Espionage in the Himalayas: No Ordinary Adventure

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On the slopes of Nanda Kot, a peak of some 22,500 feet in the Himalayas of Northern India, a savage snowstorm has taken over the world. The clear night sky and blazing stars are gone. The constellations swallowed up by the male strong. Even the light from the waning half moon has vanished,

engulfed in a vortex of thick white flakes and ice pellets.

The wind hounds with a wild, primal anger, as if it were the voice of the mountain itself.

Every so often an avalanche cascades down the rocky ice and crusted inclines, sending thick clouds of snow, blowing into the opaque sky.

“With each new avalanche, Nanda Kot purges itself of any sign of human activity.”

Abliterating the footsteps left by recent climbers. A few thousand feet below the summit, a narrow crevasse cuts deep into the side of the mountain, like a wound. Its entrance is completely concealed, covered over by a recent avalanche. And inside, four shocked climbers stare into the darkness

towards the place where their exit used to be. The silence is broken only by their shallow, anxious breathing, and the muffled roar of the storm outside. 41-year-old Pete Takeda, gropes to switch on his head torch, trying to quail the nausea and the dizziness caused by his ever-wersening altitude sickness.

The scene he illuminates doesn't make him feel any better. All you see is this wall of avalanche debris. In some ways, I felt like, wow, this is so staged. You could not make this up. Progressively, the mountain is intoming us.

That's how I felt. Until now, this crevasse has been functioning as the climbers shelter, protecting them from the elements outside. But with their exit now cut off by thick icy barrier, and tons of snow resting precariously above them,

it could just as easily become their tomb. All the time, I'm eyeing the ceiling going down.

If nothing collapses, they're never going to find us.

And it's going to be an ugly death.

“Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes?”

If you don't have to depend 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 extra ordinary situations.

People suddenly forced a fight for their lives. In this episode, we tell the unique tale of Pete Takada, a story that combines extreme locations extraordinary natural phenomena and espionage. In September 2005, Pete is leading a small party

deep into the Himalayas. His plan is to summit Nanda Kot, a peak of striking beauty and spiritual significance. But this is no ordinary mountaineer intervention. Their mission is more like something of a spy movie.

To find proof of plutonium-powered surveillance devices, rumored to have been planted in the mountains by the CIA some 40 years earlier. I kind of had this fantasy of now. We're going to go up there and we're going to find this

poking out of the glacier and here it is proof positive. You can hold it in your hands. This is proof positive of one of the CIA expeditions. But when the might of the mountain turns against Pete and his team, all their priorities shift,

unable to descend due to the wild weather, the climbers become trapped, buried alive beneath hundreds of tons of snow. Cut off from any sort of help, they face a series of lethal threats. Their only hope of survival is to stay alive long enough for the storm to clear.

Your thinking to yourself is the ceiling going to collapse on us. Is there going to be another avalanche that, you know, compresses our profess, are we going to suffocate in this cave unless we get some air circulation? I'm John Hopkins.

From the noise of podcast network, this is real survival stories.

It's 18 years earlier.

“A cold October night in 1987 in a glacier carved valley deep within your”

semity national park, California.

The wilderness is steeped in shadows and great granite monoliths rise eerily from the ground, reaching towards the sky as if grasping for the stars. In a small forest clearing surrounded by pine trees, a campfire burns, crackling in the dark. Plustered around it is a group of six climbers in tattered

fleeces and well-worn shoes, drinking beers and discussing the roots of attempted that day. Home to iconic rock formations, such as El Capitan and half dome, it's no surprise that your semity attracts climbers from across the globe of all skills and disciplines. And one of these is Peter Cater.

“In 1987, I was just a 20-something-year-old climber living the dream.”

I got to climb 250 to 300 days a year. I had a job busing tables that didn't take up too much of my time.

I could free climb. I could put up first a sense and I could climb El Capitan

on the weekends. I mean, this is what I dreamed of. And to me, it was like, this is the pinnacle of climbing. As the evening wears on, the cold ones give way to cheap liquor. lengthy elaborate anecdotes are swapped, fueled by the many rumors that circulate within the climbing community. Part of climbing culture is

there's these legends that are out there. And so if you hang out with climbers for any period of time, eventually you're going to hear about some legendary character or some yarn that exists within each genre of climbing. But time passes easily, and the campfire burns lower, until eventually there is a loll in the conversation.

