The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  The men moved slowly and carefully up the final ridge. Haston led the Hillary Step, floundering upward in yet more sugary, loose snow. “It gradually dawned on me that we were going to reach the summit of the Big E,” he later recalled. As it was, they did not reach the top until 6:00. Despite their fatigue, and the coming on of night, they were overjoyed, “hugging each other and thumping each other’s backs.” They took photos of each other and stared into the limitless distance on all sides. Those photos, published in Bonington’s expedition book, are amazing and beautiful, with the pale light of the setting sun playing over the tops of clouds well below them. But at the same time, those images seem sinister and foreboding, for they portend the arrival of nightfall, only minutes away. There’s no clear statement in the expedition book about how long the men stayed on the summit, but I suspect it was longer than I would have liked. On a summit, time flies, and you’re sorely tempted to linger and enjoy the moment, after all the effort that has gone into getting there. By now, Scott and Haston knew that they were committed to a bivouac on the descent.

  It was almost pitch dark by the time they regained the South Summit. There, they dug a hole in the snow, crawled into the bivvy sac, and tried to melt a little snow on their stove. No one had ever spent a night out so high on earth. At 8:00, their bottled oxygen ran out.

  Haston later called that night out the coldest bivouac of his life. To keep their blood circulating, the men frenziedly attacked the snow hole with their ice axes, until they had crafted a veritable snow cave big enough to lie down in.

  Many years later, Scott would remember that night: “I kept thinking about Tom Hornbein. It was obvious we had to keep awake, to keep friction-warming. Then Dougal started talking to Dave Clarke [the team’s equpment manager, at that moment way down at Camp II] about the merits of different sleeping bags. I was starting to worry about him, but then I realized I was talking to my feet.”

  At first light, the men started down. They had had nothing to eat for thirty hours. Now the fixed ropes proved a godsend. At 9:00 a.m., they stumbled back to Camp VI and crawled into their tent. Two of the world’s strongest Himalayan climbers had completed an epic journey lasting thirty hours. Anyone of lesser strength and fortitude would not have survived. Inside the tent, they radioed their success to their teammates waiting anxiously below. Cheers erupted from the various camps. So well had the two men taken care of themselves that neither subsequently lost a single digit to frostbite.

  On the sixth major attempt, the Southwest Face had finally succumbed. Haston and Scott had indeed climbed Everest “the hard way.”

  • • •

  Two days later, on September 26, the second team of four started off from Camp VI. Almost at once, Martin Boysen’s oxygen rig malfunctioned and he lost a crampon. There was nothing for him to do but return to the tent. Inside it, as he wrote in his diary, he “howled with anguish, frustration and self pity.” Mick Burke, who had become a professional cameraman for the BBC, was determined to film all the way to the summit, so he lagged behind Peter Boardman and Pertemba.

  With the route paved by Haston and Scott and the aid of the fixed ropes, Boardman and Pertemba made better progress. They reached the summit at 1:10 p.m., but spent only a few minutes there, as the weather was fast deteriorating. Near the South Summit, they were alarmed to run into Burke, still filming and still bent on getting to the top. Burke asked Boardman to accompany him as he climbed the last 300 vertical feet, so he’d have a partner to film, but Boardman was too tired even to contemplate that extreme and dangerous effort. Instead, Burke shot his two partners trudging in the snow, hoping that footage would pass for the summit. Then he headed up alone.

  Boardman and Pertemba agreed to wait at the South Summit for Burke’s return, though that delay seemed to endanger their own lives, with the weather getting worse by the minute. Soon they lost sight of their teammate in the blowing spindrift. They waited and waited, anxiety mounting. Pertemba was especially eager to head down at once. “Ten more minutes,” Boardman said.

  When the time limit expired, the men started down. Pertemba got off route, and Boardman had to guide his partner’s shaky steps back to the upper end of the fixed ropes. As the storm intensified, the two endured a grim retreat, regaining Camp VI in darkness only at 7:30. A pillar of strength all day, as he had shepherded Pertemba back to safety, Boardman took half an hour to crawl the final hundred feet to camp. He collapsed inside his tent and wept. Then he radioed the terrible news about Burke to his teammates scattered below.

