The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  This meteoric ascent made a certain impact on the climbing world. And on the medical world as well. I knew that certain experts in high-altitude physiology expressed their doubts in the face of such a record time. Some of them asked me if we were shooting amphetamines. I answered, “No!” They told me that the limits of human medicine had previously been met and that there was no scientific explanation for such a feat. I answered: “It’s pretty simple. All it takes is a little bit of will.”

  Twenty-seven years after their great deed on Everest, Troillet continues to lead expeditions to the Himalaya. After finishing his pursuit of all fourteen 8,000ers in 1995, however, Loretan retreated into an almost reclusive privacy in his small hometown in Switzerland. On our way to Annapurna in 2002, I met the man very briefly in a restaurant in Kathmandu. Loretan was leading a trekking group. J.-C. Lafaille introduced me to him, but we had no time to chat, and the language barrier stood between us as well.

  Among all the great mountaineers around the world whom I wish I’d gotten to know better, Erhard Loretan ranks right at the top of the list. The combination of the boldness of his climbs and the quirky, understated brilliance of his writing fascinates and awes me. As I was researching The Will to Climb, I exchanged a couple of cursory e-mails with Loretan, as I asked for further details about his Annapurna traverse.

  Perhaps that exchange might have opened the way to a friendship. If I’d found myself in Switzerland, I’m sure I’d have looked Loretan up. But on April 28, 2011, on his fifty-second birthday, as he was leading his girlfriend up an easy climb in the Alps, she slipped and fell off a high snow ridge, and the rope pulled Loretan off as well. She survived the fall; Loretan did not.

  It’s the classic irony—a great adventurer, who has survived all the close calls his boldest deeds subjected him to, ends up getting killed in a silly accident on a routine outing. But it never ceases to shock. Loretan’s great climbs survive him, as does his reputation. But he deserved to live longer than fifty-two years, and to savor his accomplishments in his old age—as I hope to in mine.

  Epilogue

  The Future of Everest . . . and a Fond Farewell

  Well, after 1997, I really didn’t expect to return to Everest again. Instead, I focused on finishing Endeavor 8000, my campaign to climb the fourteen highest peaks in the world. In 1999, I got to the top of Manaslu and Dhaulagiri only twelve days apart, pulling off one of the best twofers of my career. Two years later, I summitted on Shishapangma, removing the annoying little asterisk that turning back 100 yards from the summit in 1993 had tacked onto my résumé. Then, with my good buddy J.-C. Lafaille, another twofer in 2003, summitting on Nanga Parbat and Broad Peak.

  By the end of that summer, I’d climbed thirteen of the fourteen 8,000ers. But I’d failed twice on Annapurna, turning back in 2000 in the face of horrendous avalanches on the north face, and in 2002 because I couldn’t justify to myself the risk on steep, unstable snow slopes high on the east ridge. I’d come to think of that mountain as my personal nemesis, and I spent many sleepless hours wondering whether I could ever find a reasonably safe way to get to its summit. When Greg Child interviewed me for Rock and Ice in 2002, just after my second defeat on Annapurna, I told him that if I had to stop at thirteen and never finish Endeavor 8000, I’d be okay with that. (Greg titled the piece “Unlucky Thirteen.”) I’d be disappointed, to be sure—but I wouldn’t second-guess that decision for the rest of my life. The risks on Annapurna seemed off the scale.

  Meanwhile, Paula and I were building our family. After Gil came along in 1997, in the summer of 2000 Paula had given birth to a daughter whom we named Ella. When we’d first gotten married, we’d had a friendly disagreement about how many kids we should have. I’d always envisioned two as the right number, while Paula hankered after four. Now she convinced me that three wouldn’t be a bad number, so by January 2004, Paula was pregnant again.

  Despite what I told Greg Child about being willing to close the book with thirteeen 8,000ers, I’m congenitally unable to leave a project unfinished. I often liken it to a household chore, such as building a patio deck. Until I’ve hammered the last nail into the last board, the incompleteness of something I’ve started nags away at me. (I’m sure there are deep-seated psychological reasons for my perfectionism, but I don’t think I need a shrink to figure them out, as I believe that my drive to finish a project has done me far more good than harm.)