Pete swills the amber liquid in his cup, and eyes the glowing embers as the silent stretches on. And then one of his companions speaks up, a stout, old man, with an authoritative air. Sloaring his words only slightly, it begins to recount a rich compelling story

of cold war espionage, mountain climbers, and nuclear power. It's unlike anything they've ever heard before. According to Pete's friend, sometime in the 1960s, a group of elite climbers were paid by the CIA to place a plutonium powered surveillance device somewhere in the Himalayas, in order to gather information on China's nuclear weapons program.

But somehow the device was either lost or stolen. And could at that very moment be threatening the entire population of India with huge doses of radiation poisoning. Everything apparently was covered up by the CIA, with a climbers sworn to secrecy on pain of death.

Pete and his companions listen with interest. It's a diverting story, but seems way too far fetched to be true. You hear that, you're around the campfire, you've got a buzz on, and it's really intriguing, but you're like, "Yeah, whatever, you know, that's a rich yarn, but that's all it is." After stumbling to bed that night, Pete dismisses the tale and forgets all about it.

But many years later, he hears the story again from a different source. Curious, he begins to do some research, interviewing older climbers and digging out long buried news articles. I realized there's some truth to it, and I started pulling strands and talking to people and asking around and found some pretty cool, factual information to support this kind of climbing legend. And the course of his research, Pete unearths a story that's pure James Bond.

He finds evidence that in the midst of the Cold War, the CIA collaborated with the Indian government spy on the Chinese nuclear development program.

“Throughout the 60s, a number of secret expeditions were made”

in an attempt to plant plutonium-powered espionage devices on two Himalayan mountains. Nanda Devi, and its smaller, more accessible neighbour, Nanda Kot.

The first expedition to Nanda Devi ended in failure after bad weather forced the climbers to abandon their undertaking.

In their scrambled descent, they left the surveillance device behind, and when they returned to look for it the following spring, it had disappeared. The Nanda Kot mission proved to be more

The nuclear powered battery pack was later retrieved, but parts of its residual framework were

“left or lost somewhere on the mountain. As Pete delves deeper into his research,”

various new possibilities open up to him. With a natural aptitude for writing, he already contributes regularly to a number of climbing magazines, but perhaps this story could be the push he needs to write a book. More than that, it would give him a chance to escape the humdrum of a fairly deskbound job and focus all his attentions on his true passion.

If I've had a struggle in life, it's always been trying to be something I'm not and returning

to climbing. Pete's first experience of climbing was as a child growing up in Idaho. It left a deep and lasting impression on him. When I was at maybe six, five or six years old, I kind of wandered off out of the house, and there was an adjacent set of these maroon sandstone boulders next to the house. I remember climbing to the top of one of those, and it's probably whatever, like ten feet high,

or something, but to me, it just looks colossal, and the top of it is like this terra incognita. It's like this place that in my imagination, no one had ever been, and so naturally I was drawn to that. So I kind of tore my clothes up and slipped and got dirty and came back home and got scolded by my parents, but the feeling I remembered was, it's almost like you're stealing something from

the universe. This promethian thing, like wow, I got away with that and no one caught me.

As the years passed, Pete's passion for climbing grew with him. I remember spending all the money I had to get a pair of these expensive rock climbing boots,

“and I think for a year, I climbed every day, and so I always say, well, I never discovered”

climbing, but climbing discovered me, and yeah, it's kind of the one constant in my existence, and I feel really lucky for it. By the early 2000s, Pete is approaching 40, and has built a great reputation. He's well known in climbing circles, and has gone on expeditions across the globe. But despite his talent, climbing is rarely a lucrative source of income,

and he's forced to take on various other jobs along the way. It's not exactly how he saw his life going.

So, having now ascertained that there is some truth behind the incredible CIA

espionage story, Pete has a decision to make. At the time I was doing this, I was a content developer for an internet company, and I was just unhappy, and I was looking at my life going well.

