The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

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  WE ARRIVED IN BASE CAMP on June 22, 1999, following a train of 148 Balti porters who carried close to five tons of food and equipment. Our team included two climber-cinematographers, Mike Graber and his assistant, Jim Surette. These guys had been hired by NBC Sports to make an hour-long documentary about our climb for a new expedition television series sponsored by the North Face and hosted by Sting. The Quokka team included a field producer named Greg Thomas and a British satellite technician named Darren Brito. Our Pakistani contingent included a military liaison officer, a cook, and a high-altitude porter.

  Our camp was situated on the back side of a lateral moraine bordering the eastern edge of the Trango Glacier. It’s an idyllic spot lying alongside a small lake fringed with a grassy meadow, which in late June was peppered with tiny pink and yellow wildflowers. In every direction, our camp was surrounded with towering granite walls, which had the effect of making us feel like tiny specks of dust in a grand, unforgiving universe. Of all the walls that surrounded us, the northwest face of Great Trango, the one we had come to climb, was by far the most intimidating.

  The entire bottom half of the wall, roughly the same height as El Capitan, was a crackless, homogenous, water-polished slab. We stared at it for hours with a pair of high-powered binoculars but saw no obvious line of weakness. The slab, we soon realized, was a bowling alley for loose rock, a kind of gutter that collected every errant stone that came loose from the acres of storm-lashed wall that hung above it.

  Shortly after arriving in base camp, I awoke in the middle of the night to a roar that sounded like a 747 taking off nearby. Seconds later, a hurricane-strength blast of wind flattened my tent, pressing me facedown into my sleeping pad. I knew it was an avalanche, and that if I stayed where I was, I’d be buried alive. So I desperately fought my way out of the flapping nylon. Outside, I watched the brightly lit Quokka communications tent go fully airborne, with Brito riding it like a magic carpet. When it was five feet off the ground, the lights went out. Screams filled the air. Whoever it was, I couldn’t tell, must have thought he was about to die. The rushing air was laden with slush, which shellacked me from head to toe. I couldn’t see anything and there was nowhere to run, so I crawled back into my tent and huddled in the fetal position. A minute later, an eerie silence fell over camp. The debris—television, refrigerator, and car-size chunks of ice that had peeled off a hanging glacier—had stopped five hundred yards short of camp. Trango was saying hello.

  * * *

  —

  OUR EXPEDITION HAD GOTTEN OFF to a wobbly start. Jared was the first to go down, falling prey to a nasty bug he picked up shortly after we arrived in Islamabad. Greg Thomas caught it from Jared on the approach; then Alex woke up with a sore throat just as we arrived in base camp. None of us, perhaps with the exception of Jared, who did multiple forays up 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado before the expedition, were fully acclimatized, which made the timing of the illness particularly bad for Alex. Jared had recovered by the time we got to base camp, but over the course of a few days the cold dropped into Alex’s chest, where it blossomed into a nasty bronchial infection.

  One morning I entered the cook tent and found Alex in his customary seat stirring a bowl of oatmeal. He had dark bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the skin on his face had a corpse-like gray pallor. “I feel like shit,” he said in a nasal voice. A standard comment for any sick person, but not Alex Lowe. He was a stoic and not one to admit weakness. It was the first time I’d ever heard him confess he wasn’t doing great.

  I knew it hurt him when Jared and I headed off up the hill to lead the first pitches of the route, leaving him behind to convalesce. Our plan was to climb the wall in capsule style, meaning we would fix ropes and then use them to rappel back down at the end of the day. The next day we would climb back up the ropes to our high point with mechanical ascenders and foot loops—a process we call “jugging.” At the high point we’d pull more ropes out of our packs and then lead higher, laying more lines behind us as we went. Eventually the commute would become so long that we’d set a camp, pull the ropes up from behind us, and use them to restart the same process.

