Into Thin Air (44 page)

So he continued to take novice climbers to the high peaks, even after experiencing the horrors and controversies of the 1996 disaster.

In the spring of 1997, one year later, Boukreev agreed to lead a team of Indonesian Army officers hoping to become the first members of their island nation to climb Everest—despite the fact that none of the Indonesians had any prior mountaineering experience, or, indeed, had even seen snow before. To assist him with his neophyte clients, Boukreev employed two highly accomplished Russian mountaineers, Vladimir Bashkirov and Evgeny Vinogradski, and Apa Sherpa, who had climbed Everest seven times. Moreover, in 1997, unlike in ’96, everyone on the team relied on bottled oxygen for the summit assault, including Boukreev—notwithstanding his insistence that it was safer for him “to climb without oxygen in order to avoid the sudden loss of acclimatization that occurs when supplementary oxygen supplies are depleted.” In 1997, it also bears noting, Anatoli was never more than a few paces from his Indonesian clients on summit day.

The team departed the South Col for the top just after midnight on April 26. Around noon, Apa Sherpa, in the lead, arrived at the Hillary Step, where he encountered the body of Bruce Herrod
^*
dangling from an old fixed rope. Clambering over the deceased British photographer, Apa, Anatoli, and the rest of the Indonesian team labored slowly toward the summit.

It was already 3:30 P.M. when the first Indonesian, Asmujiono Prajurit, followed Boukreev to the top. They stayed on the summit only ten minutes before heading down, whereupon Boukreev compelled the two other Indonesians to turn around, even though one of them was within 100 feet of the top. The team made it down only as far as the Balcony that night, where they endured a miserable bivouac at 27,600 feet, but thanks to Boukreev’s leadership and a rare night without wind, everyone descended safely to the South Col on April 27. “We were lucky,” Anatoli allowed.

Boukreev and Vinogradski paused during their descent to Camp Four to cover Scott Fischer’s body with rocks and snow at 27,200 feet. “This last respect was for a man I feel was the best and brightest expression of the American persona,” Boukreev mused in
The Climb
. “I think often of his brilliant smile and positive manner. I am a difficult man and I hope to remember him always by living a little more by his example.” A day later Boukreev traveled across the South Col to the edge of the Kangshung Face, where he located the body of Yasuko Namba, covered her with stones as best he could, and collected some of her possessions to give to her family.

A month after climbing Everest with the Indonesians, Boukreev attempted a speed traverse of Lhotse and Everest with a brilliant thirty-year-old Italian climber named Simone Moro.
^*
Boukreev and Moro set out for the top of Lhotse on May 26. That same day, eight members of a separate Russian team—including Boukreev’s friend Vladimir Bashkirov, who had helped guide the Indonesians up Everest—also started up Lhotse. None of the ten climbers was using supplemental oxygen.

Moro reached the summit at 1 P.M. Boukreev arrived twenty-five minutes later, but he was feeling ill and started down after spending only a few minutes on top. Moro stayed on the summit for perhaps another forty minutes, and then headed down himself. During his descent he encountered Bashkirov, who was also feeling sick but nevertheless still pushing upward. Late that afternoon Bashkirov and the rest of the Russians all reached the summit.

Not long after the last of the Russians topped out, Moro and Boukreev arrived back at their tent and went to sleep. Upon waking the next morning, Moro turned on his radio and happened to overhear a transmission from some Italian friends who were in the process of ascending Lhotse. The Italians reported with alarm that, high on the peak, they had encountered the body of a climber dressed in a green down suit and yellow boots. “In that moment,” Moro says, “I realized that it could be Bashkirov.” He immediately woke Boukreev, who made a radio call to the Russian team. The Russians reported that Bashkirov had indeed died during the night from an altitude-related illness on his way down from the summit.

Although Boukreev had lost yet one more friend to the heights, he did not let it dampen his passion for climbing the world’s highest mountains. On July 7, 1997, six weeks after Bashkirov perished, Boukreev made a solo ascent of Broad Peak in Pakistan. And exactly one week later he completed a speed ascent of nearby Gasherbrum II. Although Moro says that climbing all fourteen of the 8, 000-meter peaks wasn’t particularly important to Boukreev, he had now ascended eleven of the fourteen: only Nanga Parbat, Hidden Peak, and Annapurna I remained.