  So I planned to give Annapurna another shot in the spring of 2004, once more approaching from the north, and in all likelihood following the route by which the French had made the first ascent in 1950. I actually secured places for Veikka Gustafsson and myself on an Annapurna permit held by the husband-and-wife team of Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner and Ralf Dujmovits (both of whom have by now climbed all fourteen 8,000ers). Veikka had become my partner of choice on 8,000-meter peaks, and there was no one with whom I would have felt more comfortable tackling a difficult and dangerous mountain.

  But that very danger unsettled both Paula and me, and with her just beginning a pregnancy, the spring of 2004 seemed an unpropitious time to do battle with my nemesis. At that point, an escape hatch presented itself, in the form of yet another film project David Breashears was putting together. Stephen Daldry, the British director acclaimed for such films as Billy Elliott and The Hours, had become fascinated with the 1996 tragedy on Everest, even though he’d never climbed a peak in his life. Having read Into Thin Air, he intended to craft a scripted movie with professional actors, not around the whole disaster but around the three characters whose personalities and fates he found most intriguing: Scott Fischer, Rob Hall, and Beck Weathers.

  Most of the film would be shot near sea level in settings that would stand in for Everest, but Daldry wanted real Everest footage as well, and he wanted to travel to the mountain. He hired Breashears to do the filming, and David immediately invited me to help organize the food and equipment and to run the logistics of the expedition. We rounded out the team with Veikka, Robert Schauer (the great Austrian climber who’d backed up David’s IMAX filming in 1996), Jimmy Chin (a very strong climber and up-and-coming photographer and filmmaker), and a Teton guide named Amy Bullard. I looked forward to being back on Everest again with such trusted friends as David and Veikka. I hadn’t seen Robert since we’d parted ways after our IMAX expedition. As we hugged good-bye at the end of that tragic season, he had said, “Next time, let’s have some fun.”

  I rationalized the Everest project by planning it as the first half of a twofer: on Everest, I’d get acclimatized for a second expedition, and once we were done filming, Veikka and I would zip over to Annapurna and try to climb it fast.

  It didn’t quite work out that way. Daldry was a good sport and an interesting guy to hang out with. Despite being slightly out of shape, having just kicked a two-and-a-half-pack-a-day smoking habit, he was keen to go not only to base camp below the Khumbu but to probe partway through the icefall. On April 7, I roped up with him and started through the labyrinth. That evening I wrote in my diary, “Played in icefall w/ SD. Even though he was convinced he wouldn’t cross the ladders, he did.”

  It turned into an odd expedition. Much of David’s filmmaking consisted of shooting scenics with a high-resolution film camera. I never quite understood how Daldry would integrate these panoramas into his action film, but David explained it rather cryptically as “like painting the inside of a Ping-Pong ball.” With a camera mounted on a tripod, which he rotated through a set number of degrees, David would film the inside of a spatial sphere. Then the footage would be digitally spliced together. Eventually, a professional actor in a comfortable studio in England would be “painted,” thanks to David, into a scene in the Western Cwm or up on the Lhotse Face.

  We had good weather, and despite the by-now normal hordes on the south side of Everest (that spring no fewer than sixty-four expedition teams tackled the mountain), we decided to go for the summit in mid-May. We avoided the traffic jam by leaving the South Col at 10:00 p.m. on May 16, a
nd at sunrise I stood on the summit. All five of my teammates also summitted without incident. In some ways, it was the smoothest and easiest of all my Everest expeditions, in large part because each of us was hired to do a job with well-defined responsibilities. Everybody got along well, and we were all experienced climbers who took care of ourselves while we looked out for one another. At age forty-four, I’d climbed as well as I ever had, and now I’d stood on the highest point on earth a total of six times. Being there with great friends was icing on the cake.

  In the end, Daldry got sidetracked by other projects. Nine years later, there’s a real possibility that the film he cared so much about will never get made. (That’s showbiz, as many folks have told me.) It seems a pity if David’s stellar work ends up in the cinematic trash bin, but all of us had a good time on Everest that year, I met some memorable characters in the world of moviemaking, and I got paid well to revisit what had become one of my favorite places on earth.

