Falling Into a Mountain: Pulverising Impact

A science professor leads a research trip to a remote corner of the Himalayas. But one morning, John All experiences first-hand the dangers of working at the top of the world. A hidden danger in the snow thrusts him into a desperate scenario. Falling into a freezing cold chasm that sinks into the very bowels of the mountain, John’s only hope is an audacious, elaborate and incredibly dangerous self-rescue… A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. Written by Joe Viner | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Matt Peaty | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay, George Tapp | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Ralph Tittley. Go to https://surfshark.com/survival or use code SURVIVAL at checkout to get 4 extra months of SurfsharkVPN! For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:49John Hopkins?

  It's May 22, 2014.

• 0:53John Hopkins?

  In a remote corner of the Himalayas, close to the border of Nepal and Tibet, a jagged mountain chain surates the cobalt sky. It's a bright, cloudless day, and the sun's glare off the snow is blinding.

• 1:08John Hopkins?

  Around 20,000 feet up, on a wide, windswept plateau, a tent has been erected on the frozen ground. Inside, an unzipped sleeping bag, a head torch, a coffee percolator balanced atop a camping stove, unused. Clearly, whoever was just here didn't plan on being gone for long.

• 1:31John Hopkins?

  Outside the entrance of the tent, a set of footprints leads off at a slight angle, weaving through the deep, soft powder. The tracks are fresh, not yet covered over by new deposits. They stretch on for a short distance, until abruptly, they stop, vanishing into a tiny, dark hole in the snow.

• 1:56John Hopkins?

  A pinprick of black in the endless white.

• 2:01John Hopkins?

  It's the opening to a deep, hidden crevasse, where 70 feet beneath the surface, down in the bowels of the glacier,

• 2:11John Hopkins?

  44-year-old John All lies in a crumpled heap.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  I'm just laying there on my side, and I'm on top of the arm that I just ripped out. And then I feel the agony, but then it's also like, whoa, wait, I'm alive.

• 2:30John Hopkins?

  John blinks, his vision adjusting to the bluish blackness. Blood gushes from his nose and spills through the cracks in his clenched teeth. His right arm hangs by his side, twisted into an unnatural position.

• 2:47John Hopkins?

  Far above him, a dim shaft of light leaks through a hole in the snow.

• 2:53John Hopkins?

  Gingering, trying not to put any weight on his right arm, John pushes himself upright.

• 3:00John Hopkins?

  Every breath sends volleys of pain ripping through his chest.

• 3:05John Hopkins?

  He looks around, dazed. The last few seconds are a blur, a rush of vertigo, a sudden Pulverising impact with the crevasse floor.

• 3:19John Hopkins?

  But as he comes to his senses, John notices that his legs are dangling off the edge of something.

• 3:26John Hopkins?

  He isn't at the bottom of the crevasse at all.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  I could see maybe a hundred meters one direction and probably fifty meters the other direction. And there was just a couple of blocks of ice trapped in different spots in the crevasse, and I had landed on one of them.

• 3:46John Hopkins?

  John has landed on a frozen slab wedged between the crevasse's vertical walls. Below him, the chasm continues, stretching on endlessly into black nothingness.

• 4:00John Hopkins?

  Balanced on this precarious platform, delicately poised above a bottomless abyss, John turns his gaze in the only direction that now matters: up.

• 4:11John Hopkins?

  His only option of escape, it seems, is an impossible one.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  There was just no way to climb it, especially with just one arm, because this arm was totally useless. But I can't use this half of my body. So I'm just looking up and going, "How in the hell am I gonna get up there?"

• 4:37John Hopkins?

  Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives.

• 4:58John Hopkins?

  In this episode, we meet professor, mountaineer, and environmental scientist John Orr. In the spring of 2014, the 44-year-old is leading a research trip in a remote corner of the Himalayas. And on the morning of May 22, John experiences firsthand the dangers of doing scientific research on the roof of the world. While crossing a harmless-looking snow field, he stumbles into the mouth of a concealed crevasse, plummeting into the chasm.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  And so it's one of those things where it's just like vertical, I'm falling. This is how I die, you know?

• 5:35John Hopkins?

  After tumbling 70 feet, John comes to land on a hard, icy ledge. But surviving the fall might only have bought him time, turning what would have been a quick death into a slow one. He's trapped, critically injured, deep beneath the surface of the glacier, with no means of calling for help. His only hope is an audacious, elaborate, and incredibly dangerous self-rescue.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  100-meter fall if I fall, so I'm having to like free solo from block to block, knowing that one fall is death.

• 6:10John Hopkins?

  I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Real Survival Stories.

• 6:37John Hopkins?

  It's April 2014, Everest Base Camp.

• 6:42John Hopkins?

