Keeper Of The Mountains

by Bernadette McDonald

  She posed detailed questions to those who supposedly reached their summits in bad visibility. She would ask for details of the terrain and whether there were any particular landmarks, and then wait to see if they volunteered those details. If possible, she would check with other expeditions on the mountain.

  In the end, Elizabeth credited Benoît Chamoux with only 10 of his 13 claims. False claims included Shishapangma, Cho Oyu and Makalu. In her archival mountaineering database, she adjusted her notes to say claims were unsubstantiated if she wasn’t sure. In Chamoux’s case, she thought she understood the problem. He was under pressure from Bull, the computer company, to succeed. To keep the sponsorship, he needed to succeed and succeed and succeed again. She thought the pressure to produce results was too much for him and so he lied.

  She was convinced Chamoux’s death on Kangchenjunga was linked to the 8000-metre race. On the mountain at the same time were the Swiss Erhard Loretan, who was going for his 14th 8000-metre peak, and Sergio Martini, an Italian who was going for his 11th. Loretan climbed Kangchenjunga, efficiently as always, with his frequent climbing partner Jean Troillet. Elizabeth pressed Loretan for details of the climb and tried to learn more about the Chamoux situation. He replied that when he and Troillet reached the bottom of the West Ridge at 4:00 p.m. on their descent, they encountered Chamoux and his partner Bernard Royer moving up. About 30 minutes later, Royer radioed that he was abandoning his summit bid because of fatigue. About an hour after that, at 5:30 p.m., Chamoux also radioed that he was too tired to continue and that he was unable to find his way down the ridge. He stayed that night a few metres above the col and got back on the radio at 8:10 a.m. on October 6. He was seen reaching the col, but then went out of sight on the north side of the mountain. Neither Chamoux nor Royer was seen again. As a footnote, their Sherpas did not try to mount a rescue or even search for the French climbers, because earlier in the expedition the two had done nothing to help one of them when he fell. A few days later, Sergio Martini summited, making it 11 8000ers for him.

  There was much discussion in the mountaineering press about the presence of three world-class mountaineers – all racing for the 8000-metre prize – climbing on Kangchenjunga at the same time. Did they create a dangerously competitive situation on the mountain? An American climber put it bluntly: “It was a fatal challenge for Chamoux. The Swiss were much faster. Loretan is the best.… The French were not well acclimatized. They tried to keep up with the Swiss and they killed themselves.” From her observations, Elizabeth was inclined to agree.

  When Loretan returned to Kathmandu, she asked him how he felt about the accomplishment. He said only, “It is something done.” He told her the 8000-metre goal had not been a burden to him, and therefore, having achieved it, he didn’t feel any great sense of relief. She pressed him more on his dreams for the future, wondering if he would continue to climb in the Himalaya. He responded with other mountaineering projects: ambitious steep climbs, such as the unclimbed West Face of Makalu. She was certain she would see more of Erhard Loretan.

  Although she wasn’t fond of the 8000-metre obsession in general, Elizabeth hesitated to lump all of the aspirants into the same pot. Messner had been the first, and for that reason she thought he stood alone. For him it was an idea – an original idea – and she was convinced he did it for the fulfillment of that idea, not for the glory. She felt Kukuczka took it to another level by doing so many of the climbs in winter. He was a true mountaineer. Loretan she saw as an incredibly talented and efficient climber and a real mountaineer as well. Krzysztof Wielicki was a serious climber and not afraid of winter. But on the topic of Alan Hinkes, she became critical. She was convinced that he was opportunistic, that he timed his climbs so that the other teams on the mountain had already set up the fixed ropes. He would then show up with one Sherpa and off he would go. And Chamoux – she saw him as a tragic figure.

  Elizabeth had a welcome respite from all the peak bagging when she was invited to Tokyo by the first woman to climb Everest, Junko Tabei. It was the 20th anniversary of Tabei’s ascent and she had invited 10 of the 26 living women Everest summiteers to Tokyo for an international symposium and a celebratory climb of Mount Fuji. Among the 10 invitees was the Chinese climber who summited just 11 days after Tabei’s historic climb. Elizabeth declined the Fuji climb, but she joined them in a nearby mountain hut. She was initially confused about why she was invited, and speculated she had been “tacked on as an observer.” In fact, she was invited because of her knowledge of the history of women climbers in Nepal, and so was asked to give a speech after the Everest summiteers had been honoured.

  In her speech, Elizabeth was typically blunt, expressing a certain amount of disappointment. With few exceptions, she felt that women were following in footsteps that had been made by men before them. She pointed out that 31 years had elapsed between the time that the first men came to climb in the Nepalese Himalaya and time that the first woman, Hettie Dyhrenfurth, came and climbed on Kangchenjunga in 1930. Women tended to use standard routes in standard seasons. Not many had been leaders and not many had done all-women expeditions. “They just haven’t progressed a whole lot in terms of coming to the forefront of mountaineering in Nepal,” she said.

  Using example after example, she pointed out that women were not opening new routes or advancing the standards set by men. “Women have yet to prove their ability to lead the way in change and innovation.”

  She wondered if it was because female alpinists were a smaller group from which to draw. She was sure it was not a physical disadvantage, because, as she pointed out, some of the best Himalayan climbers were very small men. Finally, she challenged them to attempt some of the last big Himalayan prizes, such as the Horseshoe Traverse. “Are there women who can find the financing, calculate the logistics and enlist the highly talented climbers needed to accomplish such a feat?” Her standards were high for men – and for women.

  CHAPTER 14

  Living Archive

  I’ve got to go back – Elizabeth says I didn’t really climb it.

  — Anatoli Boukreev

  Having observed the mountaineering scene in Nepal for almost 40 years, Elizabeth was beginning to see developments that disturbed her. First was the increasing number of sloppy (and sometimes incorrect) reports coming out of Nepal regarding expedition successes, failures and, most seriously, fatal accidents. Much of the misinformation emanated from the Internet. One report indicated that five Kazakhs died in a storm when they were actually three Russians. Another report suggested that seven New Zealanders died – yet there weren’t seven New Zealanders among all the climbers on the mountain at the time, and none of them had been involved in an accident. She thought this “instant kind of reporting” was unreliable and sometimes irresponsible. It wasn’t subjected to the rigorous cross-checking for accuracy that she practised. There were apologies and retractions about the errors, but she knew the families of these climbers must have been distressed, and for no reason other than sloppiness.

  She also wondered what kind of impact satellite phones and other forms of instant communication would have on an expedition’s ability to focus. She cautioned a Polish team attempting a difficult winter ascent of Makalu to consider leaving their phones behind. She believed they needed to concentrate on the task at hand, not their families, their kids’ school problems and so on. But ever the journalist, she added, “But don’t forget to call me when you get back to Kathmandu.”

  She saw another disturbing trend with commercial expeditions. As this business became more profitable, it was inevitable that some questionable players would enter the arena. In 1996 the peak fees alone earned the Nepalese government around $1.8-million. Elizabeth was painfully aware of guiding inconsistencies because she heard the stories first-hand. Some commercial guiding companies were highly reputable, providing excellent services, experienced guides, plenty of oxygen and other important equipment. Others did not. Some were outright illegal. One German company accepted payments f
rom 30 to 40 clients for expeditions to Everest, Cho Oyu and Shishapangma, but failed to forward any of that money to Kathmandu agents for their transport to base camp, or to Kathmandu staff to prepare the food and arrange logistics. When the unsuspecting clients arrived in Kathmandu, they were shocked to learn that the agent wouldn’t do anything for them unless they paid him directly – and immediately. The German company was already so indebted to him that he refused to grant any more credit to the company’s clients. Some went home disappointed, while others stayed and paid – a second time.

  But Elizabeth’s most fundamental disappointment was with the climbers themselves. She categorized them as three major types: pioneers who attempted unclimbed mountains or routes, peak baggers who attempted as many 8000-metre peaks as possible, and fee-paying clients and their guides.

  One of the few climbers she placed in her “preferred” category – the pioneers – was the Slovenian Tomaž Humar. In the fall of 1997 Humar had made a brief appearance in Nepal with climbing partner Janez Jeglič to climb an impressive direct line up the previously unattempted West Face of 7855-metre Nuptse. The two completed the route, but only Humar survived the climb. They required three bivouacs on their ascent and climbed with no fixed lines and no fixed camps. Humar reported that the face was wracked with avalanches and falling séracs. Although they climbed together during the ascent, they became separated and summited separately, Jeglič about 15 minutes before Humar. When Humar arrived on the summit, all he saw were his partner’s footprints in the snow leading toward the south side of the mountain. He surmised that Jeglič had gone beyond the summit by mistake and been blown down the South Face by the strong gusting winds. Humar then had the long, complex and dangerous descent to do alone. He explained to Elizabeth: “If you are pushed and you want to survive, everything is possible.” She queried his ambitions to climb such dangerous routes and he explained that steep Himalayan faces roused his mountaineering passion – he couldn’t explain why. As they looked at photographs of other unclimbed faces in the Himalaya, he referred to Nuptse’s West Face as “gorgeous” and talked at length about his dreams of other faces. This was the kind of conversation that Elizabeth loved – reminding her of the old days discussing new routes with Messner and other Himalayan pioneers.

  In the second category – the peak baggers – Elizabeth’s interest was primarily statistical. There were certainly a lot of them to keep track of in 1997. Basque climber Juanito Oiarzabal knocked off his 12th 8000er with Manaslu, and South Korean Park Young-Seok claimed an unprecedented five 8000-metre summits in six months. Two Spanish brothers, Jesús and José Antonio Martinez, set themselves the ambitious goal of climbing all the 8000ers within a year of their first success, all without oxygen or Sherpa support. They were now up to three. Elizabeth grilled them about their plan, asking whether they ever tired from such an ambitious schedule. Antonio replied, “Three days’ stay here in Kathmandu … is enough to recover from a climb.” She asked if they ate anything special to help them succeed. “Aspirin,” he said.

  Italians Sergio Martini and Fausto De Stefani made it to 12 successful 8000-metre summits, if you counted a confusing account of their ascent of Lhotse. At first they told Elizabeth they had summited, but when pressed for details, they clarified they had been so near the top they felt they could rightly claim it, though they weren’t sure just how close they had been because they couldn’t see a thing. Then Young-Seok, who summited three days later, followed the Italians’ crusted footsteps in the snow and said they ended at least 150 vertical metres below the summit.

  When Martini summited Everest in 1999, he called it his 14th. But that included his “almost” summit of Lhotse, which Elizabeth didn’t count. However, he did tell her that he might return and climb Lhotse again.

  Martini allegedly refused to talk to Elizabeth for two years because of her report on Lhotse, but she insisted she used their words in the report, verbatim:

  “We think that we did.”

  “How high did you get?”

  “We think that we got very, very close.”

  “How close?”

  “Maybe 50 metres.”

  So she reported what he had said, rather than stating they had definitely reached the summit. They were unhappy about that, but Martini subsequently went back to Lhotse and summited it, making sure to get pictures. He eventually spoke to her again.

  Also in 1999, Oiarzabal summited Annapurna as his 14th. When Oiarzabal told Elizabeth that he would probably return and do some of the 8000ers again she wryly observed, “It seems to be extremely difficult for climbers to stop climbing.”

  Another 8000-metre man, Alan Hinkes, had a plan of adding a few more 8000ers to his list in short succession, but his strategy was thwarted by a bizarre mishap. While at base camp for Nanga Parbat in 1998, he inhaled the flour coating on the chapati he was eating, causing a violent sneezing fit that injured his back so badly that he was unable to move because of the pain. He was rescued by helicopter and was eventually hospitalized in Britain. Elizabeth found this amusing, as did Hinkes, since he told the story in all of his lectures, to the delight of his audiences.

