Beyond the Summit Page #5

The storm continues to intensify...

This is Base Camp.

Where are you do left?

How are you doing? Over.

Complete white-out conditions here...

Can't see a damn thing...

I'm stuck in place...

There's no Sherpa following me...

And the team's totally spread out.

At 11 AM and in the complete white-out,

Pemba Nurbu is the last to summit.

Pemba and 3 cleanup Sherpas descend,

cleaning up discarded oxygen bottles

as they go.

Below the south summit, Bob Hoffman

wisely decides to abandon

his summit bid.

Alone and with snow blindness

in one eye,

he turns and descends toward

the South Col...

finds Sherm Bull...

Unwilling to allow the storm

to daunt him,

Sherm pulls himself methodically

up the fixed lines.

Taking into consideration

the intensity of the storm,

Apa convinces him to turn back

and give up his dream...

Sherm and Apa is turning back...

For those in Base Camp,

all that is left to do is

to wait for confirmation that the team

has arrived back safely at Camp 4.

Bob Boice, alone at the south summit,

calls in to report that his

oxygen tank has frozen up.

Hello Ben, it's Robert... Ran out of

o's between the summit and the step...

Jim Williams intercepts

the transmission.

Boice, relax start breathing...

get yourself in a comfortable place...

It may take some time...

...eventually finding Bob Boice

weak and very cold.

Williams replaces the frozen tank and

the two descend together back to Camp 4...

It has been 22 hours

since the team left Camp 4...

They now begin a 2-day descent

to Base Camp.

In their final sweep of The upper

mountain and the South Col

the Sherpas will pack out

more than 100 spent oxygen bottles

and other refuse.

I'm so proud of you, hon.

You don't know how much.

Man, that was a b*tch of a day

and you just didn't wanna hear

what I wanna do.

I'm super proud of you.

I'm 58-years-old, and it kicked the

stuffing outta me coming down...

But coming down was really

life threatening...

I mentioned to you that

I had one eye shut down...

I had to take off my goggles,

so I knew I was susceptible

to snow-blindness,

but I couldn't see outta them...

And this blizzard, we had a white-out

the whole time we were up there...

and so what I was having to do... is...

we had a line of ropes going up,

and I clipped into a figure-8

and repelled backwards,

where I could kinda see

where the rope was coming from...

But I kept on stumbling into

deep snow drifts.

This frost-bite...

I think it's almost worse maybe 5 days

after it happens... supposed to

when it has actually occurred.

I mean I've never really

had a bad case before,

but I knew at The Balcony that

I was gonna have... frost-bite...

I'll be honest with you,

I'm really scared...

I hope I don't... like, lose anything

...like any tips... you know,

that wouldn't be good...

you just don't realize how much

you depend upon your fingers

until you lose them...

for a few... for a few days.

Actually we get on the summit

at the right time,

around 8 o'clock on the summit.

First I went to the summit,

I went to fix the rope up to the summit,

then I come back to Hillary step

where I met Lily,

then went back to the summit again.

This time I want to get all the teams

to the summit,

but the weather changed and

only the three summated...

So you see it as your job to

get the whole team on the summit?

On the top... I want to get all of them on the summit,

but the weather had changed...

The next thing you know,

Apa pops over the hill.

This guy, I'm tellin' ya... I just

can't... Oh, you've heard about him...

I can't say enough about him.

Not just as a Sherpa,

but as a person.

So he comes over the hill, and I'm

struggling away, and he said,

"Sherm, I wanna get you to the summit

more than anything in the world."

And he said, "You know, I think,

probably, I could, get you there."

But then he said, "I dunno about

getting you down, Sherm."

He said, "I think you might die."

And then he said the thing

that really got me, he said,

"I think a Sherpa might die doing it."

I said, "Apa, I take your advice 100%.

I would never put someone else's life

at risk for somethin' I wanna do.

I mean it's one thing if a climber

wants to risk his own scrawny neck,

that's somethin', but to take somebody

else's life, put that at risk,

there's no, no one has the right

to do that

particularly on an egotistical

adventure like climbing a mountain.

I thought it over about

"Apa, let's go down...

let's go down."

And I gave up my dream,

and I got a little emotional

about giving up my dream...

been trying to do this thing

for almost 10 years now...

but... there are more important things

I chose in life - I chose my wife,

I chose my family,

I wouldn't jeopardize those things...

Bob, are you gonna be dancing

this evening?

I don't think so...

just being here... thank you...

just being here is about

all I can manage.

He loves that bathrobe.

The Inventa Everest 2000 Environmental

Expedition left Base Camp

with 632 discarded oxygen bottles...

and over 600 pounds of garbage

from the high camps.

reached the summit of Everest...

and a new world record was established

by Apa Sherpa.

For the Sherpas this ends

the climbing season,

many will return next year

to support other expeditions...

Our simple message is...

that no matter where we live...

no matter what we do...

we can do a better job in cleaning up

our own environment.

If we were able to come to

some place as difficult,

and with an environment as harsh as

Mt. Everest has, and clean it up,

there's nothing we can't do

in the world

in helping the environment.

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