  No trace of Mick Burke has ever been found. He was so myopic that he wore virtual Coke-bottle glasses, and his teammates speculated that in the blowing snow, unable to clear his vision, Burke might have stepped off the summit ridge and fallen all the way down the Kangshung Face.

  It would be easy to fault Burke’s judgment for going on solo to the top of Everest in the teeth of a mounting storm, but I’m not willing to do so. Once again, each climber has to decide where his own margin of safety lies. It’s a very private matter.

  The great success on Annapurna’s south face in 1970 had been bitterly undercut by Ian Clough’s death in an avalanche at the beginning of the retreat from base camp. Now the first ascent of the Southwest Face was likewise marred by the loss of one of the team’s most popular members.

  Many years later, Bonington said, “I’m almost certain Mick made the summit.” If so, he would have been the first person ever to reach the top solo.

  “Did Mick make a mistake?” Bonington added. “Sure. But I would have done the same. Lots of people have done the same.”

  • • •

  The problem posed by the other great unclimbed wall on Everest, the Kangshung Face, was the mirror image of the challenge of the Southwest Face. On the Kangshung, all the technical difficulties lie in the first 4,000 feet. But those difficulties are fierce indeed. From a huge crevasse-riddled field of snow and ice crowning the mountain, a series of buttresses plunge toward the Kangshung Glacier. Not only are those buttresses alarmingly steep—they’re threatened by every avalanche and collapsing serac coming down from above.

  It was not until 1980, fifty-nine years after Mallory and Bullock’s reconnaissance, that any Westerner returned to the Kangshung Glacier. That year, Andy Harvard inspected the face from up close, took lots of pictures, and came back reporting that he thought there were two relatively safe routes through that ominous 4,000-foot wall.

  The following year, a very strong team came to Everest from the Tibetan side to attempt the Kangshung Face. The leader was Lou Reichardt, who three years before had been one of the four climbers to make the first American ascent of K2. Along with Reichardt came his buddy John Roskelley, who had also gotten up K2 in 1978. With his partner, Rick Ridgeway, Roskelley had reached the top without supplemental oxygen, the first two climbers to pull off such a feat on K2. The day before, Reichardt had finished the climb oxygenless himself, after his rig had broken down and he had simply discarded it. Their triumph, and the shining example of Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler, who that same year had become the first men to climb Everest without bottled oxygen, convinced the Kangshung party in 1981 not to bring the cumbersome apparatus.

  All but three members of the nineteen-man team were Americans. Besides Roskelley and Reichardt, they included such all-stars as George Lowe, famed for his cutting-edge climbs in the Tetons, Canada, Alaska, and Pakistan; David Breashears, who had been a legendary rock climber in Colorado (nicknamed the “Kloberdanz Kid” after one of his finest routes), and who would later become the first American to get to the summit of Everest twice; Gary Bocarde, who had put up some of the hardest new routes in Alaska; and Sue Giller, the only woman on the team, who at the time was probably America’s strongest female mountaineer.

  Rounding out the entourage were Chris Jones, an Englishman transplanted to the States, who with George Lowe in 1974 had climbed the north face of North Twin, the hardest route then forged anywhere in the Canadian Rockies; and the Austrian
Kurt Diemberger, a legend in his own right, who had made the first ascent of Broad Peak in 1957, the only one of the fourteen 8,000ers to be knocked off alpine-style. Diemberger and Breashears were ostensibly along as filmmakers, though David would do his share of leading on the climb.

  As an added bonus, the team persuaded Sir Edmund Hillary to come along to base camp, where he would end up playing a crucial role in shoring up the team’s morale when it had reached a low ebb.

  As Andy Politz and I with our Georgia teammates would in 1988, the 1981 Kangshung team decided to tackle the face in the postmonsoon season. That meant that the lowland approach, like ours, would be an ordeal by soggy, washed-out trails and nearly incessant rain. Still, the party reached base camp by the early date of August 28, and four days later they chose their route—the central and most massive of all the buttresses. It’s a magnificent line, leading straight as an arrow up the headwall of mixed rock and ice, through the billowing snow mushrooms and serac towers above, and on to the final snowfield directly beneath the summit. I think that in 1988 we might have chosen that very route ourselves, had it not already been climbed. But that central buttress is so massive and technically difficult that it probably would have been too much for our smaller and less experienced team. Instead, we focused our energies on the next buttress left, or south, of the central pillar.

