On a clear May morning near the roof of the world, John All was in his element.
The long-haired, 45-year-old climate scientist from Kentucky stood on a 19,700-foot glacier deep in Nepal's Himalayan Mountains, holding an ice ax to collect snow and ice samples for his research on climate change.
All was alone, his two fellow climbers at a lower camp dealing with illness. It wasn't ideal, but time was tight, with the climbing season soon to be slammed shut by bad weather.
Then, with no warning, the 6-inch crust of snow and ice gave way, sending All plummeting into a deep, hidden crevasse. He ricocheted off the icy walls, slamming his face, arms and sides as he fell. He tried to stop himself with his ax, but it only dislocated his right arm. Seventy feet down, he finally thudded to a stop on a small ledge where the crevasse narrowed.
Gasping, bleeding and badly injured, he peered down into the quiet white void, then back up at the small patch of blue sky poking through the hole he'd punched on the side of Mount Himlung near the Tibetan border.
He had no food, no water, no way to call for help. His clothing was too thin to survive until his team arrived. One arm was useless, his ribs were broken and he was bleeding internally. The crevasse appeared too wide to climb straight up.
"I'm dead," he thought. "There's no way you live through a fall like this."
He would have to save himself.
Mount Everest's link
An associate professor of geology and geography at Western Kentucky University, All wasn't even supposed to be near Himlung.
His Nepal expedition had planned to summit Mount Lhotse, a 27,940-foot sister peak to the legendary Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain.
In mid-April, All had been 200 miles west of Himlung in a cooking tent at an Everest base camp, sipping black Nepali tea with the Sherpas who work as guides, cooks and porters during the climbing season.
Outside, Tibetan prayer flags fluttered amid a sea of tents set atop a rocky camp, where more than 300 climbers waited, some of whom had paid upward of $90,000, and most of whom were there to summit the 29,029-foot Everest. As the climbers adjusted to the altitude, Sherpa guides fixed ropes and ladders along the route while setting up high-altitude camps, stocking them with food, stoves and oxygen.
All was waiting for four climbers and a doctoral student with the American Climber Science Program, a volunteer organization he'd co-founded in 2010 to bring together climate scientists, students and volunteer climbers to measure the effects of climate change on the environment. He and his team would collect data on pollution and carbon dioxide in Nepal, where melting glaciers and warming temperatures put it and other Alpine areas on the front lines of global warming.
WKU geography professor Dr. John All discusses his survival of a 70-foot fall into a crevasse in the Annapurna Range in Nepal. Having other close calls in his headlining career as a climate researcher, Dr All was prepared for the worst.
Alton Strupp/The Courier-Journal
All had already summited Everest in 2010 during a yearlong Fulbright fellowship, and those at the camp knew him by his easy laugh and laid-back personality. His plan this time was to climb partway up Everest, then head east to Lhotse to gather high-altitude data on carbon-dioxide levels, soot and dust deposits from pollution.
That evening in the tent, he had offered to help a group of Sherpas, including his friend, Asman Tamang, carry supplies the next day to higher camps. But All had just arrived, and Tamang urged him to stay and rest.
The next morning, All was shaken awake in his tent by a Sherpa cook. "There's been an avalanche," he told All. "Many people are killed."
Shortly before 7 a.m. on the Khumbu Icefall, "an overhanging wedge of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion" broke loose,shattering into "truck-size chunks" that hurtled into four-dozen climbers, according to author and climber Jon Krakauer, who wrote about the incident. It killed 16 Nepali guides, including Tamang, who had a 9-month-old child.
It was the single deadliest event on a mountain that has claimed more than 200 lives over the years.
"It was horrible," All said, recalling bodies torn apart by ice. "You don't see Sherpa men cry, but there were a lot of tears in a lot of eyes."
It was a stark reminder of the dangers lurking in the Himalayan range, from sudden storms and high-altitude ailments of cerebral adema. And now, the warming Himalayan climate was adding risk to climbers, All told Atlantic magazine. That included the increased instability of ice falls.
Tracking those changes was what brought All to the Himalayas in the first place.
