The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  Tilman, however, was not comfortable in the role of polemicist. In his seven mountaineering chronicles, and later, in his equally blithe accounts of exploratory sailing in the polar regions, he perfected an understated, laconically humorous style that makes every page a delight to read. Simply put, Tilman is one of the finest mountain writers ever—and Shipton is not far behind. Thus Tilman mocks the traditional Himalayan style not only for its inherent nationalism, but for its inefficiency: “Indeed, there is more to be feared from underwork than from overwork on these expeditions. Far too many off-days are forced upon a party and much time is spent lying about in sleeping-bags. Mr Shipton, who has taken part in two of the large expeditions, has remarked that there is sometimes a grave risk of contracting bed sores.”

  Chronicles from the first ascents of 8,000ers in the 1950s, such as Ardito Desio’s Ascent of K2, often read like grim nationalistic manifestos, full of the metaphors of war. Tilman’s humor, in contrast, portrays the 1938 Everest expedition as a happy outing shared by friends, full of the joking camaraderie of a vacation lark. One example:

  Over the first few days of any march [to base camp] it is wise to draw a veil. The things that have been forgotten are gradually remembered, and the whole organization creaks and groans like your own joints. You wonder if man was really intended to walk, whether motoring after all is not his natural mode of progression, and whether the call of the open road is as insistent as you yourself thought or as the poets of that school sing. Nothing much happened. It rained.

  About their fast-and-light modus operandi, however, both Shipton and Tilman were dead serious. Somewhere Shipton laid down the dictum that if an expedition could not be planned on the back of an envelope in a few hours in a pub, it wasn’t worth going on. And there’s a great anecdote from one of Tilman’s lectures, this time to an audience of army cadets. After the recital, a young soldier rushed up to the podium and earnestly asked, “But sir, how does one get to join an expedition such as yours?” “Put on your boots and go!” Tilman roared.

  The 1933 expedition had gotten three men to 28,200 feet without bottled oxygen. Hopes were high in Britain that the next attempt on Everest would succeed in claiming the summit. It was curious, then, that the 1935 attempt, led by Shipton, was organized as a “reconnaissance,” charged, like the very first attempt in 1921, with surveying and mapping the surrounding valleys and peaks as much as attempting Everest itself. Curious, too, that despite the hard-won wisdom about the vicissitudes of the monsoon gleaned by the 1922 and 1924 teams, the 1935 expedition chose to explore in June and July. Not surprisingly, the team got no higher than the North Col at 23,000 feet.

  From the 1935 expedition an unexpected harbinger of Everest’s future arrived, cloaked in virtual anonymity. In Darjeeling, at the outset of the journey, Shipton chose fifteen Sherpas out of a pool of a hundred eager applicants. One of the last to be selected was a lad only nineteen years old, whom Shipton chose, he later wrote, “largely because of his attractive grin.” His name was Tenzing Norgay. The 1935 venture was the first of seven expeditions to Everest on which Tenzing would serve.

  In 1936, a strong team including Smythe and Shipton set out with the unalloyed ambition to reach the summit. But this time weather did the party in. The conditions were abominable, with deep, soft layers of new snow threatening major avalanches even well below the North Col. The monsoon arrived on May 25, earlier than any party in the Himalaya had ever experienced. Despite narrowing their margin of safety to the thinnest possible edge, the party got no higher than the North Col. The members returned to England seething with frustration.

  George Finch, still smarting from the class-based prejudices that had almost excluded him from the 1922 expedition, scolded his peers. “We ought not to treat the climbing of Mount Everest as a domestic issue,” he wrote in a newspaper article. “It is an issue of National and Imperial importance. The present position is that we are beginning to make ourselves look very ridiculous.” Finch went on to warn that if British climbers kept making such a botch of Everest, perhaps the mountain should be turned over to Germans and Americans. (Climbers from both countries had expressed the desire to have a go at Everest.)