“I could do this for the rest of my life, make X amount of money, retire, and that's it.”

And part of me is like, whoa, hold on a second, you got to escape this. So, I viewed this story almost as this way to finally ride a decent book. Also escape from what I saw was this kind of dreary nine to five thing. If not now, when, Pete takes the plunge, he quits his job, and secures an advance for his book, which helps to find an expedition to the Himalayas.

It takes months of preparation to put together a team, secure permits, and arrange logistics. But there is a stumbling block. Nanda Devi is closed to the climbing. On the face of it, it's like, well, it's closed because there's environmental degradation in this ecosystem that surrounds that peak.

But the legend was that Indians closed this peak because they knew there was this missing plutonium. Despite trying to secure special permission, Pete is still denied access to Nanda Devi. Instead, he turns his attentions to its smaller neighbour, Nanda caught. Supposedly, where the remains of another surveillance device are still buried, somewhere in the snow. The mission is on.

But what I want to do is not to keep the most of the students. The semester-by-tag labed Tob pepper soft-behind the internet, and it's a master's real-time. But you can say, you can't say that. Yes, you can say that, right?

But you won't believe it. EGAL, Tob pepper word "falust" for a track, make the whole thing just like this story. And when they then work, it's "catching". - That's "kid"? - "save". Like this story.

Holy Dangle zurück. Now it's cost-nose-ous-for-been.

On real survival stories, we're in sunny Spain. As a lifeguard on his holidays,

“gets drawn into a terrifying near drowning experience.”

And remote Myanmar, as a devastating flood, overwhelms an isolated mountain community. And in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, a woman arrived at Holmes' door, bemused by the sudden disappearance of her fiance,

in a case of identity. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus. And if you haven't already, get your hands on a copy of Noiser's book, a short history of ancient Rome. Available in all good bookshops and wherever you get your audiobooks.

In late August 2005, the expedition leaves America for the Himalayas. With Pete are three other climbers, Johnny Cop, Chuck Bird, and Sarah Thompson. In the early hours of August the 29th,

“they arrive into a vibrant, heavy city of New Delhi,”

where the centre of incense and spices mingles with the industrial small. It takes over a week of hard traveling before they reach base camp. Surrounded by the icy majesty of the Himalayas, they pitch their tents in a bolder field, carpeted with short grass, and fading wildflowers.

Above them looms the rocky snow covered might of Nanda Cot, adorned with its distinctive tabletop summit. At 22,500 feet high, the mountain is by no means the largest in the Himalayas, but it still poses a significant challenge. Its name literally means Nanda's fortress,

and refers to it being the home of one of the sacred forms of poverty, a major goddess in Hindu religion. The spectacular sight reminds the team of why they're here. I kind of have this fantasy of man, we're going to go up there,

“and we're going to find this poking out of the glacier,”

and here it is, proof positive. You can hold it in your hands. This is proof positive of one of these CIA expeditions. But although they've successfully made it to base camp, a combination of illness and unseasonably bad weather prevents Pete and his crew from ascending much further.

And with no ready internet access, it's hard to say when the low clouds and rain might let up. They spend the downtime trying to prep, doing small practice climbs to adjust to the altitude.

But even after the weather finally breaks, there is another delay.

So much snow has fallen that they have to wait for it to settle and harden on the avalanche prone slopes before mounting a summit expedition. Finally, on September the 22nd, Pete and his team are able to leave base camp. But we're climbing, and the weather is perfect, and the weather is what we call splitter.

It's just clear skies, sunshine, high pressure system. Luckily, the good weather holds, and they make steady progress. The snow squeaking and crunching as their crampons drive into its surface. Beneath clear, Azure skies, the four climbers pick their way up the jagged east ridge of Nanda-Cott, following the path of the CIA's sponsored expedition

from nearly 40 years earlier.

They move fast by the end of the second day there are only a few thousand feet from the summit.

But as the air thins, they're all feeling the effects of the altitude. Pete is hit particularly hard, his head froping with a dull ache. And then the sky begins to change. The brilliant blue fading to a dull, sinister grey, as the clouds roll in, and the snow starts falling.

