Keeper Of The Mountains (21 page)

Meanwhile, on the Tibetan side of Everest, a large American expedition was attempting an ambitious new route: the vast Kangshung Face. The team, led by Dick Blum of San Francisco, included Himalayan heavyweights like John Roskelley and Lou Reichardt, with David Breashears doing camera work. Even Hillary joined them
as far as base camp. Fairly early in the trip, Roskelley declared the route too dangerous and argued for a change of plans to the north side. Arguments ensued and tempers flared, with Hillary weighing in as well, imploring the team not to abandon their original objective. He obviously inspired them, because most opted to stay with the face. But Roskelley left, and others followed, after expending significant energy on the route. A weakened team continued to pick away at it, but they ultimately failed. After hearing all of the reports, Elizabeth thought the expedition (like so many others) failed because they tried to function as a group of prima donnas rather than as a cohesive team.

Hillary was forced to return to New Zealand because of cerebral edema he experienced while at base camp with the team. He wrote in a letter to Elizabeth that he would probably not be able to go higher than 3962 metres in the future. His altitude ceiling had decreased steadily ever since his first trouble in 1961 on Makalu. Sadly, he was correct; as time went on he even had to limit his time in the Solu Khumbu from two weeks to one. And then he was unable to go as high as Kunde, but only to Phaphlu and finally not even to Phaphlu. Elizabeth worried that some day he might not be able to come to Kathmandu.

There were still first ascents to be done in Nepal, and in the spring of 1982 Roskelley and his team managed one. Cholatse was only 6440 metres high, but it was the last unclimbed peak in the Mount Everest region and a prize worth pursuing. But the team underestimated the severity of its difficulties. Hidden high in the Gokyo Valley, it didn't appear on the permitted list until Al Read of Mountain Travel finally convinced the government in late 1981 for the following year. Roskelley assembled a five-person team and, despite some bizarre equipment failures and questionable weather, they made the summit. Roskelley explained that, in order to save time, he led all of the top 15 pitches of steep ice, often with completely unprotected belays. They reached the top on April 22 in a howling blizzard with electricity crackling the air. Elizabeth arranged a grand party to celebrate their achievement, but while they were celebrating, she received a report from Rome that Reinhold Messner had been killed on Kangchenjunga. Much to her relief, he turned up in Kathmandu a couple of days later, thoroughly alive and triumphant after having reached the summit without the use of artificial oxygen. This was his seventh 8000er.

S
oon after, an important figure in Elizabeth's life passed away. Elizabeth was on her way back to Nepal from the United States after her annual trip to see her mother, when she ran into the brother of former prime minister B.P. Koirala at the Bangkok airport boarding gate. She greeted him, only to learn he was taking Koirala to Kathmandu. She asked where B.P. was and was informed he was in an ambulance. The charismatic Koirala was near death; he had been in hospital in Bangkok and had been told his throat cancer was terminal. His brother was taking him home to die. Before the plane left, Elizabeth spent almost an hour talking with the brother and with Koirala's son, who was a doctor. She wrote her Reuters story on the plane and began filing it as soon as she reached home. Before she could finish, she received a phone call that he had died. The sad news became her biggest scoop. Reuters had the news before any other agency; as far as she knows, it was the only time a story of hers hit the front page of the
New York Times
.

Koirala's impact on Nepal had been huge. In 1947 he founded the Nepali National Congress, which in 1950 became the Nepali Congress Party; he led the armed revolution of 1951, which overthrew 104 years of Rana rule; and he became Nepal's first elected prime minister in 1959. But Koirala was too powerful and too influential for the ruling monarchy, and his career became a series of confrontations, almost always leading to arrest and imprisonment. In addition to several stints in Nepalese prisons, he spent years living in exile. Yet each time he returned, his influence was felt. Tens of thousands of Nepalis revered him, forming a huge procession as they took his body through the streets of Kathmandu to Pashipatinath for cremation. Elizabeth admired him and wondered who would have the leadership abilities and clear political vision to take his place.