The deadly accident brought All's Lhotse expedition to a halt, and threatened to scuttle his data collection, after Sherpas staged a boycott over the small compensation that the Nepali government offered to their companions' families.
All's guiding company, cognizant of its scientific mission, offered to transfer the team's supplies to a mountain far to the east, called Himlung, between the Manaslu and Annapurna ranges. It was an easier peak, reaching above 23,000 feet, but still afforded the team the data samples it needed.
The expedition was back on. But time was getting tight. They had to transfer gear and get new permits before the monsoon season at the end of May made it too dangerous to climb.
"The important thing," All posted on the group's website, "is that the science will continue."
All's passion for high-altitude climate study was cemented during a yearlong trip in the 1990s through Central and South America, grabbing rides on buses, donkeys and pickups as he visited cities and communities high in the Andes Mountains.
He saw how climate change was altering vegetation and melting glaciers in ways that impacted nearby impoverished mountain villages. In the fragile ecosystems of the Alpine areas, "a change in climate makes a huge difference," he said. "If you want to study climate change, that's where you're going to see the big impacts."
All had a degree in international environmental law but by then had already given up a brief career as an attorney, instead enrolling in a doctoral program in geology and geography at the University of Arizona. In his spare time he climbed, hiked and volunteered for a search and rescue organization that helped lost hikers, climbers and cavers.
His father, whose name is also John All, a University of Georgia entomology professor, said that was in keeping with the boy who used to follow him into the corn and cotton fields for crop research and, years later, took his father and brother Joe backpacking in national parks out West.
By the time his son was in high school, he had climbed 15,000-foot peaks and once tethered his mother to help her climb in the Tetons, the elder All said.
"He's totally devoted," his father said. "If you want to push his buttons, start arguing with him about climate change. He'll give you an earful."
In 2002, the younger All took a position at Western Kentucky University, studying how resource management and climate change interact on Alpine ecosystems, by using satellite imagery and collecting ground data.
His Bowling Green ranch home is full of climbing gear, and his bedroom closet is filled with down jackets, just like a rack of business suits. He's made research trips from Denali, Alaska, to the Cordillera Blanca mountains in Peru, and has spent months living in a tent in national parks and game reserves in such countries as Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia and Swaziland.
The travel has been tough on relationships, All said, perhaps helping explain why he is single. It's the science that excites him and his colleagues, such as Keith Mountain, an Australian University of Louisville glaciologist who has worked on remote, mountaintop glaciers in Peru, Kenya, Papua New Guinea and Tibet to get climate histories from ice cores.
Such ground data is a critical piece of a puzzle, both men say, especially in remote mountains such as the Himalayas, where temperatures have risen at twice the global average since 1980, according to NASA. The changes hold consequences for those living nearby, and portents for the rest of Earth.
Mountain said high-altitude scientists don't mean to take risks, but the work can turn dangerous. Twice since the 1980s, Mountain had been on expeditions where he said hidden glacial crevasses had taken lives, including a fellow scientist and a guide.
"It's an inherently dangerous place," Mountain said. "But the information we get from this kind of research is critical to understanding how humankind lives and sustain ourselves."
Chapter 2
Climbing Himlung
On May 18, a bright morning sun lit the inside of the orange tent where All slept at Camp 2, nearly 19,700 feet up Mount Himlung. Unzipping the flap, he squinted at the gleaming white glacier outside and nearly flat, snowy expanse.
All and his team had arrived a few days earlier, finding the 15,700-foot base camp area was deserted because it was so late in the season. He'd brought along an ice axto help with the climb in the absence of ropes fixed by Sherpas.
Two of the five group members already had summited Himlung and decided not to make the climb again. That left All, University of Colorado doctoral student and climber Ulyana Horodyskyj and climber Jake St. Pierre to make the ascent and take samples of snow and ice, testing for heavy black carbon and dust, as well as checking carbon dioxide levels in the air.
After setting up Camp 1 at 18,000 feet, all three climbed over loose, dirty, broken rock and through an icefall to Camp 2 about four hours later.
"Good weather for now — hope it lasts a bit," the team wrote on its Facebook page.
But Horodyskyj was feeling ill from a stomach virus. After climbing back down to Camp 1, they decided St. Pierre would accompany her down to base camp to recover for a day or two, and All would go back up to Camp 2, collecting samples while he waited for the two to rejoin him and resume the climb.