  In the shadow of the world's tallest mountain, a group of people sit around a campfire, heads bowed in meditation.

• 6:50John Hopkins?

  This is a puja, a Buddhist ritual for blessing the dead.

• 6:56John Hopkins?

  While solemn mantras echo around the valley, ink-black smoke rises and dissipates in the thin, clear air. Brightly colored prayer flags strung between tent poles flutter in the frigid wind.

• 7:12John Hopkins?

  Among the mourners is 44-year-old John Orr, a blond-haired, blue-eyed college professor and climate scientist. John is here on official business. He's leading a team of researchers collecting snow samples from Everest's sister mountain, Lhotse. The hope is that the samples will contain clues about how climate change is affecting ice in the region.

• 7:37John Hopkins?

  But yesterday, tragedy struck on Everest, and work was pushed to the back of everyone's minds.

• 7:45John Hopkins?

  A massive slab of ice broke off the side of the glacier, crashing down on the heads of an unsuspecting group of Sherpas. John was one of the first on the scene to help search through the debris.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  We spent that whole day digging bodies out and helicoptering bodies down and trying to figure out who was alive and dead because you didn't even know. Some people had gone above, and so it was like, did they make it through? Were they trapped there?

• 8:13John Hopkins?

  By the time all the victims were accounted for, the death toll had reached 16, making this the deadliest accident on Everest to date.

• 8:22John Hopkins?

  Among those tragically lost were several of the Sherpa guides who John had hired to assist with his own expedition.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  And so it really was this kind of intense time period where it was just me and my friends mourning. So we spent essentially hours of the day doing nothing but meditating on doing pujas, trying to bless the dead as much as we could.

• 8:51John Hopkins?

  One death has hit John particularly hard. Ashman was a young Sherpa he'd hired in the weeks before the trip. It was to be his first ever expedition as a guide.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Essentially, if you can get on and become a guide as a Sherpa, that's like, you know, playing in the NBA or something. It's gonna make the money for your family to survive and everything. And so, we were giving him that shot, you know?

• 9:19John Hopkins?

  In the wake of such a tragedy, everything else can pale into insignificance.

• 9:25John Hopkins?

  As the days go by, however, John and his colleagues' thoughts gradually return to the reason they're here: the expedition, the research.

• 9:38John Hopkins?

  Carrying on as before clearly isn't going to be possible. Following the deadly icefall, no climbers are allowed to ascend Everest or its surrounding peaks. John and his team wait patiently at base camp.

• 9:52John Hopkins?

  But after almost a month with no change, it becomes clear that ordinary service isn't going to resume.

• 9:59John Hopkins?

  Still, despite this setback, neither John nor his colleagues are ready to go home.

• 10:05John Hopkins?

  Perhaps even more so than before, they feel they have a duty to complete the research that brought them here.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  What I felt at least was Ashman sacrificed for this greater good, and for us just to walk away would tarnish the sacrifice he made.

• 10:22John Hopkins?

  If anything, the tragedy on Everest only highlights the importance of John's research. As the planet gets warmer, these mountains become more volatile, with a greater likelihood of avalanches, rockfalls, and collapsing glaciers. And so, unwilling to call it quits, John and his team start scouting out different locations to gather samples.

• 10:46John Hopkins?

  But time is not on their side. It's already mid-May. They have just a few weeks to pick a location, get there, acclimatize, and collect samples. All before the arrival of warmer weather in June makes their high-altitude work far too dangerous.

• 11:03John Hopkins?

  After some discussion, they settle on Mount Himalayan, near the Annapurna Range. After obtaining climbing permits, the team embarks from the capital Kathmandu to the base of Himalayan, keenly aware that every day that passes brings them closer to that all-important cutoff.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  The end of the climbing season on Everest and in the Himalayas is when the monsoon hits. And so we knew we were looking at late May, early June is when the monsoon hits. And so we were getting closer and closer to that because we'd had to move and come down from Everest, haul all our gear over to Annapurna and go back up. So we know we've got like a week and a half left.

• 11:42John Hopkins?

  It's a trip not without risk. But balanced against that is potential reward. The opportunity to gather data and push science forward.

• 11:53John Hopkins?

  This search for knowledge is one of John's main motivators that keeps bringing him back to the mountains.

• 12:00John Hopkins?

  Growing up as a keen climber, he learned about the early mountaineers who scaled Everest for no better reason than because it was there.

• 12:09John Hopkins?

  But such naked ambition has never sat well with him.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  At the end of the day, climbing is a selfish pursuit. I mean, it's risking your family's happiness, it's risking your friends' happiness. If you die, you're dead, but everyone that you've touched is hurt and you're leaving that void. And for me personally, it just needed to mean more.

• 12:33John Hopkins?

  It wasn't until he was older that he discovered how to make climbing more meaningful.

