Into Thin Air (18 page)

Oddly, most climbers on Everest knew less about Ngawang’s plight than tens of thousands of people who were nowhere near the mountain. The information warp was due to the Internet, and to those of us at Base Camp it was nothing less than surreal. A teammate might call home on a satellite phone, for instance, and learn what the South Africans were doing at Camp Two from a spouse in New Zealand or Michigan who’d been surfing the World Wide Web.

At least five Internet sites were posting dispatches
^*
from correspondents at Everest Base Camp. The South African team maintained a website, as did Mal Duff’s International Commercial Expedition.
Nova
, the PBS television show, produced an elaborate and very informative website featuring daily updates from Liesl Clark and the eminent Everest historian Audrey Salkeld, who were members of the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX expedition. (Headed by the award-winning filmmaker and expert climber David Breashears, who’d guided Dick Bass up Everest in 1985, the IMAX team was shooting a $5.5 million giant-screen movie about climbing the mountain.) Scott Fischer’s expedition had no less than two correspondents filing online dispatches for a pair of competing websites.

Jane Bromet, who phoned in daily reports for Outside Online,
^*
was one of the correspondents on Fischer’s team, but she wasn’t a client and didn’t have permission to climb higher than Base Camp. The other Internet correspondent on Fischer’s expedition, however, was a client who intended to go all the way to the summit and file daily dispatches for NBC Interactive Media en route. Her name was Sandy Hill Pittman, and nobody on the mountain cut a higher profile or generated as much gossip.

Pittman, a millionaire socialite-cum-climber, was back for her third attempt on Everest. This year she was more determined than ever to reach the top and thereby complete her much publicized crusade to climb the Seven Summits.

In 1993 Pittman joined a guided expedition attempting the South Col and Southeast Ridge route, and she caused a minor stir by showing up at Base Camp with her nine-year-old son, Bo, along with a nanny to look after him. Pittman experienced a number of problems, however, and reached only 24,000 feet before turning around.

She was back on Everest in 1994 after raising more than a quarter of a million dollars from corporate sponsors to secure the talents of four of the finest alpinists in North America: Breashears (who was under contract to film the expedition for NBC television), Steve Swenson, Barry Blanchard, and Alex Lowe. Lowe—arguably the world’s pre-eminent all-around climber—was hired to be Sandy’s personal guide, a job for which he was paid a substantial sum. In advance of Pittman, the four men strung ropes partway up the Kangshung Face, an extremely difficult and hazardous wall on the Tibetan side of the mountain. With a great deal of assistance from Lowe, Pittman ascended the fixed ropes to 22,000 feet, but once again she was forced to surrender her attempt before the summit; this time the problem was dangerously unstable snow conditions that forced the whole team to abandon the mountain.

Until I bumped into her at Gorak Shep during the trek to Base Camp, I’d never met Pittman face-to-face, although I’d been hearing about her for years. In 1992,
Men’s Journal
assigned me to write an article about riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle from New York to San Francisco in the company of Jann Wenner—the legendary, exceedingly rich publisher of
Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal
, and
Us
—and several of his wealthy friends, including Rocky Hill, Pittman’s brother, and her husband, Bob Pittman, the co-founder of MTV.

The ear-splitting, chrome-encrusted Hog that Jann loaned me was a thrilling ride, and my high-rolling companions were friendly enough. But I had precious little in common with any of them, and there was no forgetting that I had been brought along as Jann’s hired help. Over dinner Bob and Jann and Rocky compared the various aircraft they owned (Jann recommended a Gulfstream IV the next time I was in the market for a personal jet), discussed their country estates, and talked about Sandy—who happened to be climbing Mount McKinley at the time. “Hey,” Bob suggested when he learned that I, too, was a climber, “you and Sandy ought to get together and go climb a mountain.” Now, four years later, we were.

At five foot eleven, Sandy Pittman stood two inches taller than me. Her tomboyishly short hair looked expertly coiffed, even here at 17,000 feet. Ebullient and direct, she’d grown up in northern California, where her father had introduced her to camping, hiking, and skiing as a young girl. Delighting in the freedoms and pleasures of the hills, she continued to dabble in outdoor pursuits through her college years and beyond, although the frequency of her visits to the mountains diminished sharply after she moved to New York in the mid-1970s in the aftermath of a failed first marriage.

