by Ed Viesturs
In other words, the team must reach the summit by February 17 or else pack up and start the homeward journey. It seemed an impossible ultimatum.
But now the two youngsters, Wielicki (despite his frostbite) and Cichy, sprang into action. They got back to the South Col on February 16. The temperature that night was minus 42 degrees Celsius, and the wind continued to roar.
Nevertheless, the two men set out the next morning, carrying only a single oxygen bottle apiece. They moved almost wordlessly. Wielicki had no feeling in his feet, but he wasn’t ready to turn back. At base camp, the rest of the team waited with mounting anxiety. At 2:10 p.m., Zawada tried to radio the summit duo, but got no answer. With gallows humor, the teammates joked about each cutting off one or two of their own fingers as a good-luck token for their friends.
At 2:25, the radio sparked into life. “Guess where we are!” Cichy’s voice boomed over the wind.
“Where are you? Over.”
“At the summit. At the summit.” Base camp broke out in a frenzy of jubilation, while, 11,000 feet above, Wielicki and Cichy hugged each other.
The descent turned into an extreme ordeal. The two men ran out of bottled oxygen before they regained the South Summit. The wind continued unabated, flinging snow in their faces, and the welding goggles they wore were all but useless. It grew dark very early, and then both men’s headlamps failed. They groped on downward in pitch darkness, crawling part of the way. At last they found their tent at Camp IV. Inside it, Wielicki spent most of the night trying to thaw his frozen feet over the camp stove. Two days later, the men regained base camp.
• • •
The first winter ascent of Everest by the Poles remains one of the greatest of all Himalayan deeds. I can only imagine the courage and perseverance it must have taken for Wielicki and Cichy to push on in such dreadful conditions. The coldest I’ve ever been in the Himalaya was when I climbed to the summit of Annapurna in 2005. On the north face, Veikka Gustafsson and I were in shade for most of the day. The wind kept sucking heat out of our bodies. Stopping for a break in that bitter cold was not an option, and with every step I took, I had to scrunch my toes to keep frostbite at bay. I cannot fathom what it would be like high on Everest in winter, with equipment barely suited for the conditions.
That the first winter ascent of any of the fourteen 8,000ers should have come on the highest one of all is itself astounding. That the team succeeded in getting to the top in only forty-three days after establishing their base camp serves as a striking testimony to their drive and courage. That, despite the shortness of the February day, Wielicki and Cichy got to the top by the quite reasonable time of 2:25 p.m. is proof of their superb efficiency as climbers.
Moreover, that the first winter ascent came on the first attempt is also remarkable. And that the Poles observed the arbitrary Nepalese deadline of February 17 and still pulled off the climb gives further proof of their competence and hardihood.
The men became heroes at once in Poland, but the deed was barely recognized outside their native country. And in that recognition, a sour note threatened to tarnish the great accomplishment. By 1980, Reinhold Messner was starting to be hailed as the best high-altitude climber alive. But out of some bizarre streak of envy, perhaps, he now announced that the Polish climb was not a true winter ascent, since the Nepalese calendar officially deemed the end of winter to occur on February 15. Giving the Poles their due in her official Himalayan record, Elizabeth Hawley dismissed this specious canard, haughtily vowing, “I am not amongst these quibblers.”
Gradually other climbers started saluting the Polish achievement, so Messner came partway around. Now he granted that it was indeed a winter ascent, but he declared that the Poles had carried it out illegally. Only after the Nepalese Ministry of Tourism certified the ascent as occuring within the “official winter window” did Messner finally back down.
Thirty-three years after this great leap forward in Everest annals, the first winter ascent remains hugely undervalued. None of the team members, not even Zawada, wrote a book about the expedition. And not until 2011, when Bernadette McDonald published Freedom Climbers, based on many months of interviews with Polish climbers and commissioned translations of their journal articles, did anything like a coherent account of this extraordinary expedition appear in English.
When I met Wielicki on Gasherbrum I in 1995, I was only hazily aware of his great deed on Everest fifteen years earlier. On our expedition, we chatted about each other’s past climbs as well as future plans. His winter ascent of Everest was simply one of many hard climbs he had done, and he wasn’t the least bit boastful about his track record. Now, having read McDonald’s account of the climb, I’m more in awe of it than ever. Hats off to the Poles, to the vision it took even to conceive of a winter ascent of Everest that early, and to the courage it took to pull it off.
• • •
Speaking of Messner, the great climber from the German-speaking South Tyrol region of Italy, had first made a name for himself in the 1960s, with very hard alpine routes in very fast times in his native Dolomites. In the Andes in 1969, he paired up with the Austrian climber Peter Habeler at the beginning of one of the legendary partnerships in mountaineering history. In 1974, the two men astonished the climbing world by dashing up the Eiger Nordwand in only ten hours, halving the previous record. The next year, they climbed Gasherbrum I in the Karakoram in the purest of alpine styles—three days, with no porters or teammate support and no bottled oxygen, solving technical difficulties without even bothering to rope up.