  Rotating leaders, the 1981 team got 2,000 feet of fixed rope strung up the buttress in only three days. The crux pitches, harder than anything yet climbed on Everest, were led by George Lowe, with Sue Giller belaying. Some of the climbing required direct aid to surmount overhangs, and the rock was so rotten it scarcely took pitons.

  “We were right on the edge of control,” Giller remembered decades later. “Every time George would move his feet, he’d knock a rock off, and I was right in the line of fire. I was terrified he’d fall off and get hurt. How could I lower him? What if he had to come to my rescue?”

  Congenitally modest, almost self-effacing, Lowe recalls, “It didn’t seem unreasonable. It was hard; the rock was pretty bad. But I could get in some pretty good protection every thirty feet or so. . . . Sometimes, though, I could reach down and just pull out the previous piton with the sling [attached to it].”

  Optimism was running high at advance base camp under the buttress, but the team could not ignore the dangers of the route. The names they bestowed on the features along the way reflected that edge of fear. The approach gully became the Bowling Alley, because of the rocks careening down it; the camp at the top of it, nestled on a small snow ledge under an overhanging cliff, was named Pinsetter Camp.

  On September 5, Kim Momb (Roskelley’s partner on Makalu the year before) and George Lowe tried to push the route through the mushroom towers above the buttress. They found hideous conditions, breaking through snow crust up to their thighs. A single pitch took two hours to lead. Momb led another pitch by crawling on all fours. He came back down with the malediction “We’re screwed.”

  John Roskelley was probably the strongest climber of all on the team. Besides K2, he’d previously notched landmark new routes on Dhaulagiri, Makalu, Nanda Devi, Great Trango Tower, and Gaurishankar. But from the start in 1981, Roskelley hadn’t liked the looks of the Kangshung Face, and he’d played no part in leading pitches on the buttress. Now he declared unequivocally that the route was too dangerous to attempt.

  That judgment might not have swayed the rest of the party, but Roskelley exhorted the whole team to abandon the Kangshung Face, hike back out and around to the north, and salvage the expedition with a routine ascent of Everest via the northeast ridge. Even though the Chinese had granted the team an alternate permit for the conventional north-side route, such a shift in goals would have been a logistical nightmare.

  But Roskelley wouldn’t let it go. “He was like this little black cloud that ran around base camp,” Sue Giller remembers. And despite their close bond on K2, Reichardt weighed in years later: “John’s idea was ridiculous. By the time we could have ferried all our gear over there, the climbing season would have been over.”

  In 1989 on Kangchenjunga, I was teamed up with Roskelley. He’s eleven years older than I am, and knowing about his extraordinary record, I was in awe of the guy and considered it an honor to share an expedition with him. On Kangchenjunga, we got along fine. But there I also saw how strong-willed and inflexible John could be.

  That said, I’ve always admired John’s willingness to voice his opinion and his refusal to be swayed by others. If he thought a route wasn’t safe, he’d stand his ground, even if it meant walking away from a climb. His example had a strong influence on me, helping me to stand my own ground in similar situations.

  On Kangchenjunga, I also saw what happens when John decides a certain “project” isn’t to his liking. After brilliantly leading most of our route, John felt that his heart simply wasn’t into the rest of the climb. His closest partner, Jim Wickwire, was suffering from the early stages of pneumonia and was having a hard time contributing to the effort. John also disapproved of our hiring Sherpas to carry loads up the face, as he thought the terrain was too risky for them. Using Sherpas for support also simply wasn’t John’s style. For these reasons, and to accompany Wickwire on the way out, he left the expedition early. I was surprised by John’s decision, but respected the fact that he walked his talk.

