Everest Ultimate Rescue

[Skyy Mansour]

Ihave watched many documentaries about accidents on Everest and what I learned is, that it is impossible to rescue anybody from the death zone. It is simply too hard for the sherpas, or anybody else to carry somebody. So, when a climber is unable to stand on his own feet, he is left there, basically to die. If other groups on the way up or down encounter the individual, they leave them there and continue upwards or downwards.

1) Abort ascents, organize a rescue group and bring the person more supplies: oxygen bottles and blankets, maybe even a tent or other way of keeping them warm, until they get better. Maybe even put them in a portable compression chamber. This should be theoretically doable.

6) Have a rope installed on one of the steeper, longer walls or slopes and let the person down, until he reaches a lower point, even if that lower point is not very easily accessible, just to kill some altitude.

I know that most of these are probably stupid, but somehow I can't believe, that the only option there can ever be is to leave people for dead there. There have been well-known climbers, who criticize the practice of leaving people for dead. However, as far as I know, those well-known climbers haven't provided practical solutions to the problem.

The problem with rescuing someone in the death zone is, well, that it is the death zone. Supplemental oxygen helps, but the decreased pressure is also problematic. If you are injured or sick, you are not going to get better no matter what type of supplies could be hauled up to you. The only way to rescue someone is to get them down, and get them down quickly.

Rescuing someone requires a time window of good (or at least reasonable) weather. Above 8000m these weather windows are often short and unpredictable. The first rule of search and rescue is not to put yourself at risk. By definition, going above, or staying, 8000m is putting yourself at risk, even in perfect weather.

Assuming you can get rescuers to the scene, you now need to get the injured party down. Littering someone out under ideal conditions is really hard (even with a team of 10). On steep snow and ice in extreme conditions, it is probably just not possible. Giving them a paraglider or sled has essentially zero chance of working and likely will cause more injury. While it is sad, comfortably freezing to death may be more desirable than a short sled ride resulting in broken bones only to then freeze to death.

This sort of hard decision happens at lower elevations. In some ways harder: The Death Zone scenarios obliges you to abandon the victim to save the rest of the party. At lower elevations it's often less clearcut.

Mountain sickness (altitude sickness) you need to descend. Not now. Right NOW. I think it was in Freedom of the Hills, or Mountaineering Medicine mentioned that sometimes as little as 300 feet can make a difference.

Keeping a person who cannot walk warm is difficult. His heat production is dropping to something like 1/3 of what an active person is using. He is likely at least damp from sweating. Lying on the ground is a good heat sink. This becomes more pronounced if he is going into shock.

You also have to worry about everyone who is standing around getting cold. People donate their parka as ground insulation under the victim. In the excitement (panic?) of the moment people aren't monitoring each other for signs of hypothermia. It is very easy to end up with the smaller, thinner members of the expedition to get shivering cold and no one notices. (This is a particular problem with day trips -- you usually don't have the extra gear you need to make an emergency camp.)

I talked to a Search and Rescue organization. "How many people does it take to rescue someone who can't walk?" His response was that it took 12. 4 people with the stretcher at any given time. 8 people who carried some of the stretcher bearer's gear and would swap off with them. In rough terrain it would take 6 or 8 on the stretcher, with lots of scrambling to get to the next position.

The stretcher bearers were slow. Sometimes it made more sense to have some of the party shuttle with packs, making several trips. (Two pack trips = 3 times the distance -- there, back, there, Three pack trips = 5 times the distance.)

I've yet to have someone who can't walk, but I had one case where a young man tore ligaments in his ankle. He could put zero weight on his foot. To get him the fairly short distance (somewhere under a km) to a clearing where a helicopter could land:

Normally you stretcher someone only to a clearing where you can get a helicopter, or a road where you can get a 4WD. But not many choppers have operational ceilings above 12,000 feet. And in wilderness settings most of our roads are there for logging or are remnants from previous eras. There are few above timberline unless it was a pass.

There is a reason that first aid manuals say, "transport victim to medical facility" A big part of wilderness first aid is really 'second aid' -- how to deal with the problem until you can get help. Most of this simplifies to keep the blood inside, keep warm and quiet -- while his clock runs out. Meanwhile communicating with someone that you need help, and preparing a place for it to arrive, if by air. Often even doing this much is difficult.

Good leaders know this: Accidents kill. The same sort of thing that is no big deal when you are a ten minute drive or even an hour drive from the nearest hospital become a big deal indeed when help is a day or two away. So you take extra care to keep them from happening.

