Lincoln Hall’s new book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest, is pretty much what it sounds like: an account of how Hall, who had nearly reached the summit of Everest in 1984, suffered a cerebral edema and was left high on the mountain during his second attempt in May 2006. Presumed dead after hours of immobility and non-responsiveness, he was found alive the next morning having miraculously survived the night with no shelter, oxygen, water, or warmth. As far as things to have done go, that’s pretty impressive.

Almost as impressive is the book itself. Hall, an Australian magazine editor by trade who has been climbing for decades, recounts his story in elegant prose and with a generosity of spirit that comes not only from his very nature, but also his dedication to Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual orientation that infuses the narrative with calmness, kindness, and a thoughtful precision. The end result is a sort of existential account of a near tragedy, vastly more meditative than the typical climbing yarn, and ultimately more rewarding.

I met with Lincoln Hall earlier this week.

Jared Bland: Toward the end of the book, you ask yourself how it is that you could still be alive, but realize that you don’t think you’ll know until you’ve recovered properly and had time to explore it. It’s been just over two years since these events. Do you have a better idea of what happened?

Lincoln Hall: As I’ve got distance from it, I see it in perspective as more remarkable. At first I couldn’t understand why I was the one that was alive. I can understand how the guys who were crushed under tons of ice weren’t alive—that was pretty obvious—and there were three of them. And someone else died of a combination of edemas, quite low down, and he was actually a local, so that was kind of a left-field thing. But there were others up there in exactly the same circumstances as me who died, and so I couldn’t get a handle on that. I asked, “Why me?� And when I think I about it now, I can see I had thirty years of climbing mountains, not that I climbed every day, every week, or even every year—particularly since I’ve had kids—but it’s sort of like once a climber, always a climber. There’s that mentality there. In the book I talk about the various influences, the yogic breathing, the learning early on in mountaineering never to give up—that’s a very important one—but I think that the focus that comes from big, continuously difficult climbs has to be 100 percent all the time. On a lot of Everest, it’s just plodding up snow, which doesn’t require that much focus. But when the time arrived, after I came to after having been dead, I put everything that I had, which wasn’t very much, into just getting through the night. Because in an impossible situation—I learned this years ago—you’ve got to find the slightest little chink in the impossibility and chip that one out.

I suppose I haven’t answered your question. The big thing I see is that what I had believed to be the nature of reality—the barrier between life and death, the dichotomy, I suppose—is actually not what I thought. And two things: the impossible can be possible, and death is not the grim reaper. It’s more welcoming. And it’s not like a trap, a welcoming trap. It’s actually just the next phase. I’ve been a card-carrying Buddhist for a dozen years now, and had Buddhist sympathies for a dozen years before that, but what happened this time around, on Everest, was that my appreciation of the Buddhist understanding of reality suddenly became real to me. That death isn’t the end, that it’s a cycle. So that’s the really potent life-changing message, even though I’m much the same person outwardly.

JB: You write in the book about the hallucinations you experienced that night. You suggest that since typical consciousness can only conceive of being alive or being dead, your mind responded on another level to understand the process of dying. The territory in between, in other words, has to be understood in some other way, which is how these hallucinations came about. How have you dealt with these since? Have they come back gradually? In bursts?

LH: The hallucinations have been with me since they happened. Some of them, it took me a while to work out that they hadn’t happened, like people who weren’t there. I emailed and got onto Skype with people here in North America who were climbers who I thought were there at that time, but there were no Westerners there. When I was coming down to the North Col, there were no Westerners there, but I was talking to three of them. So that’s a hallucination that isn’t real. And the other ones weren’t really real, but there were a whole lot of files in my head, and my brain was able to sort of flop up a suggestion as to what reality was. Being optimistic in character, it was optimistic files, like “hope, and just wait.� Not necessarily wait for someone, but just wait for an opportunity where there could be a way out. But in terms of the consciousness issue, in Tibetan Buddhism there is a belief that consciousness leaves the body in different stages over a three day period, and then there’s up to forty-nine days before consciousness settles in somewhere else. And so there are eight recognized stages of death in Tibetan Buddhism, and in my case I ticked two of those boxes.

What I don’t understand is why I went the other way. Just to put some science in here— not that Buddhism isn’t a kind of science—I was approached by a guy at the Centre for the Mind, which sounds like the loony bin, but is actually a research centre at the University of Sydney. This doctor approached me, and he posited that perhaps emotion could mitigate the cerebral edema. I guess he was thinking about the power of love, which is what made me resist or dismiss the lure of hypoxia and hypothermia. You go into this sort of state, like you’ve had mushrooms, and it’s all warm and beautiful, and I knew that wasn’t where I wanted to go. So his position was that perhaps that emotion could have overpowered the physiological crisis I was facing. Now he’s only got a statistical sample of one and it’s a theory. So, you know.

