Into Thin Air (5 page)

The moment aroused a whole orchestra of rich emotions among the British—pride, patriotism, nostalgia for the lost past of the war and derring do, hope for a rejuvenated future.… People of a certain age remember vividly to this day the moment when, as they waited on a drizzly June morning for the Coronation procession to pass by in London, they heard the magical news that the summit of the world was, so to speak, theirs.

Tenzing became a national hero throughout India, Nepal, and Tibet, each of which claimed him as one of their own. Knighted by the queen, Sir Edmund Hillary saw his image reproduced on postage stamps, comic strips, books, movies, magazine covers—over night, the hatchet-faced beekeeper from Auckland had been transformed into one of the most famous men on earth.

Hillary and Tenzing climbed Everest a month before I was conceived, so I didn’t share in the collective sense of pride and wonder that swept the world—an event that an older friend says was comparable, in its visceral impact, to the first manned landing on the moon. A decade later, however, a subsequent ascent of the mountain helped establish the trajectory of my life.

On May 22, 1963, Tom Hornbein, a thirty-two-year-old doctor from Missouri, and Willi Unsoeld, thirty-six, a professor of theology from Oregon, reached the summit of Everest via the peak’s daunting West Ridge, previously unclimbed. By then the summit had already been achieved on four occasions, by eleven men, but the West Ridge was considerably more difficult than either of the two previously established routes: the South Col and Southeast Ridge or the North Col and Northeast Ridge. Hornbein’s and Unsoeld’s ascent was—and continues to be—deservedly hailed as one of the great feats in the annals of mountaineering.

Late in the day on their summit push, the two Americans climbed a stratum of steep, crumbly rock—the infamous Yellow Band. Surmounting this cliff demanded tremendous strength and skill; nothing so technically challenging had ever been climbed at such extreme altitude. Once on top of the Yellow Band, Hornbein and Unsoeld doubted they could safely descend it. Their best hope for getting off the mountain alive, they concluded, was to go over the top and down the well-established Southeast Ridge route, an extremely audacious plan, given the late hour, the unknown terrain, and their rapidly diminishing supply of bottled oxygen.

Hornbein and Unsoeld arrived on the summit at 6:15 P.M., just as the sun was setting, and were forced to spend the night in the open above 28,000 feet—at the time, the highest bivouac in history. It was a cold night, but mercifully without wind. Although Unsoeld’s toes froze and would later be amputated, both men survived to tell their tale.

I was nine years old at the time and living in Corvallis, Oregon, where Unsoeld also made his home. He was a close friend of my father’s, and I sometimes played with the oldest Unsoeld children—Regon, who was a year older than me, and Devi, a year younger. A few months before Willi Unsoeld departed for Nepal, I reached the summit of my first mountain—an unspectacular 9,000-foot volcano in the Cascade Range that now sports a chair-lift to the top—in the company of my dad, Willi, and Regon. Not surprisingly, accounts of the 1963 epic on Everest resonated loud and long in my preadolescent imagination. While my friends idolized John Glenn, Sandy Koufax, and Johnny Unitas, my own heroes were Hornbein and Unsoeld.

Secretly, I dreamed of ascending Everest myself one day; for more than a decade it remained a burning ambition. By the time I was in my early twenties climbing had become the focus of my existence to the exclusion of almost everything else. Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.

And climbing provided a sense of community as well. To become a climber was to join a self-contained, rabidly idealistic society, largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world at large. The culture of ascent was characterized by intense competition and undiluted machismo, but for the most part, its constituents were concerned with impressing only one another. Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than
how
one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable. Nobody was admired more than so-called free soloists: visionaries who ascended alone, without rope or hardware.

In those years I lived to climb, existing on five or six thousand dollars a year, working as a carpenter and a commercial salmon fisherman just long enough to fund the next trip to the Bugaboos or Tetons or Alaska Range. But at some point in my midtwenties I abandoned my boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest. By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a “slag heap”—a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a “serious” climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world’s highest mountain.

Such snobbery was rooted in the fact that by the early 1980s, Everest’s easiest line—via South Col and the Southeast Ridge—had been climbed more than a hundred times. My cohorts and I referred to the Southeast Ridge as the “Yak Route.” Our contempt was only reinforced in 1985, when Dick Bass—a wealthy fifty-five-year-old Texan with limited climbing experience—was ushered to the top of Everest by an extraordinary young climber named David Breashears, an event that was accompanied by a blizzard of uncritical media attention.

Previously, Everest had by and large been the province of elite mountaineers. In the words of Michael Kennedy, the editor of
Climbing
magazine, “To be invited on an Everest expedition was an honor earned only after you served a long apprenticeship on lower peaks, and to actually reach the summit elevated a climber to the upper firmament of mountaineering stardom.” Bass’s ascent changed all that. In bagging Everest, he became the first person to climb all of the Seven Summits,
^*
a feat that brought him worldwide renown, spurred a swarm of other weekend climbers to follow in his guided boot-prints, and rudely pulled Everest into the postmodern era.

