Into Thin Air (14 page)

At first I pretended that I’d be going as a journalist more than a climber—that I’d accepted the assignment because the commercialization of Everest was an interesting subject and the money was pretty good. I explained to Linda and anyone else who expressed skepticism about my Himalayan qualifications that I didn’t expect to ascend very high on the mountain. “I’ll probably climb only a little way above Base Camp,” I insisted. “Just to get a taste of what high altitude is about.”

This was bullshit, of course. Given the length of the trip and the time I’d have to spend training for it, I stood to make a lot more money staying home and taking other writing jobs. I accepted the assignment because I was in the grip of the Everest mystique. In truth, I wanted to climb the mountain as badly as I’d ever wanted anything in my life. From the moment I agreed to go to Nepal my intention was to ascend every bit as high as my unexceptional legs and lungs would carry me.

By the time Linda drove me to the airport she had long since seen through my prevarications. She sensed the true dimensions of my desire, and it scared her. “If you get killed,” she argued with a mix of despair and anger, “it’s not just you who’ll pay the price. I’ll have to pay, too, you know, for the rest of my life. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

“I’m not going to get killed,” I answered. “Don’t be melodramatic.”

* Ever since the first Everest attempts, most expeditions—commercial and noncommercial alike—have relied on Sherpas to carry the majority of the loads on the mountain. But as clients on a guided trip, we carried no loads at all beyond a small amount of personal gear, and in this regard we differed significantly from noncommercial expeditions of yore.

* A
bergschrund
is a deep slit that delineates a glacier’s upper terminus; it forms as the body of ice slides away from the steeper wall immediately above, leaving a gap between glacier and rock.

* Although I use “commercial” to denote any expedition organized as a money-making venture, not all commercial expeditions are guided. For instance, Mal Duff—who charged his clients considerably less than the $65,000 fee requested by Hall and Fischer—provided leadership and the essential infrastructure necessary to climb Everest (food, tents, bottled oxygen, fixed ropes, Sherpa support staff, and so on) but did not purport to act as a guide; the climbers on his team were assumed to be sufficiently skilled to get themselves safely up Everest and back down again.

* Three-foot-long aluminum stakes called pickets were used to anchor ropes and ladders to snow slopes; when the terrain was hard glacial ice, “ice screws” were employed: hollow, threaded tubes about ten inches long that were twisted into the frozen glacier.

* Although Yasuko had used crampons previously during her climbs of Aconcagua, McKinley, Elbrus, and Vinson, none of these ascents involved much, if any, true ice climbing: the terrain in each case consisted primarily of relatively gentle slopes of snow and/or gravel-like scree.

APRIL 13, 1996 • 19,500 FEET

Everest has attracted its share of men like these. Their mountaineering experience varied from none at all to very slight—certainly none of them had the kind of experience which would make an ascent of Everest a reasonable goal. Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance
.

Walt Unsworth

I grew up with an ambition and determination without which I would have been a good deal happier. I thought a lot and developed the far-away look of a dreamer, for it was always the distant heights which fascinated me and drew me to them in spirit. I was not sure what could be accomplished by means of tenacity and little else, but the target was set high and
each rebuff only saw me more determined to see at least one major dream through to its fulfillment
.

Earl Denman

The slopes of Everest did not lack for dreamers in the spring of 1996; the credentials of many who’d come to climb the mountain were as thin as mine, or thinner. When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formidable challenges of the world’s highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as though half the population at Base Camp was clinically delusional. But perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.

In March 1947, a poverty-stricken Canadian engineer named Earl Denman arrived in Darjeeling and announced his intention to climb Everest, despite the fact that he had little mountaineering experience and lacked official permission to enter Tibet. Somehow he managed to convince two Sherpas to accompany him, Ang Dawa and Tenzing Norgay.

Tenzing—the same man who would later make the first ascent of Everest with Hillary—had immigrated to Darjeeling from Nepal in 1933 as a nineteen-year-old, hoping to be hired by an expedition departing for the peak that spring under the leadership of an eminent British mountaineer named Eric Shipton. The eager young Sherpa wasn’t chosen that year, but he remained in India and was hired by Shipton for the 1935 British Everest expedition. By the time he agreed to go with Denman in 1947, Tenzing had already been on the great mountain three times. He later conceded that he knew all along Denman’s plans were foolhardy, but Tenzing, too, was powerless to resist the pull of Everest:

[N]othing made sense about it. First, we would probably not even get into Tibet. Second, if we did get in we would probably be caught, and, as his guides, we, as well as Denman, would be in serious trouble. Third, I did not for a moment believe that, even if we reached the mountain, a party such as this would be able to climb it. Fourth, the attempt would be highly dangerous. Fifth, Denman had the money neither to pay us well nor to guarantee a decent sum to our dependents in case something happened to us. And so on and so on. Any man in his right mind would have said no. But I couldn’t say no. For in my heart I needed to go, and the pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth. Ang Dawa and I talked for a few minutes, and then we made our decision. “Well,” I told Denman, “we will try.”