  Noel Odell and Bill Tilman had been invited on the 1936 expedition, but they chose another goal instead. With two compatriots, they joined four Americans to attempt Nanda Devi, a beautiful mountain in northern India. Their expedition was the antithesis of the sort of military campaign urged by Finch, so casual and collegial that the men did not elect a team leader until late in the trip. And it was fast-and-light in spades. On August 29, 1936, Tilman and Odell stood on the 25,643-foot summit. Nanda Devi was the highest mountain climbed anywhere in the world, and would remain so for the next fourteen years. In the expedition book, Tilman recorded the pair’s joy on the summit in one of the most memorably understated lines in mountaineering literature: “I believe we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands on it.”

  In 1938, the fourth British Everest expedition of the decade unfolded. Under Tilman’s leadership, the fast-and-light credo was applied to every facet of the team’s logistics. Tilman later bragged that the expedition cost only one-fifth as much as the preceding efforts, with one-fifth as much baggage. Nonetheless, the team was the strongest yet thrown at Everest, with all four stalwarts—Odell, Smythe, Shipton, and Tilman—aboard. They reached base camp on the Rongbuk on April 6, ten days earlier than any previous expedition, and started up the well-worn route to the North Col full of optimism. Against the better judgment of the purist Tilman, the team carried bottled oxygen, which they would use higher on the climb.

  By now, three men—and maybe five, depending on Mallory and Irvine’s high point—had climbed to within 800 feet of the summit. If ever a team seemed destined to succeed on Everest, it was the 1938 expedition. But the mountain would have the last say.

  Through the rest of April, temperatures stayed frightfully cold, colder than any previous party had undergone. It took a desperate effort simply to establish Camp IV on the North Col, an achievement forged only weeks later, after the temperatures had moderated. But on May 5, it started snowing . . . and didn’t stop. It is hard to judge from the hindsight of seventy-five years, but either the monsoon, which two years earlier had arrived on May 25, engulfed the mountain in 1938 three weeks before that unfathomably early date, or the party had the worst possible luck with snowstorms in May, normally a relatively calm and clear month on Everest.

  After several retreats to base camp to recuperate, the men made a final effort to get above the North Col. In extraordinarily bad conditions, Smythe, Shipton, and several Sherpas, the strongest of whom was Tenzing Norgay, reached 27,200 feet, where they pitched a shaky Camp VI. The Sherpas descended while the two Englishmen spent the night in their tent, hoping for a last chance to go to the top in the morning. It was June 8, and the smothering monsoon was now unmistakably here.

  In the morning, setting off before dawn, Smythe and Shipton found the cold so intense they were sure they would suffer serious frostbite if they continued. They retreated to the tent, then made a second start at sunrise. Sinking to their hips in soft powder snow, the men took a full hour to gain a mere 120 feet. Above that floundering crawl, they found themselves on steeper, downsloping slabs of rock, covered with snow that seemed poised to avalanche at any moment. “Convinced of the hopelessness of the task,” as Shipton put it, he and Smythe turned around. “It was bitterly disappointing, as we were both far fitter at these altitudes than we had been in 1933, and the glittering summit looked tauntingly near.”

  So ended the seventh British attempt on Everest. “It is difficult to give the layman,” Shipton later wrote, “much idea of the actual physical difficulties of the last 2,000 feet of Everest. . . . [A] climber on the upper part of Everest is like a sick man climbing in a dream.”

  • • •

  With the onset of World War II in September 1939, mountaineering worldwide was pretty much shut down. And it would take several years after V-E an
d V-J days in 1945 before climbers returned in force to the Himalaya. It is possible that the assaults on 8,000-meter peaks between 1950 and 1964 would have been organized along nationalistic and military lines even if Tilman’s fast-and-light ethos had won Everest in 1938. After all, the war had pitted nations bitterly against one another. The French success on Annapurna in 1950—the first 8,000er to be climbed—took on the aura of a huge patriotic victory for a country that had been humbled and shamed by the German occupation. Likewise the Italian triumph on K2 in 1954, for a nation on the losing side of World War II.

