The Climb

by Anatoli Boukreev

  *Fastened to the bottoms of a climber’s boots, these devices, ovals of sharpened points fashioned from chrome-molybdenum steel or similar metal, have become standard gear when climbing on snow and ice faces.

  *A belay is a technique of climbing safety that provides for one climber to rely upon another by roping together and having one climber stand by to provide friction on the rope to stop a fall.

  †The point to which a belay rope is attached. It can be a natural rock feature or a manufactured device such as an ice screw, piton, or snow stake.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CLIENTS

  By February 29, 1996, Mountain Madness had been successful in signing up eight climbers. In a personal letter to each of them Fischer said, “This is shaping up to be a great climbing team and I am really psyched. Not only are we a strong bunch, but personalities seem compatible as well.”

  Lene Gammelgaard was still committed to the climb even though her fund-raising efforts, which had continued after Fischer left Denmark, had not yet reached the target of the fee Fischer had asked from her. Eager to have Gammelgaard along, Fischer reassured her, telling her not to worry, that “I want you to come, so we’ll figure it out.”

  Not one of the clients who Mountain Madness had signed on, except for Sandy Hill Pittman, had paid the full asking price of $65,000. Dickinson recalled, “Sandy paid for her father to accompany her on the trek and a lot of other stuff. She paid for extra Sherpas to bring in her gear … other miscellaneous things, so her [cost] ended up … quite a bit higher than sixty-five thousand dollars actually.”

  As for the other six clients, the prices of their tickets varied as much as their qualifications to climb at high altitude. The client list was a mixed bag of talent and experience.

  For Fischer, one of his most satisfying recruits was Pete Schoening of Bothell, Washington. At sixty-eight, if he was successful, Schoening would be the oldest person ever to summit Everest. Lionized in the annals of high-altitude climbing, Pete Schoening was something of a hero to Scott Fischer.

  On August 10, 1953, Schoening and seven other Americans turned around on their summit bid on K2, which at that time had yet to be conquered. They had given up their effort for the most honorable of purposes, an attempt to save the life of a fellow climber who had developed a blood clot in one of his legs, a condition that unless treated was likely to cause his death. During their descent in a driving snowstorm, Schoening was providing a belay to the stricken climber, as five other roped team members below him were making their way down an ice slope. One of the climbers, who was suffering from severely frostbitten hands, lost his balance and fell. One by one, four of the other climbers between him and Schoening were pulled off the mountain. Schoening, his end of the connecting rope tied to his ice ax, which he’d wedged behind a boulder, felt the rope play out over his shoulders. The friction of that play and his skill at anchoring the rope arrested the fall, and the five climbers came to a dangling stop, one of them more than 150 feet below Schoening. It was a textbook save, one of the greatest mountain rescues of all time, and Fischer, who had personally felt the cruelty and danger of K2, had nothing but the highest respect for him. As Fischer characterized him, Schoening was “an incredibly strong, strong person, strong climber … so, I’m really confident in his ability to climb Everest.”

  Joining Pete Schoening on the expedition was his nephew Klev Schoening, thirty-eight, of Seattle, Washington. Klev, not nearly as experienced a climber as his uncle, had never summited an 8,000er. Formerly a nationally ranked downhill ski racer, he was a superb athlete who maintained his conditioning by frequently climbing in the Cascades. A “big, strong young buck” Fischer called him.

  Then there was the Colorado trio: Martin Adams, Charlotte Fox, and Tim Madsen, all of whom had been recruited by Neal Beidleman, the Aspen, Colorado, climber whom Fischer had signed on as a guide. Beidleman, according to Dickinson, was untested and “had not climbed Everest or any real big mountains as a guide before,” so in lieu of a salary, he was “paid” by having his expenses for the climb covered and by offering him a commission on the fees paid by any clients he could recruit.*

  Beidleman was aggressive in his recruiting efforts, Martin Adams remembered, saying that Beidleman pitched the climb to him several times.

  Adams, forty-seven, who had retired after a successful career selling and trading bonds on Wall Street, had climbed some of the classics in the Alps and the Rockies, and had climbed Aconcagua, Mount McKinley, and Kilimanjaro, but he’d never summited an 8,000er. In May 1993, he had attempted Broad Peak, but had turned around at 7,000 meters. In 1994, on the same expedition that Beidleman had made to Makalu with Boukreev, Adams had climbed to 7,400 meters before turning back.