A storm front is approaching. Deciding to call it quits for the day, they pitch their tents in the lee of a tall icy cliff, hoping to gain some respite from the elements. The weather has other plans. We're camped out there, and the snow is getting heavier and heavier, and I'm like,

wow, we got to take shelter.

And so there was a crevasse, basically this massive fisher in the side of the ice that's

coating this mountain. At the bottom of this crevasse was a lot of hard packed avalanche debris. So we could enter into this crevasse and pitch our tents on this snowy platform. Above us was a roof that was created by the compacted snow. So in essence, we were in almost like a massive narrow cave.

The four climbers take refuge inside the crevasse and pitch their two tents. One for Pete and Chuck, the other for Johnny and Sarah. It's a relief to be out of the storm.

I'm really, personality about my preparations.

“So I'd put this tubular threaded screw into the wall of the glacier to anchor the tent.”

There's no real reason for that, but it's just one of those crazy precautions I take. Pete doesn't know it now, but this tiny precaution. We'd like to have huge significance. After a hearty meal, the climbers head to bed, borrowing deep into their sleeping bags as the wind howls outside.

Throughout the night the storm grows and grows.

This is no ordinary blizzard.

It was one of the biggest storms in recent history and we were up there on the mountain and as this storm progressed the snow got heavier and heavier and people were actually

“dying in the lowland villages because of flooding people were dying in avalanches.”

Trectors and climbers throughout the range were getting killed in avalanches. The climbers are lucky to have found shelter inside this crevasse. But still, the dark narrow cave is undeniably claustrophobic and Pete struggles to sleep. I have my sleeping bag kind of unzip because I get a little bit claustrophobic when I'm fully modified in the bag and I have the tent door open so I could breathe fresh air.

Those things seem to negate any feelings that I have of being claustrophobic. As the snow continues to fall outside, the grumble of distant avalanches echoes around the cavern.

The low, powerful sound is deeply unsettling.

These aren't like those little avalanches that kind of slough down and create this beautiful

“powder cloud. These are like so big that it sounds like artillery and then there's this rumble.”

So you can almost feel it shaking the mountain. But we're in this cave, right? So we're pretty safe. Then, just after midnight, the sound changes. Growing in intensity and seeming to shake the very core of the mountain itself. Getting nearer with every second. I hear this crack in this rumble and it was so close that I'm like this is the one

that's coming to get us. It's sometime afternoon midnight on September 24th, 2005 in the Himalayas of Northern India. High upon the slopes of Nanda Kott, a vicious, deadly snowstorm is blowing, dislodging avalanches across the mountain. One of these is thundering straight towards a long narrow cave, a few thousand feet below the summit.

Inside the crevasse, four climbers are sheltering from the wrath of the storm. In his tent, Peter Kader sits bolt upright as the deafening roar approaches. With his sleeping bag unzipped and his tent door open, Peter is able to move more quickly than any of his companions. Acting on pure instinct, he tears himself free of his sleeping bag and reaches for an ice

screw anchoring their tent to the glacier. Beside him, his climbing partner chuck, is flexibly slower to react. Within seconds, the tidal wave of snow flies into the crevasse and crashes around the two men. I reach over my head, I grab this ice screw with my bare hand, pull myself out just as the snow starts rushing into our cave. At the same time, my partner is getting buried in the snow and I reach down with

my hand and grab his arm in a fireman's grip and ride as the snow starts to really solidify around him, I yank him out. Chuck emerges from the deluge, coughing and spluttering and hacks up a clump of snow lodged in his throat. Pete glances towards where the other tension be, the one where his fellow climbers Johnny and Sarah were sleeping. There was nothing but the pristine glint of the crystallizing snow. Chances are, they have been swept away by the force of the avalanche,

crushed beneath the huge weight of the icy powder, or else thrown into the plunging depths of the crevasse at the back of the cave. Either way, it seems impossible if survived. Around Pete and Chuck, the snow started to settle. avalanches are weird because they kind of resemble a liquid, they kind of resemble a gas sometimes,

motion when it comes to rest it just kind of solidifies into a solid matrix.

