For Denver schoolteacher Mike Haugen and his climbing partner, reaching the summit of Mount Everest last month was “the easy part.”
The hard part was not only descending, as is often the case in mountaineering, but carrying a critically ill woman to safety in the process.
“Getting to the top was a ton of work, but in terms of an Everest climb we had a pretty easy summit day — just absolutely perfect weather, and everything went well,” Haugen, 30, reported Friday after he and his friend Casey Grom arrived back in the United States.
By contrast, he said, the life- or-death rescue – in which they and four others hauled the stricken Nepali climber from Camp 4 on the South Col more than 3,000 feet down an ice wall to Camp 3 – turned what would have been a nine- hour day into a grueling, 24-hour push.
And a tragedy en route made the experience even tougher. “As we were lowering her down one of the steepest parts, we watched a woman fall to her death on Lhotse,” a neighboring peak that is the fourth-highest in the world, Haugen recounted.
“That energized our minds, because we knew every rope, every clip had to be just right.”
Haugen, a science teacher at Kepner Middle School, and Grom reached the 29,035-foot summit of Everest around sunrise on May 21 after having left their high camp about 10:30 the night before.
“We spent about half an hour on top and got back down to the South Col by about 7 in the morning, when we started hearing radio calls about a woman in trouble at about the 27,500-foot level,” near a feature called the Balcony, he said.
The two had passed her on the way up and “thought she’d just get tired and turn around,” but by this point she was losing consciousness, apparently from altitude-related cerebral edema, or fluid on the brain. The patient became more responsive after an American guide from another expedition injected her with a powerful steroid under the direction of doctors lower on the mountain, and Sherpas managed to move her down to the South Col.
“It was the docs’ thought that if we didn’t get her down, she was going to die there,” Haugen said. “By default, it was our rescue.”
A British doctor doing research at the South Col volunteered to help, and the two Americans recruited three other Sherpas. The rescuers “packaged” the woman in a sleeping bag, harnessed her to a makeshift sled and made it down to Camp 3 by nightfall.
“There was a team of doctors there, and we felt it was definitive care at the point,” Haugen said. Besides, “We were exhausted. It was all we could do to get ourselves the rest of the way down.”
The expedition was outfitted by Coleman, the outdoor gear manufacturer, which also provided laptop computers and electronics that enabled Haugen to post a running account of the climb on the website
“We had thousands of people following us every day,” he said. “That inspired us as much as we hope our adventure inspired them.”
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-954-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
