The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  • • •

  Things went so well in 1994 that Rob invited me to come back the next year and guide for Adventure Consultants again. It wasn’t my ambition in life to become an Everest guide, running trips for clients year after year on the South Col or northeast ridge routes, as climbers such as Russell Brice and Eric Simonson had done, and as Rob and Scott Fischer were starting to do in earnest. But once more, I concocted a twofer. After Everest, if we had time, Rob and I would hike out to Lukla, where we’d board a prearranged helicopter to fly us to the base of Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak. If our acclimatization held up in 1995 as it had in ’94, we might be able to dash up Makalu alpine-style, just as we had Lhotse.

  In fact, I had a hugely ambitious program for 1995, for after flying home from Nepal and recuperating for two weeks, I would meet Rob again in Pakistan, where we’d try to get up Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II. Two twofers, back to back. A “fourfer”?

  In the summer of 1994, at a barbecue in Seattle, I’d met Paula Barton, with whom I fell in love almost at once. It didn’t take long to realize that Paula was the woman for me, the one I could spend the rest of my life with. Assuming, of course, that I was lucky enough to have her reciprocate my feelings.

  In No Shortcuts to the Top, I wrote at length about my courtship of Paula, our marriage, and the years thereafter during which, despite her fears for my safety, she was my number one cheerleader as I pursued Endeavor 8000. I won’t repeat the story here, but it gives me immense pride to say that, nineteen years later, we’re still in love with each other as we manage a family of four great kids. Whether or not our children ever become climbers, Paula and I will support them in the goals in life they choose. I have no investment in their following in my footsteps. Let them discover their own passions, just as I did.

  Paula had little grasp of mountaineering before she met me, but she gamely climbed to the top of Rainier with me that summer. It was a grim outing, cold and windy, and on the summit, with her eyelashes covered in rime ice, she chewed on a frozen bagel without complaining. On this ascent and on a few other climbs in the Cascades, Paula gained a small understanding of what it was that I did in the mountains.

  That autumn on Cho Oyu, I brought up with Rob the idea of Paula coming along to Everest base camp next spring to act as assistant manager. Even though Rob had yet to meet Paula, he agreed at once and offered to pay her expenses—this despite the fact that he already had a highly competent base camp manager in his friend Helen Wilton.

  Paula had never traveled anywhere in the world as remote as Nepal. In March 1995, when we arrived in Kathmandu, I explained that if the food wasn’t boiled, baked, or peeled, it was probably best not to eat it. One evening, against my advice, she had a chocolate sundae with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top. To me the dessert looked like a gastrointestinal time bomb, and I cringed with every bite she took. Sure enough, Paula was sick as a dog and stayed in bed for the next day or two. On the hike in to Everest, we ate in all the lodges. At Gorak Shep, only a day’s march short of base camp, Paula was eating a bowl of rice for dinner when she found a huge dried spider in it. She plucked it out, tossed it aside, said “Yuck!” and just kept eating. I knew then that she was my kind of partner!

  As I had the year before, Paula and I got to base camp below the Khumbu Icefall before Rob and the clients had arrived. Hiking in with us was Guy Cotter, a Kiwi friend of Rob’s, who was along this year as a second assistant guide. I liked Guy immediately, and welcomed the added strength he’d give our party. He was an extremely competent and experienced climber, with a dry wit and little patience for whining and incompetent clients.

  As I’d learned in 1994, Adventure Consultants was famous for its elaborate base camp dining quarters. The tent was a large, rectangular, heavy canvas contraption with vertical side walls. Whoever got to base camp first—in this case, the Sherpas, Guy, and me—was in charge of the monumental job of leveling a spacious platform for the dining tent, erecting and anchoring it against possible hurricane-force winds, and building solid stone benches with backs along three inside walls that surrounded a big central table also made of stone. We would shovel gravel in to fill the gaps between the rocks. Getting everything relatively flat took a ton of work. We covered the table with a large tarp and a plastic table cloth, and cushioned the benches with thick foam pads. We also set up a stereo system with speakers hanging from the ceiling, and electric lightbulbs run on batteries charged by solar panels.