“The avalanche debris has covered all of the small hole of the entrance of their cave.”

Shivering in the waste deep snow and wearing nothing but their thermal underwear, Chuck and Pete blink against the enveloping darkness, shock and adrenaline coursing through them. Some of this still alive, but the trouble is just getting started. Chuck, he's like, "Oh my God, you saved my life and I go, man, if we don't find our clothes, we're just going to be dead in whatever five hours anyway, so I didn't save anything,

but we got to get to work."

Certain their companions have been killed, Pete and Chuck have little choice but to focus on saving

themselves. Without their gear, they might not survive until morning.

“Everything they need is buried inside their tent beneath several feet of solidifying snow.”

In the darkness, they scramble around with their bare hands, digging like animals. Numbness starts stealing along their unprotected fingers and feet, as they pour blindly through the icy debris. They make painfully slow progress, but eventually they start unearthing pieces of equipment. So miraculously, we found our downjackets and our boots, and then we actually found our gear,

and as we were doing that, we hear this noise down on the crevass and my other two climbing partners had burrowed out of the tent, cut the tent, and popped out out of the snow. It's like double miracle. We found our gear and our two comrades have survived also. It's barely believable.

“Swept away in their nylon bubble by the force of the avalanche.”

Johnny and Sarah came tumbling to a stop beside the sheer drop at the back of the cave. A few feet further, and it had plunged into the void. Bury to life beneath the crushing weight of the snow. Johnny snapped an aluminium tent pole, sliced open the tent, then dug himself and Sarah out of their icy tomb. Now here they are, in front of an astonished peat and chuck.

The four climbers catch their breath and check in with each other. But they can't sit still. The search for their gear quickly recommences. After some time, the climbers look at their head torches and a shovel, which makes digging easier. We dig and dig and dig and find all our gear, and it's like, yeah, great. We survive this. What a thing to have survived. It's fortunate that, you know, we entered this crevass cave because

we would have been swept away. They've had a close call, a terrible scare, but perhaps that's all this will be. Working by the light of their head torches, by 4 a.m. peaked and his team have managed to locate all their gear apart from one of Johnny's boots. Outside the snow falls relentlessly. Slowly, grey, pre-dorn light begins to bleed into the sky and seep into the cave through the tiny gap at its mouth. Visibility out of this small opening is low and with the frosty

tempest still raging, they can't risk descending yet. After finally locating Johnny's missing boot,

the team can now rest a little. A welcome break from the exertion of digging and the oxygen thin air. They melt some snow for water and force down a few energy bars. They just need to hold on a little longer to wait for a better moment to descend and they should get out of this soon enough. But then, sometime around 6.30 a.m., another tell-tale tremor shakes the ground. You could hear it rumbling. Everyone's kind of jumping up and trying to do something,

but you really can't do anything. You kind of just got to sit there and take whatever nature's going to give you. There is nowhere to go. Above them is the raw, prim evil might of another avalanche, hurtling mercilessly towards them. With this sleeping bag wrapped tightly around his shoulders, Pete braces himself for the onslaught. The avalanche thunders over the crevasse, hissing and roaring like a wild beast. Within seconds, the thin, grey of light seeping into the cave is gone.

You hear this roar? You see this massive freight train of snow arrive at the door.

“And in two or three seconds, it just stops. It's perfectly quiet. So we turn our head lamps on.”

You're looking at the solid wall of snow, where there once was a garage-sized opening, and you're like, "Whoa, this is kind of gnarly. All you see is this wall of avalanche debris.

Basically, it made the entrance of our cave into the solid wall of snow."

The second avalanche has sealed the climbers exit, trapping them inside the crevasse behind a thick barrier of white. It's eerily quiet, and their own breath sounds magnified inside the claustrophobic confines of the cave. It's hard to comprehend what has just happened. In some ways, I thought like, "Wow, this is so staged. You could not make this up." Progressively, the mountain is entoming us.

