Dark Summit

Death from hypoxic hypothermia comes slow.  In the beginning, hands and feet begin to tingle and throb, then ache as if squeezed by a slowly closing vise.  Speech slurs.  Balance slips.  As the brain starves and swells, you're gripped by persistent dementia.  During the 1933 Fourth British Expedition, Frank Smythe, a writer and photographer, imagined pulsating teapots floating in the air at 28,000 feet.  Maurice Wilson, the Brit who made an ill-fated fatal solo attempt to ascend the Northeast Ridge in 1934, described sensing a benevolent presence with him as he withered on the mountain.  In 1996, during the lethal May 10 storm, Sandy Hill Pittman, a New York socialite, thought that she was at a garden tea party listening to Beck Weathers play a flute.  In truth, they were both trapped on the South Col, desperately trying to stay alive.

As the deep cold intrudes, nerve endings go numb and the pain recedes as circulation retreats toward the core.  Often, ironically, it is around this point where freezing feels like being tossed into a furnace.  Victims tear at their clothes, throw away gloves and hats, and frantically unzip their parkas, accelerating the slide.  Flesh farthest from the heart -- toes, fingers, nose, cheeks -- freezes first, death advancing from the perimeter.  Skin turns pale with frostnip, white during the full throes of frostbite, red and purple with chilblains and blisters, and ultimately black with gangrene - cellular necrosis, doctors call it, the point at which living tissue is permanently destroyed.

In the final stages, limbs become insensate and immobile, freezing into place as your body shunts blood toward the lungs and heart, trying to preserve the vital organs.  Vision blurs and darkens.  Involuntary shivering ensues, a last-ditch attempt to generate heat through movement.  Your mind swirls deeper into the subconscious, a deep dream state.  A few who have returned from the brink of hypothermic oblivion have recounted their last conscious moments as almost pleasurable.  "You really do start feeling warmer," Weathers wrote in his memoir Left for Dead.  "I had a sense of floating.  I wondered if someone was dragging me across the ice." 

The end arrives a few hours later, quietly, in the dark waters of unconsciousness.  Your blood runs chilled; most brain activity has ceased.  The heartbeat slows, fluttering erratically, a wounded bird.  This action might continue for a while, the vessel destroyed by the encroaching cold while the heart presses courageously on.  At last the pump shuts down, and with that the limited circulation ceases.  Internally, there is perfect stillness, equilibrium returning between a delicately calibrated but dissonant energy field in the form of a man and the larger energy field around him --- the mountain, the air.  The only movement now is wind, ice crystals skittering over rock and snow, a jacket flap rustling, a clump of hair, stiff with rime, flicking across the forehead.

Dark Summit, The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season  by Nick Heil, 2008