by Ed Viesturs
Miraculously, George’s butt stance and the jumar held, stopping Greg’s fall after forty feet. “Are you okay?” George yelled down, sure that his partner must have been badly injured.
“I . . . I think so!” came back the quavering answer.
“We were stunned,” George later said. “That’s about as close as you can come to dying in the mountains and get away with it.”
• • •
A few days later, Eric, Craig Van Hoy, and I got our chance. We began working our way back up the mountain for what felt like the nth time. After spending the night at Camp III, just above 25,000 feet, we faced the arduous task of climbing the steep couloir to Camp IV. Before leaving Camp III, we put on our monstrous custom-designed suits, in which we would live for the next few days. Although there was a long fixed rope strung up the couloir, it had been frozen under a windslab of hard snow. With every step we took, we had to pull the rope upward to cut it loose from the windslab. It was excruciating and frustrating work.
By 8:00 p.m. on May 20, the three of us had crammed ourselves into the two-man tent at Camp IV. Our plan was to wake up at 1:00 a.m. (assuming we’d get any sleep at all) and be off by 4:00 a.m. Eric is a tall guy, well over six feet, and he seemed to need more space than Craig and I did. Eric also had an oxygen bottle from which he was breathing during the night nestled between us. Packed in like sardines, wearing our bulky suits, we kept kicking and elbowing each other as we shifted position. It was a really claustrophobic setup: at one point, I was jammed into the corner of the tent, with the nylon fabric of the wall only an inch away from my face. Had I been afflicted with true claustrophobia, there’s no way I could have gotten through the night. The space in the tent was so tight that I gave up trying to take off my boots and slept with them on, draping my sleeping bag over me like a blanket instead of crawling inside it, boots and all. So much for a restful night before what I knew would be one of the hardest days of my life!
Craig had had a hard time getting from Camp III to Camp IV, and it was clear that the summit push was going to be an ordeal for him. The camp was situated in a truly exposed niche in the Great Couloir, with a “front porch” of snow only about two feet wide by three feet long. Beyond that shelf, the slope dropped off into what felt like an infinite abyss. Only one of us could maneuver outside the tent at a time, and we stayed clipped in to the anchors guying the tent whenever we were outside. Inside the tent you could pee into a bottle, but taking a dump meant going outside and risking your life.
In the morning, Eric got off first. He’d slept all night breathing his supplementary oxygen, and now he loaded his pack with two fresh bottles weighing a total of 36 pounds. Because he had all that weight, he asked me to carry our 500 feet of fixed rope and a few pitons and carabiners. That didn’t really seem fair—since I was climbing without bottled oxygen, I wanted to go as light as possible—but as is my penchant, I didn’t protest. I just said, “Yeah, okay.” I got moving about fifteen minutes behind Eric. It was still dark out, but it looked as though a good day was in the offing.
A bit later, Craig got ready to leave. As we found out later, he took one look at the couloir stretching above Camp IV and decided against going for the top. Like Wickwire in 1984, Craig lacked the heart for the final push. The ground leading up to the Yellow Band, which had no ropes fixed on it, looked to him too steep and intimidating. Instead, he spent the day carefully descending all the way to Camp II. Each of us has to make his own decision about acceptable risk. For Craig, I think, going down was the right call.
Because Eric was climbing with his oxygen tank cranked to about two liters a minute, while I was going without oxygen, he was faster and stayed a little way ahead of me through the early hours of the morning. Climbing alone, I felt that I was moving in some isolated capsule. Unroped, we had to focus all our concentration as we zigzagged our way upward within the steep confines of the couloir. Then something odd happened: both my left foot and my left hand kept falling asleep. I couldn’t figure out why, but it seemed alarming. I knew it wasn’t frostbite, but I wondered if I might be experiencing a minor stroke, induced by altitude. It was worrisome enough that I seriously contemplated turning around and going down. I thought about Roskelley in 1984, struggling to stay warm without supplemental oxygen, and finally deciding to call it quits. But after a while the tingling sensation wore off, so I continued upward.
