Keeper Of The Mountains (29 page)

That summer brought a welcome respite from climbing via an invitation from the governor general of New Zealand. July 20 was Hillary's 80th birthday and Elizabeth was invited to the party. The festivities included a gala black-tie dinner in his honour. During the flight to Wellington with the Hillarys, each and every passenger who saw Sir Edmund stopped to say happy birthday. After several of these congratulations, he muttered to Elizabeth, “This is getting embarrassing.” She was struck once again by his modesty: “What world-famous person would be embarrassed by this?!”

That evening they donned their tuxedos and ball gowns and proceeded to the banquet hall of the governor general's residence, where elegantly decorated tables awaited them. Elizabeth wore a deep red gown of exquisite Thai silk, with golden slippers and a matching gold purse. She met a fascinating mélange of New Zealanders: opera singers, sports heroes, business tycoons, politicians, a chief justice of the Supreme Court, and a Maori queen. Among the many greetings and congratulatory messages from around the world was a formal birthday greeting from the Queen of England. And then it was time to
cut the cake. Much to Hillary's delight, the icing read, “We knocked the bastard off.” It was a magnificent evening, in Elizabeth's opinion.

Back in Nepal, high-performance athletes brought some ambitious schemes to the Himalaya in 1997, but perhaps they were a little too ambitious. Britain's Alan Hinkes planned to add three more 8000ers to his list this season alone: Lhotse, Makalu and Kangchenjunga. Bringing publicity material that described him as “the most successful high-altitude mountaineer in Britain,” he planned to break a one-year record by climbing six of the giants. After the first three, he planned to go on to Nanga Parbat, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna
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in the fall. But bad weather so greatly delayed his ascent of the first one that he was unable to reach the top of the second and he never attempted the third.

A complex plan hatched by Anatoli Boukreev also fell apart. He summited Everest while leading an Indonesian expedition and subsequently summited Lhotse, but his goal to traverse from the top of Lhotse over to Everest and then descend Everest's northern side was not achieved.

His complicated plan required three permits: a British team's Nepalese permit for the south side of Everest, a Kazakh permit for the north side of Everest and a Russian permit for Lhotse. Everything was in place, but Boukreev made the fatal error of coming back to Kathmandu after Everest with the Indonesians. A week later he returned to the mountains and climbed Lhotse, but he had picked up a lung infection in Kathmandu and was unable to continue his traverse. It was a bitter disappointment.

A happier occasion in the spring of 1997 was the ascent of Everest by Tashi Tenzing, grandson of Tenzing Norgay. A devout Buddhist, he carried a 15-centimetre bronze statue of Buddha to the summit as a message of peace and compassion to the world. With boyish enthusiasm, he told Elizabeth what he saw from the top: “Two great orange balloons in the sky – the setting full moon and the rising sun.”

Elizabeth queried him about his reasons for climbing Everest and he explained that it wasn't the same reason as many of his fellow Sherpas – to make a living. He was paying his respects to his grandfather. She approved of his response, since she was a fervent admirer of Tenzing Norgay, who she thought was one of the greatest Sherpas in the history of climbing. She concluded that Tashi was climbing
for the right reason: for passion. Even though Elizabeth claimed to have “never been passionate about a single thing,” she recognized it in others and she approved.

On Christmas Day 1997, Anatoli Boukreev was killed by an avalanche. He and the Italian Simone Moro had come to climb the South Face of Annapurna
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. When they arrived, the snow conditions were too dangerous for the face, so they opted for an alternative ridge route. Moro was in the lead when a cornice fell off, broke into pieces and created a large ice and snow avalanche. He saw it just before Boukreev did and shouted a warning, but neither Boukreev nor their cameraman, Dmitri Sobolev, was seen again. In his subsequent interviews with Elizabeth, Moro said of Boukreev, “I never saw another person with such instinct for mountains.… His death is a big loss for the mountaineering world.”

