Seven Summits (15 page)

“You've got that Everest experience behind you now,” I said, “so I bet you could handle it.”

Frank hedged on deciding, and he queried the others to see how they felt. Emmett was easy and said he was happy with any route. Dick was the same. Neptune said he would go with either route but had a preference for the Polish Glacier. Frank was afraid that without the Polish route Chouinard might not come, and as he was looking forward to having a climber of such stature on the trip, he agreed to try the Polish.

As our plane approached Santiago, and we glimpsed the snow crest of the Andes, Frank still wasn't certain he shouldn't have pushed harder for the regular route.

Granted, I’ve been to twenty-four grand on Everest, he told himself, and that's higher than Aconcagua. But still, what's important is that I get this summit.

As Frank had left his office the day before, where he was still doing some consulting for Warner Bros., his secretary said, “I hope you get to the top of this one. Everyone is saying how you never make it to the top on any of these climbs.” And it wasn't just his reputation with his friends, either, that was on the line, but his commitment to the Seven Summits as well. With the hardships of three more months on Everest coming up, and the work and money still needed to tie up Antarctica, not to mention McKinley and Kilimanjaro and Elbrus, he
had
to suceed on this first one. If he didn't, he didn't know if he could muster the toughness and determination to go through with the rest of it.

I should have stuck with the regular route, he thought again.

We spent an extra day in Santiago meeting with the Chilean military to work out details of the fuel drop for the Antarctica trip later in the year, then we were off in a minibus on the trans-Andean highway which passes by Portillo close to Aconcagua. We entered the foothills, climbing dozens of linked switchbacks up a narrow rocky defile. Near the top of the pass the valley opened and the hills were colored with spring grass and patches of yellow flowers. Things looked different from the way Frank an0064 Dick remembered the year before. It had been a heavy winter, with record snowfall, and now with an unusually warm spring the rivers were in high flood. The railway running parallel to the road was washed out in several places, and soon our van was stopped in front of a 200-foot-wide tongue of mud oozing across the highway. The only way across was to wait for morning, after the night's temperatures had slowed the mud enough so that a bulldozer could plow a temporary swath.

The next day at the crest of the highway we rendezvoused with our two mule drivers and their pack animals to begin the three-day walk-in. These mule drivers told us no one had yet attempted to get up the Polish Glacier route this season, and they warned us the trail might be washed out. We took off ahead of the animals knowing they would soon catch us. An hour later we came to the first gray tongue of dried mud that covered the hillside, the hardened remnant of a huge flow that had come down during the spring thaws; it cut our trail for a quarter mile.

“Looks easier along the water edge,” I yelled, raising my voice above the nearby Vacas River, roaring in full flood.

The churning water forced us against the mud cliff. I was in the lead, and turning a corner I could see ahead what looked like an impassable section where the raging water had cut vertically into the mudslide.

“Up here,” Frank yelled, indicating a breach in the mud wall leading up to the surface of the slide. We had all been hesitant to make the traverse on the slope of hardened mud because it was covered with ball-bearing-like rocks, and a slip could send you off the edge into the turbulent rapids.

But there was no choice. We followed Frank up, then everyone fanned out across the mud slide, each man concentrating on his own footing. None of us were saying anything. It was like trying to walk across a floor tipped at an angle and covered with marbles. I glanced below to the eight-foot standing waves in the muddy torrent, and went through the mental drill of what to do should I plummet in: get my pack off, feet downriver, backpaddle for an eddy. But I knew if I got into one of those sucking ten-foot holes it would probably be all over.

I delicately placed one foot, then the other. Suddenly somebody was yelling, “Frank's going in!”

I spun and saw Frank on his belly sliding quickly toward the edge. Marts was below and off to the side, going for him. He reached and grabbed—and missed. Under the weight of his full pack Frank gathered speed, pawing the hard mud, trying to dig in with his fingers. He had twenty-five feet to the edge, and there was nothing any of us could do. Fifteen feet … ten … then his feet hit a small rock glued in the mud. He tried to brake on it, but his feet popped over. Five feet and he hit another rock … and stopped. He was on the very edge of the cliff.