  On the fourth day of working our ropes up the slab, we came back to camp and Alex was gone. Thomas said he had decided to head down to a camp on the Baltoro Glacier called Paiju to try to recover at a lower elevation. That evening, Jared and I were sipping whiskey in the communications tent, which was set up like a CIA listening post with a horseshoe of tables covered in laptops, modems, batteries, and electrical cords spiderwebbed across the floor. Thomas opened his laptop and dialed into the satellite through the three-foot-wide dish sitting in the sand outside the tent. It took a while for the site to load, but slowly a line of text, overlaying a photo of the massive granite face that hung above us, came into focus.

  “There’s a bad vibe in camp.” Alex Lowe.

  Speechless, I looked over at Jared, who frowned and shrugged his shoulders. Thomas and Brito looked at us feigning bemusement, but it was obvious they knew this was coming. I was being informed for the first time—by a website—that my team was apparently infected with poor morale. And now thousands of the site’s followers around the world knew all about it too.

  Quokka had pulled and twisted the quote from a dispatch Alex had written that day, shortly before he departed.

  . . . current plans are to head off alone for a few days and convalesce away from mounting unsympathetic “get-off-your-ass-you-slacker” vibes (real or imagined). A group of dear friends and old climbing soul mates are camped at Paiju. . . . I’ll spend a night or two in the company of good friends.

  Alex, I was starting to think, had a tendency to project his feelings onto others. The slacker “vibe” he was feeling had to be coming from himself, I reasoned. Jared and I certainly understood he was in no shape to climb—and not for lack of grit or motivation. But, at the same time, he may have picked up on something more subtle. Jimmy Surette was spending a lot of time with us on the wall in Alex’s absence. He was a legendary climber in his own right, a close friend and soul brother who lived minutes away from me in New Hampshire. Jared and I had been talking, quietly, about the possibility of Jimmy taking Alex’s place if he didn’t recover. We kept this talk strictly among ourselves when we were well away from camp, but now I wondered if Alex had somehow picked up on it.

  He returned three days later, reenergized and psyched to get to work with us on the wall. No one mentioned the dispatch, and in the interim I had convinced myself it was nothing more than a manifestation of Alex’s frustration at not being involved in the beginning of the climb. When he finally got on the rock, he climbed like a madman, charging up his pitches and, in the process, proving that even in his weakened state he was the strongest climber on our team.

  On our way back down the lines at the end of one day, I was setting up my rappel and fumbling a bit. I wore long pants and a long-sleeve light blue turtleneck. Under my helmet I had tucked a bandana to cover my neck. My nose was white with zinc. Alex was standing next to me, and we made for an odd-looking couple because he was wearing nothing but a pair of polypropylene boxer shorts; no shirt, no helmet. I had been using a device called a shunt for a rappel backup. It attached to the rope above my belay device, so that if I got hit by a rock, or for any other reason lost control of the rope, it would lock and keep me from falling to my death. It took a little extra time to get it hooked up, and apparently it was more time than Alex had, because he grabbed the rope beneath my device, said, “See ya,” and stepped off the ledge. Like I had done on Cathedral Ledge as a kid, Alex was now sliding Batman-style down the rope, attached with nothing but his hands.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” said Jared, who had just touched down from the rope above.

  Alex slid a few body lengths down the eighty-degree wall before he was struggling to hang on. He threw a foot onto a small hold and unweighted the rope enough to
give it a few wraps around his arm. When I caught up with him back in camp, his arm looked shredded. Graber asked him what had happened, and Alex mumbled something incomprehensible.

  A couple of days later, we were prepping some gear to take up to the wall when I made a mundane comment to Alex.

  “I don’t give a damn what you think, Mark,” he said, locking me in an icy stare.

  Whoa.

  We stepped out of camp, away from the ever-present cameras. I sat down on a rock and looked up at Alex, who was standing over me. “You’re being bossy and manipulative,” he said. “And you’re trying to hog all the attention for yourself. I didn’t appreciate how seriously you would take being the expedition leader.”

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  —

  FOR THE NEXT THREE HOURS we explored the interpersonal dynamics of our team. Our lines of communication had become so jammed up that we were actually figuring out how each other felt by reading about it on the website. Alex and I had gotten along fine in Baffin, where I had taken a subservient role, but as expedition leader, I had set myself up for the mother of all head-butting sessions with climbing’s alpha dog. “I’m seriously questioning whether I want to continue with this climb,” he said.

  When I looked up at the wall that towered above me, knowing I had lost the solidarity of my team, I realized that my dream climb suddenly had no meaning. I had been fantasizing about climbing Trango since I was a teenager, but now all I wanted to do was go home.

  “You know, I read some of that stuff that you wrote to Lauren [my wife] about me,” Alex said.

  “You read my e-mail?” I shot back.

  “It popped onto the screen while I was reading mine,” he said.

  “I’m sorry if any of that hurt your feelings, Alex, but you shouldn’t be reading my e-mail,” I told him. “I bet if I read your e-mails to Jenni [his wife] there would be stuff in there I might not be too psyched about.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said.

  “Even if we don’t do the climb,” I said, “I do want to leave here as friends.”

  “Me too,” said Alex.

  We decided the only way to save our expedition was to bail on Great Trango, at least temporarily, and head off up Nameless Tower. No film guys, no cameras, no dispatches, just the three of us, climbing a mountain, with no strings attached, no Quokka playing the puppeteer. Alex and I shook hands on the plan, and as I looked earnestly into his eyes, I thought I saw a glimmer of goodwill.

  Back in camp we convened a meeting in our cook tent to share what was going on with the rest of the team. With the cameras rolling and the three of us sitting in plastic chairs at the end of the table, Alex kicked it off.

  “Mark and I have issues,” he said. “We find ourselves in a crucible that is new to us and is bringing out some of the best in us and, more importantly, some of the worst in our characters.”

  “The energy hasn’t been good, and you can’t do this wall without it,” I added. “It’s impossible.”

  Graber and Thomas went along when we told them that we were putting the Great Trango circus on hold to run off for a few days of soul-brother R & R. But they did remind us that we had already spent 50,000 dollars of someone else’s money and that thousands of people were already following our progress via the website. Thomas had been bragging to me about how he was going to be set for life after the Quokka IPO, and I’m sure he saw his stock options flash before his eyes as he contemplated the possibility that this entire dog and pony show might implode.

  After the team meeting, we headed up our fixed lines to get our equipment for Nameless. When I pulled onto the ledge at our high point, about 1,500 feet off the deck, Alex was waiting. He had unhooked from the rope and was standing about ten feet away. He strode toward me purposefully, and I felt my adrenaline spike. Then he opened his arms and gave me a heartfelt hug. We both choked up a bit and apologized for all the grief we had caused each other.

  My dispatch later that night ended with these words:

  . . . It’s weird, because I think we’re now better friends than we’ve ever been. Sometimes, when you go through these traumatic moments, it makes the relationship stronger in the end. I don’t think you’ll be hearing any more about bad blood between Alex and I [sic].

  To this day I still wonder what hand Brian Terkelsen might have had in the drama that was swirling around me. After all, we were only a week into our expedition, and it was already playing out like a crude version of Survivor. “On Survivor, people say one thing to your face, then do their ‘confessional’ to the camera,” said Terkelsen, years later. “Trango was the exact same, but more raw and real.”

  The next morning it was dark and gloomy, and we decided to postpone our launch up Nameless for another day. Thomas, with some help from Graber, went to work on us, and by our third cup of coffee had talked us out of our plan.

  * * *

  —

  WITH OUR ROPES FINALLY FIXED to the top of the slab, it was time to launch our bid for the summit. Everyone was looking forward to getting onto the headwall, where we’d no longer have to worry as much about dodging rockfall. In fact, the day before, Alex had been hit in the head and knocked unconscious by a falling rock while ascending one of our lines. Luckily, this time he had been wearing a helmet.

  We had no way of knowing how long it would take us to climb the 3,000-foot headwall that loomed above our high point, so we took a guess and settled on packing up twenty days’ worth of provisions. We laid it all out in the sand, and the food alone covered an entire six-by-six-foot blue tarp. Here’s the list:

  60 Snickers and Mars bars

  120 Clif Bars

  25 pounds homemade Montana beef jerky

  50 pounds trail mix

  30 pounds granola

  4 gallons powdered milk

  8 gallons Gatorade mix

  60 freeze-dried dinners

  2 huge bags of dried papaya and pineapple

  dozens of soup packets

  dozens of hot chocolate packets

  10 pounds of Peet’s coffee

  On another, bigger tarp we laid out everything else: a dozen butane canisters, a hanging stove, mugs, eating utensils, extra clothing, sleeping bags, first aid, headlamps, plus all the communication gear for the website, including mini laptops, memory cards, batteries, cables, and a huge antenna. We packed everything into six urethane-coated haul bags, trying to stack things in the order in which we would later need them. After a soul-destroying, hernia-inducing day of hauling the six “pigs” up the El Cap–size slab, we collapsed on the ledge at the base of the headwall, knowing the most grueling part of this whole endeavor was now behind us.

  We had been working on the upper headwall for a few days when Alex opened up the minicomputer one evening and it was dead. “Thank god,” I said. “Now we don’t have to type dispatches anymore.” That little computer had come to embody everything I hated about Quokka, and I had dreamed about smashing it to smithereens with my wall hammer.

  “It doesn’t seem to be getting power,” said Alex. “I know Darren could fix this thing. I think I’m going to rap off in the morning and bring it down to him.”

  “Really, Alex?” said Jared. “That seems like a waste of time. I’m with Mark—let’s call ourselves lucky. We can still do voice dispatches with the radio.”

  “I wouldn’t feel right not trying,” replied Alex firmly, and I knew that was the end of the discussion. The next morning, ignoring our entreaties, he rapped down the fixed line, which we had left in place so Graber and Surette could continue filming us. Alex spent twenty-four hours in base camp and was back the next day with the computer, which Darren had been able to fix. Everyone at Quokka thought Alex was a total hero, but Jared and I felt betrayed. It was the first time one of us had openly bucked the majority-rules mantra we had followed for settling disagreements.
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  Alex now treated the computer like it was his personal property. He kept it in his ditty bag with his first aid kit, and if I wanted to use it to write a dispatch or to check my e-mail, I had to ask him for permission. We were sitting outside one evening, watching the sunset while Alex pointed the radio modem toward base camp and began uploading our e-mail. “Hey, is there anything for me?” I asked. I had written my wife, Lauren, and Climaco before the machine had broken, and I was hoping they had e-mailed me back. Alex stared intently at the machine and made no reply. There was no acknowledgment I had spoken, not even a glance in my direction. I tried to look over his shoulder, but he kept turning farther away so I couldn’t see the screen. I could see his face, though, and something was wrong. He was breathing deeply and clenching his jaw. I remember thinking, Is he reading my e-mail again? Alex continued to ignore me, so I went back to my bivouac. The weather was clear, so we had all found our own ledges to lie out on. I dozed off, and when I awoke Alex was standing over me, fists clenched, his body shaking.

  “What did you write to Climaco?” he demanded.

  “What? What are you talking about?” I replied.

  “I said, what did you write to Climaco?”

  “Did you read my e-mail?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “What the fuck, dude?”

  “I had a feeling you were talking about me behind my back, and I was right,” he said. “What did you tell him about me?”

  “I told him the truth, Alex,” I replied, “that I’m trying to win back your friendship, but the harder I try, the more you push me away. That you’re kind to Jared but disrespectful to me. I told him that the bad blood between us is getting worse, not better. That I’m having a miserable time and I don’t want to be here.”

  Alex stormed off, and it wasn’t until the next day that I read Climaco’s e-mail. It was harsh. Among other things, it said that Alex was an egomaniac. Climaco, now the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, says he wrote that Alex “may be the greatest climber in the world, but he’s also the greatest showman,” and “Remember Mark, this climb was your dream, not his.” He says he’s lost his e-mail and mine, but he doesn’t remember me bagging on Alex. The essence of it, he says, was that I was miserable and planning to quit the expedition. Climaco says he came down so hard on Alex because he was trying to bolster me in an effort to convince me not to quit. He felt certain that if I did drop out, it would ruin my budding career as a professional climber.