Keeper Of The Mountains (26 page)

But was she missing something by reporting on commercial climbs and overlooking an important new climb on the lower peaks? There was an emerging group of top climbers who were more interested in challenging routes – not the height of the peak.

Some climbers who sought credit for their hard new routes com­plained publicly about her lack of appreciation. But American climber Dave Hahn didn't have much patience for those who whined about Elizabeth not being sufficiently interested in their hard, esoteric and dangerous climbs: “They're going to have to get used to climbing their climbs for their own reasons – they are probably never going to get the kind of acclaim from the public that they feel they deserve.” But some of these climbers weren't simply interested in public acclaim. They wanted their peers – other climbers – to know about their climbs, and they said it was Elizabeth's job to keep them informed. Some climbers thought that a lot of important activity was going unrecorded and that this smacked of elitism.

In 1991 Elizabeth had the opportunity to be reacquainted with American climber Richard Salisbury. She had met him in 1984 when he was part of an Everest climb sponsored by the Nepal police. It began as an effort to remove garbage from the mountain but ended up a confusing mess of invalid permits and an illegal attempt on the summit, where two Nepalese lost their lives. This time, Salisbury was back in Nepal with a permit for Annapurna
IV
. His team didn't get very high on the mountain, because it was a snowy spring, but it wasn't their climbing that interested Elizabeth. Before heading to Annapurna
IV
, Salisbury sat down with her for the requisite interview. She brought out all the information she had on previous expeditions to Annapurna
IV
; to her surprise, Salisbury pulled out a spreadsheet with similar information. He had taken everything he knew about previous expeditions – times, camps and elevations – and plotted them on a spreadsheet so as to better plan the food supplies and general logistics of the trip. She was fascinated. She had accumulated copious notes on every Nepalese peak being climbed and was interested in
creating a database of the information. Salisbury, who was a computer analyst specializing in databases back at the University of Michigan, her old alma mater, offered to help.

At the time, a Nepali graduate student was helping her with the project, so she declined Salisbury's offer. But later, when the student left Nepal to study in the United States, she contacted Salisbury again to see if he was still interested. He was. In fact, Salisbury was the perfect choice. He knew about climbing and he knew how to program a database. He had both the skills and a passion for organizing information about climbing.

Salisbury hired a Nepali woman to go to Elizabeth's house each morning to do data entry. For the next 11 years, she entered all of Elizabeth's files into the program Salisbury had designed. Twice a year Elizabeth sent Salisbury updates; he would then go through the reports carefully, checking the facts against other sources. Once all the disputes were resolved, they synchronized their databases, working on the same project from two different continents. He worked with her for 13 years building the database. He recalled their working relationship as: “She didn't terrorize me – she got impatient with me sometimes, but I just let it roll off. I knew it wasn't personal.”

A statistic that Elizabeth entered into the database with sadness was the death of Wanda Rutkiewicz on Kangchenjunga in 1992. There weren't that many women who impressed Elizabeth, but Rutkiewicz was one of them. The Polish woman was the world's leading female Himalayan climber and Kangchenjunga was to be her ninth 8000-metre peak. Elizabeth described her as a skilful, although slow, climber. Rutkiewicz had conceived an exceptionally ambitious plan to bag all 14 of the 8000-metre peaks by the end of 1992, which meant six in one year, although she had since reconsidered and thought it might take until the following spring to finish the job.

She was last seen by the Mexican climber Carlos Carsolio at about 8250 metres in a snow hole where she was spending the night before heading up to the summit. According to Carlos, she had been climbing even more slowly than usual. Carlos went to the summit and was descending when he met her in her snow hole. He told Elizabeth it was a well-protected spot, but he still urged her to go down. Wanda told him she was cold because her old down suit wasn't warm enough anymore. She was pitifully short of equipment: no sleeping bag, stove,
fuel or food. She had only a bivouac sac that she had wrapped around herself to keep warm. “She seemed tired,” Carlos told Elizabeth.

And yet she was determined to continue up. “I think she felt this was her last chance to climb Kangchenjunga,” he said. He told Wanda he would go down to Camp
IV
for the night, then descend to Camp
II
and wait for her there, as there was no food or fuel at Camp
IV
. Their conversation lasted not more than 10 minutes.