When the People's Republic of China opened its autonomous regions, including Tibet, to non-Chinese mountaineers in 1979, new opportunities opened up on the north side of Mount Everest. Two important expeditions with different objectives found themselves in Tibet in the summer and fall of 1982. One was from the United States, led by Lou Whittaker, and the second was from England, under the leadership of Chris Bonington. Although the teams travelled through China, Elizabeth kept close track of their progress.

T
he American team consisted of a strong group of Mount Rainier guides from Washington, and Bonington's British team had only four climbers, a sign that he was moving away from the big-expedition ethos. The British team included some of his most reliable climbing companions, including Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker. The Americans chose the striking Great Couloir as their route, while the Brits were after the long, unclimbed Northeast Ridge. They were climbing without oxygen and knew that the major difficulties on the route would be high on the mountain between 7925 and 8382 metres.

The two teams enjoyed a festive evening together before heading their separate ways. Their next meeting would not be at all festive, as both teams experienced tragedy in the course of their climbs. While searching for a campsite at 8016 metres and while attached to a fixed line, American team member Marty Hoey inexplicably and without warning fell 1829 metres down the face. Her teammates were horrified to see that her harness and jumar were still attached to the fixed line, indicating some kind of buckle failure or human error. Much higher on the mountain, Boardman and Tasker were performing exceptionally well on the difficult terrain – as had been expected – and were poised for the summit. As the rest of the team watched through the telescope, they made steady progress, but after several missed radio calls and their disappearance around a corner, the team assumed something had gone wrong. A search party was dispatched to the area where they were last seen, but to no avail. Bonington concluded they had fallen, and it would be years before Peter Boardman's body was found lying alone on the ridge with no sign of his companion. Bonington later confided to Elizabeth that although the trip had a tragic end and two of Britain's top Himalayan climbers were dead, it had been one of the happiest expeditions of his life. She was sympathetic, but he sensed a disapproving concern from Elizabeth for this clan of climbers she had adopted. Once again, people she knew and liked had gone off to the mountains and hadn't come back. Such deaths took their toll.

Can a climb be described as successful if one man does reach the summit but all four die in the descent?

— Elizabeth Hawley

E
lizabeth once characterized the 1980s as belonging to Reinhold Messner, the “supreme star of the Himalaya,” and it was the spring of 1985 that truly belonged to him. He and his teammate, Hans Kammerlander, climbed a new route on the Northwest Face of Annapurna
I
in five days from base camp to summit, and then went on to climb Dhaulagiri
I
by its normal route in only three days. This brought his quest to summit all 14 of the 8000-metre peaks to a total of 12.

The previous winter, Polish climber Jerzy Kukuczka had achieved an even greater feat with two 8000-metre summits in one month – in winter. The only person with more 8000-metre summits than Kukuczka was Messner, and so the “horse race” had begun. The phrase, first coined by Austrian climber Kurt Diemberger, became Elizabeth's preferred descriptor for the unofficial race between Messner and Kukuczka. Although they were two very different climbers, it appeared they had the same ambition.

Elizabeth watched with great interest as the pressure mounted. In January 1986, Kukuczka and Krzysztof Wielicki completed an impressive winter ascent of Kangchenjunga without supplementary oxygen, bringing Kukuczka's total to ten and Wielicki's to four.

One of Kurt Diemberger's favourite images of Elizabeth was in connection with the “horse race,” which he described in his book,
Spirits of the Air
: “This charming lady, who you would be justified in calling a landmark of Kathmandu and who knows really everything that's happened in the Himalaya, having painstakingly recorded it over many years – such as the ‘horse race' … she keeps a table of all the mountaineers who have climbed 8000-metre peaks. You can see
quite clearly how they are proceeding from year to year – this one has two, that one in the meantime has three, one has four … And then there are two who have five each.…”

Although there were important political elections in Nepal in the spring of 1986, the biggest race in town was not political; it was the mountaineering race that captured Elizabeth's imagination and dominated her reporting headlines. She wrote, “Himalayan mountaineering is not ordinarily considered to be a highly competitive sport. But last autumn's climbing season in the Nepalese Himalaya had much of the drama of the World Cup Final, when the race to be first to conquer all of the world's 8000-metre mountains was finally won by Italy's Reinhold Messner, by the relatively narrow margin of 14 to 11.” By the end of that season, the runner-up, Jerzy Kukuczka of Poland, had moved his score from 11 to 12, Swiss climber Marcel Rüedi scored 10 and then died the next day on his descent, possibly from pulmonary or cerebral edema, and Swiss climber Erhard Loretan suffered the first failure of his career on what he had hoped would be his tenth 8000er.