Since the days of Mallory, climbers had argued about whether it was possible to climb Everest without the aid of oxygen. Although on the 1924 expedition Teddy Norton had reached 28,150 feet without it, in the next fifty years no one had gone higher without breathing bottled gas. In 1978, Habeler and Messner determined to try. Allying themselves loosely with an Austrian expedition, they went for the top unsupported on May 8. Many in the climbing world had predicted that anyone trying such a feat would die in the attempt, or at least suffer irreversible brain damage. Some members of their own party were skeptical about the wisdom of the effort.
But Messner and Habeler pulled off the first oxygenless ascent of Everest in blithe style, though on the way down Messner contracted snow blindness that turned the further descent from the South Col into an ordeal. I was eighteen years old when the two men accomplished that feat, and the news of their triumph electrified me. The photos of those two men climbing “naked”—wearing only down suits, carrying no rucksacks, with only a handful of snacks and a liter of water each in their pockets—were mesmerizing, as I tried to imagine myself in their shoes. In the end, that ascent of Everest in 1978 profoundly influenced my own decision to try to get up all fourteen 8,000ers without supplemental oxygen. Messner set the standard in Himalayan climbing. A true visionary, years ahead of his time, he broke physical and psychological barriers that no one else had dared to test.
Along with being a great mountaineer, Messner was a purist and an idealist. A book he wrote in 1981, called Siebter Grad, translated into English as The Seventh Grade, has become one of the most influential polemics in the history of our pastime. In it, Messner argues for climbing mountains only “by fair means,” by which he implies not relying too heavily on artificial aids and safety hatches. Some of his phrases have become catchwords in mountaineering, such as the aspersion against climbers “who carry their courage in their rucksack.” A kindred essay, called “The Murder of the Impossible,” excoriated Cesare Maestri for desecrating Cerro Torre in Patagonia by wielding a gasoline-powered compressor to drill a four-hundred-bolt ladder up the beautiful peak in 1970.
Because he is so strong-willed, even dogmatic, Messner has found himself at the center of many a controversy during his long career. In 1970, on his first expedition to an 8,000-meter peak, Messner and his brother Günther made the first ascent of the huge and daunting Rupal Face, but in a desperate traverse over the mountain and down its opposite face, Günt
her vanished. Decades later, Messner publicly blamed his teammates for his brother’s death, reigniting the firestorm of acrimony that the expedition had kindled.
And in 1978, after what should have been their greatest triumph, Messner and Habeler had a bitter falling out, in part because Habeler wrote his own book about the Everest climb, which told a version of the story slightly less flattering to Messner than Messner’s own. It would take decades for the men to repair the breach.
With that great climb, however, Messner was only beginning his Everest campaign. In 2003, he told my co-author, David Roberts, “The idea to climb Everest without oxygen was not what I really wanted. It was always to climb Everest alpine-style.” So he concocted an even more “out there” project for 1980. He would climb Everest by a harder line than the South Col route, again without bottled oxygen. He would do it solo. And just to up the ante, he would tackle the mountain in the monsoon season of summer, when virtually all climbers deemed Everest too choked with snowstorms to attempt.
Messner jumped on the new openness on the part of the Chinese authorities to approaching Everest from the north, snagging the first permit after a thirty-year closure to climbers from the West. Initially, he planned to follow the north face and northeast ridge route pioneered by Mallory in 1924. To emphasize the purism of his approach, he intended to bring along only a single companion, his then girlfriend Nena Holguin. He would do without porters or Sherpas. The Chinese demanded that he also hire a liaison officer and a translator. They would not go beyond base camp on the Rongbuk Glacier, however, while Holguin would go only to advance base. Her company was psychologically important to Messner. As he explained in 2003, “It is much easier to speak and divide the worry. It is important to be able to say, ‘I don’t feel well, maybe I should not go.’ I could do this maybe with a friend, but it is better with a woman.”
The four-man party set up camp on the Rongbuk in late June. During the next several weeks, Messner made several forays up the East Rongbuk Glacier, having to rebreak the trail in deep, soft snow each time. On his last effort, he reached the North Col, but decided the conditions were too dangerous to push higher. Rather than give up his attempt, he put it on hold, while he spent several weeks exploring in the vicinity of Shishapangma.
When he returned in mid-August, Messner seized upon a window of relatively good weather, with the temperatures dropping and the snow freezing hard enough for good step-kicking. On August 17, he and Holguin reached advance base camp again. The next day he set out to climb the mountain. Holguin later wrote about that parting, “Yes, he has gone! A tender kiss on the lips was all.”
Before dawn on the eighteenth, just short of the North Col, Messner suddenly broke through a snow bridge and fell into a hidden crevasse. As he later wrote, “It felt like eternity in slow motion, rebounding back and forth off the walls of ice, although it was in reality only eight meters deep.” A small snow bridge inside the crevasse stopped his fall, but he had no idea how stable it was. And at that moment, his headlamp died. “I see a twinkle from a lone star through a small hole somewhere up above,” he later recalled.