• 12:39John Hopkins?

  After finishing his bachelor's degree in environmental science, John began applying for PhD programs. But before resuming his studies, he decided to take a year out. And it was during this period, traveling through South America and climbing peaks as he went, that he came to an important realization.

• 12:58John Hopkins?

  His two great passions in life, climbing and environmental science, could exist side by side. The mountains could teach him more about our changing world.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  The Andes are great because maybe 100 meters of horizontal distance gets you 5,000 meters of vertical distance. And so I could see how, as people moved up and down the mountains and managed the land in different ways, that it led to really different environmental outcomes.

• 13:27John Hopkins?

  Years later, John co-founded the Climbers Science Program, a nonprofit organization that facilitates research in remote, mountainous environments. John is currently professor at Western Kentucky University. But during the summers, he guides researchers through some of the world's most extreme places, from the driest deserts to the highest peaks.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  We'd measure vegetation, we'd measure water quality, we'd measure grazing impacts, fire impacts, and, you know, publish papers on all these different things. But then, the heart was always the snow. You know, how was the snow changing?

• 14:05John Hopkins?

  The purpose of this trip to the Himalayas is to measure the speed at which glacial ice is melting.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  One of my colleagues actually was working with NASA, and so NASA was gonna fly a satellite directly overhead. So while we were collecting snow samples on the ground, they would measure the reflectance up. And of course, the reflectance, the more that reflects, the less it's absorbed and the less the glacier melts. So it really lets us directly measure how fast glaciers are disappearing. So it was this wonderful scientific expedition we had all planned out.

• 14:37John Hopkins?

  Now, after the tragedy on Everest and the delays that followed, that expedition is back on track, albeit behind schedule. John and his lean team of two researchers, plus a few local porters and cooks, make their way up the lower slopes of the Himalayan Massif.

• 14:56John Hopkins?

  But ominous reminders of the advancing season are never far away.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  We start heading up and there's a snowfall of about half a meter. We're all kind of nervous about it.

• 15:10John Hopkins?

  As the snow continues to cascade down, the group forges on.

• 15:15John Hopkins?

  They ascend fast, quickly reaching the 6,000 meter, or 20,000 feet camp, situated on a snow field above the upper glacier.

• 15:24John Hopkins?

  They've made excellent progress, but as they set up their tents, the consequence of their haste becomes clear. One of the researchers is suffering from altitude sickness due to not acclimatizing properly. She's in a bad way, and it leaves John as expedition lead with a tough decision.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  And so we were sort of stuck with this, what the heck are we gonna do? So me and the other guy who was feeling good, we kind of walk our perimeter, make sure there's kind of a nice, safe area in the camp. I agreed to stay up high at 6,000 meters and collect the samples that we're collecting. And they'll go down for a day, eat a bunch of food, kind of recover a little bit, and then come back up.

• 16:09John Hopkins?

  John watches as his two fellow researchers, accompanied by the Nepalese guides, make their way back down to base camp.

• 16:18John Hopkins?

  For the first time in weeks, he's alone.

• 16:22John Hopkins?

  He crawls into his tent and hunkers down in his sleeping bag. After a long day's climbing, sleep quickly overtakes him.

• 16:41John Hopkins?

  The next morning, John rises at around 8:30.

• 16:45John Hopkins?

  He sits up, yawning, his breath misting the air inside the tent. Sparkling frost clings to the inner canvas.

• 16:55John Hopkins?

  He unzips the door flap to reveal a magnificent vista sprawled out beneath him, the mountains framed against an impossibly blue sky. Aside from the wisps of spin drift blowing from the peaks across the valley, nothing stirs.

• 17:13John Hopkins?

  The panorama is as still and silent as a photograph. John stretches and smiles.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  And I've got the whole day. I got nothing to do. It's a beautiful day. Beautiful views. I can see Annapurna. I can see Everest. I can see all this stuff. So I'm like, all right, I'm gonna go out, collect some snow to melt for coffee.

• 17:37John Hopkins?

  John gets dressed, pulling on his climbing trousers, t-shirt, gloves, and a thin, lightweight shell. He doesn't bother with a hat or down jacket. He'll only be outside for a few minutes. He grabs a pair of ice axes to dig up snow. Then he trudges away from the tent, crampons crunching. The air is thin and lungs scorchingly cold. John shields his eyes, blinded by the sun's dazzling reflection off the glacier.

• 18:10John Hopkins?

  As he walks, his steps are confident, self-assured, the strides of a man in his element. But there is something he doesn't know. This area appears, at first glance, like an unbroken field of snow. But it isn't. Beneath the fresh powder lies a crack, a slender, jagged seam carved into the glacier's frigid bulk. And he is headed straight for it.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  There was just this one little hidden crevasse, and it was hidden because of that meter of snow that was on top. So it was kind of like a tiger trap. There was no way to know it was there type deal. So yeah, I'm just walking along and suddenly I'm falling.