In Manhattan Pittman worked variously as a buyer at Bonwit Teller, a merchandising editor at
Mademoiselle
, and a beauty editor at a magazine called
Bride’s
, and in 1979 married Bob Pittman. An indefatigable seeker of public attention, Sandy made her name and picture regular fare in New York society columns. She hobnobbed with Blaine Trump, Tom and Meredith Brokaw, Isaac Mizrahi, Martha Stewart. In order to commute more efficiently between their opulent Connecticut manor and an art-filled apartment on Central Park West staffed with uniformed servants, she and her husband bought a helicopter and learned to fly it. In 1990 Sandy and Bob Pittman were featured on the cover of
New York
magazine as “The Couple of the Minute.”

Soon thereafter Sandy began her expensive, widely trumpeted campaign to become the first American woman to climb the Seven Summits. The last—Everest—proved elusive, however, and in March 1994 Pittman lost the race to a forty-seven-year-old Alaskan mountaineer and midwife named Dolly Lefever. She continued her dogged pursuit of Everest just the same.

As Beck Weathers observed one night at Base Camp, “when Sandy goes to climb a mountain, she doesn’t do it exactly like you and me.” In 1993 Beck had been in Antarctica making a guided ascent of Vinson Massif at the same time Pittman was climbing the mountain with a different guided group, and he recalled with a chuckle that “she brought this humongous duffel bag full of gourmet food that took about four people to even lift. She also brought a portable television and video player so she could watch movies in her tent. I mean, hey, you’ve got to hand it to Sandy: there aren’t too many people who climb mountains in that kind of high style.” Beck reported that Pittman had generously shared the swag she’d brought with the other climbers and that “she was pleasant and interesting to be around.”

For her assault on Everest in 1996, Pittman once again assembled the sort of kit not commonly seen in climbers’ encampments. The day before departing for Nepal, in one of her first Web postings for NBC Interactive Media, she gushed,

All my personal stuff is packed.… It looks like I’ll have as much computer and electronic equipment as I will have climbing gear.… Two IBM laptops, a video camera, three 35mm cameras, one Kodak digital camera, two tape recorders, a CD-ROM player, a printer, and enough (I hope) solar panels and batteries to power the whole project.… I wouldn’t dream of leaving town without an ample supply of Dean & DeLuca’s Near East blend and my espresso maker. Since we’ll be on Everest on Easter, I brought four wrapped chocolate eggs. An Easter egg hunt at 18,000 feet? We’ll see!

That night, the society columnist Billy Norwich hosted a farewell party for Pittman at Nell’s in downtown Manhattan. The guest list included Bianca Jagger and Calvin Klein. Fond of costumes, Sandy appeared wearing a high-altitude climbing suit over her evening dress, complemented by mountaineering boots, crampons, ice ax, and a bandolier of carabiners.

Upon arrival in the Himalaya, Pittman appeared to adhere as closely as possible to the proprieties of high society. During the trek to Base Camp, a young Sherpa named Pemba rolled up her sleeping bag every morning and packed her rucksack for her. When she reached the foot of Everest with the rest of Fischer’s group in early April, her pile of luggage included stacks of press clippings about herself to hand out to the other denizens of Base Camp. Within a few days Sherpa runners began to arrive on a regular basis with packages for Pittman, shipped to Base Camp via DHL Worldwide Express; they included the latest issues of
Vogue
,
Vanity Fair
,
People
,
Allure
. The Sherpas were fascinated by the lingerie ads and thought the perfume scent-strips were a hoot.

Scott Fischer’s team was a congenial and cohesive group; most of Pittman’s teammates took her idiosyncrasies in stride and seemed to have little trouble accepting her into their midst. “Sandy could be exhausting to be around, because she needed to be the center of attention and was always yapping away about herself,” remembers Jane Bromet. “But she wasn’t a negative person. She didn’t bring down the mood of the group. She was energetic and upbeat almost every day.”