Then something else odd happened. Out of nowhere, one of the Swedish climbers, Lasse Cronlund, came bombing up on my heels. He had apparently traversed from high on his northeast ridge route and entered the Great Couloir very near our highest camp. It was a last desperate attempt by the Swede to salvage his fizzling expedition. He must have rationalized that he could benefit from our fixed ropes and our support on his way to the summit. He was climbing so much faster than I was that I figured he must have his own oxygen set cranked to the max, about four liters to the minute. I let him pass me. Then we met up at the foot of the Yellow Band, where Eric was waiting.
We needed to relead the pitch on which Greg Wilson had pulled loose the fixed rope in his forty-foot fall on May 16. Cronlund offered to go first. It was a mistake. As I later wrote in my diary, “He was clumsy & flailed around, wasted time. . . . At one point he was directly above me, looked as if he was going to fall over backwards & take me along for the ride!”
At last, with a desperate scramble, Cronlund got to the top of the pitch, where he lay gasping for air. Eric and I came up on the rope, then Eric took the lead. By now we had reached the bottom of the ropes fixed by Greg and George, so all we had to do was clip our jumars to the lines and half-climb, half-pull on the jumar as we ascended. But now I discovered that Cronlund didn’t have an ascender of any kind. I ended up tying a prusik knot—the simple substitute for a mechanical ascender, named after the Austrian climber who invented it way back in the 1930s—for him.
As we climbed on, the Swede started to slow down. It looked as though Cronlund was trying to crank his oxygen set even higher, but he’d obviously used up his supply. Then, almost without pausing to give it a serious thought, he turned around and started descending. Without the boost of bottled O’s, he’d shot his wad. Once he passed out of sight below us, we didn’t see Cronlund again the rest of the day. And as it turned out, none of the Swedish team made the summit.
Climbing through the Yellow Band was arduous and scary. Thank God, George and Greg had fixed ropes here. Even with the aid of the lines, however, I had to scratch for tiny footholds with the front points of my crampons. The rock of the Yellow Band had the texture of a roughly troweled concrete wall—mostly smooth with random irregularities. I felt nothing but admiration for George and Greg. I guessed now that the effort of putting in the route through the Yellow Band had cost them any chance of getting to the summit. But it had given Eric and me a great opportunity.
Above the Yellow Band there was more steep snow, which eventually led to another layer of exposed rock called the Grey Band. It was here that we fixed the 500 feet of rope that I had been carrying all day. Eric found a passage through this section by climbing up a narrow snow couloir to the right
Amazingly, there was no wind. Shortly after noon, I followed Eric as I kicked my front points up the last 60-degree slope of hard snow and emerged from the couloir. This stretch was rather desperate, so I had to move quickly and couldn’t afford my normal high-altitude pace of fifteen breaths per step. As a result, I became hypoxic, flopping onto the relatively flat ground above, gasping for air like a fish out of water. Once I had recovered, I looked at the last section of the climb above me. It dawned on me like a revelation—we were going to reach the summit!
In the postmonsoon season of 1984, Phil Ershler had faced only packed snow on the summit pyramid, so he had been able to climb straight up it to the top. In May 1987, that same pyramid was reduced to bare rock with a few patches of ice and snow, so now Eric had to angle right, traversing the slope until he intersected the top of the West Ridge route pioneered by Tom Ho
rnbein and Willi Unsoeld in their gutsy climb in 1963. We were only 300 feet below the summit.
But Eric, still slightly faster with his bottled oxygen, climbed a short distance above me and ran into a steep rock wall with almost no foot- or handholds. (We would later realize that it was here that Hornbein and Unsoeld had passed their point of no return, necessitating a traverse of Everest down the South Col route to have any chance of surviving.) We were out of rope and pitons. Eric spent a little time traversing right and left, looking for a way through that last rock band. Then we conferred. “Ed,” he said, “I think we could get up this thing, but there’s no way we could get back down without a rope.”
I stared upward long and hard. Afternoon clouds had started to gather, portending a possible storm. But only 300 feet lay between us and the highest point on Earth! At last, however, reason prevailed. I said to Eric, “All right. I agree.”