Carlos descended and never saw her again. “It was difficult for us to leave the mountain,” Carlos told Elizabeth, “but I'm sure that she cannot have survived, because of the bad weather and because she was extremely tired and without drink.” He continued, “It is a sad loss for all of us and for the mountaineering world … she was a safe climber but she was extremely slow.” She had confided to Carlos that she had to finish all the 8000ers quickly before she became even slower.

Elizabeth wondered if this was a case of ambition outstripping physical abilities. She remembered Wanda as a charming, complicated woman, and “tense … wound up like a mechanical doll … she had determination. She just kept plugging away at these mountains until she could plug away no longer.”

Another tragedy played itself out in the fall of 1992 when the two French climbers Pierre Béghin and Jean-Christophe Lafaille attempted the South Face of Annapurna
I
. Lafaille remembered meeting Elizabeth when they arrived. As it was his first time to the Himalaya, he was the junior team member. “It's my first trip in Himalaya, my first expedition. I discover the magic Nepal, I don't speak English, and I'm the young boy with my boss Pierre.” His impression of Elizabeth was that she was very serious and “not so much friendly.”

The two were attempting an alpine-style ascent of the great South Face by a new line. With Béghin's Himalayan experience and Lafaille's technical skills, they were a strong team. They had made good progress over difficult terrain to an elevation of 7400 metres; then the weather deteriorated and they had to descend. During a rappel, Béghin fell to his death. Lafaille was left alone on that terrible face and had a multi-day epic getting down in the storm. He broke his arm in the process and his exhaustion was extreme. As Lafaille described it, “I was completely tired, broken physically and psychologically.”

When Elizabeth interviewed him upon his return to Kathmandu, Lafaille described Béghin as “the best Himalayan climber from
France.” He described their partnership as a “good cocktail of his experience and my technique.” Béghin had remained true to his ideals of small teams on difficult routes, writing about it in the 1992
American Alpine Journal
: “A simple rope team for days and days without logistical support striving with incertitude towards a summit, a goal with real meaning. What is the purpose of setting out with ten or fifteen climbers on that kind of objective while uncoiling kilometres of fixed rope? Today, when our technology lets us explore space, the conquest of the great walls of our planet is interesting only if done ‘by fair means'.…” – the phrase Messner had brought to Himalayan climbing.

But there were successes, too. Described by Chris Bonington as “one of the most beautiful and difficult peaks in the Himalaya,” Menlungtse was a prize to be plucked, and two Slovenian climbers did just that in the fall of 1992. A British team had climbed a lower summit of the peak in 1988, and an American team with John Roskelley, Greg Child and Jim Wickwire tried hard on the East Ridge in 1990, but neither team considered attempting the route taken by the Slovenians: the Southeast Face, which led directly to the main summit. Marko Prezelj and Andrej Å tremfelj combined their experience, confidence and speed to reach the top on October 23 via a dangerous and difficult face in pure alpine style, spending just over 53 hours on the face. Elizabeth was pleased: a beautiful mountain, an ambitious route and a skilful team.

A tragic story unfolded in the spring of 1993 when Nepalese climber Pasang Lhamu Sherpa and her husband, the director of the Thamserku trekking agency, assembled a team to get her to the top of Everest before any Nepali women from the joint Indo-Nepali expedition, on the mountain at the same time, summited. Before Pasang left Kathmandu, she issued a statement saying that, no matter what, she was going to climb the mountain on behalf of Nepali women. The most cynical of her detractors said she had too much encouragement from her husband, who saw profit to be made by making her famous as the first Nepali woman on the summit. It was well known that she was not an experienced climber and that she was also quite slow.

An Indian team spread a rumour that they were going to attempt the summit on an absurdly early date in late April. Pasang took the bait. She had to be on top first. New Zealander Rob Hall, who was
leading another party, spoke to Elizabeth about Pasang's summit party, describing them as completely on their own, way ahead of everyone else, without proper communications equipment and with no support climbers to help them out in case of trouble – all in the name of a record. Other foreign climbers at base camp reported that Pasang's husband ordered her “in good Asian, husband-to-wife fashion” to go up. She was in tears, but, being an obedient wife, she did it.