  Unfortunately, we spent so much time on Everest that the twofer with Annapurna went out the window. I’d have to put it on hold. That May several of the team on our Annapurna permit reached the summit without incident. I wondered if I had missed my golden opportunity. During the next year, my nemesis would keep me awake long into the night on too many occasions. But on October 12, Paula gave birth to another beautiful baby. We named her Anabel.

  • • •

  Ever since 1996 and Into Thin Air, the focus of media attention on Everest has been negative. The hordes, the traffic jams, the incompetent clients paying big bucks to get dragged up the mountain, the indifference to dying climbers as others clump past them toward their selfish personal goals—these have become the stock clichés of the Everest soap opera.

  It’s not that there isn’t some truth to those stereotypes. Everest has indeed become far too popular for its own good—especially on the two standard routes on the north and the south. Accurate statistics are hard to come by, but according to the respected Everest chronicler Alan Arnette, in the spring of 2012 something like 548 climbers reached the top of Everest, 150 of them on May 25 and 26 alone. The experienced German mountaineer Ralf Dujmovits, who in 2009 became the sixteenth person to climb all fourteen 8,000ers, took a photo high on the Lhotse Face that spring that instantly “went viral.” When I saw the photo, my jaw hit the floor. It shows a line of something like 150 climbers treading on one another’s heels as they slide their ascenders up the fixed ropes—a “human snake,” as some have called it. And that photo cut off the head and tail of the snake, as even more plodders formed at either end of the procession. In disgust, Dujmovits gave up his own attempt to go to the top without bottled oxygen. As he kicked steps down the Lhotse Face just above the human snake—Dujmovits being far too good a climber to need a fixed rope there—some of the folks in the line screamed at him, for fear he would fall and knock them off their own feet.

  Had I been on Everest that spring, somewhere in the middle of that human conga line, I would also probably have turned back. I can hardly bear to drive down the highway behind another car going well under the speed limit, let alone put up with being on a mountain, attached to a single strand of rope, stuck among a hundred or more people, going only as fast as the slowest person somewhere at the front of the line. Crowded slopes are the reality of Everest these days, and my view is jaded by the fact that I’ve been there when there were very few other climbers around.

  In the spring of 2012, ten men and women died on Everest. It’s one measure of the dehumanization of the place that that toll seems to have been accepted as business as usual, rather than mourned as tragedy. On the Hillary Step on May 25 and 26, it was reported that climbers had to stand in place waiting for their turns on the fixed ropes for as long as two and a half hours. It’s a wonder more of them didn’t come to grief.

  Many folks have suggested that China and Nepal ought to limit the number of expeditions to which they grant Everest permits. But it’s not up to us Westerners to tell those nations—especially Nepal, one of the poorest countries on earth—how to run their tourism industry. Meanwhile, the number of outfitters offering guided trips on Everest keeps burgeoning, and the top-end companies now charge as much as $75,000 per client. Despite that astronomical fee, there are plenty of customers willing to fork over a good hunk of their life savings to have a chance to reach the top of the world.

  As I said at the outset of this book, however, the Everest soap opera fails to mirror my own experience on Everest. Yes, in the latter years, I’ve had to figure out strategies to avoid getting stuck in the traffic jam above the South Col, and I’ve seen my share of follies carried out on the mountain—but not among my own teams. The clients I’ve guided to the top were competent climbers to begin with, and it’s been immensely gratifying to help them realize lifelong dreams.

  In this book, I’ve emphasized the great deeds in Everest history, of which there have been many. Although I’ve ended my accounts of those deeds with Loretan and Troillet’s dazzling climb up the Japanese and Hornbein couloirs in 1986, it’s not because great things weren’t done during the subsequent twenty-seven years. Perhaps inevitably, however, the more recent “firsts” have focused not on new routes, but on bold new ways of upping the Everest ante. They aren’t stunts, exactly, but they tend to be records defined by somewhat arbitrary parameters.