  We also erected a big kitchen tent with rock walls for our Sherpa staff, and made level platforms and set up tents for each of our clients. When they finally arrived at base camp, they simply “moved in.” All that prep work was backbreaking labor at 18,000 feet, but I loved it, feeling that it would only make me stronger and help me acclimatize faster. And as with a construction job, at the end of the day you get a visual reward for your day’s toil.

  The prime reason for all this luxury was to make the clients as comfortable as possible during their down time and recovery at base camp. It served also to help them get fit and eager to be on the verge of coming to grips with Everest. But Rob also liked to throw a big party midway through the expedition so that everyone could let off steam. He’d invite climbers from other teams to come over and party with us. Many beers would be consumed and guys and gals would dance on the table well into the night.

  Rob had begun to believe that, given enough time, careful management of logistics, and patience with even the slowest of clients, he could get almost anyone up Everest. In one sense, I admired that quality in Rob. He seemed to have a deep empathy for his clients, as he did everything he could to help them fulfill their mountaineering quests. On the other hand, I was more pragmatic about guiding, or perhaps I simply had less tolerance and patience than Rob did. No matter how much I liked my clients personally, I needed them to show me that they had the toughness and grit to earn a summit. My approach, I believed, gave the mountains their due respect, and was safer as well. But there’s really no right or wrong in this matter. When I worked with Rob, I deferred to his style.

  By 1995, after all, Adventure Consultants had become a hugely successful company, with many loyal clients who stuck with Rob for one adventure after another. Buoyed by our Everest triumph in 1994, Rob had actually started claiming a “100% success rate” in the advertising for his guided expeditions. I later thought that a certain overconfidence in this respect contributed to the tragedy of 1996.

  In any event, the weather and snow conditions turned out to be far worse in 1995 than the year before. And the clientele . . . well, what you might call a “colorful character” in normal life can become a real tribulation on Everest. One of our 1995 clients, in particular, proved to be a handful. She was a Polish woman whom I’ll call Karina.

  Karina actually had an impressive climbing résumé, but she was a huge pain in the ass. She climbed so slowly that Guy Cotter lost all his patience with her. On trips through the Khumbu Icefall, with Guy escorting her, she would balk at a crevasse that was so narrow, all it took was a simple step or a short jump to cross. In addition, she was clipped into a fixed rope for backup. But Karina would wail, “I cannot do this. I cannot cross. You must help me. You are my guide and that is your job.” Fed up, Guy would answer, “Okay, don’t cross the crevasse. Go back down.” Then he would keep walking up the hill. Sure enough, with no other options, Karina would step across the crevasse and follow. But she was excruciatingly slow. Guy would climb ahead for half an hour or so, stop, make himself comfortable, and read a book until Karina arrived. As she approached, he’d pack up, then continue for another half hour and repeat the process.

  Two of our other clients were Doug Hansen and Chantal Mauduit. Doug was a postal worker from Washington State who was so keen about Everest that he’d taken the night shift at his post office while he worked construction in the daytime, just to save enough money to buy a place on the Adventure Consultants team. A single parent, Doug took great pains during the exp
edition to stay in touch with his daughter back in Seattle. He was an extremely nice guy, and we were all pulling for him to succeed, but Everest would reduce him to his last resources. Rob, I think, got so emotionally invested in Doug’s eventual success that it played a fateful role in the 1996 disaster.

  Chantal was one of the top women big-range mountaineers in Europe, and she signed on with us as a client only to minimize the permit fee. She announced that she would perform the climb on her own, independent of us guides, and she had an intense ambition to become the first woman to climb Everest without bottled oxygen. She would take advantage of Rob’s logistics, sleeping in our camps and using the supplies we carried up the mountain. On summit day, she would climb with us, accompanied by two Sherpas, but eschewing the aid of us guides.