“That's how it felt. You have no choice but to be fatalistic because you don't control any”

of these events. You're there. And, you know, if you're gonna die, you're gonna die. There's nothing

you can really do about it. Pete glances up. The beam from his head lamp reveals jagged fractures in the snowy ceiling covered in thin delicate layers of translucent ice. It could cave in at any moment, and they'd be gone. The mountain swallowing them whole. Your thinking to yourself is the ceiling gonna collapse on us. Is there gonna be another avalanche that compresses our crevasse? Are we gonna suffocate in this cave unless we get some air circulation?

Suffocation is a real danger now. With their one way out sealed shut, they can't be sure how long

the air supply will last. The situation forces Pete to take charge to do something.

Knee being the quote unquote leader, I kind of took it upon myself to take our shovel and start digging a tunnel to the outside. I don't know if this tunnel, as I dig it, is gonna collapse on me. Pete removes his bulky outer layers and grabs the shovel. Tentatively, he begins boring into the wall of avalanche debris. The shovel cut through it with a flat, tinny sound, and the snow falls away in large crumbling chunks. As he digs deeper, Pete's head and

shoulders disappear into the tunnel. Soon, he's forced to crawl inside it. The claustrophobia is almost overwhelming. It takes everything I can muster to keep digging and also I'm still altitude-sig. You know, the adrenaline kind of overcomes the symptoms of that, but yeah, I'm altitude-sig and I'm digging a tunnel. Behind him, Johnny clears the excavated snow, making sure his close enough to grab Pete's legs in case the tunnel suddenly collapses. Pete borrows on desperately,

the weight of the mounting, creaking above him. As the snowy passage grows, it becomes clear how deep the recent avalanches have buried them. Suddenly, the crumble of powder dislodges above Pete and falls on top of his head. He freezes, holding his breath, not daring to move. But the tunnel holds. Steadying himself, he pushes the shovel up again, and a waft of fresh air hits him. Pete manoeuvres his head and shoulders through the hole he's just made. But it's not an

inspiring sight. It's just this mailstrom outside. You have zero visibility. All you see is this wind-blown whirling snow punctuated by a regular sound of avalanches. And so I just turned around and

“scrambled back into the cave and, you know, like fellow climbers go, "Well, how is it outside?”

I go, man, you don't want to know. It's like a war out there." Even if they can all dig their way out, the climbers are still totally trapped. Surrounded by a savage storm in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, there is no way they can get back down the mountain safely. Their radio isn't picking up any signal, and even if it could, there is little anyone could do to help them in this weather. All they can do is hope the storm will subside soon, and pray that the snow

sealing above them doesn't come crashing down, bearing them inside the Himalayas forever. Exhausted, they tried to rest, drifting in and out of consciousness as the gales shrink around them.

shaking them from their stupers. Unbelievably yet another avalanche is on its way.

“The third one was dramatic because it was this huge roar, everyone is adrenalineized. I imagine”

it's like being shot at by artillery. It's just like you hear it, and it's like, "Well, I can't do anything except hope that this isn't going to get me." The cave is once again plunged into darkness, as the latest avalanche cascades down the slopes,

passing over the entrance of the tunnel, Pete has so painstakingly excavated. It's the third one

in less than 12 hours. Can they look really home? There is that feeling of helplessness. You hear this crack in this roar, and you can sense the snow coming, and then you're looking at the door of your cave, and the snow just kind of comes and passes by. So it's almost like watching a massive freight train come and not hit you. Within a few moments, the snow slides clear,

“and the dull light of dawn once again filters into the tunnel, along with the loft of fresh”

cold air. A collective sigh of relief fills the cabin. You're just standing around on top of this snow going woo. That was a close one. With nothing left to do, but wait out the storm, the climb is tried to get into some sort of routine. They melt snow to make drinking water, and cook meals on their camping stoves, all the while, painfully aware of their dwindling supplies of gas and food. They spend the time talking, resting fictfully, and trying to keep their

minds occupied. Johnny and Sarah share the earphones of her MP3 player, and are able to escape into fantasy by listening to Harry Potter audiobooks. But the crushing weight of the mountain above

is always there. The ice and rock seeming to press in all around them.

