Camp 2 May 19  20,000 feet Sunny and mild, not much wind

Horrible night.  I tossed and waited for day light all night long.  It isn’t unusual to not sleep the first night at a new altitude but I have been here before for several nights.  I didn’t have any appetite when I got here the day before either.  I attributed that to the slog through the snow Sahara but I am not hungry again this morning.  I’m also wondering whose idea this was.  None of these are good signs.

While laying in my bag contemplating why I am always getting myself into these fixes and waiting for the sun to hit my tent I hear a odd moaning.  People are so often sick, etc. that at first I don’t give it much thought.  Then I hear a Sherpa yelling something in Nepali over and over.  Finally, the responsible Bud drags the lazy Bud out of my nice warm bag to see if there is a problem.   One of our climbing partners, Henri (Henri is a runs a chemical plant in Germany – a super guy and super strong) has apparently passed out and done a face plant into a rock.  It isn’t pretty and he is in real distress.  We get him into his tent and start him on oxygen.  No one in our camp that morning has medical training.  Fortunately, there is an EMT at the camp next to ours and he jumps right in.  There is also a doctor with the Croatian Women’s Expedition (that’s a whole other story) and some one goes to get her.

In a few minutes things go from bad to worse when Henri has a seizure.  I understand this isn’t unusual in people who have had a concussion but at this altitude there is no helicopter or rescue.  Eventually, our team mate stabilizes and the decision is made to get him down as quickly as possible.   It is always quicker if the patient can walk and initially it appears he will be able too if only very slowly. That only last a few minutes and Henri is out of it again.  He is then strapped to a Sked.  That is a semi-rigid plastic stretcher.  Once some one is strapped in it is rigid and allows a patient to be lowered, dragged, flipped upside down, suspended over bottomless crevasses and bumped over ladders all with the reasonable assurance that the patient will be unable to get out of it and beat the daylights out of you.

I told my teammates that if I ever had to be taken down in one of those things I needed to be knocked out.  I don’t even want to think about being rolled up in that thing while being dragged across a ladder over a gaping crevasse – especially after seeing how easy they flip upside down.  They don’t strap you in for no reason.  The C2 gang got him to the top of the ice fall and people from BC took him from there.  All together it took 12 hours to get him down with as many as 8 people helping at any one time.  When you consider this was on the comparatively flat stretch from C2 to C1 it makes it easier to understand why most bodies are not recovered from higher up.  Several years ago a family hired ten Sherpas to recover a body on the North side very high up.  They spent the better part of a day and a ton of oxygen and were only able to lower the body about a 100 yards before giving up.

Henri was evacuated to KTM on the helicopter the next morning as it was already too late to get him out that night.  We hear he is doing much better and after some test to confirm there has been no permanent damage he is on his way home.  It reinforces that so much of this is about luck.  Henri has had poor luck ever since he got here starting with having to go to Namche to have a wisdom tooth extracted two days after getting to base camp.  Considering he was one of the strongest people I have ever climbed with and near the top of my list of “most likely to summit” I really feel for him.

In the midst of all the talk about getting bodies down from the higher reaches of Everest I thought of a new business opportunity.  Maybe we could take a cylinder of helium and some balloons and float them down.  We could call it “Bodies R Us” or my favorite “Remains to Go”.  I might be on to something.