  If he was going to climb Everest, Adams wanted the best advice his money could buy. When he heard that Boukreev was one of the guides with whom Mountain Madness had contracted, he made the decision to go and negotiated a price of $52,000 for his slot. “I like the way Toli operates. He doesn’t bother you… . He tells you something, he tells it straight up… . Hey, Toli is himself … he’s not out there trying to schmooze everybody.” Adams was not looking for a Club Med excursion to the top of a hill. He knew the dangers of high-altitude climbing, and he trusted Boukreev’s judgment and experience. “That’s what I bet on when I mailed in my check. I knew my chances of summiting were infinitely greater with Toli on the team.”

  Charlotte Fox, thirty-eight, an Aspen resident and friend of Beidleman’s, was a highly qualified find for the Mountain Madness expedition. She had summited two 8,000ers in her climbing career and had climbed all fifty-four of the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado. Unassuming and secure, she was a team player, and Fischer regarded her as a true asset, somebody who could perform with a minimum of maintenance. She knew how to take care of herself in the mountains.

  Fox signed on with her friend Tim Madsen, thirty-three, who, like her, was a ski patroller in the Snowmass Ski Area. Madsen, while inexperienced as a high-altitude climber, was in excellent physical condition and had good climbing experience on lower elevation peaks. Realizing that they both needed to be prepared for Everest, Madsen and Fox both committed to training extensively in the Canadian Rockies before taking on the mountain.

  The eighth client on the roster was Dale Kruse, forty-five, a dentist from Craig, Colorado, who had been the first to sign on and had gotten the best price. A good friend of Fischer’s for more than twenty years, Kruse (aka Cruiser) had been the financial fuel that had enabled Fischer’s launch of the Mountain Madness expedition to Everest, according to Karen Dickinson. “Dale Kruse was what you’d call the ‘seed’ client… . He paid all of his money like eighteen months in advance and said, ‘Here, take this cash; go do what it takes.’ And, so, he got a substantial discount, because he was almost like a partner in getting it off the ground.”

  With eight climbers signed on, Fischer and his staff had done a commendable job in their first effort to package a commercial Everest expedition, but Fischer wanted more. In his February 29 letter to his clients, he asked them, “If you know of any eleventh hour candidates, please have him or her call ASAP.”

  Outside’s decision to sign Krakauer with Rob Hall had created an open slot, and Mountain Madness was scrambling to fill the vacancy. A last-minute, full-price sign-on, if they got lucky, could mean an additional $65,000, and that would make a substantial dent in expedition overhead; it might even make the difference, ultimately, in Fischer’s ability to turn a profit. As the departure date for Everest approached, the bills were piling up on Karen Dickinson’s desk. Henry Todd’s oxygen tab alone came to more than $30,000. But neither Fischer nor Dickinson was particularly optimistic. They knew the odds of signing on another customer with less than a month to go before the expedition was improbable; the chances of selling a full-price ticket, ridiculously small. They would do better to take the company’s bank balance and bet that on the next Saturday it would be a sunny day in West Seattle.

  Among the cli
ents there was a general sense that the recruiting had gone well. Adams had been impressed. “The people on this team were as qualified and as strong as the average person on the other two teams with which I had gone to the Himalaya.” And Gammelgaard, with one exception, had been enthusiastic about the job Mountain Madness had done. In fact, she wondered if she could hold her own against most of them. “My first impression: ‘How am I going to deal with this? They are so strong; they are so experienced.’ ”

  The exception to Gammelgaard’s enthusiasm was Dale Kruse, who Gammelgaard thought was a questionable candidate for Everest. “He had been on Fischer’s 1995 expedition to Broad Peak and had failed to make the summit. I knew that Dale couldn’t cope with altitude. He’s a very strong man, but he cannot cope with altitude. He gets sick very early on… . So there was no reason for him, if he had been very honest toward himself, that he should try to attempt to climb a high mountain, because above four thousand meters he just gets sick all the time.” Reflecting on why Fischer accepted him as a client and what she would have done instead, Gammelgaard said, “It was about being Scott Fischer, being a nice guy and giving people what they want and also wanting to have the money… . If it was me, I wouldn’t have taken him… . I would really have taken care of [Dale] and said, ‘You’re not going. I will risk our friendship to save your life.’ ”*

  Some expedition leaders, according to Henry Todd of Himalayan Guides, are not above suspicion for taking on marginal clients, pocketing their money and dreams while all the time strongly suspecting that they didn’t have a prayer of making the top. Considering one of his archrivals on Everest, an American packager of Everest expeditions, he’s said, “That’s his stock-in-trade. He hasn’t had anyone up [Everest] for two years!”