  At base camp in September 1981, the team was torn with uncertainty and dissension. Then, of all people, Sir Edmund Hillary leaped into the fray. He gathered the team together and urged them to stick with the Kangshung Face. “You have a chance to make history,” he said. “A chance to explore an unexplored face on the highest mountain on earth.”

  In the end, only Roskelley and one other climber voted against the Kangshung Face. Roskelley promptly packed up his gear and left the expedition. Sadly, shortly thereafter, Hillary developed cerebral edema and had to be evacuated to the lowland village of Kharta.

  With George Lowe, Sue Giller, Dan Reid, Kim Momb, Chris Jones, and David Breashears in the vanguard, the team redoubled its efforts. On September 26, the team established its Helmet Camp at 22,000 feet above the central buttress. Yet already other climbers were coming down with physical ailments, while several began to agree with Roskelley that the route was too dangerous. On October 5, Lou Reichardt led up the jumbled slopes above Helmet Camp. Gary Bocarde had predicted that it would take two weeks to find a way through the crisscrossing crevasses there. That day, Reichardt solved the passage in only two hours.

  Nevertheless, the team had reached an altitude just shy of 23,000 feet. A full 6,000 feet of unknown terrain yawned above. The able and willing manpower had been reduced to five climbers. Reluctantly, Reichardt called an end to the assault. It took five more days to evacuate the mountain and begin the hike out.

  As David Breashears wrote in his memoir, High Exposure, “The climbers had made a splendid effort but we all knew we’d reached the end. It was a defeated team that left the mountain, vowing to return another year and finish the route.”

  • • •

  Two years later, once again in the postmonsoon autumn, a new American team arrived. Back from the 1981 effort were Reichardt, Momb, Lowe, Reid, Jim Morrissey, and Geoff Tabin. Among the other eight climbers was Andy Harvard, whose 1980 reconnaissance had sprung the Kangshung effort into being. This time, Reichardt ceded leadership to Morrissey, a forty-seven-year-old heart surgeon and excellent climber who had been with Roskelley on Great Trango Tower in 1977.

  The 1983 team made fast progress up the 4,000-foot buttress that had been pioneered two years earlier. Many of the fixed ropes were still in place, and though the climbers were leery about their condition, they found that most of them were still safe to ascend with jumars. On other pitches, the climbers reled the rock and ice, but kept an ascender clipped to the old fixed rope as a backup.

  The great innovation of the 1983 team was a pulley system designed by John Boyle and modified day after day to fit the job. Once the pulley became fully operational, h
uge quantities of gear and food were easily hoisted up the buttress, toil that would otherwise have required dozens of load carries, every one exposed to falling rocks and avalanches. Many years later, Reichardt reflected, “The winch up the wall made a huge difference.”

  By late September, the team had ferried 2,000 pounds of supplies up to the Helmet Camp, with thirteen climbers installed there. In the American Alpine Journal, Morrissey later joked about the party’s remarkable physical condition: “The good health may be attributed to the fact that none of the physicians (we were three) wanted to get stuck evacuating the ill and infirm. The frequency of maladies was inversely proportional to the number of practicing physicians.”

  Unfortunately, several members soon came down with ailments that would preclude any chance for the summit. Andy Harvard cracked several ribs and contracted pleurisy during a coughing fit. Two of the very strongest technical climbers, Dave Cheesmond and Carl Tobin, succumbed to pulmonary edema and frostbite, respectively.

  The healthy members pushed on up the surprisingly easy slopes above Helmet Camp, establishing a Camp II at 25,000 feet, then a Camp III at 25,800 feet. That still left a climb of 3,200 feet to the summit, but the team felt they could go for the top without another intermediate camp. This year, all the climbers were using supplemental oxygen.

  On October 8, Kim Momb, Lou Reichardt, and Carlos Buhler set off at 4:30 a.m. Once again, they found the going easy. As Reichardt later claimed about the upper Kangshung Face, “It’s actually the gentlest ridge on the mountain.” Buhler would later be touted by the mountaineering press as my chief rival to become the first American to climb all fourteen 8,000ers, but that was a pure media fiction. Neither of us sensed any such rivalry, and after 1991 Carlos turned his ambitions toward lower, more technical peaks such as Changabang.