Bukreev Anatoliĭ Nikolaevich - The climb: tragic ambitions on Everest

In ancient Buddhist scriptures the Himalaya are referred to as the storehouse of snow, and in 1996 the storehouse was filled again and again as unusual amounts of snow fell in the mountains.

In the early evening of May 10, 1996, a particularly vicious storm blew into Mount Everest and lingered at its highest elevations for more than ten hours. Twenty-three men and women, mountaineers who had climbed the mountain that day from its southern side in Nepal, could not make it to the safety of their highest-altitude camp. In a virtual white-out, battered by hurricane-force winds strong enough to blow over a semitrailer truck, the climbers fought for their lives.

The mountaineers had been caught in the Death Zone, the elevations above 8,000 meters where extended exposure to subzero temperatures and oxygen deprivation combine and kill, quickly.

As the climbers fought for survival, they were often blind but for an arms length. Sometimes there were ropes to secure and guide them. The pressure gauges on their oxygen tanks fell to zero, and the raging confusion of hypoxia began to conquer most rational figurings. The foretelling numbness of frostbite pushed the possibilities of amputations from remote to probable. In the dark and the screaming howl of the storm the climbers began to bargain. My fingers for my life? Fair enough; just let me live.

Below the descending climbers, in the high-altitude camp they were struggling to reach, a Russian mountaineer and climbing guide was fighting his own battle: yelling, cajoling, and pleading with other climbers to assist him in an effort to rescue those who were above, lost in the storm.

Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev made a decision, one that some would later call suicidal. He decided to attempt a rescue, to go into the storm solo, into a pelting blow of snow, into a lacerated darkness, into the roar of what one climber described as a hundred freight trains passing over your head. Boukreevs efforts resulted in what the mountaineer and writer Galen Rowell would later call one of the most amazing rescues in mountaineering history.

Two weeks after the disaster on Mount Everest, Boukreev flew from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Denver, Colorado, where he was met by friends and driven to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to recuperate from his ordeal. Upon arriving, he asked to meet me, because a few months earlier, at a mutual friends request, I had arranged for him the purchase of a camera and its delivery to the Everest Base Camp. On May 28, 1996, we met for the first time.

I had seen photographs of Boukreev that had been taken prior to the events on Mount Everest. Lean, taut, with a confident smile, is how I imagined him. As I walked into our mutual friends house, he rose slowly from a chair to greet me. His eyes were sunken, tired. The tip of his nose and places on his lips were crusted in black, the telltale dead skin that comes with severe frostbite. He was distant; he looked as if hed moved out of his body and into a place that had no address.