Later that summer Anatoli invited Reinhold Messner to join him in the Tian Shan for some recreational climbing. During Messner’s visit, Boukreev asked the legendary Italian alpinist for advice about his climbing career. Since first visiting the Himalaya in 1989, Boukreev had accumulated an amazing record of high-altitude ascents. All but two of these climbs, however, had followed traditional, relatively oft-traveled routes with few technical challenges. Messner pointed out that if Boukreev wanted to be considered among the world’s truly great mountaineers, he would need to shift his focus to steeper, very difficult, previously unclimbed lines.

Anatoli took this advice to heart. In fact, even before consulting with Messner, Boukreev and Moro had decided to attempt Annapurna I via a notoriously difficult route on the mountain’s immense south face that had been climbed by a strong Anglo-American team in 1970. And to increase the challenge, Boukreev and Moro decided to make their attempt on Annapurna in winter. It would be an exceedingly ambitious and dangerous undertaking, involving extreme technical climbing at high altitude in unimaginable wind and cold. Even when ascended by its easiest aspects, Annapurna—26,454 feet high—is regarded as one of the deadliest mountains in the world: for every two climbers who have reached its summit, one has died. If Boukreev and Moro were to succeed, it would be one of the boldest ascents in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.

In late November 1997, soon after publication of
The Climb
, Boukreev and Moro traveled to Nepal and helicoptered to Annapurna Base Camp, accompanied by a Kazakh cinematographer named Dimitri Sobolev. It had been an unusually early winter, however. They were hit by frequent storms that dumped prodigious quantities of snow and sent giant avalanches thundering down their intended route. As a consequence, a month into the expedition they decided to abandon their original plan and instead attempt a different route at the eastern margin of Annapurna’s south face. It was a route that had been attempted several times by accomplished climbers, without success. The difficulties would be extreme—Boukreev’s team would have to ascend a formidable satellite peak called the Fang on their way to the summit—but the avalanche danger appeared to be significantly lower on this new route.

Having erected Camp One at 17,000 feet below the first of the new route’s steep terrain, Boukreev, Moro, and Sobolev embarked from their tent at sunrise on Christmas Day, intending to establish a line of fixed ropes up a broad gully to a ridge that towered some 2,700 feet above their camp. Moro, in the lead, had climbed to within two hundred feet of the ridge crest by noon. At 12:27 P.M., as he stopped to pull something from his backpack, he heard a sharp boom. When he looked up he saw an avalanche of massive ice blocks hurtling directly toward him. He managed to scream out a warning to Boukreev and Sobolev, who were ascending the gully some 700 feet below, just before the wall of snow and ice plowed him from his stance and carried him down the mountain.

For a moment Moro tried to arrest his slide by clutching the fixed rope, burning deep gouges into his fingers and palms, but it was to no avail. He tumbled approximately 2,600 feet with the cascading ice and was knocked cold. When the mass of frozen rubble came to rest on a gentle slope slightly above Camp One, however, by chance Moro happened to be on top of the avalanche debris. Upon regaining consciousness he looked frantically for his companions, but could find no trace of them. Searches by air and ground over the ensuing week proved futile. Boukreev and Sobolev were presumed to be dead.

News of Anatoli’s death was greeted with shock and disbelief on several continents. He traveled prodigiously and had friends around the world. Many, many people were devastated by his passing, not least of them being the woman with whom he’d been sharing his life, Linda Wylie of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Anatoli’s death was extremely upsetting to me, as well, for a host of complicated reasons. In the wake of the accident on Annapuraa, the debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took on a different light. I pondered how things between Anatoli and me had come to such a state. Because both of us were stubborn and proud and loath to back down from a fight, our disagreement had escalated vastly out of proportion, diminishing both of us in the process. And if I’m being honest with myself, I have to accept as much responsibility for this as Boukreev.