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• 20:08John Hopkins?

  It's the morning of May 22, 2014, in the Himalayas. On the slopes of Mount Himlung, 44-year-old John All has just inadvertently stepped into a concealed crevasse.

• 20:22John Hopkins?

  The ground opens up beneath his feet and swallows him in a single swift gom. One moment he's there, the next he's gone.

• 20:31John Hopkins?

  Vanished in a blur of flailing arms and a scattering of ice shards. Below the surface, John plummets through the dark, stunned by the disorienting whiplash of sensation.

• 20:44John Hopkins?

  A moment ago, he was on solid ground, bathed in glorious sunshine. Now, he's falling through black space.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I mean, it's bright sunlight to the point that's hurting my eyes to effectively darkness. You feel the vertigo. And we're human beings. We know what vertigo means. And so it's one of those things where it's just like, I'm falling. This is how I die, you know?

• 21:14John Hopkins?

  John bumps, scrapes, and crashes his way down the crevasse, his knees and elbows clattering against the walls.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  I start bouncing off the one side. And my reaction, like, I'd always thought, well, if I fall in a crevasse, kind of like you see in a movie, you know, you're gonna like, catch yourself.

• 21:35John Hopkins?

  He's still gripping both his ice axes. He throws out a desperate right hand, slamming the blade into the wall. The axe pierces the ice, but it doesn't stop his descent. Instead, the sudden jolt of resistance snaps his arm and yanks the bone from its socket.

• 21:56John Hopkins?

  And then...

• 22:05John Hopkins?

  John lies in a tangled heap, stunned, the breath smashed from his lungs. Little specks of light dance across his vision. Slowly, his senses flicker back to life.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  I'm just laying there on my side. I'm on top of the arm that I just ripped out. And my legs are dangling over the edge. And then I feel the agony, but then it's also like, whoa, wait, I'm alive.

• 22:34John Hopkins?

  It feels improbable, miraculous even. It also feels like something heavy is pressing down on his diaphragm. John strains, using all his strength to force a trickle of air into his lungs. Once he's breathing more normally, he attempts to sit up and get his bearings. He has landed on a block of ice suspended between the walls of the chasm. Peering over the edge, it seems the crevasse continues down for 300 feet more at least. If this ice block hadn't broken his fall, he would be dead, no question, swallowed without a trace. Gasping in pain, he tips his head back and peers up towards the surface.

• 23:19John Hopkins?

  The walls of the crevasse don't rise in a straight line. They undulate with kinks and crags and overhangs. But at the very top, 70 feet above his head, a faint beam of sunlight trickles through the hole he fell through, roughly the height of a seven-story building.

• 23:41John Hopkins?

  John stares for a while, and as the facts of his situation become clear, disbelief turns to dismay. He isn't carrying a satellite phone or any other means of calling for help. He can't just sit and wait because the others won't get here until tomorrow afternoon. And there's no way he'd survive the night, not down here.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  And I could just feel the cold penetrating because all I had on was just a thin liner glove and a T-shirt and then just a shell. Because again, it was bright sunlight. I was only going to be out of the tent for, you know, 20 minutes. And so it was like I was in a deep freezer. I mean, it was cold, cold.

• 24:26John Hopkins?

  It's pretty obvious. John's only hope of surviving is by climbing out himself. An almost inconceivable prospect. He looks around for his ice axes. He let go of them during the fall, and without them, he'll have no chance of scaling the crevasse. He feels around in the gloom.

• 24:47John Hopkins?

  No sign. A pang of dread shudders through him. The tools could easily have bounced off the ledge and gone tumbling down into the abyss. His hands scrabble about, desperate. Until... Relief. John closes his grip around the handle of one axe, then another, both lying beside him in the darkness. It's a big stroke of luck.

• 25:14John Hopkins?

  But as he turns to the seventy-foot edifice looming over him, he sees that the wall is covered in a thick layer of slushy snow.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  And so I reached up and sort of put my axe in, and it just slides down without any resistance at all. And what I realized had happened was, as moist air came over before the snowfall hit, came over and went down the crevasse, it quick-froze. It pulled the water out, I guess is the way to put it. And so it created this, like... whipped cream is the consistency it had. And so there was just, there was no way to climb it.

• 26:01John Hopkins?

  It's about 9:00 a.m.

• 26:04John Hopkins?

  With the crevasse wall above John manifestly unclamable, he is flummoxed. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something he always brings with him on research expeditions: his video camera.

• 26:18John Hopkins?

  He turns the lens on himself and starts narrating. The fall, his broken arm, the apparent impossibility of escape.

