The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  When I returned to Seattle later that month, my predominant feelings were relief to be finished and pride in what I had accomplished. An eighteen-year campaign that had dominated my life and defined me as a public figure had finally come to a close. I’d climbed all fourteen 8,000ers without even a minor injury. It would take many months before relief shaded into restlessness, but at some point, the nagging question crept into my thoughts: Now what can I find to replace this amazing and time-consuming campaign? Endeavor 8000 had been the vital fabric of my life for almost two decades, and now that it was over, I felt a void.

  At first, finding other avenues of adventure came easily to me, with abundant rewards. I ran the New York marathon with Paula. I undertook two sledging trips on Baffin Island, one with dogs, the other man-hauling just as Scott and Shackleton had done. It was hard work, to be sure, but throughout both trips, I kept having the giddy realization, Boy, the air is pretty thick down here near sea level!

  I also got to climb beautiful mountains on continents other than Asia, including Aconcagua in South America for my second time, and the Vinson Massif, the highest point in Antarctica, for my first. I kept climbing Rainier two or three times every year, including guiding Commissioner Roger Goodell of the NFL to the summit in 2009. He later called that climb “one of the greatest experiences of my life.” And I went back to guide on Denali, where I had last climbed in 1985.

  Although in general after 2005 I was done with 8,000-meter peaks, I’d always kept on my personal back burner the possibility of returning to Everest. I had no immediate plans or any particular desire to go, but if the right opportunity came along, I might be tempted. Another film project or something equally unique would be the only reason to go back. Annapurna and K2 had presented the sternest challenges during my Endeavor 8000, but I’d had an incomparable range of experiences on my ten expeditions to Everest.

  Then, in 2009, the opportunity presented itself. Two years earlier, Eddie Bauer, the Seattle-based equipment company, had become one of my chief sponsors. The company hired me as one of several mountain guides to help design and test a new line of hightech clothing and gear called First Ascent. (My first sleeping bag, at age fourteen, had been a classic green Eddie Bauer mummy bag.)

  We spent two years creating and testing a product line that included everything from base layers to fleece jackets, wind shells, down jackets, gloves, tents, and packs. As a final test of our products, and to mark the official launch of First Ascent, the folks at Eddie Bauer asked us to use what we had developed on Everest in 2009. We would also be photographed and filmed “in action,” for use in promotions and advertising. The hope was to rejuvenate the Eddie Bauer brand by bringing the company back to its roots of expedition outfitting, a function it had not served since the late 1970s.

  Tempting though the proposal was, I did not immediately say yes. It was a tough decision to make. By early 2009, Paula was pregnant again. Our brood would consist of four kids, each with his or her own passion for the outdoors. In fact, on August 15 that year, Paula would give birth to our third daughter, whom we named Nina.

  By now, of course, Paula knew just how dangerous any trip to an 8,000er, no matter how well organized, would be. There was a constant reminder of that fact in the doleful roster of former partners of mine who had died on such expeditions, including Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, Chantal Mauduit, and J.-C. Lafaille. When a woman is pregnant, moreover, she’s emotionally more vulnerable. We were also in the midst of a move to Sun Valley, Idaho, and that made everything more complicated. Paula’s doubts and fears in January and February couldn’t help reinforcing mine.

  For weeks, we deliberated long and hard. In the end, I felt that this new expedition had more upside than downside. I could help launch a brand of clothing and gear that I had a hand in designing, I would be paid well for my efforts, and I would have one more chance to visit a mountain that had come to feel like a close friend. At last, Paula agreed with my logic, and she supported me as wholeheartedly as she had always done. Still, this separation would prove to be the toughest we had ever undergone.

  Another reason I wanted to go back to Everest was that, on the verge of turning fifty, I hoped to find out if I could still climb above 26,000 feet as well as I had in my early thirties. Even after climbing Annapurna, I’d kept up the rigorous daily workouts with which I’d always trained for expeditions. As a guide and professional climber, I felt that it was my job to be fit and ready at a moment’s notice to go on a climb. At forty-nine, I felt as fit as ever, but Everest would be the real test.