  But I’d like to think that if Tilman’s team had pulled off the first ascent of Everest, big-range mountaineering would have pursued an entirely different course during the following decades. By the mid-1950s, Tilman and Shipton and their fast-and-light doctrine had slipped into the shadows. It is only in the last several decades that those two men and the way they approached the biggest and hardest mountains have taken on the prophetic aura they deserve. Nearly all climbers today look back on them as heroes and visionaries, way ahead of their time.

  Among all my expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks, only Jim Whittaker’s International Peace Climb took on the trappings of nationalism. Jim’s intention, of course, was to promote internationalism, not nationalism, but, as I made clear in chapter three, it didn’t quite work out that way, with the Soviets banding together in a clique frequently at odds with us Americans. For myself, making a political statement on that expedition—even as a plea for harmony among former Cold War enemies—was pretty low on my agenda. I didn’t climb Everest in 1990 as an American, but simply as a mountaineer.

  I did, however, carry an American flag to the summit, simply because the other teams took their flags to the summit as well, and I felt that it was the right thing to do. (Years later, when I appeared on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert asked me if I took the American flag with me to the summits of other 8,000-meter peaks. I said no. He asked, “Why not?” I answered, “Because America didn’t support or sponsor my climbs.” True to his onscreen persona as the über-capitalist, he was delighted with my reply.)

  Nowadays, there’s precious little nationalism involved in mountaineering. Yes, certain individuals will still tout themselves as, say, the first Malaysian to climb K2 or the first South African woman to get up Everest. But thank God I never had to sign a pledge of unwavering allegiance to a leader, as the French did to Maurice Herzog in 1950, or follow commands typed up at base camp by a lead-from-the-rear dictator like Ardito Desio on K2 in 1954. Instead, I’ve relished the chance to climb with brilliant mountaineers from other countries, even when the linguistic difficulties reduced our communication to sign language and rudimentary English. One of the best and most congenial expeditions I ever went on was on the east ridge of Annapurna in 2002, where our four principals were a Frenchman (Jean-Christophe Lafaille), a Basque (Alberto Iñurrategi), a Finn (Veikka Gustafsson), and an American (me).

  Like most climbers my age or younger, I believe that nationalism should have nothing to do with mountaineering. Had I been climbing in the 1950s and ’60s, I might have had a different attitude, although I think most of the mountaineers of that generation simply went along with the nationalism imposed on them by the clubs and committees that organized their expeditions. For the likes of Hermann Buhl or Edmund Hillary, the climbing itself was the important thing.

  The whole question runs deeper than personal predilections. Throughout history, exploration has been wedded to national ambition. In conquering Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro boldly claimed ownership for Spain of the Aztec and Inca empires they had subjugated. That trend persisted into the twentieth century. We tend to look on such great Antarctic explorers as Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson as purists interested only in adventure and discovery, but they were very much caught up in the game of claiming new land for the countries they came from. The names they left attached to vast stretches of barren polar plateau bespeak their nationalism: King George V Land, Princess Elizabeth Land, Queen Maud Land, and the like. Before the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 declared that the southern continent would belong to no country and would be preserved for science, British, Norwegian, French, German, Russian, American, Australian, and Japanese governments seriously intended to mine Antarctica for minerals, oil, whales, and seals.

  Every mountaineer has to ask him- or herself what the ultimate motivation for risking one’s life again and again might be. Until about forty years ago, it was common for climbers to talk about “conquering the mountain.” That kind of military metaphor is, fortunately, completely out of vogue today. Yet there’s no getting around the idea that fame is an intoxicating spur in the mountaineering game. Even in recent years, such bold alpinists as Tomaž Humar, Catherine Destivelle, and Oh Eun-Sun returned from triumphs in the Himalaya to cheering crowds in Slovenia, France, and South Korea, respectively, and it was clear that they basked in that acclaim.

  Reporters always ask us climbers why we climb. It’s a reasonable question, one we find it strangely hard to answer. I’ve pondered my own motivations as deeply as I know how, and what I’ve come up with is that it’s vital to my whole makeup to pose tough challenges to myself and not to quit until I’ve solved them. Skeptics have tried to get me to admit that the modest fame I’ve earned, as the first and still the only American to reach the summit of all fourteen 8,000ers, must have been the carrot that lured me along on my race against my own limitations. But I have to disagree. I became the sixth person worldwide to climb all the 8,000ers without supplemental oxygen. But in the eyes of the media and the general public, only the guy who was first—Reinhold Messner—really registers. Coming in second, as Buzz Aldrin and Robert Falcon Scott recognized, let alone sixth, hardly matters.