“To aging Walter Mitty types like myself, Dick Bass was an inspiration,” Seaborn Beck Weathers explained in a thick East Texas twang during the trek to Everest Base Camp last April. A forty-nine-year-old Dallas pathologist, Beck was one of eight clients on Rob Hall’s 1996 guided expedition. “Bass showed that Everest was within the realm of possibility for regular guys. Assuming you’re reasonably fit and have some disposable income, I think the biggest obstacle is probably taking time off from your job and leaving your family for two months.”

For a great many climbers, the record shows, stealing time away from the daily grind has not been an insurmountable obstacle, nor has the hefty outlay of cash. Over the past half decade, the traffic on all of the Seven Summits, but especially Everest, has multiplied at an astonishing rate. And to meet the demand, the number of commercial enterprises peddling guided ascents of the Seven Summits, especially Everest, has multiplied correspondingly. In the spring of 1996, thirty distinct expeditions were on the flanks of Everest, at least ten of them organized as money-making ventures.

The government of Nepal recognized that the throngs flocking to Everest created serious problems in terms of safety, aesthetics, and impact to the environment. While grappling with the issue, Nepalese ministers came up with a solution that seemed to hold the dual promise of limiting the crowds while increasing the flow of hard currency into the impoverished national coffers: raise the fee for climbing permits. In 1991 the Ministry of Tourism charged $2,300 for a permit that allowed a team of any size to attempt Everest. In 1992 the fee was increased to $10,000 for a team of up to nine climbers, with another $1,200 to be paid for each additional climber.

But climbers continued to swarm to Everest despite the higher fees. In the spring of 1993, on the fortieth anniversary of the first ascent, a record fifteen expeditions, comprising 294 climbers, attempted to scale the peak from the Nepalese side. That autumn the ministry raised the permit fee yet again—to a staggering $50,000 for as many as five climbers, plus $10,000 for each additional climber, up to a maximum of seven. Additionally, the government decreed that no more than four expeditions would be allowed on the Nepalese flanks each season.

What the Nepalese ministers didn’t take into consideration, however, was that China charged only $15,000 to allow a team of any size to climb the mountain from Tibet and placed no limit on the number of expeditions each season. The flood of Everesters therefore shifted from Nepal to Tibet, leaving hundreds of Sherpas out of work. The ensuing hue and cry persuaded Nepal, in the spring of 1996, to abruptly cancel the four-expedition limit. And while they were at it, the government ministers jacked up the permit fee once again—this time to $70,000 for up to seven climbers, plus another $10,000 for each additional climber. Judging from the fact that sixteen of the thirty expeditions on Everest last spring were climbing on the Nepalese side of the mountain, the high cost of obtaining a permit doesn’t seem to have been a significant deterrent.

Even before the calamitous outcome of the 1996 premonsoon climbing season, the proliferation of commercial expeditions over the past decade was a touchy issue. Traditionalists were offended that the world’s highest summit was being sold to rich parvenus—some of whom, if denied the services of guides, would probably have difficulty making it to the top of a peak as modest as Mount Rainier. Everest, the purists sniffed, had been debased and profaned.

Such critics also pointed out that, thanks to the commercialization of Everest, the once hallowed peak has now even been dragged into the swamp of American jurisprudence. Having paid princely sums to be escorted up Everest, some climbers have then sued their guides when the summit eluded them. “Occasionally you’ll get a client who thinks he’s bought a guaranteed ticket to the summit,” laments Peter Athans, a highly respected guide who’s made eleven trips to Everest and reached the top four times. “Some people don’t understand that an Everest expedition can’t be run like a Swiss train.”

Sadly, not every Everest lawsuit is unwarranted. Inept or disreputable companies have on more than one occasion failed to deliver crucial logistical support—oxygen, for instance—as promised. On some expeditions guides have gone to the summit without any of their paying customers, prompting the bitter clients to conclude that they were brought along simply to pick up the tab. In 1995, the leader of a commercial expedition absconded with tens of thousands of dollars of his clients’ money before the trip even got off the ground.

In March 1995 I received a call from an editor at
Outside
magazine proposing that I join a guided Everest expedition scheduled to depart five days hence and write an article about the mushrooming commercialization of the mountain and the attendant controversies. The magazine’s intent was not that I climb the peak; the editors simply wanted me to remain in Base Camp and report the story from the East Rongbuk Glacier, at the foot of the Tibetan side of the mountain. I considered the offer seriously—I went so far as to book a flight and get the required immunizations—and then bowed out at the last minute.

Given the disdain I’d expressed for Everest over the years, one might reasonably assume that I declined to go on principle. In truth, the call from
Outside
had unexpectedly aroused a powerful, long-buried desire. I said no to the assignment only because I thought it would be unbearably frustrating to spend two months in the shadow of Everest without ascending higher than Base Camp. If I were going to travel to the far side of the globe and spend eight weeks away from my wife and home, I wanted an opportunity to climb the mountain.

I asked Mark Bryant, the editor of
Outside
, if he would consider postponing the assignment for twelve months (which would give me time to train properly for the physical demands of the expedition). I also inquired if the magazine would be willing to book me with one of the more reputable guide services—and cover the $65,000 fee—thus giving me a shot at actually reaching the summit. I didn’t really expect him to say yes to this plan. I’d written more than sixty pieces for
Outside
over the previous fifteen years, and seldom had the travel budget for any of these assignments exceeded two or three thousand dollars.