• 26:28John Hopkins?

  Partly, John does this out of habit. When he's out in the field, he records his observations and ideas for reference later. On this occasion, he can't be certain if they'll be a later. But one thing's for sure: he has never needed a good idea more than now.

• 26:45John Hopkins?

  He speaks slowly into the lens, his breath fogging the glass as he describes the layout of the chasm.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  To my left, the crevasse gets wider and wider and wider. There's not much I can do with that.

• 27:02John Hopkins?

  He swivels the camera around in the other direction, and there, a glimmer of hope. Several hundred feet to his right, the chasm narrows, its walls tapering until they almost touch.

• 27:17John Hopkins?

  If he could get there, he might be able to wedge himself between both sides and shimmy his way to the surface.

• 27:25John Hopkins?

  Crucially, the wall along this horizontal stretch isn't completely smooth. Loose chunks of ice and broken boulders are wedged in the crevasse, intermittently filling the hollow space.

• 27:38John Hopkins?

  With any luck, John could use them as makeshift stepping stones, moving from block to block and climb his way out that way.

• 27:48John Hopkins?

  It's a plan. Whether or not it's a good one, only time will tell.

• 27:54John Hopkins?

  He switches off the camera and stows it away in his pocket.

• 27:59John Hopkins?

  Gritting his teeth, he tries to move his right arm. That's a non-starter. He is going to have to maneuver along the wall without the use of his right hand. He'll have to devise a makeshift solution.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  So unfortunately, I was moving to my right, and my right arm wasn't working. So what I had to do was I would take one ice axe and reach over as far across my body as I could, sink it into the wall, and then pull myself over until I was kind of leaning up against it, and then I would reach back and grab the other ice axe.

• 28:37John Hopkins?

  It's going to be slow and perilous. John will have to dig the points of his crampons into the ice and reach across his body with his good left arm. He'll plant one axe, then lean against it as he reaches back for the other, repeating this difficult move over and over.

• 28:56John Hopkins?

  Readying himself, John sets off, stepping cautiously from his narrow perch, driving metal spikes into the glassy crevasse wall.

• 29:06John Hopkins?

  One-armed, he inches his way along the slippery face.

• 29:12John Hopkins?

  It takes him over half an hour to reach the first block of ice. He collapses onto it. His body's screaming, his lungs burning.

• 29:21John Hopkins?

  After a brief rest, John looks for the next solid platform.

• 29:26John Hopkins?

  His heart sinks. It's separated from him by a fifty-foot gulf, more than double what he's just traversed, with nothing to cling to but sheer, featureless ice.

• 29:40John Hopkins?

  He rallies his courage and continues on.

• 29:45John Hopkins?

  Pretty soon, he's established a kind of labored rhythm. Strike, heave, swing, kick, on and on.

• 29:56John Hopkins?

  He's about halfway across the gap when he pauses to catch his breath. His muscles are on fire, every tendon stretched to breaking point. Teetering on the points of his crampons, John glances down between his quivering legs.

• 30:11John Hopkins?

  A few ice chips come loose and swirl down into the darkness.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  There's nothing below me, so it's a hundred-meter fall down into the very bowels of the glacier. And I'm just, you know, I'm on my front points, so I'm on two pieces of metal on my feet and one hand, and that's all that's holding me up from a hundred-meter fall.

• 30:38John Hopkins?

  He stares into the abyss.

• 30:43John Hopkins?

  Glaciers are active, moving objects, not just static blocks of ice. They advance and recede, split open into crevasses and slam shut again. From the blackness, John can almost hear the ice groaning and shifting, the wind shivering through its dark channels.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  I'm looking down and it sort of is undulating. I can see how the water had flowed down it and I could just visualize my body flowing down it. I started just kind of getting nervous or whatever. And then I had this vision of my mom and I was just, I was like, you know, if I fall in here, they're never gonna find my body. Nobody's gonna be able to figure out what happened to me, where I went. And I just couldn't do that to her. And so it was kind of amazing. It just slammed the emotion shut and just reinvigorated me.

• 31:35John Hopkins?

  John pulls his eyes away. He summons the strength and redirects his focus into his hand movements, his feet positioning.

• 31:45John Hopkins?

  On he goes, sidestepping along the vertiginous ice, one foot over the other.

• 31:52John Hopkins?

  Until, eventually.

• 31:56John Hopkins?

  He reaches the second platform.

• 31:59John Hopkins?

  Panting, John pulls out his camera. Time for an update.

• 32:04John Hopkins?

  He looks down the lens and describes his journey so far, his words coming in short, breathless gasps. He points the camera left to show the distance he's come, and then up and right to show the distance still left to climb.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  The video was nice because it was me talking myself through what I was doing, you know? So I was like, alright, well, I can't go that way. I still can't go up yet. This way, I can see, so I was thinking it through at every time I would stop.

