Two Sonoma County climbers recall devastation on Mount Everest

Two Sonoma County men who were preparing to scale Mount Everest are back home, two weeks after a deadly earthquake and avalanche abruptly ended their quest to reach the world’s highest peak.

Jon Reiter of Kenwood and Scott Holder of Santa Rosa are friends but were preparing to climb Mount Everest separately with different mountaineering companies when the April 25 earthquake sent a massive wall of ice, snow and rock hurtling toward base camp.

Reiter was having a cup of tea with friends and talking about how boring things were. Then, just before noon, the magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck.

“All of a sudden the tent and table started shaking,” he recalled Monday.

Then came a “ferocious wind” as the avalanche came roaring through their camp, cutting a path of death and destruction in the seasonal village of about 800 climbers, guides and porters spread out at the base of the mountain.

Reiter, a general contractor making his third attempt in as many years at summiting Everest, escaped physical injury. For the next 36 hours he would help tend to the injured and dying stuck at the 17,500-foot-high base camp.

“Our job was basically to comfort these guys,” he said Monday, three days after returning to Kenwood from the deadly Nepalese quake that killed more than 7,000 people, including 19 on Everest.

“This is the biggest story that’s ever happened in mountaineering,” Reiter said, although he added that “it pales in comparison to what’s going on in Kathmandu,” where the casualties were much higher from the earthquake and aid continues to be slow in reaching victims.

Both men eventually flew out of Kathmandu last week after staying a couple of days in hotels where they had food, water and power as opposed to most of the residents of the capital, who were left without water and electricity.

Holder’s experience was not quite as grim as Reiter’s, thanks to a sinus infection that forced him off the mountain the day before the big temblor, to convalesce at a lower elevation before resuming his bid for the 29,035-foot summit.

“I’m not about to say the cold saved my life. But it saved myself and my family a lot of anxiety,” Holder, 49, said Monday, speaking from his office in Santa Rosa, where he was already back working as a financial planner.

For Reiter, 50, the seemingly interminable, 42-second ground shaking and the “monstrous” avalanche that it spawned was a much closer call.

He and his companions had nothing to hide behind but a nylon tent, which they grasped to prevent it from being swept up in the ferocious, tornado-like avalanche.

Within a half-hour, the communal tents belonging to Reiter’s mountaineering group were transformed into a field hospital for 58 patients.

One tent was for head injuries, one for broken limbs and another for minor injuries.

Despite the presence of four doctors, there was little that could be done for the most severely injured, who required hospital surgery. But the weather made it impossible to land helicopters to evacuate them.

Reiter helped administer intravenous fluids to some of the injured, including medication to reduce the pronounced cranial swelling that occurs with high-altitude head injuries. But there weren’t enough drugs.

They tried to dress the wounds, stop the bleeding and keep the injured warm. But it was obvious some would not survive.

The doctors instructed Reiter to comfort the severely wounded, if nothing else.

“I would lean over and whisper, tell them ‘you will make it,’ and try to give them hope. All you could do is give them a little peace,” Reiter said.

He helped wrap some of the dead in sleeping bags, including one labeled “unknown male.”

The fatalities included two climbers from the United States and one each from China, Australia and Japan. The 14 other victims were Nepalese Sherpa guides.

It was not the first deadly encounter on Mount Everest for Reiter. The year before he narrowly escaped an icy grave at 19,000 feet, when the next-deadliest avalanche in Everest history hit, killing 16 Sherpa guides on April 18, 2014.

“It was very traumatic for me. I was 100 yards from being wiped out,” he said.

Reiter was also turned away during his first attempt to climb Mount Everest in 2013. He was at 20,000 feet when some members of his group encountered problems. One climber fell off an ice ladder and another began to spit blood, not uncommon at altitude. They decided to abort that climb.

Reiter said he was inspired to climb when his younger brother was shot and killed in a carjacking more than eight years ago.

“It dawned on me, life is brief. This is not a dress rehearsal. This is going by quick,” he said, adding he decided to “see every continent, every culture. This globe is all we have. I want to climb seven summits.”

Both Reiter and Holder were on a quest to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents, and Everest presented the biggest challenge. On Monday, neither was willing to rule out another try on the world’s highest peak.

“I’m not prepared to answer that question,” Holder replied when asked if he might go back and try another ascent. “It would be more emotional than factual.”

“A lot of people are hurting,” added the father of two daughters, ages 17 and 19. “For me to think about going to climb a mountain seems a little selfish.”

He saw some of the funeral processions for the earthquake victims and also helped pass out food.

“I saw a lot of bad stuff,” Holder said. “I don’t want to think about putting my family through that again.”

Reiter said when he had his first close call in 2014, he didn’t think he would go back but did the next year. Now that there have been mass deaths two years in a row, he said “we don’t seem to be able to get up (Everest) without a bunch of people getting killed.”

“There are 1,000 guys from all over the globe all doing something crazy - trying to climb up the mountain for nothing,” Reiter said.

“I have a little boy and my wife at home. That seems a little more important,” he said

He also has a 25-year-old son and said he wants to inspire both sons, “but I don’t want to be killed in the process.”

“A lot of guys need Everest. I don’t need Everest,” Reiter said.

But he made a distinction between the icy south side ascent, which he said is “nasty” with “too many dead guys.”

“I will never (climb) on the south side of Everest again,” he said, but didn’t rule out a safer route “north through Tibet.”