  What fame I do have, I did not seek out. It was generated instead by the media and by the marketing departments of my sponsors. I welcome it only insofar as it enables me to go on further adventures, to make a living, or to inspire others to overcome the challenges in their own lives. I never raced anyone else to be “first” in anything. (Well, except for swim meets in high school!) I became the first American to climb the 8,000ers virtually by default: no one else was actively pursuing this goal at the time. Although some people still question my true motivation, I insist that I did all my mountaineering simply to test myself against my heroes and my own ideals.

  So it’s the Tilmans and Shiptons, disdaining their own fame and disavowing nationalistic goals, not the George Finches, whom I admire and have strived to emulate. Mallory, in his characteristically aphoristic way, said it best: “Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.”

  • • •

  The aftermath of the war changed the Himalayan game in a profound way. According to the historian Walt Unsworth, the Dalai Lama had his horoscope cast in 1947, and the result was the gloomy prediction that Tibet would soon be threatened by foreigners, so he decreed a ban on all non-native travelers in Tibet, to last at least until 1950. In that year, the Chinese invaded the ancient autonomous homeland, fulfilling the prophecy. The Dalai Lama would flee to India in 1959, but with the Chinese takeover, foreigners were all the more strenuously banned from Tibet. The north side of Everest, by which seven British expeditions had sought to find a way to the summit, was off-limits indefinitely.

  Yet at the same time, insular Nepal began to open up, in part because the rulers, fearing a Chinese takeover, sought allies in the West. Gradually, the possibility of approaching the world’s highest mountain from the south dawned in the minds of Everest’s most ardent suitors—not the least of them being Tilman and Shipton.

  Only a handful of Westerners had ever seen those southern approaches. In 1921, Mallory had crested the Lho La on the border of Tibet and Nepal, from which perch he had stared down at the Khumbu Icefall and named the Western Cwm, the U-shaped basin above the icefall. But he deemed the cliff leading from the pass down to the Khumbu
a “hopeless precipice.”

  In 1935, Shipton and Dan Bryant had made the first ascent of Lingtren, the 21,730-foot summit just west of the Lo Lha. From the top, Shipton got an even better look than Mallory’s, as he saw the whole of the Khumbu unfold before him, all the way to the South Col linking Everest and Lhotse. His estimation of the southern approach was more optimistic than Mallory’s. “As far as we could see,” he wrote, “the route up it did not look impossible, and I should very much like to have the opportunity of one day exploring it.”

  It took the American expedition leader Charlie Houston to organize the first reconnaissance of Everest from the south. Actually, it was Charlie’s father, Oscar Houston, who pulled the mysterious strings that opened the doors of permission to Kathmandu and beyond. One of the finest American mountaineers of his day, Charlie had led the 1938 K2 expedition, which reached the remarkable altitude of 26,000 feet on a peak much harder to climb than Everest. And he had been one of the strongest climbers on Nanda Devi two years before. He had in fact been pegged to go to the summit with Noel Odell on August 29, but on the eve of the summit dash, he got food poisoning from a tainted can of bully beef. Tilman took his place in the summit pair.

  By 1950, Oscar Houston was sixty-seven years old. He had never been a climber of the caliber of his son, but he had a zest for exploration and adventure, and had co-organized with Charlie the first ascent of Mount Foraker, the second-highest peak in the Alaska Range, in 1934. And Oscar had the kinds of connections in high places that made all the difference.

  The 1950 reconnaissance unfolded as something of a lark. The Houstons invited several friends who were only casual mountaineers, but when Charlie accidentally bumped into Bill Tilman in Kathmandu, he spontaneously invited his former teammate to come along. Straight off a grueling reconnaissance of his own in the Annapurna region, Tilman accepted without hesitation.