We turned around and started down. It started snowing lightly, making the down-climbing all the hairier. We reached our tent at 5:30 p.m. Eric was so exhausted that on arriving he vomited in the snow. We spent one more miserable night in that cramped and spooky site. I got back to Camp II the next day, and to ABC the day after. Eric followed a few hours behind me.
• • •
Once I was safe and sound, the turn of fate that had thwarted us only 300 feet short of the summit seemed all the crueler. If I’d been able to top out, it would have meant not merely that I’d climbed an 8,000er on my first try. I would have been only the second American to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen, after my friend and fellow RMI guide Larry Nielson.
But on May 22, as I ran into my teammates in the lower camps, I learned some shocking news. The same day that Eric and I had gone for the summit, Roger Marshall, the daring Canadian, had tried to solo the north face by the Super Direct. Once he got up the Japanese Couloir, he reached the bottom of the Hornbein Couloir, but then turned around. My teammates had watched through binoculars as Marshall descended with agonizing slowness. They wondered if he was suffering from cerebral edema, which had afflicted him twice before on Himalayan climbs.
At some point—my friends didn’t see it happen—Marshall slipped and fell to his death.
It may sound like an exaggeration, but I literally thought about those last 300 feet every day for the next three years. I knew I’d have to come back to Everest and give it another shot.
But I never second-guessed the decision Eric and I made in the early afternoon of May 21. By 1987, I had already absorbed the lessons that other climbers more experienced than I had sadly left in their wake, when the pull of the summit proved irresistible. Having now felt the tug of war between ambition and common sense firsthand, I could see how in many cases ambition wins out. In 1979, the Swiss-born Alaskan Ray Genet—one of the three men who had pulled off the first winter ascent of Denali in 1967—reached the summit of Everest so exhausted that he collapsed and died shortly below the top on the way down. And the tough and courageous Brit Mick Burke, a stalwart on the trailblazing first ascent of Annapurna’s south face in 1970, pushed on toward the top of Everest as part of another British team forging the first ascent of the southwest face in 1975. Two of his teammates, having topped out themselves, waited for Burke at the South Summit, just 300 feet below the top, but he never reappeared. To this day, no one knows what happened to Burke, but his partners were convinced he reached the summit. Burke was very near-sighted, and had complained about his glasses fogging up. It may be that, as the mist and fog swirled around him, he made a misstep and fell down the huge Kangshung Face. Like Marty Hoey’s, Burke’s body has never been found.
Later, there was another source of solace in our defeat. As it turned out, during both the spring and fall campaigns on Everest in 1987, not a single climber reached the top by any route. The mountain repelled all its suitors. And 1987 was the last year that Everest pulled off that kind of shutout.
Eric and I could probably have gotten to the summit on May 21. But I’m not sure I’d be here to tell about it today. For all the remorse that turning back so close to the top flooded me with in the months and years after our attempt, I can see in retrospect that it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. It allowed me to pursue my dream on thirty subsequent Himalayan expeditions.
That near miss in 1987 was the first vivid demonstration of a moral I would come to live by as I pursued all fourteen 8,000ers: Listen to the mountain. You can always come back. It will still be there.
2
Because It Was There
The Everest disaster of 1996, when eight climbers died, including five in a sudden storm on May 10–11, seems to have fixed for good in the public imagination a picture of what the scene on the world’s highest mountain has become. That spring, as a member of the IMAX team led by David Breashears, I got caught up in the tragedy, and we played a role in shepherding the most injured survivor, Beck Weathers, down to advance base camp and safety. The leaders of the two big guiding outfits on the south side of Everest, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, both perished in the storm. Rob and Scott were close friends and former partners of mine, and sixteen years later, I still miss them and feel an ache of sorrow about their untimely deaths.