“Don't move!”

Now I was closest. I took my pack off, braced it on a rock and worked across to Frank. With one hand on a rock I prayed was solidly glued and another grabbing Frank's pack frame I had him until Emmett could throw a rope.

Frank was motionless on his belly, breathing hard. His legs were shaking, and he had a nasty scrape on his thigh.

“Don't move until I get this rope around you.”

No doubt feeling that flush of irrationality that sometimes hits you after a close call, Frank calmly said after we pulled him to safety, “You know, Rick, the last time my leg was shaking this bad I was with you too, on that rock climb in Sespe Gorge.”

Then he looked up to Steve Marts and asked, “Did you get it?”

“Get what?”

“Get the scene on film?”

“Frank, you almost died and you're worried about the movie.”

“I don't want to have almost died for nothing!”

Up-slope Gary Neptune found a better crossing, but further up, the trail became an obstacle course of avalanche debris. In several places we spotted carcasses of guanaco lying petrographically in the mud. They had apparently been caught in the slides and swept to their deaths. One baby guanaco had come to rest on a small flat and now, watered by the spring thaw, had a ring of yellow flowers around it. Late afternoon we came to a huge fan of avalanche mud that was clearly impassable; the only possible route might be across the river, but the rising torrent looked too treacherous.

“Let's try it anyway,” Dick ventured.

“It's almost dark,” Frank countered. “The river is swollen, we don't know how deep it is, and you want to cross.”

“Heck, yes. Let's get this show on the road.”

“That's my partner,” Frank said, shaking his head.

“I’m not sure our mules are even going to make it this far,” Emmett said.

He had a good point, and we decided to drop our packs and wait for the animals. By nightfall there was no sign of them so we spread our bags and bivouacked. In the morning we spotted the two mule drivers on horseback riding our way, but with no mules. When they got to us they said one of the mules had slipped and rolled over several times, fortunately without injury. Marts raised his eyebrows. I was acting as translator, and he asked me to ask if it had been the mule with the silver metal case, the one marked “camera equipment.”

“Sí, señor.”

Marts was crestfallen, but Frank perked up. Without the mules it was obviously impossible to continue toward the Polish route, and he knew the only alternative remaining would be to go back and try to get in by the easier regular route.

“Looks like the ruta normal,” I said, voicing Frank's thoughts.

“I wouldn't mind seeing the other side of this mountain anyway,” Dick added.

“And I wouldn't mind seeing the summit,” Frank piped in, a wide grin on his face.

Fortunately Marts had done a good job packing his cameras and there was no damage from the mule tumble. Our reversal definitely had one advantage: Chouinard was able to catch up with us. As a complete team we were off again the next day, this time following a wide valley little affected by the avalanches that had turned us around on the other route. Despite the heavy snows and record runoff the surrounding cliffs were dry and barren. This was a high desert. On the second day of our hike the air above the flat floor shimmered under noon heat and it was easy to imagine from this a mirage of camels carrying turbaned riders with curved swords through their cummerbunds. The only reminder we were on our way to the base of the highest mountain in the western hemisphere was the tops of a few snow peaks visible above the valley rim.

We stopped for lunch in the shadow of a rock resting solitarily on the sandy expanse like a remnant of a Zen rock garden.

“You all look like you're in a natural theater in the open,” Dick said. “How about I lay a poem on ya?”

“Let's hear it.”

I smiled. It was great to be with someone with such unabashed romanticism.

“How about ‘The Men Who Don't Fit In’?” Dick asked.

“Hear! Hear!”

Dick then recited from memory just as the mule drivers arrived, smiling as though they understood the words:

“There's a race of men that don't fit in,

A race that can't stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin

And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood

And they climb the mountain's crest.

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood

And they don't know how to rest.”

The next day we reached the end of the line for the mules, base camp at 13,700 feet, and we decided to spend at least two days there to acclimatize and also to sort loads. It would be important, in order to prevent mountain sickness, to climb at a slow rate; this was potentially even more a hazard here than on Everest because an easy route like this often lures people into climbing too high too fast. But then it looked like we might be in base camp for a few days whether we planned it or not. Telltale lenticular clouds forming over the summit presaged storm, and the next morning we awoke to several inches of new snow blanketing the rocks around camp.

