Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain by Jonathan Bloom (bookreader TXT) 📗

tents seemed rather scandalous. But the ado did not last long. The team was tired and needed to rest. Junk wrote that night: “In the tent, River Leaf said litle [sic] to me. ‘Zeigler needs to go down’ was all. Nothing else was needed. Her words were like an incantation. I rose and began planning for Zeigler’s decent [sic].”

As it would happen, Cole wanted to take Zeigler down. It would give him an opportunity to look for his lost journals, papers, and sketches. The decision was therefore made: Cole would take Zeigler down to Camp Two and one of the Sherpa would join him. One accepted but only after a long pause and raucous chewing out in Nepali by Pasang Dolma. The decision was a bold one for Junk to make. With both Zeigler and Cole down the mountain, two of his strongest climbers would be unavailable to him. He would have Pasang Dolma and that was about it. He was unlikely to rely on the other remaining Sherpa for anything after what had occurred only moments earlier. No progress up the lip could be made until Cole and the Sherpa returned.

As Cole prepared to help Zeigler down, he reminded Junk this would be a perfect time to let McGee go as well. Junk refused. His friend would make it. Cole and Zeigler walked out of their tents and into the blasting wind at noon on September 9th, prepared to climb back down the two steps on their way to Camp Two, where Zeigler would have a respite from the paucity of air at the higher camps. Junk and the rest of the team would wait at Camp Two B, hoping to have Cole back by nightfall. But before the descending party could even make the step, the dyspeptic Sherpa began yelling in a rambling manner back to Pasang Dolma. Junk wished to know what the man was saying. Pasang Dolma responded “Nothing. A string of terrible excuses why he cannot go down. Fear of heights? The way down is actually the other direction? What silly things to say!” Pasang Dolma began yelling again in Nepali, undoubtedly telling the dyspeptic Sherpa to stop with his nonsensical excuses and begin climbing down.

No one had even been paying attention to McGee who was puttering about camp in a daze looking for his misplaced hat (the tired, rotund, confused Irishman was in fact wearing his hat). He had his backpack on, possibly confused about the plans and thinking he was going down along with Cole and Zeigler. According to various team members’ notes, what happened next seemed to occur at a slow pace, like a reel of film being presented one frame every second. An exceptionally powerful gust of wind blasted through the camp. Only the members who were about to climb down were tied off. Everyone else simply held their ground, bending down in order to minimize wind resistance. McGee did not. His solution was to walk into the blast, standing straight up, taking the full force of it. This solution was working for him. However, the gust died as quickly as it was born, and then McGee was in trouble. His overcompensation now had no opponent, and he went stumbling forward, half-running and half-falling. It was not long before his awkward scramble turned into a spastic descent down the side of the lip. Down into the Icy Bellows.

McGee yelled bloody murder as he went over the edge. It was then everyone turned and moved to see. They all watched in horror as McGee took multiple tumbles down the steep ice. His fall was arrested only modestly by the raised, icy trail of a deceased avalanche crossing his path. This had the result of putting McGee into a slide. Helpless to do anything “we wached [sic] as, quite alive and aware, he sarted [sic] a high-speed glissade down the Belows [sic]” wrote Cole in misspelled, beaten writing that fumbled across the page.. “Limbs flailed. Hed [sic] snapped violent with each flaw in the slope. The scene was nauseating. Ashamed as I am to write this, it would have been less nausating [sic] had he fallen and died right away. Easily ten seconds after the calamity had begun, McGee, now only a dot in the distance below us, reached the botom [sic] of the Bellows thousands of feet down, and disappeared into the Oculus. We were tramatized [sic].”

The exhausted climbers snapped out of their mental slumbers. They had the sudden capacity to yell and go into a chaos of activity. The activity was disorganized. The ailing Zeigler simply went down on one knee and buried his hands in his mitts, muffling his cries. Others like Cole started pointing to possible routes down the Bellows and yelled at the Sherpa to prepare ropes and ice screws. River Leaf did not have a plan but began climbing down the side of the lip alone in desperation. Her fellow inexperienced climber – the other person on the trip who was clearly not supposed to be there - was gone and she refused to stand still for a moment.

Amid the chaos, standing silent and motionless was Junk. He was a statue, still staring at the place where his childhood friend, his brother, his business partner, his confidante, had fallen. “The look on his face wasn’t one of horor [sic] or grief as I would’ve imagined,” Cole wrote. “It was one of calculation.”

The mad activity of the camp continued a few moments longer and then an ear-splitting eruption near the summit drowned out all sound. Everyone stopped what they were doing and held their mitts to the sides of their heads. When the noise resided, Junk took the silence as an opportunity to say “Listen to me” in a calm voice. How was their fearless leader going to respond to the loss of his old chum? What came out of him must have been a surprise to all. “We are not climbing down there to get him. Continue