Being alone was "certainly not ideal," All said, but he felt he was on safe ground and knew he had to get up and down the mountain in about 10 days.
About 9 a.m. on May 8, after boiling water on a camp stove to make instant coffee, All grabbed his ice ax, plastic bags and GPS unit to record samples. He slipped on a light jacket over a T-shirt and added fleece gloves and thin pants.
"It was bright sun. I was just out for a 45-minute walk," he said. "I wasn't climbing, so I didn't have rescue gear. No rope, no flashlight."
Marveling at the sea of sharp, snowy peaks along the Annapurna range, named after a Hindu goddess — he explored a nearby ice wall a few hundred yards away.
"So I turn around, I'm just kind of strolling back. I see a nice flat area. OK, that's where I'll take my sample," he said. "I start walking toward it. It was ankle deep snow. Perfectly normal. ..."
"And then, boom. I'm in a mine shaft, smashing my face against the wall, going, 'Holy shit.' "
"I threw my right arm out with my ax and it stuck in the wall. ... But, of course, free-falling you can't stop yourself with one arm like that. So it just ripped it out of its socket, but my ax pulled out thankfully, so I had it," he said.
"I bounced a few more times, wound up landing on my side ... with both legs dangling into the void."
All was stuck on a crevasse ledge — solid ground 70 feet above him, no help anywhere near, and no idea how he was ever going to get back up.
Chapter 3
The climb out
The pain from his nonfunctioning right arm was searing and, with blood running down his face, he carefully righted himself.
Then he took stock. Calling for help was out because he had no communication — his satellite texting device was back in the tent. It was well below zero, and ice was already forming on his body. He knew he'd die of hypothermia long before his team returned. If the ledge went, he'd die. But he still had the ax, as well as his crampons, metal spikes attached to his boots to help his climb.
He could not climb straight up, because the crevasse widened above him, and with only one arm, he'd need to wedge himself between the two walls to make it up. Looking over a few hundred yards, he could see a possible route where the walls narrowed sufficiently.
"This isn't impossible," he remembers thinking. "I really had to focus. That's what climbing teaches you. You just learn tunnel vision. There's just one thing happening here."
Before beginning, All pulled out the tiny point-and-shoot camera he kept in a breast jacket pocket, deciding to document his dilemma. He filmed four dramatic video clips, including one in which he swears repeatedly and asks, "How the f––– do I get back up there?"
"I wasn't giving myself any room for doubt, and I think documenting it sort of it reaffirmed that for me. I will show this to people," he said. Plus, "I'm a scientist, I document everything."
Then, he began to climb.
He braced the spikes on his crampons against both walls, then moving the ice ax a few inches ahead, pulled himself to the ax with one hand. Then, he reset his feet and did it all over again — and again and again and again.
The ice kept giving way, and he knew one bad slip could be his death. But he slowly inched his way diagonally upward.
"It was painfully slow," he remembered. "And it's 20,000 feet, so I'm breathing like a bellows. So, whenever I got any kind of flat-foot stance, I'd put my head down and breathe."
At least four grueling hours later, around 2 p.m., All finally punched through the crust covering the top of the glacier.
"I'm so utterly spent, just breathing and panting. I probably spent 5-10 minutes just there, with half my body out, until finally I could just flop backward. Eventually I stood up and immediately just fell again because I was so weak," he said.
It took him at least two more hours to stagger and crawl back to his tent. It was after 4 p.m., and dusk was approaching. Unable to get his crampons off or crawl into a sleeping bag, he lay with his feet sticking outside the tent, thankful to be alive.
As darkness started to fall, he was reluctant to seek an evacuation. He knew it could put rescuers at risk. But given his injuries, he knew he couldn't climb back down.
He sent the first of several texts for help, some of which automatically were programmed to land on the Climber Science Facebook page.
"Please call Global Rescue. John broken arm, ribs, internal bleeding. Fell 70 ft crevasse. Climbed out. Himlung camp 2," he posted. "Please hurry."