• 32:33John Hopkins?

  But he can't stop for long.

• 32:36John Hopkins?

  It's not just the cold.

• 32:39John Hopkins?

  At this altitude, the air he's breathing contains dangerously low levels of oxygen, roughly forty-five percent of that found at sea level.

• 32:48John Hopkins?

  Pilots generally turn on supplemental oxygen at around ten thousand feet.

• 32:54John Hopkins?

  John is twice that high. It makes everything he's doing that much harder.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  I was like, I was running a marathon at a full sprint. I'm breathing as hard as I could breathe the entire time. And essentially, every time I would reach a platform, I would just stop and spend like five minutes catching my breath.

• 33:13John Hopkins?

  After further enormous effort, John makes it three-quarters of the way along the horizontal stretch, almost at the point where he can start climbing straight up. Pain riots down his right side. But by pouring all of his concentration into what he's doing, he manages to suppress all other distractions.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  It was a computer. It was, this ax goes into that spot. This ax goes into that spot. That foot goes there, that foot goes there. There was no emotion. I mean, there was just no way your mind could take the overwhelming impossibility of what I was doing, unless you just wore a computer.

• 34:01Speaker 00

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• 34:30Speaker 01

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• 34:49John Hopkins?

  It's about 2 PM, almost five hours since John fell. Finally, with acid coursing through his muscles, he has reached the place where the crevasse narrows. Its walls close enough that he can balance his back against one while digging his crampons into the other.

• 35:10John Hopkins?

  He hacks at the pale blue ice, chiseling off glassy sheets.

• 35:15John Hopkins?

  The texture of the walls here is different. Less moisture flows through the narrow opening, resulting in a harder, brittler consistency. It makes it difficult to get a firm purchase.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  So it's super slow and time-consuming. But on the positive side, there was actually little edges. And so I could sort of stem between it. And I'm slowly starting to just climb my way through that broken, stemmy ice.

• 35:45John Hopkins?

  John looks up. The surface can't be more than 40 feet away.

• 35:52John Hopkins?

  With his back pressed against the one wall, he kicks his spikes into the opposite wall and chimneys his way up the crevice.

• 36:02John Hopkins?

  As he gets higher, the light changes around him, going from a bluish-black to a kind of deep aquamarine.

• 36:11John Hopkins?

  He's getting closer.

• 36:13John Hopkins?

  Lost in his rhythm, John reaches up with his left hand and hammers his axe into the ice.

• 36:20John Hopkins?

  He hears a crack and feels a sudden lurch as a huge chunk of glacier breaks off the wall. It smashes into him, knocking one leg from its foothold.

• 36:31John Hopkins?

  John braces himself.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Thankfully, the other leg was anchored and I was pushed up against the wall, so it effectively just pushed me into the wall and bounced off and fell down. Otherwise, if I'd been lower, it would have knocked me off and I'd have died.

• 36:47John Hopkins?

  He shakes it off. Can't lose concentration now. On he goes, an automaton. Kick, shimmy, kick, shimmy. Every inch bringing him closer to daylight.

• 37:02John Hopkins?

  He can see the blue sky through the opening now, can practically feel the sun warming his frozen skin, guiding him towards the light. His broken bones grind together as he scrambles higher and higher. And then, finally,

• 37:22John Hopkins?

  breakthrough.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  So I get then to the top of the actual crevasse and there's this hole and it felt like digging myself out of my grave because I, you know, had to reach up then and clear all that snow out so that there was a hole big enough for me to crawl through.

• 37:41John Hopkins?

  He anchors his crampons and thrusts himself up through the hole.

• 37:48John Hopkins?

  His head and arms are out. All he has to do now is plant his axe and pull the rest of his body from the crevasse.

• 37:55John Hopkins?

  But at the final hurdle, John finds that he has nothing left to give.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  And I'm just like shaking, I'm so tired. And I'm screwed because it's loose, thick snow. I'm like raking through it. I couldn't, I couldn't get out. I sit there for a minute or two, I'm like, holy crap. I get all the way here and I'm gonna fall back down.

• 38:22John Hopkins?

  John's muscles quiver, every fiber on the verge of collapse.

• 38:27John Hopkins?

  It's impossible to get any traction in this loose, powdery snow. It's like trying to hammer a nail into quicksand. And any second, his crampons could lose their purchase on the ice.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna have to jump for it. And so I just push off as hard as I can with my right leg and like kind of dive forward with my axe and try and like sink it as deep as I can.

• 38:54John Hopkins?

  With the last drop of energy he can muster, he propels himself forward. He leaps from the jaws of the crevasse and flings out his left arm, bringing the axe down hard into the snow and hoping, praying that it bites.