You wake up, you make water, you try to eat some food, you sit there, and talk about whatever, and all the time I'm eyeing the ceiling going down. If nothing collapses, like they're never going to find us, and it's going to be an ugly death suffocation. It's my big fear. I get claustrophobic, and I certainly don't want to suffocate. To go along with the fear, Pete is suffering physically too. He's grown sicker by the hour. I had high altitude illness, and there's two types of

that. There's high altitude pulmonary edema, and which your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's your body's reaction to this reduced atmospheric pressure and, quote unquote, less oxygen. That you can usually deal with. The trouble is it can turn into high altitude cerebral edema, which is where your brain starts swelling. And when that happens, you lose the ability to stand up, to be in balance. Your brain is swelling, and it's a pretty quick descent into death, and the only cure for that

is to descend. But in the current conditions, descent to back down the mountain still isn't an option. And even if they can survive long enough for the weather to clear, Pete's poor physical state will be a major burden. My concern was, if I get cerebral edema, which I think I was creeping up on, I'm going to be incapacitated. Now, I'm just going to be this dead weight that they're going to have to haul down the mountains. And because I'm the quote unquote leader of this

“trip, you should be responsible for everyone who was on your trip. And I felt that the best way to”

deal with that was to descend on my own and take my chances. So I announced to everyone, well, folks, I'm going to take my chances. I'm going to go down. You guys stand a better chance to survival without me here. And if I get back to base camp, I will call for help, and we will attempt to extracate you. But Pete's decision is quickly met with resistance from Johnny. He was a very experienced and outstanding climber, and he took issue with my decision and said, you can't go down. We need you

to get off this mountain. And so in my altitude, adult brain, I kind of put two and two together

and said, okay, yeah, we're all in this together, and I can play a critical role in getting the

team down because the two other climbers were far less experienced than we were. So we negated that. I just kept my fingers crossed. It's like, don't get sick or Pete, don't get sick or just hang in there.

bend in their icy shelter. And still, there is no let up from the storm. All the time, you're kind of keeping your eye on while how much fuel that we have left. Can we afford to boil anything? If you get in these conversations, it must be in some ways like being in a prison camp where you talk about what you're going to do and you get out of here.

“And the big thing, as is the case with a lot of these situations, is what are you going to eat?”

If you could eat anything, what would you eat? And so those things end up taking up the time. As an experienced climber, Pete is in a stranger to perilous situations, and he has already survived a string of near-death experiences. But here, in the depths of the mountain, things are

different. Most accidents in climbing take place in a split second. So you repel off the

end of your rope, you take a massive ball. And after that happens, all choices are taken out of the equation, and you just gotta take what's coming. But those usually transpire over seconds, a very short period of time. So the interesting thing with this is you're kind of entombed on the side of the mountain, and you actually have days to ponder your survival. To be a Himalayan climber, an expedition climber, it's not how fit you are. It's not how hard you train to those things

“are important. But it's how you can deal with not saying anything and being isolated and being”

sensibly deprived for long periods of time. Finally, after four long days, the storm dies down.

At 930am on September 27, the climbers slithered through the excavated snow tunnel, pushing their packs in front of them. They emerge from their icy prison into a terrain of bleak, savage beauty. The flawless panorama, a welcome change from the tomb they've been encased in. With virtually no supplies left, they must seize their chance to descend. But it won't be easy. The avalanches and snow had basically wiped out all the tracks from our ascent,

and so it's like dealing with a completely different topography because the snow has altered everything. Corsiously, they pick their way down the mountain, their bodies slow and aching, racked by exhaustion and poor nutrition. The air becomes easier to breathe the further they descend. The much needed oxygen circulating in the climbers blood, the symptoms of their altitude sickness starting to ease. But then, as if to remind them of its might, the mountain flashes its power once

more. We were repelling a steep cliff like a steep ice cliff, and the final person to go triggered this slide, which slid past us. So I don't think it was a major slide looking back, but you're so amped up and keyed up that you're like, "Oh my god, like this is going to grow into this huge avalanche." Luckily, the snow slide is fairly small, and causes no damage. Beating hearts settle again and the team returned to their descent.