“As long as we're going to get pinned down, it's fortunate we're already in base camp.”

It was less fortunate, though, for the dozens of climbers caught higher on the mountain by the sudden and unseasonable weather. As the storm continued for the next two days they straggled in, four Venezuelans, three Basques, a Japanese team, three Swiss, two Brazilians, and an American couple from Arkansas. Many of them were novice, and they were suffering. The Brazilians had frostbitten hands with fingers starting to go black; another climber was suffering pulmonary edema, a potentially fatal accumulation of liquid in the lungs caused by high altitude; and even worse, there was a solo Korean missing, who had last been seen near the summit, just as the storm set in. “He was not climber,” the Japanese reported. “Maybe just traveler who decides to climb mountain. No sleeping bag, no parka, no boots, only shoes like you wear in city. Maybe he have big trouble.”

“I was afraid of this,” Chouinard moaned. “Travel the length of the hemisphere just to get stuck in rescues.”

I knew what Chouinard was talking about. As the most tenured climbers present, if anyone above were to get in trouble—and that seemed likely—the unwritten code of the mountain would have Chouinard, Neptune, and me up there trying to get them down alive. And we weren't in the mood. It wasn't that we had a dispassion for our fellow climbers as much as impatience for incompetents and fools who had no business on the mountain without guides. It was the same on McKinley. Each season so many people get in trouble that the better-equipped and more competent climbers often spend all their time in rescues and sometimes miss reaching the summit.

There was nothing we could do while the storm lasted, so we gathered in one of the larger tents and passed the days swapping stories. I told about my first adventure, when I had sailed a sloop to Tahiti with some other teenage friends, and how only one of us knew how to navigate, or claimed to know how, because after twenty days we sighted an island, but it wasn't Tahiti. When we asked our navigator, all he could do was shrug his shoulders, so we fashioned a directional antenna from a coathanger, tuned Radio Tahiti on our transistor, determined the direction of the strongest signal, and sailed that way. In the morning we sighted Tahiti and even before entering the pass through the fringing reef we heard the drums. Near the quay women were dressed in flowerprint wraps with hibiscus in their hair. Men chased women and women pushed men in the water. Everyone had a rum bottle. “This is it.” “I knew it would be this way.” “I’m never leaving.” We all assumed it was just another typical day in paradise; none of us had ever heard of Bastille Day.

Chouinard had a story from his youth, too, when he was an itinerant climbing bum vagabonding from one mountain range to the next. He was in upstate New York, at the Shuwangunks cliffs, when he and his climbing pal took on an automobile delivery to New Mexico. They needed to get to Yosemite, and had just enough money to see them through the season there. The car kept breaking down, though, and all their money went to repairs. In New Mexico the car owner refused to pay them back, so penniless they set out hitchhiking toward Yosemite. In Winslow, Arizona, they were arrested for vagrancy and spent eighteen days in jail at hard labor, with only oatmeal to eat. By the time they got to Yosemite, Chouinard had lost twenty pounds and was too weak to climb.

“Those were the formative years,” Chouinard concluded, “and to this day I can't get close to oatmeal.”

“Dick, how about a story from your repertoire.”

“Compared to you all,” Dick said, “I’ve led a sheltered life. But I could tell you about the time I went around the world with my kids repeating the adventures of Richard Halliburton.”

“Let's hear it.”

“You younger guys might not know about Halliburton, but when I was ten years old his books really whetted my yearning for adventure. He had done all kinds of things like swim the Hellespont and the Panama Canal, ride an elephant over the Alps like Hannibal, and climb the Matterhorn. I knew he had done the Matterhorn in 1921 right after his college graduation, so when I was nineteen and going to Europe for the summer—that was 1949—I conned these three guys with me into giving it a try. Two of us made it—the other two got acrophobia—and on top I told our guide, Emil Perren, that someday I would come back and climb it again, with my kids.