Fortunately, Neal Beidleman and some other members of the Fischer group also came along just then, including Sandy Pittman, Charlotte Fox and Tim Madsen, all of whom had summitted, and all of whom were close to the limits of their endurance. Yasuko and I were the acute problems, however. Neal took her and headed on down the Triangle. Mike short-roped me, which is exactly what it sounds like. One end of a rope went around the waist of the downhill climber, me. Twenty feet back was Mike, who’d use muscle and leverage to stabilize me as we descended. It was nearly 6:00 P.M. by now.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Both my hands were completely frozen. My face was destroyed by the cold. I was profoundly hypothermic. I had not eaten in three days, or taken water for two days. I was lost and I was almost completely blind.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“I could no longer feel or move my right hand, no surprise under the circumstances, and normally a fairly simple problem to fix. You take off two of the three gloves you wear and jam the affected hand beneath your coat against your bare chest. When it’s warmed sufficiently, you take it back out, put on the gloves and go about your business. Now, I had been in very cold places, but what happened next was a complete shock. When I pulled those two outer gloves off, the skin on my hand and my arm immediately froze solid, even underneath that third expedition-weight glove. The shooting pain of instant frostbite so startled me that I lost my grip on the glove in my left hand, which the wind grabbed—whoooooosh—and sent into outer space. There was another pair of gloves in the pack on my back. But they might as well have been under my bed at home. In such a storm, there was no way I could take off that pack, put it down and rummage through it. The wind was strong enough to lift me bodily off the ground and drop me, which at one point it did. I didn’t have the time, or presence of mind, to consider my exposed right hand and forearm’s probable fate, or how I might fare in the future as a one-handed pathologist. I did reinsert my hand under my coat, a frozen Napoleon. Life and death were now the issue for all of us, with the odds against the former lengthening each moment.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“The operation was a radial keratotomy, in which tiny incisions are made in one’s corneas to alter the eyes’ focal lengths and (presumably) improve vision. However, unbeknownst to me and to virtually every ophthalmologist in the world, at high altitude a cornea thus altered will both flatten and thicken, shortening your focal length and rendering you effectively blind. That is what happened to me about fifteen hundred feet above High Camp in the early morning hours of May 10, 1996.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Once again the helicopter rose. One lone man. He moved up that valley with deliberate and delicate precision, and lay those skids down on the surface. He dared not let the weight of the helicopter descend. He had no idea if this was solid, or if this was chiffon over air. You never know up there whether you’re standing above a crevasse. The power was full on. His hands were frozen on the controls. His head didn’t move left or right—that changes your depth perception. We grabbed Makalu like a sack of potatoes, ran him over there and threw him in the back of this machine, slamming the door shut. The tail of the helicopter rose up. It did not lift up, but it did move forward toward the Icefall, where it plunged out of sight, as did my heart, because I knew he was not coming back.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“One of the Icefall’s more challenging features is the lightweight aluminum ladders you use to negotiate its jumble of slippery, cantilevered walls and deep crevasses. Anchored to the shifting ice, and lashed to one another, the ladders have a makeshift look and feel to them. On your five round-trip circuits of the Khumbu Icefall, you cross approximately seven hundred of these ladder bridges. Your first traverse is a religious experience, certainly not something you can practice at home. When you pass through the Icefall, you try to do so at first light, so you can see, but before the surrounding hills and ice fields can reflect the high-altitude sun’s intense radiation directly onto the Icefall, partially melting and dislocating the ladders’ moorings, and also energizing the chockablock seracs, loosening them to tip, slide and crash all the more.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“That season there’d been heavy snow on the trail up to Everest Base Camp, about seven miles beyond Lobuje. Yaks still couldn’t negotiate the final stretch, meaning that all gear, equipment and food had to be carried the last few miles on human, mostly Sherpa, backs. Even beneath Lobuje the path was steep and deep with snow. At one turn we saw a bloody yak leg sticking straight out of a snowbank. We were told the limb simply had snapped off as the animal had struggled through the snow. In Lobuje, we received word that one of our Sherpas had fallen 150 feet into a crevasse and broken his leg while scouting trails on the mountain above us. We all spent an extra day in Lobuje while Rob Hall and one of his guides went ahead to help manage the Sherpa’s rescue and evacuation.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“It can get extremely warm around Base Camp on a sunny day in May. A thermometer left out in the afternoon sun by the Hillary expedition reportedly registered a high temperature of about 150 degrees.