At long last, the enjoyer stretch of good fortune, making smooth progress back down the slopes.

Until finally, peat and the team stumbled back into base camp, with a golden sun setting behind them.

Much to the relief of their friends and colleagues at the camp.

“I think everyone deals with it differently. When they are greeted as someone returning from the grave,”

I can't speak for the others, but I think there's probably this relief, and also it probably underlined how serious the situation is, because it's one thing to say, "Oh, I almost died." I mean, people throw that out quite a bit. But to actually have people in the no say, we thought you were dead, that really underscores and emphasizes the situation you were in. As for peat, you know exactly how you plan to celebrate his survival.

When I walked into base camp, I'm like, "Man, I just want to eat and eat and eat and eat." And breathe the air that just feels thick when you're at altitude and you get sick. It's almost like you're living on vapors, and you feel like this apparition kind of clinging onto the atmosphere, and just trying to keep going. And when you get down to the base camp, which might be a 4,400 meters, so really high, the air is thick. You can smell things like the smell of grass

thin air tends to strip some of the senses away. So what I remember is just like going, "Ah,

“the sun, the air is thick, and someone is making me a bunch of food, and I'm going to sit here”

and eat, and eat until I go to sleep." Mead days after their return to base camp, peat and Johnny are on the move again. They climb Nanda Devi East, a nearby mountain with a spectacular view of Nanda Devi, where the CIA spy gadget may library it somewhere in the snow. They are forced back by bad weather before reaching the summit,

though not before they spot a slight depression where the device was supposedly abandoned. The vests as close as they get. In the end, peats fantasy of uncovering long-lost espionage equipment doesn't come to fruition.

“Still, upon returning to America, he froze himself into working on his book,”

eventually publishing it in 2006. It was my first book, I didn't have an editor, which is really stupid. It wasn't the greatest book, I envision myself making so much money and retiring, you know,

all that, and that never transpired.

He may not have returned with what he'd set out to find, but peats experience in the Himalayas does change his life in many other ways. The lesson that this area, this adventure, the mountain, the goddess gave to me was kind of this past to think like, well, maybe you're not the center of the universe, maybe other people are more important, and maybe you better get to work to try to become a

better human being. So I'd say that's the biggest thing I took from that experience. That, and to survive that, it goes back to that first climb, where you're getting away with something, like in some way, as it to survive that, is to steal your mortality back from the universe for the short time remaining that I have. So that's a recurrent theme for me. More than two decades on from his nanda-cut adventure, peat, now in his 60s,

is still climbing all around the world, and his numerous survival experiences have let him down an interesting path. These days, he edits an annual publication entitled "Acidance in North

“American Climbing." The real, I think, benefit for me is that I have over 40 years of”

climbing experience, you know, I've seen people die, I've been in accidents, I've almost had to get rescued multiple times, and I've had a lot of these life and death experiences. So the positive thing is, all those things can be pretty traumatic, but when I have this opportunity to talk with people who've had accidents or edit their reports, I can really bring that experience in, and the beauty of it is it makes all these potentially traumatic experiences of my life

relevant to real people having real accidents in climbing. So most of the time, I just feel like the luckiest guy in the world that struggled to survive. That's the most profound thing that I think anyone can pull out of their backpack and say, "I want to live." For me, as an individual, that's been just the huge gift to survive is to really just be handed this gift by the universe. So I'm grateful for these experiences.

Next time, a young Britain travels to General Franco's Spain and finds himself in unforeseeable danger. In 1967, 28-year-old lifeguard Guy Taplin travels to the Costa del Sol seeking a fresh start. Settling into life on the coast, at first, the days slip by in a happy haze.

But when a fellow beachguard gets caught in a sudden and powerful ripptide, Guy jumps in to help.

Battling against the choppy waves and strong current, he quickly finds himself plunged into a desperate fight for his own life as well. Swept out to see, struggling to stay afloat, their chances of reaching safety seem vanishingly slim, and their strength is running out. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen to Guy's story today, without waiting and without ads, by joining Noiser Plus.