  And in the third category, the guided clients were just too numerous to talk about, in Elizabeth’s opinion. But one season, guided climbs in particular dominated Elizabeth’s journalistic reports: 1996 and the much-written-about Everest disaster that killed a total of 11 people. She interviewed many of the climbers and came to her own conclusions of what happened and why. She was convinced that the real fault for the disaster lay with the rivalry between the leaders of two commercial expeditions – Rob Hall, a New Zealand guide and owner of Adventure Consultants, and American Scott Fischer, head of Mountain Madness. Fischer was just getting into the business and, in her opinion, was “elbowing his way in.” On the other hand, Hall was a well-established Everest guide who had succeeded in getting his clients to the summit every year except the previous year. He had firm rules for himself and his clients about turning back if they hadn’t reached the South Summit by 1:30 p.m. He had followed his own rules in 1995, and as a result nobody reached the summit but everybody returned home alive. That was not the case in 1996, when four of his team, including Hall, and five more from other expeditions perished on their descent in a terrible storm.

  Elizabeth believed the tension on the mountain was created by two very different styles of leader, each with a huge amount at stake. They were on a collision course, with both teams scheduled to summit on the same day. She described Anatoli Boukreev, Fischer’s talented Russian guide, as being sadly miscast as a guide. In his book The Climb, Boukreev explains that he didn’t see himself as a hand-holding kind of guide but rather as a route-fixer who would go ahead and prepare the way for the clients to follow. Elizabeth thought this strategy might have worked, except that Fischer was sick that summit day and not in a position to do the hand-holding that clearly needed to be done to get all the clients down safely.

  She thought that both Fischer and Hall also likely felt pressure to succeed from organizers of other, less-expensive commercial guide companies, who charged clients around $20,000 rather than their pricier $60,000 fee. Although the cheaper expeditions provided fewer Sherpa helpers, less bottled oxygen and virtually no professional guides, there were occasional success stories and this could have been perceived as a threat.

  Elizabeth knew them both well and she wondered about the adage that familiarity breeds contempt, or at least that familiarity can foster a more blasé attitude about danger. Experienced climbers who later found their bodies on the mountain were surprised that both Hall and Fischer were clad in relatively lightweight clothing. She wondered if their strong track records had led them to be overly confident in their abilities at high altitude.

  Two weeks later another tragedy occurred, with a team from South Africa that claimed Nelson Mandela as its patron. The expedition had been plagued with internal distress from the start. Led by expatriate Briton Ian Woodall, it initially included black South Afr
ican climber Ed February, who resigned from the team along with two others. Woodall refused to comment when Elizabeth questioned him about the incident. Back home in South Africa, the press went wild and built a story around Woodall’s authoritarian leadership style. The three remaining high-altitude climbers – Woodall, Cathy O’Dowd and Bruce Herrod – made it to the summit on May 25. But this is where the real trouble began, because Herrod was slower than the others, perhaps due to his role as a professional photographer. He radioed from the top at 5:00 p.m. but failed to make contact at the scheduled 6:00 p.m. call. His teammates below him in Camp IV did not mount a search for him that night or the next morning. O’Dowd and three Sherpas continued descending, and Woodall waited till mid-afternoon, at which time his bottled oxygen ran out and he too descended. Woodall speculated that Herrod must have fallen somewhere above the South Summit.

  In the wake of all the Everest activity that season, Elizabeth was sickened by the numbers: 11 deaths out of 87 summiteers. She tried to determine the major causes. Certainly high altitude and unpredictable storms were factors. But she wondered about the number of people on the mountain. In the past, the Nepalese authorities had controlled the number of permits on the Nepalese side, but this season, due to pressure from Nepalese citizens earning a living from expeditions, they opened it up: there were no limits. There was congestion at the Hillary Step as a result and delays were a serious problem. This reduced the time available to descend before the weather turned.