(part 4) 1   2   3   4   5  If humans were taken from sea level and plunked onto the top of Everest without the months-long process of acclimatizing the body, the thin air would kill them in about three minutes. Just about how long it takes to suffocate. “I’m not very fond of heights,” Breashears says ironically, after tackling the ultimate height, “but it’s what I do to earn a living. The extra challenge of filming at altitude is just part of my life.” But what wasn’t in the job description in 1996 became a chapter in human drama that might make Everest the film join Everest the mountain in immortality. As the IMAX team prepared for the final push to the summit on May 9, 1996, Breashears looked around him, at the dozens of climbers headed up the single-lane route, and decided it was too crowded and the weather too unpredictable. His team waited at Camp II as three other expeditions pressed on to the top. They didn’t have to wait long. By mid afternoon on May 10, the signs of eventual fatality were evident. Breashears, training a telescope on the summit route, saw something which chilled his blood: a thick string of climbers bottled up near the summit, apparently stuck in their progress. Hours passed, but the climbers barely moved. When a fierce storm suddenly blew in, Breashears and his group stopped film production and sat anxiously by their radios. They listened transfixed and horrified, totally unable to help the climbers 7,700 feet above them, dead and dying, missing and mutilated, among them their friends Scott Fischer of Seattle and Rob Hall of New Zealand. But what they could do was make available the IMAX supplies arduously transported to Camp IV ahead of them. Radioing to Krakauer, a stunned survivor of the storm, Breashears instructed him to break into the locked IMAX tents, offering batteries, precious bottled oxygen, food, anything they needed to descend to safety. But Breashears’ assistance was not limited to providing supplies. When radio word came that another climber, “Seaborn” Beck Weathers of Dallas, had survived the storm but with hands frozen as solid as marble, Breashears headed up to bring the crippled Weathers down through a particularly technical section of the descent. “Beck was a gift from God,” Breashears reflects, “for him to come down from that tragedy with such grace and humor.” Humor? more...
	Home  |  IMAX Film  |  About Everest  |  Tour  |  How High?     © 1998 The Tech Museum of Innovation       info@thetech.org   credits