JB: On a different note, one of the elements you touch on is the commercialization of Everest through things like the guided tours, such as the one you unsuspectingly ended up on [Hall believed himself to be embarking on a much smaller expedition than the one he found, and was unpleasantly surprised upon arriving]. It seems to me that you end up on paradoxical ground on this front. You hadn’t been that high on the mountain since 1984, so you’re likely to notice all the changes that have taken place, but at the same time, your rescue is facilitated by the fact that there are these sorts of tours—I mean, the sherpas who rescued you were on the mountain, bringing down tents at the end of the season. So beyond the obvious ‘thank god they were there,’ how have you come to feel about the commercialization issue?

LH: In 1999 when I went to Makalu as a high-altitude cameraman, there was a friend of mine on one of those kinds of expeditions. A husband and wife climbing team—very competent—were running this expedition. They didn’t have all the fancy things we had, like saunas and televisions, and all that stuff. But there was one guy there that nobody wanted to climb with, obviously, and there wasn’t this kind of harmony within the mess tent when I went to see my friend. It was just a really unpleasant atmosphere. So that was the taste that I had in my mouth when I arrived in Kathmandu in 2006. And I had this horrified reaction, but it actually turned out to be great fun. The Russians really are like extras in a James Bond movie, but they’re fantastic mountaineers, and the doctor had treated 300 cases of frostbite because he was from Siberia. I met some really good friends, and it was good fun, and most of them were competent climbers. I talk about Kirk Wheatley, who was the guy who wanted to have a cigarette on all of the seven summits. He was unashamedly a tourist in the mountains, as far as he was concerned. And I know that the Russians regarded him a bit askance when they realized what he was trying to get up for, but he managed it. So it was a great trip in that respect. It wasn’t the horror show that I expected. I deliberately looked at getting there at the end of the season where there are fewer crowds, and the warm monsoon air. It’s warm lower down, but also a few degrees warmer higher up too, which can make a difference.

It is crowded. You get high-altitude gridlock, which if you’re on the wrong side of it means you could be trapped high and die. If you’re on the downhill side of it, it means you could be trapped below the gridlock and you’ll never get a chance to actually go to the summit. It’s really not the purity that it used to be. However, having said that, there are fourteen, maybe fifteen or sixteen different routes on Everest right now, and some of them aren’t that difficult. But it’s really only the two routes—Tenzing/Hillary British expedition of 1953, and the route that Mallory and those guys were trying to climb back in the ’20s and ’30s, which the Chinese finally climbed in 1960, and then again in 1975 because no one believed they’d done it the first time, even though they had had 261 people and built a road.

JB: On that note, you suggest that high on the mountain, summit fever is a greater driving force than survival. To the outsider, this is almost inconceivable. Is it a result of altered thinking at high altitude? Or the altered thinking of high-altitude climbers?

LH: Summit fever is your body saying go down, go down, stop this, this hurts too much, this is not good for you. And every step you take you get that message. So it has to be a question of mind over matter. You have to stop and assess your position, and some people don’t do that. Some people just don’t realize that they haven’t got the juice to come back down again. Summit fever is very real, and it really is only when—in my experience, at least—when you really face death that that survival instinct allows you to push through, beyond your limits. And that happened in 1984, when I was helping someone down and he slipped. I don’t know how he stopped. He doesn’t know how he stopped. But he stopped 20 feet short of a 3,000 foot drop. The way he described it is that he went into the sort of power, the energy between his molecules. That was real survival. But in the commercial context, you develop the acceptance that you can do more than you think you can, so you never give up. In the guided context, the guide’s job is to stop people having to dig too deep into themselves.

JB: Near the end of the book, you say you’re glad to have summited, if only because now you won’t feel the urge to do it again. So now, two years later, is that holding?

LH: Oh, I have no need to go back to Everest, and in fact because the cerebral edema was so…I don’t know why it manifested, I didn’t get the classic symptoms and I don’t know why I didn’t get them…I wouldn’t risk it again. And I really don’t have the interest. It’s like you have a great meal, and you’re no longer hungry for it. I’ve had that meal of the mountain, and it might be the last meal I’ll ever want to have. Though I did [recently] go rock climbing in Santa Fe. But that’s different. Rock climbing dangers are much more predictable. It’s a matter of choosing rock that’s solid and climbing partners who are also solid and the right equipment. And it’s safe.

JB: Have you had to learn to climb again, with your fingers? [Hall lost the top halves of eight of his fingers as a result of the extensive frostbite he developed during the night on Everest.]

LH: The level of climbing I’m doing at the moment I’ve been able to manage, but there will be some techniques I’ll going to have to find a different way around. The thing about climbing is that it’s a challenge. And it’s more of a challenge to me now. That’s what it’s about. I’ve been in the vertical world now since I was fifteen, and I’m not going to leave it. But I don’t need to go up and throw myself under avalanches again.

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Posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.