  Or so she intended. Three years earlier, on K2, Scott Fischer and I had had to give up our first summit bid to help rescue Chantal after she had collapsed on her way down from the summit. An eerily similar scenario would play out in 1995.

  It was great having Paula along at base camp. But the trip was frustrating for her. She knew she didn’t have the experience to go up through the icefall, but there was too little to do down below while the rest of us were shepherding loads and clients slowly up the mountain. To stay busy she reorganized the food supplies and took day hikes down to the lower villages. She even organized aerobic classes for anyone stuck at base camp while we were “up on the hill”! Throughout the trip, Paula worried about my safety, but in radio chats from higher camps, I’m sure I minimized for her the inevitable dangers of climbing Everest.

  Despite the shortcomings of Karina, our climb through the Khumbu Icefall, across the Western Cwm, and up the Lhotse Face to the South Col went reasonably well. By early May, we had five clients installed at 26,000 feet in Camp IV on the South Col. One of the spunkier clients was an orthopedic surgeon from Tucson named Abelardo. He and I were already friends, since I’d guided him on the Mexican volcanoes. One night, when I gave a talk in Tucson, I had stayed at Abelardo’s house. When we went to bed, he said we’d meet in the kitchen for coffee and breakfast at 9:00 a.m. I thought, Wow, that’s a nice leisurely start to the day. At 9:00 the next morning, as I showed up in the kitchen, Abelardo entered the house by the front door. I asked where he’d been. He said he’d already performed two hip-replacement surgeries that morning!

  At the South Col, our team was strong in manpower, with all three of us guides and seven competent Sherpas ready to go, two of them assigned to accompany Chantal. Rob had targeted May 7 for our summit push. Still, the weather was iffy, and the snow conditions above the South Col were not nearly as advantageous as the year before.

  On May 7, we got our usual early start in the middle of the night, but the day was cold and windy. Chantal and her Sherpas left camp before us, since she knew it would take her longer to reach the top climbing without bottled oxygen. I had misgivings about the conditions early on, but I felt that we might as well plug along, for often the winds die with the rising sun. We could still turn around if the weather got worse. In general, though, it seemed that our clients were slower and weaker than those on our team the previous year. Doug Hansen, in particular, was really hurting and moving slowly.

  We got to the South Summit at 28,700 feet by 9:00 a.m. From there on, the snow conditions along the ridge leading to the true summit looked treacherous, and the wind was whipping in fierce gusts. Guy and our most talented Sherpa, Lobsang Jangbu, made a tentative scout of the ridge, but quickly decided it would be too risky for the clients. Getting everyone to the top and back safely would be a real stretch. The decision to turn around seemed obvious. I looked at Rob and pointed thumbs down. He nodded in agreement. Even so, it was tantalizing to get within 300 vertical feet of the top and have to give up, but it was the right decision. We started down with the clients.

  Doug Hansen was in the worst shape, so I went ahead with him, tending him step-by-step. Rob, Guy, and several Sherpas were supervising the other clients. Doug was so wasted, he’d simply sit down in the snow. I had to yell at him to keep him moving, but by then, I’d lost my voice from breathing the dry, cold air. I put my face only inches away from Doug’s and hectored him in a laryngitic rasp, “C’mon, man, you gotta keep going!”

  In the midst of this grim retreat, Lobsang, who had ambitions of his own, decided to go for the top solo, rather than take care of the clients. He made the summit and caught up with us on the way down, but Rob was really pissed at him. It was for that reason that Rob didn’t hire Lobsang in 1996. Instead, Scott Fischer did—and during the disastrous events that unfolded that May, Lobsang would play a pivotal but controversial role.

  On my way down with Doug, I passed Chantal and her Sherpas, still moving upward. She was climbing very slowly and her lips were blue from hypoxia. We exchanged a few words, as I reminded her to make sure that she had enough energy in reserve to get down. It was the same advice I’d given her before her attempt, when she’d taken me aside and asked, “Ed, how do I do this? What are your tactics for getting up Everest without oxygen?”