• 39:10John Hopkins?

  And it does.

• 39:12John Hopkins?

  John crawls as far as he can, eager to put more distance between himself and the gaping black hole behind him. Finally, unable to go another inch, he claps his face down in the snow.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  And I try and stand up. And I stand up for like a split second and immediately collapse. I've reached the point where I've just, I've spent everything that's in my body.

• 39:40John Hopkins?

  Trembling, John lifts his head.

• 39:44John Hopkins?

  His tent is agonizingly close, just a few dozen feet.

• 39:50John Hopkins?

  But even the short crawl over to it might be more than his exhausted body can handle.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  I thought I had completed this and could move on to being rescued and heading home for some food, but instead I'm, I've still got a long way to go.

• 40:14John Hopkins?

  It's almost 6pm.

• 40:18John Hopkins?

  As daylight fades over the Himalayas, the ice cliffs and ridges of the Himalayan Massive fall into shadow.

• 40:25John Hopkins?

  On a remote plateau, perched high above the glacier, John drags himself through the snow, his long blond hair matted with frozen blood.

• 40:36John Hopkins?

  After staggering, stumbling, and crawling the short distance from the mouth of the crevasse, he finally reaches his tent. He unzips the door and crawls inside. He's made it.

• 40:51John Hopkins?

  He's intensely thirsty, but even though he can see the water sloshing around inside his bottle, he can't get the lid off with one functioning hand. It is just another torture he must endure.

• 41:05John Hopkins?

  John reaches for his painkillers and swallows them dry.

• 41:10John Hopkins?

  Next, he opens his backpack and pulls out his only communication tool, a small handheld InReach device. It can't place calls, but it can send and receive texts via satellite.

• 41:24John Hopkins?

  It can also access social media, and this might be the most efficient way of raising the alarm.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  And so I just posted it on Facebook. I'm like, "Hey, this is John, falling in a crevasse. Anybody sees this? It would be really helpful if we could start a rescue type deal."

• 41:46John Hopkins?

  John taps out his post and sends it off, a digital flare into the ether.

• 41:54John Hopkins?

  Within minutes, the InReach screen lights up. His Hail Mary has been seen by a colleague, a fellow academic at the climate science program. The colleague informs John that she is called Global Rescue, an international crisis response company that will soon initiate his extraction. That is, once his team has waded through all the red tape.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  That takes a while to get stuff organized. Now helicopters fly all the time, but back then there was just a few helicopters. So it was gonna take time to negotiate with them in terms of the cost for the rescue company. So yeah, I knew I was stuck there overnight.

• 42:33John Hopkins?

  At least help is on its way. John picks up the InReach again and sends off a few more messages to his girlfriend, his mom, and some of his close friends and colleagues, telling them how much they mean to him. Soon the device vibrates with a flurry of replies, messages of encouragement and affection. He draws strength from their words. But even now, surrounded by the support of his loved ones, he keeps his emotions strictly in check.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  I'm still just very analytical and it makes me feel good that they're talking to me and that they love me, but at the same time, I just, if I let myself feel, I'll feel the agony. You know, I'll feel the recognition that my body's totally broken.

• 43:20John Hopkins?

  As the night draws in, John hunkers down. The painkillers have taken the edge off his injuries, but sleep feels unlikely. Besides, there is still the possibility that if he does drift off, he might not wake up. As he sits there, listening to the wind howl outside his tent, it's not just his broken bones that are of concern.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  I knew I was bleeding internally. I could feel my stomach filling with, you know, liquid. And so I was sitting up on the packs at an angle with my feet kind of hanging down into the little vestibule area with just a sleeping bag laying over the top. Thankfully it was warm, otherwise I'd have probably frozen to death. Longest night of my life, unquestionably.

• 44:14Speaker 00

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• 44:43Speaker 05

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• 45:15John Hopkins?

  Finally, dawn lightens the edge of his tent.

• 45:20John Hopkins?

  The new day is cause for optimism. By now, the rescue operation will surely have clicked into gear.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  So maybe 5:00 in the morning, it starts getting light. I'm like, "Yes, they're gonna be here soon." 6:00, I'm just in agony. I'm running low on painkillers. 7, 8, 9, 10.

• 45:43John Hopkins?

  As the morning wears on, John's frustration grows. He sends texts to Global Rescue asking what's taking them so long, but the reply is always the same: "We're working on it."

• 45:56John Hopkins?

  The interminable wait goes on, until finally, at 11:00 a.m., he hears it:

• 46:05John Hopkins?

  the guttural thrum of rotor blades beating the air.

• 46:10John Hopkins?