  The rest of the team was made up of first-rate mountaineers who were both RMI guides and members of the First Ascent design team. The overall leader would be Peter Whittaker, the son of my former RMI boss Lou Whittaker and the nephew of Jim Whittaker, the leader on our 1990 Peace Climb. Peter had tried Everest twice before but had yet to reach the summit. He would lead our small group of professional climbers.

  A second team, with bona fide clients along, would be led by Dave Hahn, who now holds the record for most ascents of Everest by a non-Sherpa, with fourteen. Our teams would share base camp but climb on separate schedules.

  On April 8, we reached that base camp below the Khumbu Icefall. We had built into our expedition a steady stream of Internet dispatches with stunning high-def video to be sent to folks back home, so they could follow our progress day-by-day. This meant that all the way up the mountain, we had to shoot video and photos. The photos would later be used for catalogues and advertising. The video would be shown on large flat screens in all of the Eddie Bauer stores to captivate customers and demonstrate that Eddie Bauer was back on the cutting edge of adventure.

  I got a bit impatient with the rigid and pokey schedule that all this production dictated for our team. I guess I just wanted to get up the mountain as quickly and safely as I could. The bells and whistles of the media effort seemed like a distraction, but in the end I reminded myself that that was the reason we were on Everest, and that production took precedence over our schedule.

  As for my conditioning—it turned out that I moved faster through the icefall and up to the lower camps than any other member of the team. The others kept scolding me for my pace, and telling me to slow down. For me, climbing fast was a way not only to acclimatize, but to build strength for later on during the expedition. I had also made a pact with Paula that since I was not guiding, I would climb through the icefall as fast as I could on each of my passages and not wait around for anyone else. But on April 14 I wrote in my diary, “I seem to be the topic of many discussions because my speed is causing folks to try to keep up & I’m causing team separation. So, I guess I need to chill out & put on my ‘guide hat’ for a day.” In the end, my speediness became a running joke. Whenever someone got sick, something went wrong, or something broke, the standard line was “It’s Ed’s fault!”

  We were thus a pretty harmonious group. There were more tensions around how we presented our climb over the Internet than there were about the climbing itself. Privately, I really missed Paula and the kids, as my diary frequently attested. And I was upset by knowing that as she watched our day-by-day progress, with the production team sometimes overdramatizing just how dangerous Everest was, she might buy the hype and get angry with me for taking unnecessary risks. By e-mail or sat phone, I reassured Paula that everything was fine, and urged her to take the dispatches with a grain of salt.

  We got Camp I established on the edge of the Western Cwm on April 14, Camp II on the nineteenth, and Camp III on the Lhotse Face on the twenty-seventh. There was a predictable crowd of climbers on the South Col route that spring, with the usual scrambling for the best tent platforms, especially at Camp III, where good sites are hard to find. The newest tactic was for Sherpas from each team to race to these small, precious campsites and stake a claim by roping off an area. It was like a land grab, and it created a lot of tension among expedition teams. The Everest chronicler Alan Arnette counted up thirty-six different parties on the mountain th
at spring. As we got higher, I began calculating just how to avoid getting stuck in the traffic jam on summit day, a nuisance we had managed to evade in 1997 and 2004.

  In early May, we took a prolonged rest break at base camp—too long for my liking—before heading up on our summit attempt. Then the weather turned bad, and we were further delayed. I hate sitting around, and feeling extremely fidgety, I took hikes down the valley every day just to stay fit and kill time. Finally, on May 14, having received a good forecast, we started up the mountain. We hoped to snatch the first relatively good day, May 18, to go to the summit. Most of the other teams were planning on the better day being the nineteenth, so they would be a day behind us. In this way we might trade slightly worse weather for fewer people on the summit ridge. The disaster of 1996 was still fresh in my mind, and the lessons that I learned from the events of May 10–11 that year underpinned my planning on Everest in 2009. On May 16, we slept at Camp III, then climbed to the South Col the next day, where our Sherpas had already established our highest camp.