Elizabeth believed Messner did not conceive of the idea as a race, but merely a personal challenge. But it caught on, particularly with Kukuczka, making it difficult for Messner to achieve his goal before anyone else. Together with his frequent partner Hans Kammerlander, Messner topped out on Makalu on September 26, bringing his total to 13. Less than three weeks later, the two of them reached the top of Lhotse on a day when most climbers were pinned down in their camps by high winds. That 14th 8000er was the jewel in the crown of Messner's distinguished Himalayan career that began in 1970 on Nanga Parbat, which he climbed with his brother Günther. That first 8000-metre victory took a greater toll on Messner than all the others, for it was on Nanga Parbat that his brother died on the descent.

Messner, who never climbed with artificial oxygen, had shown an entire generation of climbers what was possible. Elizabeth thought he was a true inspiration for climbers to go beyond their normal scope of achievement. Others agreed with her. Erhard Loretan, who raced up and down Everest, said, “The reason we can now climb so quickly and easily is that Messner served as an example for us.” And Chris Bonington was quoted in a
Time
article as saying, “There is a wall called ‘impossible' that the great mass of people in any field face. Then
one person who's got a kind of extra imaginative drive jumps that wall. That's Reinhold Messner.” And how did Messner feel? “Now I am free!” he exclaimed, with joy and satisfaction. She pushed him: “Free to do what?” As it turned out, he had lots of plans: to climb other interesting peaks – at any altitude anywhere in the world – to make films, to search for the yeti.

Loretan's lightning-fast Everest climb was similar in style and aesthetics to Messner's “by fair means” philosophy. Together with his frequent climbing partner Jean Troillet and the equally impressive Pierre Béghin, they approached the North Face of Everest in the monsoon season. At 10:00 p.m. on August 29, 1986, the three left advance base camp, climbed through the night and stopped at 11:00 a.m. at 7800 metres. They rested in the warmth of daylight, starting off again at 9:00 p.m. that night. Béghin turned back at 8000 metres, but the other two continued until darkness made it impossible to continue past 8400 metres. At 4:00 a.m. they could see enough to continue and were on the summit at 1:00 p.m. They took advantage of the warmest part of the day, resting a bit before flying down the entire face in a five-hour glissade. The whole climb took them less than two days. Their style was unique: they climbed unroped; they climbed at night; they used no oxygen; they carried only a small amount of food and light sleeping bags; and above 7800 metres they carried no pack. Polish climber Voytek Kurtyka described it as “night nakedness.”

The following winter, in February 1987, Messner's closest competitor, Jerzy Kukuczka, accomplished an ascent in a style that made the Pole happy and elicited admiration from Elizabeth. She observed that most mountaineers who came to the Himalaya did not choose the bitterly cold months of winter, but one Pole, Kukuczka, didn't seem to mind it. Together with Artur Hajzer, he braved the cold and wind to climb Annapurna
I
, bringing his total to 13 and his winter ascents to four, all but one without oxygen. This was a record that no other climber had achieved – not even Messner – and Elizabeth grasped the significance of the extra effort, stamina and determination required to pull it off.

Unrest continued in Kathmandu during these years, and in June 1985 a terrorist bomb exploded at the royal palace. Elizabeth sped to the palace to find out what had happened. She discovered damage to
two palace gates, as well as to a building that held the government newspaper offices and the Annapurna Hotel, a property owned by the royal family. She also learned from a trusted, highly placed source that a number of printed leaflets claiming responsibility for the bombing had been distributed. She returned to her office and reported what she had seen and learned. The royal family was outraged. It turned out that the palace press secretary hadn't known about the leaflets, so the palace learned from the press something the secretary should have informed them of. But Elizabeth's source was impeccable – the story was true. That's not how the palace saw it, however. The press secretary was enraged and claimed Elizabeth was “spreading untruths and horrific gossip.” His professional humiliation demanded revenge.