American Conrad Anker remembered a more amusing connection between the Russian überclimber and Elizabeth. Boukreev, like Ed Viesturs and Erhard Loretan, had climbed the secondary summit of Shishapangma and had been “bullied” by Elizabeth into going back and getting the real summit. Boukreev had confided to Anker, “I've got to go back – Miss Hawley says I didn't really climb it.”

Frustration and disappointment permeated Elizabeth's 1998 spring climbing report. Some of the best climbers had died in the mountains, and others, she felt, had exaggerated their achievements. She described the season as one “marred by false claims of success, a pile-up of frustrated would-be Everest climbers at its South Summit, and several deaths on Everest and Cho Oyu due to ambitions beyond the strengths of unsupported and mostly insufficiently skilled climbers.”

That same year, two Everest hopefuls, the Russian Sergei Arsentiev and his American wife, Francys, were part of a 22-member expedition, of which many were Russians. By the time the Arsentievs went to the summit without oxygen on May 22, all of their teammates had already descended to lower camps. They summited at around 6:00 p.m. and then bivouacked. They survived the night, and the next day they were met by an Uzbekistani team on their way to the top. Francys was seen at the First Step at about 8600 metres, standing motionless and not speaking. They gave her some oxygen and sat her down in a comfortable position. Having received no response from her, they continued on to the summit. They explained to Elizabeth that they had met her
husband just 100 metres below, and he seemed to be okay, so they assumed he was going for help for his wife. Because the Arsentievs had no radios, they couldn't call for help, which would have been readily available if they'd only had the means to ask.

Elizabeth learned that Arsentiev reached camp and turned around to start back up with oxygen, medicine, food and drink for his wife. He was not seen again, but his wife remained where she was. On the following day, a South African party came upon her early in the morning, moaning and spasming and saying over and over again, “Don't leave me alone … why are you doing this to me … I am an American.” They, too, spent some time with her, making her more comfortable and giving her something to drink, but concluded that nothing could be done to save her. Cathy O'Dowd and Ian Woodall turned around and descended with one Sherpa while two other Sherpas continued to the summit. By the time the two Sherpas descended, Francys had died. Despite the bizarre nature of this tragedy, Elizabeth refused to be judgmental in her official report – or in private – for she admitted she didn't know what it was like up there: “That's a judgment that only a person who was there can make.”

In the fall of 1998, Sherpa Kaji claimed a controversial speed ascent of Everest, saying he had raced from base camp on the Nepalese side to the top of the world in 20 hours and 24 minutes, cutting two hours and five minutes from French climber Marc Batard's record. But Elizabeth thought Kaji's methods weren't as sporting as Batard's. Kaji had five teammates with him to break trail on parts of the ascent, and they all used oxygen (he on the descent). Japanese climber Norichika Matsumoto flatly discounted the account and explained why to Elizabeth. He had caught Kaji lying in a number of instances, and when he asked for photographic proof, he pointed out that Kaji's photo looked suspiciously like one taken of him on the summit in 1993. Kaji denied it, saying he always wore the same suit, belt and cap. “More wrangling over silly records,” was Elizabeth's comment.

In addition to being sucked into the vortex of these climbing controversies, Elizabeth continued to berate and cajole the climbers she knew well to be their very best. American Himalayan guide Dave Hahn remembers a post-climb interview after guiding a trip on the North Ridge of Everest in 1998. She asked him at what altitude they had turned on their oxygen. Hahn replied that his client had been
ill for most of the trip, and since the summit was going to be a long shot for him, they had turned on the oxygen at around 7300 metres. Her response to Hahn was blunt: “Huh, bringing the mountain down to your size, I see.…” Initially irritated, he asked her if she had ever hiked or skied or climbed herself. She answered, “No, I wouldn't think of it.”

On another occasion, Hahn led a women's expedition on Everest and Elizabeth disputed the claim that it was a women's expedition at all, pointing out that Hahn was clearly a man. He recalled that she was particularly hard on a number of the women on the trip because there had been so much media hype about it being a women's expedition. Elizabeth wasn't having any of it.

