Cheating death
After spending over a month leading his team from base camp to Camp III in order to give them time to adapt to the altitude, Gau decided on a two-team assault on the summit. If he and Chen Yu-nan, the two most likely to succeed, headed out first and succeeded, they could provide a morale boost to the two members of the second team. On May 9, Gau and Chen prepared to head for the 8000-meter-high Camp IV, but Chen slipped and fell outside their tent before they were set to depart. Although he seemed to be relatively uninjured, Chen decided it would be best if he stayed back for a while, and sent Gau and three Sherpas ahead. After reaching Camp IV, Gau learned that Chen had decided to head back to Camp II and had died on the descent. After some struggling, Gau decided it would be best to continue to the summit first and help with funeral arrangements afterwards.
No-one could have predicted that after making the summit, Gau himself would be facing down the Grim Reaper.
"I just lay there quietly, waiting for death," wrote Gau in his 1997 book Narrow Escape, describing that fateful night. Four hours back down from the summit, a snowstorm hit. It continued to grow in strength, soon obscuring the trail back to Camp IV. With the teams making a staggered descent, Gau was left separated from the others, and the storm left him without any way of making contact with the camp. In the darkness, two Sherpas--capable of getting about quicker on the mountain--struck out to find a way out, but did not return. Gau was left with no power in his headlamp, meaning that if he attempted to find the trail himself, he was very likely to lose his footing and fall. His best option was to find cover nearby, but he could not find any caves or rocks that could act as a windbreak.
Twenty hours after setting out, the zippers of Gau's clothes were frozen solid, his hands were numb from the cold, his communications equipment was unable to connect due to the extremely low temperature, and his lighter would not light because of the high winds. The snow from the storm was finding its way into every crevice. Afraid that if he fell asleep he would freeze to death, Gau first kept yelling to himself "Don't sleep! Don't sleep," then lay on his side to reduce the exposure of his face to the wind and snow. The slope of the mountain meant that on his side, he would steadily slide downhill, so Gau had to keep rolling to keep his balance and avoid sliding away.
His strength depleted and almost out of options, Gau began to wonder how his children would handle it if he died there like that, and to fear that he wouldn't be able to repay the support of Chin Hsiu Publishing for his unfinished "100 Peaks of China" project. He asked himself what ways he could end up dying there--one was through lack of oxygen, another by freezing to death. So he cleared the ice from his nostrils and began taking breaths as deep as he possibly could while slapping his hands against his thighs and stamping his feet into the ground. After doing this for half an hour, he began to feel some warmth returning, and so, at a slower pace, he continued like that for the night until he eventually fell asleep at dawn.
By the second day, the snow and wind had begun to ease up, and a team of Sherpas led by Tenzing Nuri mounted a rescue. Gau's legs were numb, and so the Sherpa tied a rope around Gau and pulled him along. Step by step along the rugged mountainside, they eventually made it back to Camp IV, after which several Sherpas continued to take Gau down, taking turns to carry him on their backs as they made their way through the dangerous terrain until they reached the icefalls near base camp, where a helicopter came to pick Gau up.
Later, Gau learned that the same incident had claimed the lives of some of the world's top climbers, including American team leader Scott Fischer, known as "Mr. Rescue," who had died near where Gau had been lying. Gau found it hard to understand how he had been able to escape from death's clutches.
"It might have been that I always tried to maintain a rookie-like attitude to climbing, being as conservative and cautious as possible. Before heading up to the summit, I put on an extra two layers of clothing, with the top layer especially cold resistant." Another reason, Gau thinks, is that prior to the Everest attempt, he had quit his job as a civil engineer and spent the previous two years living in Tibet at elevations around 4-5000 m in order to photograph China's famous 100 peaks. As a result, he had physically adjusted to high altitudes, to the point where it was as though he were half Sherpa, and was better able to handle the cold and lack of oxygen. And perhaps he simply had the Buddha's blessing on him.
Climbing Everest requires climbers to start from base camp at 5340 meters above sea level, passing through four other camps before making their final assault. This photo shows the 1996 Taiwanese expedition team as they traveled between base camp and Camp II to help adjust to the high altitudes.