Online and on TV,
Nova takes audiences
to Everest's peak

Originally published in Current, Feb. 2, 1998

By Karen Everhart Bedford

A Nova documentary that airs Feb. 24 will deliver a chilling, direct account of an expedition up Mt. Everest, the scene of 16 deaths in the last two years.

"Everest--The Death Zone" includes a climactic near-death scene of its own, when a member of the Nova team almost suffocates from an upper respiratory infection severely worsened by the effects of altitude.

David Carter, the climber who almost died after reaching the summit last May, still experiences periodic night terrors, waking up gasping for air, as he relives the moments his life hung on radioed instructions from a doctor at base camp. Ed Viesturs, expedition leader and climbing "bad ass"--as Carter describes him--saved his life by performing several Heimlich maneuvers. Carter doesn't like to watch the film and he really doesn't give a damn that he summited Everest.

Under instructions from base camp, Viesturs repeatedly performed the Heimlich manuever on Carter (pictured), and Carter lived to return from the peak of Everest. (Photos: David Carter for WGBH.)

"The memories that I have of that night of hanging on and Ed making me live, and the feelings I had--realizing what I had back home and the issue of becoming a liability--that's what it's all about," says Carter. "It reaffirmed why I'm living."

 

"I was embarrassed because I didn't want to become a liability to the team," Carter explains. "You never want to become a weak link on a climb."

 

The film of that 1997 expedition culminates Nova's two-year experience with the world's highest peak--reported first on a web site and now on broadcast TV as well. First, in 1996, Nova Online carried reports from the summit. Then, last year, an expedition shot film for Nova, while reporting again on the web.

 

The 1997 team members had the combined experience of some 14 successful ascents between them. Mountaineer filmmaker David Breashears has now reached the summit four times. Assistant cameraman Pete Athans made his fifth ascent last May. And Viesturs, a professional guide, is the only American and one of six people ever to climb the six highest peaks in the world; he's completed five Everest ascents, including three without supplemental oxygen. Carter, who runs his family's lumberyard in Indiana, was making his second attempt at the peak.

 

Back at base camp, the team was supported by Howard Donner, expedition physician; Liesl Clark, Nova producer/writer/director; and associate producer Kate Churchill. At WGBH, a designer and two web technicians helped publish the online material.

 

Web reports on the tragedy

Breashears, Viesturs and Athans were all on Everest at the time of the 1996 disaster that claimed eight climbers. Breashears and Viesturs had been working on an IMAX film when a bad turn in the weather trapped 20 people from separate expeditions in the "death zone" above 25,000 feet. All three men participated in the rescue effort. "These are the type of guys you want in a foxhole next to you," says Carter.

 

Although she wasn't in Nepal when tragedy struck, Clark played a key role from Boston by posting updates on the unfolding events to an online audience on the World Wide Web. She was producing Nova Online's "Everest Quest," a live, interactive web feature that tracked Breashears' expedition, by talking to members of the team by phone and posting their reports on the web.

 

"It was hell because we didn't know if anyone on our team was involved [in the tragedy]," she recalls. "The story broke out on the web because we had direct access to the teams." Nova Online's coverage was a key source for the mainstream media reporting on the deaths.

 

The tragedy spurred Nova to return to Everest in 1997--this time to document the effects of high stress and low oxygen. "The first year, we were not thinking about making a film," recalls Lauren Aguirre, senior online producer. "The accident happened and we began to ask why." In "Death Zone," Nova asks how much oxygen deprivation--which sends climbers into a trance-like state--may have contributed to the '96 disaster.

 

Clark consulted with several specialists from the University of Washington to devise a series of tests that would measure climbers' brain functions as they made their way up the mountain. At sea level and at each camp on the ascent, Viesturs, Clark and Breashears performed these tests while film rolled. Before and after the expedition, they also had magnetic resonance images taken of their brains.

 

The purpose of the tests was to determine "if people go to altitude and get stupid, do they come back down and stay stupid?," explains Donner. "And in fact, how stupid are they up on the mountain?"

 

The three climbers did not make a "huge scientific sample," Clark acknowledges, but results showed differences in how each team member performed. Carter, in particular, slowed down significantly and made more mistakes. Viesturs and Breashears did "incredibly well" on the tests, according to Donner, but Viesturs' MRI showed a subtle change in brain anatomy that may be attributable to long-term, high altitude exposure.

 

Live from the summit

When the Nova team reached the summit, taking in the coveted view from the top of the world at 6:50 a.m. on May 22, 1997, they had a whole list of tasks to complete--shooting film, taking another round of psychometric tests, and doing a live audio transmission on the web. Most crucial to the climbers' safety, they needed to begin their descent as soon as possible.

 

Clark had scheduled the webcast without knowing the team would be on the summit at that moment. The idea was to make the climbers available--wherever they happened to be--through walkie-talkie radio transmissions patched through to WGBH. "Anyone could have logged on and heard the team," she says. As it turned out, technicians were standing by at 'GBH and an online audience of 20,000 was "waiting to hear from us."

 

"It was horrible from my perspective," recalls Clark. "We weren't able to do both [the film and the webcast] at the same time and, of course, we had to. I felt both would suffer." The climbers made brief comments, and Breashears reported passing bodies of those who perished last year. Listeners also heard Breashears performing his psychometric tests.

The broadcast made Internet history, and some in the web audience enthusiastically compared it to hearing someone on the moon. "It was remarkable to be on the web and hear something live on Everest," says Clark.

 

The tasks of producing a film and a real-time expedition required "constant activity," says Clark. "We were there two-and-a-half months and there was not a dull moment," especially as the team was camped on a glacier.

 

At the base camp elevation of 17,600, fingers typing on a laptop would freeze into "mini-sausages" after sunset. And by morning, laptops had to be warmed in the sun before they could be cajoled into working. In a pinch, team members would seal their computer batteries in ziplock bags and drop them in boiling water. "It was not the most hospitable place for high technology," Clark comments.

 

The team was short-staffed to handle their assignments--"we were stupid and should have had extra people along," Clark says--but they had the advantage of time and a staff at 'GBH to help pull it all together. Producing for TV and the web simultaneously "keeps your mind active as you're trying to think of new ways to represent a place. It helps you stay awake in the decisions of what you do for your film."

 

The massive "Alive on Everest" web site (www.pbs.org/nova/everest) is a testament to Clark and the Nova team's efforts. It offers seamless 360 degree views from several spots on Everest, including the summit; a geologic explanation of glaciers; a photographic sequence of the gear Breashears wore at each stage of his ascent, and much, much more. Aguirre calls it "the largest web site known to mankind"; Clark, "the end-all-and-be-all Everest encyclopedia." A full transcript of radio transmissions from the night Carter almost died will be added for the broadcast premiere of "Death Zone."

 

Clark is now researching another Nova film on human physiology, one that would go even higher--into outer space. She's been trying to reach Sen. John Glenn, the former astronaut who's returning to space for a NASA study on how weightlessness effects the elderly. "Our agenda is similar to his, but he's difficult to reach," she says. Clark describes this project as her "latest dream." An expedition that's closer to getting the green light would take web and TV audiences to Easter Island.

To Current's home page

Outside link: Nova's Everest web site

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