As the small expedition marched across Tibet toward Everest, the two Sherpas increasingly came to like and respect the Canadian. Despite his inexperience, they admired his courage and physical strength. And Denman, to his credit, was ultimately willing to acknowledge his shortcomings when they arrived on the slopes of the mountain and reality stared him in the face. Pounded hard by a storm at 22,000 feet, Denman admitted defeat, and the three men turned around, returning safely to Darjeeling just five weeks after they’d departed.

An idealistic, melancholic Englishman named Maurice Wilson had not been so fortunate when he’d attempted a similarly reckless ascent thirteen years before Denman. Motivated by a misguided desire to help his fellow man, Wilson had concluded that climbing Everest would be the perfect way to publicize his belief that the myriad ills of humankind could be cured through a combination of fasting and faith in the powers of God. He hatched a scheme to fly a small airplane to Tibet, crash-land it on the flanks of Everest, and proceed to the summit from there. The fact that he knew absolutely nothing about either mountaineering or flying didn’t strike him as a major impediment.

Wilson bought a fabric-winged Gypsy Moth, christened it
Ever Wrest
, and learned the rudiments of flying. He next spent five weeks tramping about the modest hills of Snowdonia and the English Lake District to learn what he thought he needed to know about climbing. And then, in May 1933, he took off in his tiny airplane and set a course for Everest by way of Cairo, Tehran, and India.

By this time Wilson had already received considerable coverage in the press. He flew to Purtabpore, India, but having not received permission from the Nepalese government to fly over Nepal, he sold the airplane for five hundred pounds and traveled overland to Darjeeling, where he learned that he had been denied permission to enter Tibet. This didn’t faze him, either: in March 1934 he hired three Sherpas, disguised himself as a Buddhist monk, and, defying the authorities of the Raj, surreptitiously trekked 300 miles through the forests of Sikkim and the sere Tibetan plateau. By April 14 he was at the foot of Everest.

Hiking up the rock-strewn ice of the East Rongbuk Glacier, he initially made fair progress, but as his ignorance of glacier travel caught up to him, he repeatedly lost his way and became frustrated and exhausted. Yet he refused to give up.

By mid-May he had reached the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier at 21,000 feet, where he plundered a supply of food and equipment cached by Eric Shipton’s unsuccessful 1933 expedition. From there Wilson started ascending the slopes leading up to the North Col, getting as high as 22,700 feet before a vertical ice cliff proved too much for him and he was forced to retreat back to the site of Shipton’s cache. And still he wouldn’t quit. On May 28 he wrote in his diary, “This will be a last effort, and I feel successful,” and then headed up the mountain one more time.

One year later, when Shipton returned to Everest, his expedition came across Wilson’s frozen body lying in the snow at the foot of the North Col. “After some discussion we decided to bury him in a crevasse,” wrote Charles Warren, one of the climbers who’d found the corpse. “We all raised our hats at the time and I think that everyone was rather upset at the business. I thought I had grown immune to the sight of the dead; but somehow or other, in the circumstances, and because of the fact that he was, after all, doing much the same as ourselves, his tragedy seemed to have been brought a little too near home for us.”

The recent proliferation on the slopes of Everest of latter-day Wilsons and Denmans—marginally qualified dreamers like some of my cohorts—is a phenomenon that has provoked strong criticism. But the question of who belongs on Everest and who doesn’t is more complicated than it might first appear. The fact that a climber has paid a large sum of money to join a guided expedition does not, by itself, mean that he or she is unfit to be on the mountain. Indeed, at least two of the commercial expeditions on Everest in the spring of 1996 included Himalayan veterans who would be considered qualified by the most rigorous standards.

As I waited at Camp One on April 13 for my teammates to join me atop the Icefall, a pair of climbers from Scott Fischer’s Mountain Madness team strode past at an impressive clip. One was Klev Schoening, a thirty-eight-year-old Seattle construction contractor and a former member of the U.S. Ski Team who, although exceptionally strong, had little previous high-altitude experience. However, with him was his uncle, Pete Schoening, a living Himalayan legend.

Dressed in faded, threadbare GoreTex, a couple of months shy of his sixty-ninth birthday, Pete was a gangly, slightly stooped man who had returned to the high reaches of the Himalaya after a long absence. In 1966 he’d made the first ascent of the Vinson Massif, Antarctica’s highest point. In 1958 he’d made history as the driving force behind the first ascent of Hidden Peak, a 26,470-foot mountain in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan—the highest first ascent ever achieved by American climbers. Pete was even more famous, however, for playing a heroic role in an unsuccessful expedition to K2 in 1953, the same year Hillary and Tenzing reached the peak of Everest.

The eight-man expedition was pinned down in a ferocious blizzard high on K2, waiting to make an assault on the summit, when a team member named Art Gilkey developed thrombophlebitis, a life-threatening altitude-induced blood clot. Realizing that they would have to get Gilkey down immediately to have any hope of saving him, Schoening and the others started lowering him down the mountain’s steep Abruzzi Ridge as the storm raged. At 25,000 feet, a climber named George Bell slipped and pulled four others off with him. Reflexively wrapping the rope around his shoulders and ice ax, Schoening somehow managed to single-handedly hold on to Gilkey and simultaneously arrest the slide of the five falling climbers without being pulled off the mountain himself. One of the more incredible feats in the annals of mountaineering, it was known forever after simply as The Belay.
^*