  The most heartening trend during the last quarter century is the emergence of Sherpas as some of the best climbers on Everest. The record for summiting the most times is twenty-one, first accomplished by the mild-mannered, unaffected Apa Sherpa, who topped out most recently in 2011, at the age of fifty. The speed record for an ascent from base camp on the south to the summit—11,335 feet of climbing—is held by Pemba Dorje Sherpa, who made the climb in 2004 in the stunning time of eight hours and ten minutes. Pemba’s record was questioned at first, most vocally by the Sherpa who held the previous record, but a thorough investigation by the Nepal Ministry of Culture and Tourism certified the deed.

  In May 1999, Babu Chiri Sherpa spent twenty-one straight hours without supplemental oxygen on the summit, some of it asleep, without suffering any ill effects. No one else has even tried to duplicate that feat. Sadly, Babu Chiri died on Everest in 2001 when, at an altitude of only 21,300 feet, as he casually photographed the surroundings of Camp II, he slipped and fell into a crevasse.

  Some of the most dazzling performances on Everest have been performed on the way down. In the previous chapter, I mentioned Jean-Marc Boivin, who in 1988 parasailed from the summit to Camp II in only twelve minutes. In 2001, at age twenty-two, the French wunderkind Marco Siffredi performed the astounding feat of descending the Great Couloir on the north side of Everest by snowboard. Tragically, that bold accomplishment was not enough to satisfy Siffredi, who disappeared the following year trying to snowboard the far more treacherous Hornbein Couloir.

  Casual observers have sometimes lamented the state of Everest as “climbed out”—meaning that there are no significant new routes left to pioneer on the mountain. But they’re wrong. The Fantasy Ridge on the east face of Everest remains virtually untouched. It’s an immensely long ridge festooned with double cornices on the far right-hand edge of the Kangshung Face, angling up to its intersection with the northeast ridge well below the point at which climbers heading up from the North Col strike that ridge.

  Though the route was named by Mallory way back in 1921, it was not attempted until 1991. At least four parties have tried to tackle the route, but gotten nowhere on it. In 2003, the strong South African husband-and-wife team of Ian Woodall and Cathy O’Dowd, with a single Sherpa, started up a snow ramp on the south side of the Fantasy Ridge. After, in their words, “an avalanche nearly wiped out the entire route including base camp,” they gave up the effort at only 19,000 feet. And in 2006, an American team announced its intention of going after the Fantasy Ridge. After much preexpedition media hype, the team came home with its collective tail between its legs. Thanks to a lack of snow leaving gaping crevasses o
n the approach and ominously teetering seracs along the ridge, according to team member Dave Watson, “At first sight, it was obvious: if we tried it we would disappear.”

  The Fantasy Ridge, then, is a project for the next generation. So, too, is the Horseshoe Traverse, an enchainment whose name (if not concept) seems to have been bestowed by the longtime Everest chronicler Elizabeth Hawley. The idea is to make a continuous alpine-style traverse starting on the southwest side of Nuptse, over that summit and along the tortuous ridge to Lhotse, over that summit and down Lhotse’s north ridge to the South Col, up Everest by the Hillary-Tenzing route, then down the West Ridge.

  No one so far has even launched an attempt on the Horseshoe Traverse. To me, it’s an immensely appealing idea, a natural challenge that strikes your eye every time you enter the Western Cwm and are surrounded on three sides by Everest, Lhotse, and Nuptse. But it would be so committed, with so many places along the way from which retreat in a storm might be impossible, that I’m not sure even the best climbers of today could be up for it. As Greg Child, who has climbed both Everest and K2, says, “I can’t think of anything more difficult to do than the Horseshoe Traverse. It’s beyond the pale.”

  • • •

  I finally reached the summit of Annapurna with Veikka Gustafsson on May 12, 2005. It was 2:00 p.m. when we topped out. For months beforehand, my emotions had been strung as tight as a piano wire. I expected that if I reached the summit, I would break down in tears, but it didn’t turn out that way. On top, Veikka and I hugged each other as we cheered, and I sent a message down to base camp by two-way radio. “This is one of the happiest days of my life,” I said, “and one of the hardest.” On the summit, I felt overwhelmed with joy, but it didn’t provoke tears. They would come later, after I reached base camp. On top, my emotions were kept in check by my eternal vigilance: The summit is only the halfway point. And indeed, the descent would throw all the obstacles in our way that the mountain could manage to scheme up.