There Will Be Many Deaths This Year...

The queue of brightly suited climbers shuffles forward a few steps. "For God's sake, move!" someone yells from the back. They’ve been here an hour already, waiting in the highest traffic jam in the world.

On many of their faces, between goggles and oxygen mask, you can see that the silent fingers of frostbite are beginning to leave their mark. First, the skin turns white and waxy, later these marks will turn purple and swell, forming blisters. These are just the superficial injuries.

Shivering in the freezing blast of the jet stream near the summit of Everest, each of the climbers is effectively dying. They are well into the "death zone," the height above which it is impossible to live permanently. Their blood, already the consistency of syrup after weeks of acclimatizing, struggles to pump through the capillaries in fingers and toes. As a result, muscles, bones and tendons are slowly freezing. Ice crystals are forming inside the cells, growing by extracting the vital fluids and freeze-drying the tissues.

Later we will see the results: First the digits will appear normal but blackened beneath the skin. Then blisters will form, filled with bloody fluid. Then doctors will decide which fingers and toes to amputate, and which to try to save.

Another shuffle forward on the foot-wide ledge. The bottleneck is caused by the aluminum ladder that surmounts the Second Step, a 30-foot rock cliff near the summit of Everest.

The problem is that a Chinese climber appears to be trying to learn how to use his ascending device while balanced on the ladder. Some of the guides in the queue become exasperated by his incompetence and start to push past. The traffic jam starts to move.

Foreshadows

When I climbed around the corner to Advanced Base Camp a few weeks ago, I gasped at the sight of well over 200 multicolored tents. Usually I would expect to see a couple dozen. "There will be many deaths this year," my Sherpa companion remarked. "Let's hope Russell Brice has a plan to avoid the rush then," I said.

We had spent 20 days just to get to that point. After flying to Lhasa, our group of 25 climbers and filmmakers had traveled overland for a week across the endless orange-brown desert hills of Tibet. We couldn't move any faster or we would succumb to altitude sickness: First you experience headaches, then your lungs fill with fluid, then you die.

Base Camp is pitched in a spectacular setting right at the nose of the Rongbuk Glacier, with the vast pyramid of Everest rearing up at the head of the valley, usually with a mile-long flag of spindrift flying from the summit at 29,000 feet.

After Base Camp you walk up a stony valley for 12 miles past 80-foot-high ice pinnacles shaped like shark's fins. Advanced Base Camp is a motley collection of tents strung along the side of the icy glacier, right underneath the flanks of the mountain. The real climbing begins there: You have to surmount the 23,000-foot saddle of the North Col, then spend a day climbing up to each of four camps, one by one.

You spend your last evening in Camp 4, melting snow on your gas stove, desperately trying to get as much liquid into yourself as possible — due to the dry air you have to drink over a gallon a day. You probably don't have much appetite but you must eat — a climber burns 15,000 calories on summit day, the equivalent of 53 hamburgers.

The year I first climbed Everest I went from 170 pounds to 140 pounds in two months — it's a guaranteed "fat camp." Because you don't have much appetite at high altitude you tend to overeat at base camp. Where else could you stuff yourself until you're bloated and end up losing 30 pounds?

Finally, you get up at midnight and go for the summit wearing a padded down suit and a rucksack containing a couple of oxygen cylinders and a bottle of water. Using a jumar (a ratchet device) you slide up fixed ropes placed days before by the Sherpas. It's tough, but it's hardly mountaineering. The whole expedition takes around 70 days.

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