Anyway, one of the things I would do around the campfire after we'd done a hefty pass, is to set up a scenario of an injury accident at that location. The point here, wasn't to tell them how to do a rescue, but to see how hard a rescue is. With teens this is the best way I've found to get them to listen when I say, "Be careful" On senior trips, I would coach a 'victim' ahead of time, and they would have to get the victim to a place to camp. Since they were also in charge of picking camp spots this put them in a dilemma -- camp soon at an awful spot, or keep going to a better spot. My favorite spot for this was a skinny ravine on the north side of Mumm pass in Willmore Wilderness. The trail crosses the creek (or IS the creek) 67 times in 4 km. Everything that isn't cliff or scree is wet or covered in 10 foot alder and willow. Two hours of moving someone with a 'broken ankle' is very convincing case for "don't do that!"

Take a good look at required gear for day trips. In my latter days running trips, I had the boys in effect bring a reduced backpack. They could leave all their food behind, and depending on weather much of their spare clothing. I required sleeping bag each, and 1 tarp per two people, a layer of clothing, rain gear, and toque. This amounted to about 12 pounds. Since most of them had been carrying 30-40 pounds, this was still light enough to keep spirits high, but eased my mind about having to spend the night away from camp.

The manoeuvrability of such a vehicle in mountains would make it limited in application. I can't imagine someone outlaying the cost, unless climbers were willing to heavily invest in some kind of rescue. Human nature is to assume it's someone else who will need to be rescued, so I suspect this kind of solution isn't going to fly (pun intended).

Edit: I didn't know about the case of David Sharp, mentioned in the comments. The Wikipedia page about it mentions lots of other attempts to rescue people from above apx 8000m, most of them failing miserably and killing rescuers. In Patagonia it's almost impossible to even recover bodies, let alone rescuing people. I can't imagine how strenuous it must be to carry someone from 8000m down, but I'm absolutely sure the experts have thought of it and it's not due to lack of ideas: it's just not practical. Helicopter rescues depend on extremely good weather, and are most often than not unfeasible, almost always risking the aircraft, the pilot and the crew.

Together with Myles Osborne of Portsmouth, England, Andrew Brash of Calgary, Canada, and Jangbu Sherpa of Nepal, I was involved in the Everest rescue of Lincoln Hall from just below the summit, where he had been left for dead after suffering cerebral oedema at 8600 metres / 28,200 feet. The team and I gave up our attempt on Everest at 7am on a beautiful, sunny, clear, windless day, and we were luckily able to assist in bringing him down the mountain. During this ordeal, I was deeply moved and inspired by Mr. Hall's courage and desire to survive beyond what others had thought was a "hopeless case". was a tough year for both climbing and rescues, due to the tragedy and controversy over the 'non-rescue' of a British climber named David Sharp, best summarized by Sir Edmund Hillary in a radio clip narrated by David Wallis, from Melbourne, Australia.

It may seem unfair and cruel that Lincoln Hall survived this nearly insurmountable experience on Everest only to pass away 6 years later at a relatively young age. After getting to know him and his wife Barbara, I believe Lincoln fought for every extra day possible to spend with his family and friends, which seemed to be the whole world to him. I'll be thinking of him when climbing Everest and say a prayer for Lincoln when I reach 'Mushroom Rock' at 8600 metres / 28,200 feet, where we first met during his rescue. I welcome you to follow our Everest Expedition at SummitClimb News , where we have 7 Australian team members on the team.

Lincoln Hall was the first Director of the Australian Himalayan Foundation, and in memoriam to Mr. Hall, I wish to build a new school in remote Nepal during June, working together with the Mount Everest Foundation for Sustainable Development on our annual Remote Nepal Service Trek. If you or anyone you know would like to donate or become involved, please let me know. Thank you very much.

During the latter half of 2006, with his frostbitten fingers still wrapped in bandages, Lincoln Hall wrote a book called: Dead Lucky, Life After Death on Mount Everest. In the book, he credits his survival to a devotion to Tibetan Buddhism. In fact, Mr. Hall believed in the Tibetan Buddhist 8 stages of death, and that he went through two of the stages while perched overnight on Everest's summit ridge with his jacket unzipped and fingers frozen. In Tribute to Lincoln Hall's Buddhist Spirit, I wish to construct a meditation center which will welcome visitors from all over the world to Nepal's oldest Buddhist convent, and the closest to Mount Everest herself, the Deboche Nunnery, where 10 nuns pray in peaceful solitude and beauty beneath the shadow of Everest. We visit and work on this sacred temple annually during our Everest Service Trek . If you or anyone you know would like to donate or become involved, please let me know. Thank you very much.

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