Jon Krakauer’s vivid account of the 1996 disaster, Into Thin Air, was a number-one bestseller in 1997, and has since become an enduring classic. The scenario, however, that too many readers have taken away from the book reveals a curious urge to view the “Everest circus” as a deplorable corruption of what mountaineering and adventure ought to be about. In that scenario, Everest is flooded every spring and fall by yuppies willing to fork over as much as $65,000 apiece to be guided up the mountain, making no decisions by themselves except to plod upward, one foot after the other, sliding their ascenders along the fixed ropes that have been strung from base camp to the summit. The scenario paints the clients as novices so clueless they can’t even put on their own crampons. Sandy Pittman, with her espresso machine, becomes the cartoon narcissist and Manhattan socialite who threatened to sue the very guides who saved her life. Anatoli Boukreev, the strongest climber on the mountain that year, is lastingly tarred as the guide who cared more about setting records on 8,000ers than taking care of his clients.
This is a far cry from my understanding of what happened in 1996. I’ve never viewed clients attempting Everest—especially the ones I’ve personally guided—as “clueless yuppies.” I wrote about the disaster at length in No Shortcuts to the Top, my memoir of becoming the first American to reach the summits of all fourteen 8,000ers, and the sixth climber worldwide to do so without supplementary oxygen. In this book, I won’t repeat the account I laid out in 2006. There are aspects of Into Thin Air with which I disagree, but on the whole, I think Jon told the story of that catastrophic season accurately and impartially. The scenario outlined above is a caricature of what Jon actually wrote, for his book is far more nuanced and sympathetic than the two-dimensional takeaway the public seized upon. It’s not Jon’s fault that Into Thin Air was succeeded by Michael Kodas’s bitter, even vengeful High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed or by Tami Knight’s hilarious parody, Everest: The Ultimate Hump—as well as by the media frenzy that condemned the inhumanity of some forty climbers who allegedly passed by a dying David Sharp in 2006 without stopping to help or even ask if he was all right.
It’s true enough that every spring and fall nowadays, Everest is besieged by climbers, a good percentage of them paying clients. The traffic jam on the South Col route on a summit day in May is a spectacle to behold—and a mob scene to avoid, if you’re on the mountain. On a single day in 2012, May 26, no fewer than 150 climbers got to the top. Not all of them stood on the summit at the same time, but still, I can imagine what that gathering must have been like at its peak—a cacophony of voices in different languages giving orders and advice to each other and screaming their joy over two-way radios and sat phones. In moments like that, Everest indeed is reduced to a circus.
On my last Ever
est expedition, in 2009, I ran into a mob scene on the South Col route, though one not quite so jam-packed as the crowd that thronged the mountain in 2012. Had I been climbing for purely personal reasons, rather than working for an equipment company, I would probably have turned around rather than risk getting stuck in some chaotic survival drama. Everest in 2009 was almost the polar opposite of the experience I had on the mountain back in 1987. It’s dismaying that this situation has evolved, but it may be inevitable. For the government of Nepal, permits are a cash cow. The officials in the Ministry of Tourism could hardly care less about overcrowding on the slopes of their most famous peak. And who are we to tell one of the poorest countries in the world how to handle its business?
My foremost intention in this book, however, is to counter the sordid caricature of Everest as a circus for dilettantes. Between 1987 and 2009, I’ve gone on eleven expeditions to the peak, so I’ve seen it develop from a state of relative innocence (if a mountain can be innocent) to the standing-room-only theater of recent years. Yet, having guided clients on Everest four times myself, I’ve seen firsthand how helping a competent client fulfill the dream of a lifetime can be not only a morally admirable act, but one that verges on ennobling. My own Everest stories are for the most part extremely positive ones. As much as on Annapurna or K2, on Everest I’ve learned lessons that translated fruitfully into the rest of my life, and that I think I can pass on to others.
As I survey the history of Everest from its first reconnaissance in 1921 through the present, moreover, I’m struck not by the follies and fiascos sprinkled through its past, but by some of the most visionary deeds in the long chronicle of mountaineering. It’s those deeds—Unsoeld and Hornbein on the West Ridge, Messner soloing the northeast ridge without bottled oxygen in only three days, the Poles in winter, the Kangshung Face, and the like—that I wish to celebrate here.