Chapter 4
The rescue
Climber Science friends in Hawaii were the first to see his post and immediately contacted Boston-based Global Rescue, which provides medical and security evacuation to everyone from oil workers in Nigeria to Himalayan climbers, and to which All had a membership.
The firm scrambled a helicopter in Kathmandu, but bad weather meant no rescue could take place until the next morning. And there was another potential problem: Helicopters struggle to get enough lift in such thin air, and All was stranded close to the safe-flight ceiling. The attempt would be Global Rescue's second highest evacuation.
"Operating at 20,000 feet is difficult," Global Rescue CEO Dan Richards said.
On Himlung, All — who had to approve a $3,000 credit-card charge to pay for part of the rescue — ate some jelled packets of protein. He cut his crampons off and crawled into the tent. He took emergency hydrocodone to dull the "waves of agony" that swept through his broken ribs.
He kept in contact with a few friends and his parents with texts.
"GR can't find a helicopter so I'll try to survive tonight. I crawled back to tent. Unless the bleeding inside gets me, I should live," he texted to the group's Facebook page, adding another time, "Bleeding inside feels better but so cold. Pain meds running low. Longest night ever."
Back in Athens, Ga., his parents texted back that they loved him, and tried to divert his attention from the pain and cold with jokes about the Georgia heat. His mother sent a text urging him not to sleep, lest he not wake up.
"We spent all night texting him back and forth, trying to keep him encouraged," his father said.
Dawn finally came, bringing the welcome sounds of AS 350 B3E chopper blades. All said he later learned that the others on his team were hiking toward Camp 2 when they saw it fly overhead, their first realization that something was wrong.
"It was a pretty terrifying thing to witness, actually, not knowing what had happened," Horodyskyj said. "We thought he was dead."
The pilot and another rescuer circled for nearly a half-hour before finding a suitable landing area on the snow field.
They found All inside his tent, stiff with injuries and frostbite on his fingers. The rescuers dragged his 6-foot-5 frame on a sleeping pad to the chopper.
The pilot got the chopper airborne again. With the tent receding in the distance amid the snowy Himalayan peaks, All threw back his head and sighed in relief.
Chapter 5
The aftermath
At Novic International Hospital in Kathmandu, All got a battery of tests and had his arm reset. The list of his injuries was long: Eleven broken bones, including six ribs, three vertebrae, slashes across his stomach, a battered eye, injuries to his spine and fingers so frostbit that it looked as if he'd been hit with a hammer. But he'd recover after surgery on his arm.
His videos of his arduous climb up the crevasse, posted on Facebook, went viral and were followed quickly by media interview requests from around the world.
While climbing, accidents "kind of go with the territory, John's fall into the crevasse is one for the books," said Ellen Lapham, a climber who is co-director of the science climber group and has attempted Everest twice. "Given the injuries, the fact that he could climb out was amazing."
But his story also invited criticism from some who dismissed him as a "thrill junkie" and a "fool" for being alone, someone who should have been more focused on climbing out of the crevasse than taking video.
Lapham acknowledges that, in retrospect, being alone "was not a good idea," and she plans to strengthen the group's safety protocols on scientific climbs.
AndDavid Keeling, head of WKU's department of Geography and Geology, said that, though he is "grateful that John survived his accident," the fall has caused "us as a department, and as a wider scientific community, to ask serious questions" about safety plans needed to minimize risk.
Back home recovering in Bowling Green, All acknowledges his critics, even as he maintains that he didn't think he was taking risks being on a flat, seemingly safe spot. But he said he'll be more cautious. The silver lining, he said, is that the incident may help bring more attention to climate change.
Though he can't climb on this next trip, he's planning on supervising a climate research trip to Peru in late June that's funded by USAID and involves dozens of researchers and students.
And while still processing what happened, All seems to be taking it in stride — perhaps not surprising for a professor who has a tattoo commemorating a time he stepped on a black mamba snake and is a member of New York's Explorer's Club. The work of climate data collection, he insists, "has got to be done."
It's a sentiment echoed by University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank, who recently wrote a blog saying that All's experience was a reminder that "going impossible places, enduring impossible conditions, overcoming impossible odds — all in the name of getting new observations … represents one more reason to celebrate science."