Sitting in on that interview was a young woman from Washington State, Heather Macdonald. Heather was a climber and had just returned from what she suspected would be her last attempt to climb Everest. She had met Elizabeth before and had observed how overworked she was. She appreciated her humour and wit and liked her immediately. She jokingly suggested that Elizabeth needed an assistant – why not her? Much to her surprise, Elizabeth accepted the offer.

At their first work meeting, Elizabeth sat Heather down next to her big oak desk and, with little preliminary small talk, began to explain her system of interviewing Himalayan expeditions and climbers. She outlined Heather's role in collecting data and providing the information to Elizabeth for the narrative reports to be sent as news to the wire services. Heather agreed to work for two seasons.

The pace was frantic. She was up at 5:00 a.m. writing reports, making phone calls and running around to hotels to conduct climbing interviews during the day. As a climber who had previously been interviewed by Elizabeth, Heather found it strange to be on the other side of the fence. Now she was on the side of history, of facts being recorded, of stories getting told. But there was a difference between Elizabeth and Heather: Heather had been there – she had breathed the thin, lifeless air, twisted the reluctant ice screws and seen the sunrises and the curvature of Earth from airy bivouacs. Elizabeth hadn't.

The learning curve was steep, but Heather had a good teacher. She watched Elizabeth's direct approach to acquiring information, witnessed questioning so relentless that even the strongest climbers
would collapse with their head in their hands, pleading, “I don't know! I can't remember! Your questions are too hard!” And if Elizabeth suspected that someone was lying about reaching the summit, Heather watched the equivalent of a “70-year-old firing squad with pink lipstick, glasses on the end of her nose and clutching a clipboard.”

Sometimes they did the interviews together, but as Heather became more confident, she collected the data alone. Heather sometimes became distracted in ways that Elizabeth never could. For example, when she met with the Bulgarian Annapurna team, she interviewed them and then ended up spending the rest of the day drinking vodka and exchanging war stories about everything from frozen pee bottles to the age-old question, “How high have you had sex?”

When collecting information, Heather tried to place the climbs and climbers within the larger Himalayan mountaineering perspective.

Together with Elizabeth, she also collected overlapping reports from the disparate teams, carefully interviewing each team and cross-referencing their findings. This was the only way to learn conclusively what had happened, something that was particularly important in the case of fatalities. Grieving families often turned to Elizabeth to learn the truth. Heather and Elizabeth unearthed difficult information from time to time and had to handle it delicately.

When they weren't interviewing climbers or writing reports, they attended parties together. At one formal reception, Heather arrived a little “fuzzy” from a strong painkiller she had taken, embarrassing Elizabeth. When Heather met U.S. ambassador Ralph Frank that evening, she proceeded to call him Ralph when she was unable to remember his last name. Elizabeth pulled her aside and said, “What the hell is wrong with you? That is Mr. Frank to you, young lady.” Elizabeth introduced her to an endless procession of “diplomats, ambassadors, big-name kingpin climbers.” Elizabeth was in her element, surrounded by climbers and commanding their attention. “She could hold court,” Heather concluded.

Elizabeth shared her opinions freely with Heather. “She loves Reinhold Messner,” Heather said. And “she's also fond of Tomaž Humar.” But there were others she decidedly did not like, and these she sent Heather to interview. British climber Alan Hinkes was one of them. As Heather explained, “There is only a certain amount of arrogance any one person can tolerate, because she's seen it all.… When
climbers try and tell her how great they are, she knows what greatness is in a climber!”

They had some amusing experiences as well, such as an interview they did together in the Hotel Gaurishankar with a man who had just survived an “epic” on Everest. He wanted Heather to videotape the interview but was somewhat of a wreck: his glasses were duct-taped together, his fingers were frostbitten and his brain seemed addled by his high-altitude experience. He sat next to Elizabeth on the couch while Heather dutifully recorded the event on camera. Suddenly, she noticed his fly was open. What's more, he wasn't wearing any underwear. What to do? She decided to keep mum and continue – he could do the necessary edit when he returned home – rather than ask him to adjust his clothing then and there. She told Elizabeth about it later and remembered her response: “She was in stitches!”

Organizing the media on this one will be like organizing a goat rodeo.