  A few moments later, the door of his tent unzips, and the face of a Nepalese man appears. John tries to speak, but his voice is a barely audible croak.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  At this point, I'm close to death. I can't walk, I can't move. But I was kind of laying on a therma rest, and so the shepherd just grabs both edges of the therma rest and just starts running across towards the helicopter, dragging me, bumping the whole way, breaking all my bones again on the ice.

• 46:40John Hopkins?

  Within minutes, he's in the helicopter. Once he's fully strapped in place, the pilot sparks the engine and guides the chopper down the mountain.

• 46:51John Hopkins?

  Soon, they're below the snow line. Through his fluttering eyelids, John catches glimpses of lush green fields, rice paddies, and terraced foothills.

• 47:02John Hopkins?

  As the elevation changes, so does the climate, going from sub-freezing to hot and humid.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden, I'm sweating like a pig because I've got all this heavy stuff, like trying to like strip stuff off and yeah, and then we make it down and down to the hospital.

• 47:22John Hopkins?

  John is taken to a hospital in Kathmandu, and suddenly, he's being stretchered through brightly lit corridors.

• 47:30John Hopkins?

  He is wheeled into the x-ray room, where doctors and nurses swarm around him.

• 47:36John Hopkins?

  Some hold him down, while others try to force his dislocated shoulder back into place.

• 47:43John Hopkins?

  John screams, until he feels the sharp prick of a needle in his side as more painkillers are administered.

• 47:51John Hopkins?

  The room blurs, then fades to black as he slips gently from consciousness.

• 48:10John Hopkins?

  Though he has broken fifteen bones, including six vertebrae, John only spends a couple of days in hospital in Kathmandu.

• 48:20John Hopkins?

  Desperate to get back to his loved ones, he declines the doctor's advice to have immediate surgery on his right arm. He just wants to go home. And within a week, he is back in Kentucky, surrounded by friends and family, but still relying heavily on painkillers. After surgeons eventually do operate on his broken bones, he is discharged from hospital and sent home to heal at his own pace.

• 48:47John Hopkins?

  But as the physical pain slowly subsides, he finds that it's the emotional aftermath of his ordeal that might have the longer tail.

• 48:56John Hopkins?

  Sadly, as John's recovery grinds on, his relationship with his girlfriend suffers.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  After the accident, you know, I'm totally broken and my body, I could barely move, I'm in agony and everything else. And yeah, she fairly quickly broke up with me and moved on to the next person. And that was probably the hardest emotional part of the entire thing.

• 49:22John Hopkins?

  For John, life after the accident will never be the same.

• 49:27John Hopkins?

  Though he recovers well from his injuries, the near-death experience forces him to reassess.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  It basically was one of those things where, before this moment, life had always been this vast ocean of possibility. You know, I could go to Africa, I could go to Nepal, I could go to Central America. And suddenly, way off in the distance, I saw a horizon

• 49:53Speaker 03

  and realized it wasn't going to go forever.

• 49:59John Hopkins?

  But the horizon doesn't just remind John of his limitations, it also points him in which direction to go.

• 50:07John Hopkins?

  Following his fall and escape from the crevasse, he decides to uproot his life in Kentucky and live closer to the things he loves: climbing and being in the mountains. He lands in Washington State, where he sets up the Mountain Environments Research Institute, an organization that focuses exclusively on high-altitude climate research. In the years since, John says other positives have come from his ordeal. For one thing, the publicity his story receives provides him with a platform to promote his field of research and inspire others.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  It just gave me the opportunity to really share my experiences studying climate change around the world, the dangers of doing it, but also the joys and the benefits of doing it. It showed people different ways to interact with the environment, different careers and different ways to care for the environment, I think, even if there is some risk involved.

• 51:05John Hopkins?

  Ultimately, positivity and perseverance define John before and after the accident. And they are the qualities that gave him what he needed to survive.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  The only reasons I climbed out is I'm eternally optimistic. And I was like, of course I'm gonna climb out. How would I not climb out, type deal? And I've essentially had to fight for every bit of strength. Because until high school, I was the skinny, weak nerd. And so, when I hit an obstacle like this, it's like all my life I've had to fight to become what I was. And having to fight that whole time, really, I think, helped build the obstinance to keep fighting.

• 52:01John Hopkins?

  In the next episode, we meet Rob Roth, a journalist who gets trapped right in the middle of an incendiary story. In 1991, the TV reporter is following up on a small wildfire in the forested hills surrounding Oakland, California, a blaze which firefighters got under control the day before. With his wife due to give birth today, Rob is hoping to get home on time. But this routine assignment soon takes a hellish turn. When the winds suddenly change, Rob will find himself trapped in a reignited inferno, camera still rolling in the middle of one of the worst firestorms in America's history. That's next time. Listen right now without waiting and without ads by joining Noiser Plus.

• 52:51Speaker 00

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• 53:21Speaker 06

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