Storm Over MT Everest

Storm Over Mt. Everest

Film - Storm Over Mt. Everest

As Norgay Tenzing, the legendary Sherpa climber, said of George Frey, "Like many men before them, they had held a great mountain lightly, and they had paid the price.

The Law of Significance. No one can do anything of significance alone. Throughout the two days that the four teams of climbers were on Mt. Everest, nearly all of the climbers had times when they felt they were alone on the mountain. This was especially true when they climbed at night and the only evidence that there were other climbers on the mountain was the moving headlamps of the climbers ahead of them. Each climber ascended Mt. Everest for his own individual reasons, and each Sherpa aided the climbers for his own reasons, too. Each climber was on his or her own and, yet, was part of a time.

Several climbers did act on their own during the terrible challenge when they were held hostage by a ferocious, raging storm. Anatoli Boukreev saved several climbers completely by his own actions. Boukreev went several times into the storm to bring back one climber at a time. Because of the weakened state of the climbers, Boukreev could only trust himself to manage one faltering climber each trip. He went into the storm -- into the frigid night -- until he could not. Beck Weathers kept himself alive on the mountain under conditions that would have killed other men. Time and again -- like a cat with nine lives -- Beck struggled on. A few times, Beck was completely dependent on other climbers -- he became completely blinded on the mountain, his face, hands, toes, and an arm became completely frozen -- but it was his resolve and his lizard brain that made him get up, made him move, made him struggle on. Even when he was nearly left for dead when all the other climbers who had made it to the camp were leaving, Beck called out to the last man off the mountain -- and saved his own life one more time.

Makalu Gau kept himself alive by doing the "disco" to keep moving. Beside him, Scott Fischer was failing, dying because he was sick and freezing because he could not move. But Gau kept moving until finally a Sherpa found him. Makalu saved his life, but lost his fingers, toes, and his nose. Rob Hall had the biggest challenge to do something significant on his own. Hall stayed with Doug Hansen, who had collapsed on the South Summit. Hall tried to help Hansen down, tried to figure out how to get supplementary oxygen to Hansen, and tried to get Hansen to rally and help Rob save him. Then, recognizing that Hansen could not help himself, Hall tried to get him help Hansen survive. In doing so -- in staying at the top of the South Summit -- Hall put himself in a situation where he might have been able to get down on his own, if he had started down before he got too cold and too weak from being too high up the mountain. But Hall did not take his chance. He stayed with Hansen until he no longer had a chance to take.

2) The Law of the Big Picture The idea behind this law is that the goal is more important than the role of leadership. When a team has a collective goal, the main objective is to obtain that goal through ethical means and in a manner that ensures the safety of the team. However, the end goal is the target and it supersedes any notions of leadership that might get in the way. Scott Fischer was ill -- most likely from a severe form of altitude sickness -- from the beginning of the climb up Everest. He was an extraordinary mountain climber and an excellent leader, but illness was foreign to him and it clouded his judgment. He was not able to get down from the mountain, even with the help of a Sherpa. Had it not been for the storm, Fischer might have survived. The storm kept the Sherpas and other climbers from getting to Fischer with supplementary oxygen, which is crucial when someone has developed altitude sickness. This may have been the only time in Fischer's life when he could not let go of his leadership role sufficient to aim for the goal of getting all the climbers up -- and down -- the mountain safely.

3) The Law of the Niche The meaning of the law of the niche is that all players have a place where they add the most value. The most apparent application of this principle is the role of the Sherpas in high altitude climbing. The Sherpas spend all their lives at a relatively high altitude so they are physiologically "engineered" or developed to deal with the stress of high altitude climbing. Their capacity is far superior to the average climber, and on par with a climber like Anatoli Boukreev. Sherpa help on a climb can mean the difference between a successful climb and death. But the Sherpa niche is a narrow one -- Sherpa's are very superstitious and fearful of death. The best illustrations of this problem occurred with Doug Hansen and Beck Weathers. The Sherpas came within 100 meters of Doug Hansen when he was stranded at the Hillary Step, but the storm drove them back and they did not persist. Fearful of dying themselves, they left hot tea on the trail with the hope that Hansen would find it. Hansen was immobilized at the time, and his condition made them fearful -- he was close to death. Beck Weathers was rescued several times during the blizzard and was, at one point, left alone in a tent. Literally nearly frozen to death, Beck asked the Sherpa to bring him tea, but the Sherpa would not enter the tent, and Weathers' frozen face -- and apparently the look of one so close to death -- frightened the Sherpa so much that he fled, leaving Weathers alone. Within their niche, the Sherpas were unsurpassable, outside it, they became a liability.