It’s bad enough to fall into a crevasse anywhere on a mountain, even when roped to a partner. It’s really serious on a solo climb. That was my greatest fear on my only solo expedition, when I attempted the Great Couloir on Everest in 1993. In all my years of Himalayan mountaineering, I’ve never fallen into a crevasse. A few times I’ve broken through a snow bridge but managed to catch myself with my arms and crawl out. I’m sure good luck has played its part in my escaping from crevasse falls, but I also think that my ultracautious approach has kept me safe. Experience teaches you to see faint markings on the snow’s surface that indicate a hidden crevasse, but some are truly invisible and undetectable. Some of the best climbers in the world have broken through snow bridges and fallen to their deaths.
Even though he had fallen only 25 feet into the crevasse, Messner was in a real predicament, in the dark with a useless headlamp. In that moment, he promised himself that if he got out of the crevasse alive, he’d give up the expedition and go home. (Ever since 2006, when my friend and partner Jean-Christophe Lafaille vanished on a solo winter attempt on Makalu, I’ve thought that the most likely fate to which he succumbed was falling into a crevasse. The fall itself might have killed him, or he could have found himself in a trap from which he could not escape. If so, a terrible way to die.)
Now, however, Messner kept his wits about him. After an hour of gingerly feeling his way, he discovered a snow ramp that led him to the surface. And as he emerged, the impulse to abandon the expedition dissolved. Instead, as the rosy glow of dawn gathered in the east, he pushed on to the North Col. He climbed so efficiently that by the end of the day, he had covered almost 5,000 vertical feet—an amazing performance. He pitched his one-man tent on a small platform of snow, fixed a dinner of tea and cold meat, and managed to sleep well.
Messner has always been prone to hallucinations on high peaks. It’s a phenomenon I just don’t understand. I’ve always said that if I started hallucinating on an 8,000er, I’d know it was time to go down. But during that evening as he camped on his small niche, Messner became convinced that a second climber was there with him. He knew somehow that that teammate was not real, but he welcomed its company as “the partner within myself.”
He set out the next day at sunrise but soon had an instinct that the northeast ridge, with its notorious Second Step, would not go. Instead, he started angling right across the face below the ridge, just as Norton and Somervell had in 1924, four days before Mallory and Irvine set out on the attempt from which they would never return.
That evening Messner camped on a snow mushroom that he thought should protect him from any avalanches coming down from above, but he was discouraged to realize that in a full day of arduous effort, he had gained only 1,300 feet. He was at 26,900 feet, with more than 2,000 vertical feet to climb to reach the summit. The invisible companion had stayed with him all day, and that evening it was so real that Messner felt his partner cramping his own space inside the tent.
In 2003, Messner reflected on that hallucination. “Being alone in such bad conditions, we become schizophrenic,” he claimed. “I didn’t know who the other one was. But this is easier—for a few days schizophrenia was my answer. It is the only solution to survive—to have another with whom to divide the fear and the joy.”
On the morning of August 20, Messner was alarmed to find light snow falling, with clouds thickening and lowering on the mountain. Others might have turned back, but Messner was too invested in his solo quest to give up now. Carrying only a camera and his ice axe, he started up the Great Couloir. At the Yellow Band, he left the couloir and struck out to the right toward the north pillar, where bare rocks seemed to give better purchase than the soft snow. As visibility shrank to about fifty yards, he felt disoriented, unsure where he was on the mountain. On top of this, he began seeing double. The urge to give up was powerful. As he later wrote, “No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. . . . There are actually no more feelings, I consist only of will.”
His progress had slowed to taking a few steps, then leaning on his axe as he gasped for breath. But suddenly, out of the mist, he spotted the Chinese tripod on the summit. He covered the last stretch crawling on his hands and knees. It was 3:00 p.m.
As he later wrote, “I have never in my whole life been so tired as on the summit of Mount Everest that day. I just sat and sat there, oblivious to everything. For a long time I could not go down, nor did I want to.” In Messner’s situation, I’d like to think that I would have felt an urgency to descend at once. It was getting late. I doubt that I would have spent more than fifteen minutes on top. In 1991, when I reached the summit alone in marginal weather, I lingered for a mere three anxious minutes on top before heading down. Messner, however, spent a precious hour on the summit. What he felt there was not the rapture that caused Maurice Herzog to linger on the summit of Annapurna in 1950. It was sheer stupefaction.
Peering through a telephoto lens from advance base camp, Nena Holguin caught sight of her lover as he reached the North Col. “Seems as if a drunken man is descending from the col,” she wrote in her diary, “not the same man who went away four days ago.”
Messner’s solo, oxygenless ascent of Everest in monsoon season is one of the greatest deeds in the history of Himalayan mountaineering. And Messner himself might well win a poll of experts convened to vote on the greatest climber of all time. What’s hard for me to fathom, though, is how his mystical side, with all the hallucinations, seems to enhance his ability, rather than sabotage it. Whatever makes Messner tick is the diametrical opposite of the rational clarity that I strive for on every attempt on a big mountain. But it works for him, and he’s still alive, at sixty-nine, as so many of his most gifted peers are not.