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“I don’t like that idea any better than your last one,” he said. “If I come down off the top of this thing and you’re not standing here, I’m not going to have any idea whether or not you’ve gone down safely to High Camp, or if you’ve just gone for an eight-thousand-foot wipper. I want you to promise me—I’m serious about this—I want you to promise me that you’re going to stay here until I come back.” I said, “Rob, cross my heart, hope to die, I’m sticking.” It didn’t enter my mind that he might never come back.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“On May 10, 1996, the mountain began gathering me to herself, and I slowly succumbed. The drift into unconsciousness was not unpleasant as I sank into a profound coma on the South Col, where my fellow climbers eventually would leave me for dead. Peach received the news by telephone at 7:30 A.M. at our home in Dallas. Then, a miracle occurred at 26,000 feet. I opened my eyes. My wife was hardly finished with the harrowing task of telling our children their father was not coming home when a second call came through, informing her that I wasn’t quite as dead as I had seemed. Somehow I regained consciousness out on the South Col—I don’t understand how—and was jolted to my senses, as well as to my feet, by a vision powerful enough to rewire my mind.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“On clear days you can see a steady plume of ice and snow streaming for a mile or so off Everest’s summit. This is the mountain’s distinctive white banner, highlighted against the cobalt sky, and a signal that the jet stream, with its winds of 150 to 200 miles an hour, is screaming right over Everest, as it does for most of the year. No one tries to reach the top in these conditions. But at one time in the spring, and once more in the fall, the banner fades. The ferocious winds lift off Everest, offering a brief window of opportunity for you to go up there, try to tag the top and then hope that you get back down alive.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“The storm relented on the morning of the eleventh. The winds dropped to about thirty knots. Stuart Hutchison and three Sherpas went in search of Yasuko and me. They found us lying next to each other, largely buried in snow and ice. First to Yasuko. Hutchison reached down and pulled her up by her coat. She had a three-inch-thick layer of ice across her face, a mask that he peeled back. Her skin was porcelain. Her eyes were dilated. But she was still breathing. He moved to me, pulled me up, and cleaned the ice out of my eyes and off my beard so he could look into my face. I, like Yasuko, was barely clinging to life. Hutchison would later say he had never seen a human being so close to death and still breathing. Coming from a cardiologist, I’ll accept that at face value. What do you do? The superstitious Sherpas, uneasy around the dead and dying, were hesitant to approach us. But Hutchison didn’t really need a second opinion here. The answer was, you leave them. Every mountaineer knows that once you go into hypothermic coma in the high mountains, you never, ever wake up. Yasuko and I were going to die anyway. It would only endanger more lives to bring us back. I don’t begrudge that decision for my own sake. But how much strain would be entailed in carrying Yasuko back? She was so tiny. At least she could have died in the tent, surrounded by people, and not alone on that ice. Hutchison and the Sherpas got back to camp and told everyone that we were dead. They called down to Base Camp, which notified Rob’s office in Christchurch, which relayed the news to Dallas. On a warm, sunny Saturday morning the phone rang in our house. Peach answered and was told by Madeleine David, office manager for Hall’s company, Adventure Consultants, that I had been killed descending from the summit ridge. “Is there any hope?” Peach asked. “No,” David replied. “There’s been a positive body identification. I’m sorry.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Above the Icefall’s upper edge, and also hidden from your view, is the gradually sloping valley of the Western Cwm (pronounced koom), which rises another two thousand feet toward an immense, jagged amphitheater, anchored on the left by Everest, with 27,890-foot Lhotse in the center and, on the right, the third of the three brute sisters that dominate the high terrain, 25,790-foot Nuptse. The Cwm (Welsh for “valley”) was named in 1921 by George Mallory, who led the first three assaults on Everest, all from the Tibetan side. Mallory, when asked why he wished to climb Everest, quipped famously, “Because it is there.” He may also have been the first person to summit Everest. Then again, maybe he wasn’t.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

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― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Burleson later shared his first impressions of me with a TV interviewer: “I couldn’t believe what I saw. This man had no face. It was completely black, solid black, like he had a crust over him. His jacket was unzipped down to his waist, full of snow. His right arm was bare and frozen over his head. We could not lower it. His skin looked like marble. White stone. No blood in it.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“The camp is essentially a tent town of about three hundred transient inhabitants mingling with a bunch of yaks on a glacier. Some structures are built partially of stone, and must be rebuilt each spring due to the constant movement of the glacial ice below. Our cook tent, for instance, had stone walls, as did our dining and storage tents. We also had a first-rate latrine, fashioned from stone, with an opening in the back where our wastes could be shoveled out. This was a necessity under a new rule that mandates all human feces eventually must be removed from the mountain.