4) The Law of Mount Everest Of all the laws for leadership, this eponymous law is the most relevant. The meaning behind the goal is that as the challenge escalates, the need for teamwork elevates, and it was never more apropos than on this ill-fated and most tragic of the Everest climbs. One of the dynamics of being caught in ferocious and long-lasting storm on the Mountain is that climbers begin to think of their own survival to the detriment of other climbers. This doesn't happen all at once, and it is not a selfish preexisting orientation. Rather, there is a slow dawning that all one can do is save oneself -- if even that. For some climbers, it happens early in a disaster. For others, it comes only when the options seem to have been taken away. For others, like Rob Hall, it never comes. There were many noble attempts to help other climbers, and some were successful. In fact, several climbers survived only because of the teamwork that occurred. Small groups of climbers clustered together, clutching each other, encouraging each other, and trying to create some buffer from the storm by the collection of their bodies. Other climbers dragged their fellows to safety, dogging them, not letting them stop or fall; relentless, perhaps, because in saving the other person they may have been able to convince themselves that they still had some measure of control -- some response to challenge the Mountain back on its own terms. All of these valiant efforts were made all the more difficult -- and significant -- by the fact that the several leaders of the climb were incapacitated or unreachable.

5) The Law of the Chain The word chain is especially poignant in this story of Everest climbers, who work their way up the many hazardous zones of the mountain like a chain of humanity, bound together, not by links, but by raw determination and a common goal. This law argues that the strength of the team is impacted by its weakest link, and it is perhaps one of the simplest -- in terms of construct -- and purest demonstrations of the principle. Few activities that humans engage in are as elegant portrayed as a chain of human links. Yet, that is precisely what high altitude climbing is about. Each season, Mt. Everest is crowded with climbers -- it is consistently "overbooked" and team after team become, then, one long interrelated chain as the actions of one team can have enormous impact on the fate of the others. Timing truly is everything in a high altitude climb. There are only so many hours when it is possible to climb, and even at that, the climbers test the limits of those restrictions -- often to their detriment. The last meters of the climb seem almost impossible, and climbers slog along, drag themselves along, at seem an unacceptable rate, even through the clouds of their oxygen-starved brains and their blind determination to make the summit. Time passes, and progress is interminably slow. Anywhere else on earth, except during emergency conditions, say, a buffer of time can generally be found or created. But this is no more so for high altitude climbing than it is for emergency surgery -- time is not a friend in these conditions. There is no such thing as the tincture of time on Mt. Everest. The passing of time kills on Mt. Everest, and every weak link in the human chain exponentially increases the jeopardy to climbers. Leadership can only do so much under conditions when the weak links are revealed well into the climb -- for instance, when it is another team that acts like a weak link for all the climbers on the Mountain on any given day. The best that leaders can do under these conditions is stay absolutely lucid and adaptable -- responding on a second-by-second basis to changing conditions. There were 33 climbers on the slopes of Mt. Everest on May 11. For unknown reasons, the fixed ropes at The Balcony and at Hillary's Step were not set in place prior to the climbers arriving. Both Hall's and Fischer's teams were impacted by this delay of an hour while each team waited for the Sherpas. In addition, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer told their team members to stay within 150 feet of each other, so bottlenecks began to build up at the single fixed rope on Hillary's step. Leaders must make the hard decisions for the sake of the entire team -- Rob Hall had too big of a heart to make this sort of decision on his own. Scott Fischer deluded himself the way a 40-year-old suffering from a heart attack might -- it is human nature to deny what seems improbable or that is innately unacceptable.