Nevertheless, several accomplished alpinists not on her team regarded Pittman as a grandstanding dilettante. Following her unsuccessful 1994 attempt on Everest’s Kangshung Face, a television commercial for Vaseline Intensive Care (the expedition’s primary sponsor) was loudly derided by knowledgeable mountaineers because it advertised Pittman as a “world-class climber.” But Pittman never overtly made such a claim herself; indeed, she emphasized in an article for
Men’s Journal
that she wanted Breashears, Lowe, Swenson, and Blanchard “to understand that I didn’t confuse my avid-hobbyist abilities with their world-class skill.”

Her eminent companions on the 1994 attempt said nothing disparaging about Pittman, at least not in public. After that expedition, in fact, Breashears became a close friend of hers, and Swenson repeatedly defended Pittman against her critics. “Look,” Swenson had explained to me at a social gathering in Seattle shortly after they’d both returned from Everest, “maybe Sandy’s not a great climber, but on the Kangshung Face she recognized her limitations. Yes, it’s true that Alex and Barry and David and I did all the leading and fixed all the ropes, but she contributed to the effort in her own way by having a positive attitude, by raising money, and by dealing with the media.”

Pittman did not lack for detractors, however. A great many people were offended by her ostentatious displays of wealth, and by the shameless way she chased the limelight. As Joanne Kaufman reported in the
Wall Street Journal
,

Ms. Pittman was known in certain elevated circles more as a social climber than mountain climber. She and Mr. Pittman were habitués of all the correct soirees and benefits and staples of all the right gossip columns. “Many coat-tails were wrinkled by Sandy Pittman latching on to them,” says a former business associate of Mr. Pittman who insisted on anonymity. “She’s interested in publicity. If she had to do it anonymously I don’t think she’d be climbing mountains.”

Fairly or unfairly, to her derogators Pittman epitomized all that was reprehensible about Dick Bass’s popularization of the Seven Summits and the ensuing debasement of the world’s highest mountain. But insulated by her money, a staff of paid attendants, and unwavering self-absorption, Pittman was heedless of the resentment and scorn she inspired in others; she remained as oblivious as Jane Austen’s Emma.

* He should not be confused with the Sherpa on the South African team who has the same name. Ang Dorje—like Pemba, Lhakpa, Ang Tshering, Ngawang, Dawa, Nima, and Pasang—is a very common Sherpa appellation; the fact that each of these names was shared by two or more Sherpas on Everest in 1996 was a source of occasional confusion.

† The sirdar is the head Sherpa. Hall’s team had a Base Camp sirdar, named Ang Tshering, who was in charge of all the Sherpas employed by the expedition; Ang Dorje, the climbing sirdar, answered to Ang Tshering but supervised the climbing Sherpas while they were on the mountain above Base Camp.

* The root of the problem is believed to be a paucity of oxygen, compounded by high pressure in the pulmonary arteries, causing the arteries to leak fluid into the lungs.

* Despite considerable hoopla about “direct, interactive links between the slopes of Mount Everest and the World Wide Web,” technological limitations prevented direct hookups from Base Camp to the Internet. Instead, correspondents filed their reports by voice or fax via satellite phone, and those reports were typed into computers for dissemination on the Web by editors in New York, Boston, and Seattle. E-mail was received in Kathmandu, printed out, and the hard copy was transported by yak to Base Camp. Likewise, all photos that ran on the Web had first been sent by yak and then air courier to New York for transmission. Internet chat sessions were done via satellite phone and a typist in New York.

* Several magazines and newspapers have erroneously reported that I was a correspondent for Outside Online. The confusion stemmed from the fact that Jane Bromet interviewed me at Base Camp and posted a transcript of the interview on the Outside Online website. I was not, however, affiliated with Outside Online in any capacity. I had gone to Everest on assignment for
Outside
magazine, an independent entity (based in Santa Fe, New Mexico) that works in loose partnership with Outside Online (based in the Seattle area) to publish a version of the magazine on the Internet. But
Outside
magazine and Outside Online are autonomous to such a degree that I didn’t even know Outside Online had sent a correspondent to Everest until I arrived at Base Camp.