  We had planned to get up and start climbing that very night at 11:00. But an ominous cloud cap formed on top of Everest, and the winds battered our tents all night. There was nothing to do but wait it out for another day. In our tent, Peter and I tried to keep each other entertained with jokes, books read aloud, music, and conversations about what we’d do once we got back down to thicker air, hot showers, and refrigerators full of beer.

  The biggest drawback of the enforced delay was that throughout the eighteenth, other climbers arrived at the South Col, all with plans to go for the top on the nineteenth. Now we would need a plan to escape the traffic jam.

  Originally, I’d planned to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen, but now, realizing how debilitating an extra twenty-four hours at 26,000 feet would be, and also to keep the team harmonious and give myself some margin to help out others if they got into trouble, I agreed to breathe bottled O’s on summit day.

  It was a calm night, but I didn’t sleep well at all. I’d developed a bit of a sore throat from breathing the cold, dry air, and just as I’d doze off, my own coughing would wake me up. With all the climbers on the South Col poised for an ascent the next day, I’m sure my anxiety about this one last stab at Everest played its part as well. I could never be sure I’d be up to the challenge of those last 3,000 feet of climbing, no matter how well I’d trained. Not only did I not want to let myself down, I wanted to succeed for the team.

  We got up to leave our tents at 11:00 p.m. It was colder than usual for mid-May, around minus 30 Fahrenheit when we left camp. I’d hoped that an early departure would once again put us ahead of the mob, but by now other teams had learned the trick. Some climbers from other teams actually got off as early as 8:30.

  I carried two quarts of warm sweetened tea and several energy gels in my pack, along with my camera, sunglasses, and spare mittens. As it turned out, however, I took only one sip of tea all day and ate nothing. Peter Whittaker stayed in the lead of our team the whole way, making frequent radio calls to base camp to report our progress. He was on a kind of manic high, in part because of his failures on his two previous attempts. Now he could feel the summit in his grasp.

  At the bottom of the feature sometimes called the Triangular Face, our team caught up with a massive line of other climbers who were hardly moving. As I later learned, a single Korean was creating the roadblock. At the head of that line, refusing to step aside, he took one excruciatingly slow step after another, as a Sherpa unclipped his ascender from one fixed rope and clipped it to the next one for him.

  The only resort for us was to get off the fixed line and leapfrog past people. In the dark, that was potentially dangerous, but after all, when I’d first climbed Everest in 1990, there were no fixed ropes strung to the summit. All of us were competent mountaineers, so throughout the day, we passed climbers from other teams, including a whole gaggle taking a rest break between the South Summit and the Hillary Step.

  I reached the top at 8:30 a.m., half an hour after Peter. I felt slightly choked up as I radioed news of my own success down to base camp, but it was very cold on top, and with so many other folks hanging around there, the summit was not the transcendent experience I’d tasted in 1990, when I had the highest place on earth to myself. As I later wrote in my diary, “No real time to savor the moment nor even to just take a look around. . . . Just glad to be on top & to have pulled it off.”

  On the way down, nearing the South Col, Peter almost collapsed. The manic fervor of his first triumph on Everest had sapped all his energy, and now he crashed. I stayed just behind him as he stumbled and staggered back to camp, so he could count on me for backup. Still, I was really happy for my friend to have succeeded in a personal challenge that meant so much to him.

  For me, the highlight of May 19, 2009, was calling Paula via sat phone from my tent on the South Col. She was overjoyed, not only because I’d gotten to the top, but because now I was headed down the mountain and back toward home. Both of us knew, though, that I still needed to keep up my guard as I descended the Lhoste Face and Khumbu Icefall one final time. Climbing a mountain has to be a round-trip.

  • • •

  It was inevitable that reaching the summit of Everest for my seventh time would not be a life-changing event of the sort that finally getting up Annapurna had been. According to Alan Arnette, at least 281 men and women climbed the South Col route to the summit in the spring of 2009, and a sizable chunk of them did so on the same day I did, May 19.

  It was gratifying that despite being on the cusp of fifty years old, I had felt as fit and climbed as well as I ever had. I could even take a certain satisfaction in the notion that within our Eddie Bauer team, I was not only the oldest climber, but could pull my weight as well as all of my partners.

  Yet as I descended the mountain during the next several days, I felt a poignancy that surprised me. By the end of 2009, I recently calculated, I’d spent the equivalent of two and a half years on Mount Everest. Except for Mount Rainier, no piece of mountain topography had come to be as familiar to me as Everest. And no terrain anywhere in the world had been the arena for so many profound moments in my life, ranging from the wonderful to the heartbreaking, from getting to the top alone in 1990 to climbing past the bodies of Rob and Scott in 1996.

  As I made my way down Everest, starting on May 20, it was like a farewell journey. I was quite sure that I would never again sleep on the South Col, or traverse the Lhotse Face, or hike across the Western Cwm, or wend my way, heart in throat, through the Khumbu Icefall. That descent was like saying good-bye to an old friend.

  All the way down, however, I stayed vigilant. And only when I got through the icefall for the last time did I give way to full-on celebration. “Yahoo!!” I wrote in my diary. “All done, safe & sound!! Done and going home.”

  In devoting so much of my life to Everest, I had become part of a ninety-year-long pageant of adventure dating back to Mallory. I had joined an elite fraternity. And any brotherhood that contained the likes of George Mallory, Eric Shipton, Sir Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, Reinhold Messner, Doug Scott, Peter Boardman, Krzysztof Wielicki, and Erhard Loretan, among others, was a society to which it was a great honor to belong.

  I learned a lot about life and about myself during my twenty-three-year span of campaigns on Everest. They aren’t the kinds of neatly phrased slogans you can pin up in your kitchen like refrigerator magnets. They’re subtler and harder to put into words. One of them, however, has everything to do with Paula and our four children.

  I went to Everest six times when I was single, five more times after Paula and I met, and four times after we married. The last two of my Everest expeditions came after I’d become a father. The stories are legion of great climbers whose marriages have fallen apart because the mountains were more important to them than the loved one waiting at home. Conversely, there are scores of first-rate mountaineers who, concluding that risk and family were incompatible, gave up serious climbing
after they had children.

  I’m proud to believe that I’ve managed to integrate the two. It was really rough on my kids (and on me) to say good-bye to them as I headed off to the airport for another expedition to an 8,000er. No matter how many times I tried to placate Gil or Ella with the claim that when I was home, I spent more quality time with them than fathers who worked nine-to-five office jobs, they’d dissolve in tears and beg me not to go.

  After Paula and I started having children, it became much more emotionally stressful for me to go on expeditions. Yet once on the mountain, I never let the tug of home undercut my resolve to give the climb my best effort. In the face of weeks of storms, I never opted for the escape route of an early departure. I like to think that in the Himalaya and the Karakoram I climbed as well as I ever could, and that the rest of the year I was a good and loving father.

  All the credit really should go to Paula, Gil, Ella, Anabel, and Nina. As I wrote in my 2009 diary on April 8, “I love & miss Paula & kids already. How could I be so fortunate to have them?”

  The cumulative impact of my experiences on the highest mountain in the world amounts to a fund of memories and achievements that I believe will enrich the rest of my life. In old age, I’d like to be able to say, as Maurice Herzog wrote of the first ascent of Annapurna, that Everest was “a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days.”

  Acknowledgments

  For me to look back and see that Everest was the objective of my first Himalayan expedition in 1987, and that Everest, as of 2009, remains the most recent objective among my thirty-one Himalayan expeditions, strikes me as quite extraordinary. If I’ve truly reached the end of my campaign on 8,000-meter peaks, then I could not ask for a more fitting conclusion than having Mount Everest serve as the bookends of my climbing career on the 8,000ers.