So do I wish I had portrayed Anatoli differently in writing this book? No, I don’t think so. Nothing I’ve learned since the publication of
Into Thin Air or The
Climb
leads me to believe I got things wrong. What I do wish, perhaps, is that I’d been a little less strident in a notorious exchange of letters between Anatoli and me that was posted on the Internet shortly after my original Everest article was published in
Outside
magazine in September 1996. This online spat established an unfortunate tone that intensified over the following months and thoroughly polarized the discussion.

Although the criticisms I leveled at Boukreev in my
Outside
article and in my book were measured, and balanced by sincere praise, Anatoli was nevertheless hurt and outraged by them. He and DeWalt responded by attacking my character, and presenting some very creative interpretations of the facts. To defend my honesty, I was forced to present some damaging material that I had previously withheld to avoid hurting Boukreev unnecessarily. Boukreev, DeWalt, and St. Martin’s Press responded by intensifying their ad hominem attacks on me, and the tenor of the discussion only deteriorated over the period that followed. Perhaps, as DeWalt wrote in
The Climb
, there “is an advantage to an open and ongoing debate” over what happened on Everest in 1996. It’s certainly helped sell copies of his book—and mine, no doubt. But for all the bitterness that’s flowed, I’m not sure much of lasting importance has been illuminated.

The dispute reached its nadir in early November 1997 at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. Boukreev was a panelist at a forum of eminent mountaineers. I had declined an invitation to participate as a panelist, fearing that the event might turn into a shouting match, but I made the mistake of attending as a member of the audience. When it was Anatoli’s turn to speak, he had Linda Wylie (acting as his interpreter) read a prepared statement that began with a declaration that most of what I had written about him was “bullshit.” The upshot was that I rose to Anatoli’s bait and some ill-advised, very heated words were exchanged across the crowded auditorium.

I regretted my outburst immediately. After the forum concluded and the crowd dispersed I hurried outside, searched for Anatoli, and found him walking with Wylie across the grounds of the Banff Centre. I told them that I thought we needed to have a few words together in private and attempt to clear the air. Initially Anatoli balked at this suggestion, protesting that he was late to another Book Festival event. But I persisted, and eventually he agreed to grant me a few minutes. For the next half hour he and Wylie and I stood outside in the cold Canadian morning and spoke frankly but calmly about our differences.

At one point Anatoli put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I am not angry with you, Jon, but you do not understand.” By the time the discussion ended and we went our separate ways, we had come to the conclusion that both Anatoli and I needed to make an effort to moderate the tone of the debate. We concurred that there was no need for the atmosphere between us to be so emotionally charged and confrontational. We agreed to disagree about certain points—primarily the wisdom of guiding Everest without bottled oxygen, and what was said between Boukreev and Fischer during their final conversation atop the Hillary Step—but both of us came to realize that we saw eye to eye on almost everything else of importance.

Although Boukreev’s coauthor, Mr. DeWalt (who wasn’t present during the aforementioned meeting), continued to fan the flames of the dispute with gusto, I came away from my encounter with Anatoli in Banff somewhat hopeful of patching things up with him. Perhaps I was being overly optimistic, but I foresaw an end to the imbroglio. Seven weeks later, however, Anatoli was killed on Annapurna, and I realized that I’d begun my conciliatory efforts much too late.

* Among Boukreev’s harshest critics were several Sherpas who played key roles in the disaster. I have not mentioned this in print until now, and I do so presently only because DeWalt first raised the matter himself in the 1999 edition of
The Climb
.

  DeWalt’s new edition reveals that in 1998 I wrote a letter to Galen Rowell, the well-known mountaineer, in which I reported that many Sherpas “blamed the entire tragedy on Boukreev.” DeWalt then pointed out that Rowell (during a trip to Everest Base Camp in 1998) had “found no Sherpa who blamed the tragedy on Boukreev, nor any Sherpa who knew of anyone who did.”

  But Rowell never spoke with Lopsang Jangbu or Ang Dorje (the head climbing Sherpa on Rob Hall’s team). On separate occasions, both Lopsang and Ang Dorje told me, in very strong terms, that they (and virtually all the other Sherpas on their respective teams) did indeed blame Boukreev for the disaster. Their views are documented in notes, recorded interviews, and correspondence.