6) The Law of the Catalyst Winning teams have players who make things happen -- catalysts are people who get things done. There were several obvious leaders who were catalysts on the climb, one of whom was criticized for his individualistic approach. Anatoli Boukreev climbed without oxygen. He argued that using oxygen gave climbers a false sense of security -- Boukreev was one of those athletes, like Lance Armstrong, who exhibited extraordinary physical stamina and lungs capable of taking him nearly anywhere he wanted to go. Because he did climb without oxygen -- and his style was to go up fast and come down fast, Boukreev arrived at the summit before everyone else and also descended first. Doubtless, conscious of the fact that every minute he spent at altitude meant that his brain was dying, Boukreev knew that speed and his innate strength were the only two variables that gave him the capacity to climb as he did. He climbed by his own rules and because he did, he was available and able to help other climbers to safety

7) The Law of the Compass The meaning of this law -- anyone can steer the ship but it takes a leader to chart the course -- is doubtless applicable to most leadership conditions, but when a series of unpredictable events occurs, those who start out to be leaders may not be leaders in the end. Two of the leaders of the Adventure Consultants team died near the South Summit -- Groom managed to get down to the South Col. Neal Beidleman and Anatoli Boukreev were the two leaders from Mountain Madness, Scott Fischer's team. Fischer was incapacitated shortly after he began his decent, and Neal Beidleman wandered lost in the blizzard on the South Col until about midnight when he and three others saw lights that they believed were from Camp IV.

8) The Law of the Bad Apple. Bad apple seems like a rather harsh way to describe Doug Hansen, the postal worker from Seattle, but the fact of the matter is that he wanted too badly to not only climb Mt. Everest, but to make it to the summit. Doug worked two jobs in order to be able to afford climbing, and to afford this -- his last climb -- trip. Doug had collapsed on the South Summit the year before when he was climbing with Rob's team. So both climber and team leader wanted very much for this to be a successful climb for Doug. Rob was empathetic and felt a strong sense of responsibility for Doug. Rob's sense of obligation as a leader, when combined with Doug's physical condition -- which may not have been sub-par, as even the strongest climber can suddenly be overcome with Mountain Sickness though they've had no history of it in the past -- compromised the safety of the team, led to a situation from which there was ultimately no escape.

9) The Law of Countability Teammates must be able to count on each other when it counts. There is little argument that this principle was being implemented on the slopes of Mt. Everest on May 11, 1996. Everywhere, there were examples of teammates helping each other on the South Summit side. However, there was considerable controversy associated with three climbers from India, who were passed by two climbers from Japan. The Japanese climbers were reported -- by Outside journalist Jon Krakauer -- to have climbed right past two downed climbers in their bid to make the summit. According to Krakauer, the fallen climbers were not even acknowledged. Further, the Japanese climbers were said to have reneged on an agreement to join a search party to find and help the Indian climbers. The Japanese climbers made the ascent; two of the Indian climbers died.

10) The Law of the Price Tag The meaning of this principle is perhaps best applied in two ways. A team fails to reach its potential when it fails to pay its price. The price most climbers pay is that of not being able to summit. It is not at all unusual for high altitude climbers to have to make several attempts -- over several separated expensive trips -- before they can summit. When climbers like Doug Hansen are unable to let go of that goal, their refusal to pay the price is passed on to others -- who, in the case of mountaineering -- may pay with their lives. The second type of price is extracted from climbers because of the physical abuse they encounter over repeated climbs. Most climbers have fallen, have gotten tangled in equipment, and have suffered frostbite. Some, like those on Mt. Everest on May 11, 1996, suffer life-changing, debilitating physical damage. It is a high price to pay for an individual, and the cost to the team can be enormous, particularly if it means risking their own lives to rescue team members.

11) The Law of the Scoreboard This law, which means that the team that can make adjustments knows where it stands, is another law with clear and direct application to high altitude climbing. Conditions change rapidly on the mountain and any plan is susceptible to the destructive forces of nature or the accidents and oversights of climbers. The ill-fated climb is an excellent illustration of how leaders and followers both had to adapt their climbing plan in enormous and crucial ways.

12) The Law of the Bench Good teams have great depth, but a good starter is simply not enough if the team wants to go to the highest level. This law of leadership is particularly germane to the climbing teams on Everest. High altitude climbers are exceptionally fit -- mentally, emotionally, and physically. They can justifiably be called a very deep bench. The caliber of the climbers who were on Everest on May 11, 1996, was exceptional -- without a doubt, it is to their individual credit -- the concept of having a bench exemplified -- and to the inherent leadership capacity in each climber that any climbers survived.