  Somewhat later, when Doug and I were well below the South Summit, I suddenly got a call over the radio from Rob, still at 28,700 feet. “It’s Chantal,” he said. “She’s collapsed. We’re going to have to get her down.”

  It was a replay of 1992 on K2. Once again, Chantal had used up every ounce of energy getting to the South Summit. And when she collapsed, she fell apart completely. She couldn’t even walk, so Guy, Rob, and two Sherpas literally dragged and carried her down, as Guy later put it in disgust, “like a sack of spuds.”

  For all her vaunted independence as she planned to climb without our help and to make the first oxygenless female ascent of Everest, now Chantal said to Rob, “I signed up for your trip. You’re responsible for me. You have to get me down.”

  Hearing the news over the radio, I decided to wait with Doug, even though he badly needed to get back to camp himself. When Chantal arrived, pulled and lowered down the slope by the Sherpas and Guy and Rob, I pitched in and helped drag her to the South Col. Through the night, Guy administered to her every minute, and at times he thought she was going to die. But by morning, she had recovered. She headed down from Camp IV under her own steam.

  Chantal Mauduit was a very strong mountaineer, a beautiful woman, and a superstar in France. Those of us who knew her well, as I did, loved her dearly. But she had a vexing unwillingness to admit that other climbers more than once saved her life, or even to thank them for their crucial help.

  Sadly, Chantal would die in her tent at 21,500 feet on Dhaulagiri in 1998, in circumstances that remain mysterious fifteen years later.

  Doug Hansen made it through the night at the South Col, too. On May 8, exhausted by the dicey rescue, we all started down the mountain.

  The year before, thirty-seven men and women had reached the top by the South Col route. In 1995, only six did so. Besides Lobsang, five members of another team topped out on May 15. By waiting eight days after our own attempt, they benefited from better snow conditions and weather up high. Once Rob had committed to May 7, there was no way we could take a second shot.

  I’m often asked why, after investing so much time, energy, and money in an expedition such as ours, we couldn’t make that second attempt. The answer is that it takes so much manpower just to get sufficient supplies and oxygen bottles to our highest camp for one summit attempt, that the prospect of resupplying that camp days or even weeks later is overwhelming. Having reached 28,700 feet on a first attempt, even the world’s strongest climbers would be hard pressed to recharge for a second bid. With clients who barely got to the South Summit the first time, the task is unthinkable.

  When you pick a summit date, as Rob did with May 7, you have to make an educated guess. Experience and a good weather forecast contribute to that choice, but so does luck. In the high mountains, it comes down to hit or miss. For that very reason, getting to the top of any 8,000er is such a rewarding event.

  Still, i
t was maddening to have missed out on Everest by such a small margin. But on Makalu, Rob and I, climbing together with Veikka Gustafsson (the first of my thirteen expeditions with Veikka), got to the summit on May 18. The Everest acclimatization had paid off in spades, as we blitzed Makalu alpine-style in just four days.

  Less than two months later, I got to the top of Gasherbrum II alone, as Rob, not feeling well, turned back at 23,900 feet. And only eleven days later, I topped out on Gasherbrum I with three new companions I’d met in the Baltoro, including two men who would soon achieve their own lifetime accomplishments by bagging all fourteen 8,000ers. They were the Pole Krzysztof Wielicki and the Mexican Carlos Carsolio, both incredibly strong and yet genial mountaineers.

  Despite the near-miss on Everest, 1995 was my best year yet in the Himalaya and the Karakoram. I had now gotten to the summit of eight of the fourteen highest mountains in the world. I was well-launched on the path of Endeavor 8000.

  As gratifying as that achievement was, I was equally proud of having performed as a caring, responsible guide on Everest. Getting both Doug Hansen and Chantal Mauduit down alive was as challenging a deed as climbing Makalu or the Gasherbrums. I’d still never lost a partner on any climb, and I’d like to think that wasn’t just luck—that it sprang from a sense of duty to others, especially when they got into trouble, and from my steadily growing confidence that I needed to listen to my own instincts to tell me when to go on and when to turn back.