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“One of the body’s most important physiological adaptations to high altitude is the millions and millions of extra oxygen-bearing red blood cells that your bone marrow produces in response to chronic oxygen deprivation. The extra oxygen-carrying capacity is critical. Still, you thirst for air when high on the big mountains. Breathing is such hard work that 40 percent of your total energy output is devoted to it. Each day you can blow off an amazing seven liters of water through your lungs alone. That leaves you constantly dehydrated. Also, you can no longer sleep or eat. Once in the Death Zone, above 25,000 feet, the thought of food becomes repugnant to most people. Even if you can force yourself to chew and swallow something, your body will not digest it. Yet you are burning about twelve thousand calories a day, which means you’re consuming your own tissue—about three pounds of muscle a day—in order to stay alive.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“The sun at that altitude is an enormous ball of light so powerful that it can burn the inside of your mouth and the inside of your nose. If you take off those protective glasses, within ten minutes your retinas will be seared to total blindness. Hence, I expected that, once the sun was fully out, even behind my jet-black lenses my pupils would clamp down to pinpoints and everything would be infinitely focused. I was certain I was right. It had to work. In the predawn darkness, however, I was too blind to climb. So I stepped out of line and let everyone pass, going from fourth out of thirty-some climbers to absolutely dead last. It wasn’t unpleasant, really, watching everybody traipse past me. I basically stood there chatting and acting like a Wal-Mart greeter until the sun began to illuminate the summit face. As I expected, my vision did begin to clear, and I was able to dig in the front knives on my boots, move across, and head on up to the summit ridge. Then I compounded my problem by reaching to wipe my face with an ice-crusted glove. A crystal painfully lacerated my right cornea, leaving that eye completely blurred. That meant I had no depth perception, and that’s not good in that environment. My left eye was a little blurry but basically okay. But I knew that I could not climb above this point, a living-room size promontory called the Balcony, about fifteen hundred feet below the summit, unless my vision improved. Still believing it would, I said to Rob, “You guys go ahead and boogie on up the hill. At a point that I can see, I’ll just wander up after you.” It was about 7:30 A.M. “Beck,” he answered in that unmistakable Kiwi accent, “I don’t like that idea. You’ve got thirty minutes. If you can see in thirty minutes, climb on. If you cannot see in thirty minutes, I don’t want you climbing.” “Okay.” I hesitated. “I’ll accept that.” This was not a willing and happy answer; I had come too far to quit so close to the summit. But I also recognized the common sense in what Hall said.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“On the evening of May 10, 1996, a killer blizzard exploded around the upper reaches of Mount Everest, trapping me and dozens of other climbers high in the Death Zone of the Earth’s tallest mountain. The storm began as a low, distant growl, then rapidly formed into a howling white fog laced with ice pellets. It hurtled up Mount Everest to engulf us in minutes. We couldn’t see as far as our feet. A person standing next to you just vanished in the roaring whiteout. Wind speeds that night would exceed seventy knots. The ambient temperature fell to sixty below zero. The blizzard pounced on my group of climbers just as we’d gingerly descended a sheer pitch known as the Triangle above Camp Four, or High Camp, on Everest’s South Col, a desolate saddle of rock and ice about three thousand feet below the mountain’s 29,035-foot summit.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Sleep was our deadliest enemy. Every mountaineer knows that if you allow yourself to be taken down by that cold, it is a one-way ticket to death. There are no exceptions. Your core temperature plunges until your heart stops. So we yelled at each other, and hit each other and kicked each other. Anything to remain awake.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Just as we received the radio message, a group of Sherpas came running down the valley toward us. They were dragging something, which turned out to be Makalu Gau, whose feet had been destroyed by the cold. He could not stand. Now we had a problem. We talked about it, and I told the others that I couldn’t get on the helicopter and leave Makalu. I think that was the right thing to do, but that wasn’t why I said it. I didn’t want to second-guess myself every day for the rest of my life. Then we saw the Squirrel. The shiny green machine rose directly above us, and moved up the valley, ascended toward us and then just disappeared off the face. I thought to myself, This guy is not stupid. This was a supremely dumb idea. If he puts the machine down for any reason and cannot take off, he is a dead man. He’s got to know that. He was up there in civilian clothes. He was not a climber. He did not have the clothing. He did not have the experience. He did not have the skills. He’d be trapped above the Khumbu Icefall, two thousand of the most vicious feet of real estate on earth. Altitude sickness would kill him before he could walk out of there.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest

“Everest Base Camp, where you actually begin to climb the mountain at 17,600 feet, is higher than all but two points in the United States, both in Alaska. Interestingly, you cannot see the upper part of Mount Everest from Base Camp. As it is, you are huffing and puffing by the time you get there, and you wonder when you finally arrive, exhausted, just how in the world you’re ever going to survive. We arrived on April 7.”
― Beck Weathers, Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest