The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

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  NINE HOURS LATER, on a knife-edge ridge seventy-five feet below the summit, Alex missed the karate kick and barn-doored off the side of the mountain. He bounced once and then disappeared over the far side of the ridge.

  The force of the fall jerked Jared violently, but he held on, and a few seconds later all was still and we couldn’t hear anything but wind and our own ragged breathing. Terrified, fearing the worst, Jared and I yelled Alex’s name into the void. There was no response. “What are we gonna do?” asked Jared, reaching down and plucking the rope, which was jammed between two rocks and as taut as a bowstring. As I contemplated how I could traverse across the tensioned rope, I felt it come slack in my hand. “He’s alive!” yelled Jared, as he quickly reeled in rope. A few minutes later, Alex popped back up onto the ridge, threw both arms over his head, gave us a double thumbs-up, and yelled, “Yeah, boyzz!!” at the top of his lungs.

  “Are you okay?” I yelled.

  “I’m great,” he called back. To our amazement, Alex then proceeded to put himself back into the same exact position from which he had just fallen. Jared shot me a worried look but didn’t say anything. Seconds later, Alex was back on the arête. He slapped his way up to the wet hold, snagged it with his right hand, and pulled down on it with everything he had. This time, shakily, he pulled through.

  “That was fucking insane,” I said to Jared, who just shook his head in disbelief. It was the boldest bit of climbing I’d ever seen.

  These thoughts were quickly forgotten thirty minutes later, when the three of us were hugging and high-fiving on the summit in the twilight. “Uh, guys,” I said, interrupting the reverie, “isn’t that the actual summit up there?” The fifteen-foot-tall block was coated in a thin layer of ice, which meant it wasn’t possible for us to scale those last couple of body lengths.

  “I think we’re close enough,” said Alex. “Let’s get out of here.” It was midnight by the time we reversed the tricky horizontal pitches on the ridge and arrived at the sloping six-foot-wide snow ledge where we had stashed our packs. I stomped out a coffin-shaped hole in the snow for my bivouac, and as I slid into my sleeping bag, the last thing I saw was Alex sitting down with his back against the wall. It was a long, cold night, and when I awoke, it was snowing lightly and the mountain was enveloped in cloud. My Gore-Tex bivouac sack was covered in a shiny glaze of ice. I was surprised to see that Alex was still sitting where I had last seen him the night before. Something didn’t seem right, so I bundled up and shuffled over to see how he was doing.

  “I can’t get this stupid thing off,” he said, wrestling with his jacket.

  When I leaned in to help, I saw that his left arm was so swollen that the sleeve of his coat might as well have been painted onto his body. “You’re hurt,” I said.

  “I guess so,” he replied. In our hectic, half-crazed effort to get to the summit and back down, Jared and I had never assessed Alex after his fall. He had told us he was “great,” but I now realized that must have been the adrenaline talking. After he had gone back up and dispatched the arête, we both assumed he had somehow come through the fall unscathed. I carefully looked him over and found that his elbow was severely contused and his hip had a puncture wound that appeared to go right down to the bone. Worse yet, he was mumbling and seemed confused. In the few minutes I’d been working on him it had begun to snow more heavily and the wind was building. Snow was piling up on his shoulders and pooling around his legs, and the visibility had dropped to a few body lengths. It was time to get the hell off this mountain.

  By one P.M. we were back at our portaledge. We climbed inside and made some hot chocolate, unsure of whether we should spend the night and risk getting pinned by the storm, or break down camp and continue rappelling. We were all antsy to get off the wall, and when I looked out the door of the rainfly, I spied a patch of blue sky—a classic sucker hole. By the time everything was packed into the six pigs, it was snowing again.

  The snow turned wet and gloppy. Waterfalls began flowing down the wall, soaking me to the skin as I searched for the bolted anchors we had placed on our way up. Through the mist, I spotted the Russian portaledge, with its Day-Glo pink rainfly, far across the wall. They must have seen me, too, because I heard one of them yell, “Did you make the summit?”

  “Yes,” I shouted back.

  “Congratulations,” yelled the Russian team, in unison.

  We had planned to reverse our route, but the line of our ascent was steep and traversing. After only a few rappels I realized there was no way it was going to happen. As darkness fell, I committed to forging a virgin descent down a blank headwall whose contours were a complete mystery. The face was gently overhanging, so I had to kick off the wall to keep my body swinging back and forth on the rope; otherwise, I’d end up dangling in space with no way to reach the cliff. Each time I swung in, I would quickly pan the wall with my headlamp, looking for cracks in which I might build my next anchor. If I didn’t see anything, I’d push off hard with my feet, letting the wet ropes zip through my rappel device, praying I would find something before I reached the ends.

  After I’d found and built each anchor, Jared and Alex would lower the pigs to me, and I’d dock the hanging circus to the constellation of pieces I had haphazardly shoved into the cracks. In the middle of the night I touched down on a table-size ledge flowing with an ankle-deep river. I tried to remove a piece of gear from the sling over my neck, but my fingers were wooden and no longer following my commands. Water was pouring all around me and all over my body, streaming out of my jacket cuffs and my pants legs. I remember being surprised that I suddenly had an urge to pee—it felt odd to deal with a bodily function when I was in full survival mode and unsure if I would live through the night. When the steaming stream gushed forth into the beam of my headlamp, I reacted instinctively, shoving my numb, pruned fingers directly into the flow of warm urine, like I was washing them under a faucet. As sensation slowly returned, and my fingers curled with the exquisite pain known as the “screaming barfies,” I vowed to myself that this would be my last big climb.

  By the time we finally stumbled into base camp twenty-four hours later, I was already reconsidering the vow.

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  BY A STRANGE COINCIDENCE, or perhaps not, Quokka had its IPO the day we summited. This was the day when the three hundred employees, most of whom had been lured into taking the job with the offer of stock options, were supposed to hit the jackpot. A couple of weeks earlier, when we were halfway up the wall, Quokka had offered to let us in on the action: Rather than the 4,000 dollars we were supposed to be paid as talent, they would give each of us the equivalent amount in stock options. We couldn’t believe our good fortune. When Quokka had its Netscape moment, we figured we would double, triple, or maybe even quadruple our investment.

  Of course, that’s not how it went down. The hard truth was that Quokka was ahead of its time: There just weren’t enough people with access to broadband to make the website commercially viable. Worse, Quokka hadn’t been able to figure out how to monetize its business. The few banner ads and sponsorships they were able to sell dried up after the IPO flopped. Layoffs followed, and Climaco moved on. A year later, the dot-com bubble burst.

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  I’D BEEN HOME FROM PAKISTAN for about a week when I called Chris Eng at the North Face. He had been hired as the athlete team manager less than a year earlier. We exchanged a few pleasantries, but I couldn’t get him to open up and bro down like we always did. “So what trips are you working on?” I asked. Another long, awkward silence. “Well,” he said, “looks like our next big one is an expedition to the north face of Jannu.”

  “Uh . . . yeah,” I replied. “I know all about it, obviously, because it’s my trip. Jared and I have been planning it for years.”

  “Well, actually, it’s going to be Jared and Alex,�
� he said.

  I called Jared, who sheepishly admitted that he and Alex had been talking. They had decided to team up, and I was out. “No hard feelings, right?” he said. I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this was more serious than just being uninvited on a trip. I called Greg Child for advice, and he said, “Watch your back, Mark.” I couldn’t call Alex because he had already left for his next expedition to the South Face of Shishapangma, an 8,000-meter peak in Tibet. When we had parted ways at the airport, he had given me a hug. “We’re good, right?” I had said. “Totally,” he replied.

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  THE NEWS BROKE about a month later on a website called MountainZone, a competitor of Quokka’s that was covering the Shishapangma expedition. Alex and a cameraman named Dave Bridges were missing.

  It was October 5, 1999—a month and a half since we had returned from Great Trango. They had been acclimatizing on the lower apron of the South Face with Conrad Anker when they spotted a small avalanche break loose about 6,000 feet above them. It appeared benign at first, but the face was loaded with snow from a recent storm, and the avalanche quickly propagated. As it barreled toward them, Conrad ran sideways. Alex ran down. Bridges followed Alex. Right before the avalanche struck, Conrad dove onto his chest, burying the pick of his ice ax as deeply as he could into the snow. When the blast hit, the lights went out. Conrad doesn’t know what happened next, but when he came to, he was only lightly buried about a hundred feet from where he had self-arrested. Blood dripped from a wound on his head. The snow, warmed from the kinetic energy of its particles colliding on its slide down the mountain, instantly set up like quick-set cement. Conrad walked across its surface looking for his friends—but there was no trace of them.

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  I WAS WITH MY WIFE and nine-month-old son when we got the call. I said to Lauren, “Okay, he’s missing. But it’s Alex Lowe. He’s probably stuck in a crevasse or wandering around dazed and confused on some glacier. He’ll be back.” But as the days stretched into weeks and then into months, and the call that he’d been found never came, it slowly sank in that Alex was gone.

  As I processed the shock and grief of Alex’s death, criticism of our Great Trango ascent began to mount among the so-called purists of the sport. Steve House, one of the guys Alex had visited when he was convalescing in Paiju, was leading the charge. House was a staunch proponent of what people were beginning to call “modern lightweight tactics.” That year he wrote a piece for the American Alpine Journal in which he meticulously detailed all the many reasons he was unimpressed with our climb. In the author’s note at the beginning, House wrote:

  In the year 2000, the cutting edge of alpinism is not fixing ropes, placing bolts, using oxygen or high-altitude porters . . . re-leading pitches for the camera, making e-mail dispatches from the bivouac or climbing with partners whose only purpose is documentation. These are ideas that according to some will define cutting-edge climbing in the future. I think that these ideas will simply define a new specialty within climbing that I’ll call “business climbing.” Business climbing will divide our talents and degrade the amount of cutting-edge climbing that will be accomplished. . . . Was the 1999 American Great Trango Tower expedition a milestone in the history of climbing? No. Were their accomplishments equitable with the amount of publicity it garnered? Absolutely not.

  House’s article was espousing a modern evolution of the alpine-style climbing that the legendary Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner first brought to the Himalaya in the 1970s. The ethic of alpine style is that you start at the base of the mountain with your pack, climb as high as you can each day, find a bivouac, and then continue on in like fashion until you reach the top. Messner and his partner Peter Habeler were the first to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen, in 1978. Beforehand, Messner had famously said that he would climb Everest by “fair means” or not at all. In his landmark 1971 essay, “The Murder of the Impossible,” Messner decried the growing trend of climbers using oxygen and excessive amounts of equipment to bring down a mountain’s difficulty, rather than rising to meet the peak on its own terms. He wrote, “Today’s climber doesn’t want to cut himself off from the possibility of retreat: he carries his courage in his rucksack.”

  Before Messner arrived on the scene, Himalayan peaks were usually climbed in “expedition style.” The idea is simple: You lay the entire mountain, from top to bottom, with ropes. It’s a laborious way to climb a mountain, but it’s relatively safe and the nylon umbilical cord offers a fast and efficient way to get off the mountain if someone gets hurt or sick or bad weather comes in. The problem comes once the climbers have made the summit. At this point, all they want to do is get down safely, and as a result, it’s common for the fixed lines to be left behind. By the time the next season rolls around, the ropes are often unusable, shredded from the wind or frozen into the slope, which means a new set must be laid. On popular 8,000-meter-peak trade routes like the Abruzzi Ridge on K2, there are so many old ropes in place that it’s virtually impossible to climb the mountain without stumbling over them. If you’re like Messner or House, and you want to climb these routes in their natural state, you’re out of luck.

  Expedition style is how most of the 8,000-meter peaks were first climbed, and for the most part, it’s how they are still climbed today. If you sign on with a commercial expedition, even to smaller mountains like Nepal’s Ama Dablam, you pay for the privilege of using the umbilical cord, which is typically set by local high-altitude Sherpas or porters. You show up, attach your ascenders to the rope, and up you go. This extreme via ferrata is a big part of why so much controversy swirls around Mount Everest every spring. The job of establishing the fixed ropes on Everest is especially dangerous because the umbilical cord has to be run through the Khumbu Icefall, an unstable section of glacier riddled with ever-shifting crevasses and ice towers called seracs. The job is outsourced to Sherpas, who put their lives on the line each season to establish the ladders and ropes their clients need to climb the mountain. When a massive avalanche broke loose from the Western Cwm and swept across the Khumbu Icefall in April of 2014, sixteen Sherpas lost their lives—while their clients sat safely in base camp.

  Climbers have been arguing about style since Edward Whymper first climbed the Matterhorn in 1865. While there have never been official rules that dictate how a mountain should be climbed, there have always been various unwritten ethical codes. On Great Trango, we knew we were violating some of those codes—using too many fixed ropes and bolts, “spraying” about ourselves on the Internet, and posing for the cameras—but the compromises seemed unavoidable if we were going to document the climb in the way we had promised our sponsors. We found ourselves in the same position Ron Kauk did when John Bachar flattened his bolts ten years earlier. Only now it was our reputations being flattened.

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  HOUSE HAD BEEN INFLUENCED by a prominent American alpinist named Mark Twight, who was pushing to protect the sacredness of the climbing experience by taking Messner’s idea of fair means even further. A year after our Trango ascent, Twight, House, and Scott Backes completed a route on Denali called the Czech Direct in “single-push style,” meaning they started at the base and climbed more or less nonstop for sixty hours until they reached the top. They carried a stove for melting snow, but no tent or sleeping bags.

  Afterward, Twight wrote an article for Climbing magazine, entitled “Justification for an Elitist Attitude.” In it he wrote:

  I’m an elitist prick, and I think posers have polluted mountaineering. They replace skills and courage with cash and equipment. They make the summit, not the style, the yardstick of success. Only marginal minds or true individuals used to discover mountaineering. Lack of social support forced them to be autonomous, to turn climbing into a lifestyle isolated from society. We had community back then. Now I’m embarrassed to call myself a climber, because close on the hee
ls of the admission some dilettante will ask whether I’ve read Into Thin Air or done Everest.

  The night before the trio set off on their climb, House read to them from Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel.

  Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me the tendency towards positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.

  According to Twight, this passage spoke to what his team was seeking. “We were on Denali to prove the existence of consciousness,” he wrote. “I’ve tried to explain the crack we peeped through, but even close friends can’t understand. What truth we learned is locked in our three hearts alone.”

  This ultraminimalist style became known as “light and fast” alpinism. Now even carrying bivouac gear was seen as a devolution of the sport. Some called it “disaster-style,” on account of how little room for error you had when climbing the world’s biggest alpine faces with little more than the clothes on your back. Either way, most climbers thought it was an unrealistic ideal: There were only a handful of alpinists in the world who had the skill and desire to climb abiding by this new ethos. And as Twight had just unapologetically made clear, everyone else had no business on the mountain.

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  A FEW YEARS LATER, it was Odintsov and the Russian Big Wall Project who came under fire from House. They had just completed a famous “last great problem” of the Himalaya—the North Face of Jannu. That 11,000-foot wall tops out at 25,295 feet and had been attempted more than a dozen times by some of the world’s best alpinists. After Alex passed away, Jared put me back on his team, and along with Kevin Thaw, we made our own attempt in the fall of 2000. After Great Trango I needed to rediscover the soul of climbing, to find the joy that I had experienced on climbs like Polar Sun Spire and Shipton Spire. While I found House’s sanctimonious attitude and arrogance insufferable, I agreed with his assessment of our Great Trango climb to some extent (not least because the heavy logistical burden Quokka placed on us ruined much of the fun), and it was a good life lesson to take his criticism to heart.