Pete Schoening

It was mid-1953 and there were eight American mountaineers, including myself. One of my colleagues Art Gilkey was struck with a pulmonary embolism while we were stuck in the middle of a blizzard. A pulmonary embolism is when a part of the main artery or the branches of the lungs are blocked with a substance. This made the situation terrifying because first he could die and second we were on the Mount Everest.

There was something different about our group of climbers; instead of leaving him on the mountain and moving on, we would do anything we could to help Gilkey. Our goal was to get him on the mountain; we started our journey with him in his sleeping bag and it was tightly fastened to our bodies so we made sure he was with us all times.

The group was doing well for the first few days we: ate, sleep, and hiked. But one day the journey was about to come to a terrible end. One of the group members fell into the mountain's opening. As he fell he grabbed onto two other climbers who were twice as worried as he was. This would have been a graveyard for eight American mountaineers. I was belaying Gilkey, as the others were dangling in the opening of the mountain, and quickly used my instincts and caught them. I grabbed the rope and stopped the climbers' fall just in time but the only dreadful part was when I was doing this heroic act, Gilkey’s rope has snapped into the fall. Now, I have stopped the Mountain climbing due to my health reasons. My historical group will always be remembered in the novel Into Thin Air.