And here is the last morbid fact I’m going to share from my latest Everest read, Dark Summit. I hope you enjoy…
Today’s Frozen Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In May 1998 Sergei and Francys “Frankie” Arsentiev – a Russian climber and his American wife – both reached the summit of Everest without oxygen via the Northeast Ridge. Frankie was the second woman ever to accomplish such a feat, but she became ill during the descent and collapsed at around 28,000 feet. Sergei stowed her there as well as he could, clipping her to a fixed line. He then stumbled down to their high camp, where he collected oxygen and eventually proceeded back up the ridge to try to help his incapacitated wife. He was never seen again.
Frankie lived for two more days, itself an incredible feat of endurance and stamina. At least ten climbers passed her as she lay alive but incapacitated among the rocks. If anyone tried to help, the effort went unreported, until two days later, on May 24, when a South African named Cathy O’Dowd investigated what she thought was just another body. When she reached the figure, she bent down and brushed the woman’s hair away from her face. Frankie’s eyes flashed open and fixed on her would-be rescuer. “Please don’t leave me,” she wheezed.
Frankie was bent violently at the waist, torso and legs pointing down the slope, the safety leash taut between her harness and the fixed line above. Her face was ashen, wind-burnished, encased in a mask of frostbite. A spent oxygen tank lay nearby. Two of O’Dowd’s teammates, Ian Woodall and Jangbu Sherpa, arrived and helped more Frankie so that her back was propped against a rock. The footing was precarious, if not downright dangerous – loose shale covering a steep slope – and the effort left them gasping.
The trio worked on Frankie for nearly an hour. Their oxygen system was incompatible with hers, so they poured fluids into her mouth and yelled at her to do anything she could to help them, to try to stand and walk. But she sat completely limp, murmuring comments that seemed only marginally coherent: “Why are you doing this to me?” and “I’m an American. I’m an American.” Three climbers from Uzbekistan passed by on the route above but refused to get involved. “We tried to help yesterday,” one said. “We left her with oxygen. She is too far gone to help.”
They were in the shadow of the First Step, no sun, the wind howling. Finally, O’Dowd realized the inevitable. “Perched on the steep slope, I could not even stamp my feet for warmth,” she wrote in her memoir Just for the Love of It. “My fingers were almost totally numb. Orders from my brain to wiggle them met with a lackluster response, a minuscule, slow-motion movement. I had full body shivers and my teeth were chattering behind my oxygen mask.”
“What do you want to do?” Woodall finally asked her, though the question was not in reference to Frankie, who had by now fallen unconscious.
“I want to go down,” O’Dowd said. “Will you go down with me?”
The Climb was over, although O’Dowd would return the next year and make it to the top, Frankie’s body still lying where they’d left it.
Culled from: Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Season
This would be one of those situations where having a strong, fit body that had incredible endurance and a peerless will to survive would really, really suck. I’d want my heart to say, after a few minutes of suffering, “Okay, there’s no hope of survival, let’s be real. Let’s just fall into the Big Sleep right now and spare us all any further suffering.”
Also, it was eventually discovered that Frankie’s husband Sergei had fallen to his death while trying to descend the steep cliff to assist her. A few years later, O’Dowd and Woodall would return to Frankie’s body and place a makeshift memorial, including a note from her family, on her:
Here is Francys as she remained frozen in death:
And here she is after the makeshift memorial was placed over her:
The Bodies On Everest
And here’s a great article from Listverse detailing a few of the many tragedies that have occurred on Everest. I’m distressed to read that do-gooders have started burying or tossing the bodies over the side of the cliffs to remove them from sight along the trail. There go my Everest aspirations! Photographing the bodies would be the only reason I’d ever want to go there! People are always taking all the morbid away. 🙁
I am of the opinion that they are hiding bodies as to not offend the rich tourists. Personally, I don’t think Everest should be just some sort of tourist trap, and the more people who die there the fewer idiots will go.