Rumours flew down to Kathmandu that she took her oxygen via a long hose from a bottle carried by another climber. She was apparently moving extremely slowly as she went to the summit and had to be dragged down to the South Summit on the descent. She and another Sherpa, Sonam Tshering, had to spend the night in an unplanned bivouac while three stronger climbers went down to the South Col. It was the last time Pasang and Sonam were seen alive. Elizabeth unforgivingly categorized it as “involuntary manslaughter.”

Pasang became a national hero overnight. Newspapers that hadn't paid any serious attention to mountaineering accomplishments since Tenzing Norgay in 1953 gave Pasang ample press. According to one news report, “Pasang has carved an enviable niche in the history of mountaineering where she will stay till eternity, commanding the adoration of all those who love dignity, courage and bravery.” The prime minister hosted a great celebration, and several Sherpas were ordered to go back up the mountain, hack her body out of the ice and bring it back down, a practice completely contrary to the Sherpa tradition of leaving bodies on the mountain. Pasang's body was taken with great fanfare and procession to the stadium and put on display, where it lay in state for a day. Hundreds of people lined up to see her prior to her cremation. The prime minister and the king both sent condolences to her family. A street was named after her and a mountaineering institute was established in her name. Postage stamps with her picture were issued and the government provided $10,000 for the education of her children. In a final show of respect, the king bestowed the Star of Nepal on her. Ten years later, Elizabeth explodes, “The exploitation was absolutely repulsive!”

By the mid-1990s, French climber Jean-Christophe Lafaille had completely succumbed to the magic of Nepal. He met Elizabeth in 1993 when he climbed Cho Oyu, in 1994 on his way to Shishapangma,
and again on the tragic Annapurna expedition. He was well aware of her persistence in getting an interview, and he laughed that many climbers worried about getting their telephone call from her while they were in the bathroom. “Many times when you arrive after a long flight or a long expedition, you dream to wash yourself in a good bath and many times when you are in that bath, the phone rings!”

He recalled an amusing incident with Elizabeth that demonstrated the depth of her sleuthing abilities. Lafaille was doing a solo climb on a new route on the North Face of Shishapangma in 1994. He remained in base camp a long time because of bad weather. As a result, he ended up ascending the mountain on a French permit and descending on a British one. It would have been difficult for anyone to track his movements because of this convoluted combination of permits, trekking agencies and nationalities. He finally returned to Kathmandu during a national holiday. His trekking agency was closed for the day and as far as he knew, nobody knew he was back in town. But he wasn't in his room more than 30 minutes when the phone rang; it was Elizabeth Hawley, congratulating him and setting up a meeting.

Another climber who impressed Elizabeth was the British woman Alison Hargreaves. In 1995 she had the ambition to climb the three highest mountains in one year: Everest in the spring, K2 in the summer and Kangchenjunga in the fall. She was tackling Everest from the north side, in Tibet, and wanted to climb as a self-contained unit of one. Her publicist in England was touting it as a solo climb, but Hargreaves and Elizabeth agreed that it was not solo, only self-contained. As Elizabeth observed, “How could she [climb it solo] when there were 182 other climbers … on the same route?” Elizabeth checked with other teams on the mountain to be sure Hargreaves' claims were true, and the cross-checking revealed that “self-contained she claimed and self-contained she was.” She was so self-contained that she wouldn't even enter anyone's tent to have a cup of tea with them – or drink their tea at all. She carried her own loads, put up her own tent and took it down, cooked for herself and climbed the mountain by herself. She didn't even use other people's ropes.

A claim Hargreaves did not make was that of being the first woman to climb Everest without oxygen, and here Elizabeth's reporting contradicted what she'd said earlier about New Zealander Lydia Bradey.
At the time of Bradey's climb, Elizabeth expressed some doubt about her claim to have summited; since Bradey had climbed without oxygen, hers would have been an important record. But now Elizabeth seemed convinced: instead of crediting Hargreaves with the first oxygen-free ascent, she said, “That distinction belongs to a New Zealander, Miss Lydia Bradey.”