  But, on the subject of Fischer’s decision to accept Kruse’s money and to invite him on the expedition, Todd has been more generous. “What happens is this: you don’t know who’s going to come good and who’s going to go bad. You can get the best climbers not perform, and you can get other people who are very marginal who are just utterly determined and will be successful. I’ve had this happen to me again and again. I’ve taken someone whom I thought, if anyone fails, it will be him, and he’s just waltzed up. And someone whom I’ve taken thinking, ‘Hey, here’s a “cert,” put a tick by his name before we go,’ and he hasn’t done it. This happened … on the trip I was on with Anatoli in 1995. The strongest climber that I had with me … didn’t make it, and someone whom I thought was marginal but okay, he got to the summit before Anatoli.” But Todd adds, “Making those wrong calls, those calls we make before we go, those calls can kill you and other people. You’ve got to make them right. You’ve absolutely got to make them right. You cannot get them wrong!”

  *This is a typical way to allow a novice guide to win his stripes. It is the way Boukreev began his own career as a guide.

  *Fischer, whose personal philosophy was that it was the experience that counted, was more relaxed in his consideration of Kruse. Fischer felt that wherever you got on the mountain was an achievement. The summit wasn’t everything.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE TRAIL TO EVEREST

  On March 13, Boukreev flew from Almaty to Delhi, then connected to Kathmandu, arriving on March 15. For Boukreev, arrival in Kathmandu was a mixed blessing. It inspired grateful emotions as the beginning point of an expedition, but over the years Boukreev had seen the city move from a relatively isolated enclave to a city of a half million people, and with that boom came problems.

  In Kathmandu the air on most days is polluted with a suspension of heavy metals from the exhaust of diesel engines and airborne particles of human waste, which irritate the lungs and can cause respiratory illnesses. Also, a scatter of bacteria are found in some restaurants and market foods that can lead to gastrointestinal problems. Either of these maladies, if a climber falls to them, can seriously impact his or her potential to perform, so for those who come to Nepal to climb Everest, one of the first challenges is to leave Kathmandu healthy.

  Shortly after arriving in Kathmandu, Boukreev met with Henry Todd to arrange delivery of the oxygen he was providing for the Mountain Madness expedition, but to Todd’s chagrin he couldn’t deliver. Several weeks earlier the oxygen had been loaded onto a truck in St. Petersburg, and from there it was to go to Amsterdam to be loaded on a jet that would bring it to Kathmandu. But, according to Todd, “The truck was halted [in Russia] because one of the items in the truck belonging to somebody else, nothing to do with us, did not have the proper customs paper, so rather than take that item out of the container … they left them all together.”

  All Todd knew was the oxygen he’d ordered for Fischer and several other expeditions was likely parked beside the road at some Russian border crossing. He had been promised, he said, that the shipment would proceed any day, someday, but not on a known day. Boukreev was not sympathetic to Todd’s problem. O’s weren’t something you could pick up at the corner store in Kathmandu. The oxygen problem wouldn’t go away. It would get worse.

  Todd reassured Boukreev. He had made a deal and he would deliver. In the worst case, if the oxygen didn’t make it, he would give them his expedition’s supply, which had already arrived in Kathmandu.

  On March 22, Fischer arrived in Kathmandu to meet with Boukreev and P. B. Thapa. Immediately he was hit with the oxygen news, but was reassured by Todd’s promise to make good on the order. Then, Boukreev had to break some more bad news. The high-altitude tent he’d ordered made to his specifications in the Urals was, like the oxygen, still in Russia. It was supposed to have come in on a charter flight that was carrying a Russian expedition to the Himalaya, but the charter had been delayed. The Mountain Madness clients were supposed to arrive in four days!

  That night Scott invited me to dinner, and we were joined by P. B. Thapa and two of the Sherpas that Scott had hired for the expedition, Ngima Kale Sherpa and Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa. Ngima (Neema) was going to be our Base Camp sirdar and would be responsible for porters, kitchen staff, supplies, and general operations. Lopsang had been hired to work as the climbing sirdar and would manage the high-altitude Sherpas who would work and climb with us as we made our bid for the summit.

  Boukreev was pleased with Fischer’s choice of Ngima, a veteran of eight previous expeditions to Everest. Only twenty-six years old, he seemed mature beyond his years, and he had a sense of humor that Boukreev thought would help hold things together when the logistical nightmares that inevitably develop descended upon the expedition. About Lopsang, Boukreev was less certain. Lopsang, twenty-three, had summited with Fischer in his successful 1994 ascent of Everest, and had summited Broad Peak with him in 1995.* It was not Lopsang’s experience at high altitude, but his youthfulness that made Boukreev anxious.

  Henry Todd, commenting on Fischer’s choice of Lopsang, said, “To reach the position of sirdar takes quite a long time and you have to prove yourself again and again, leading as well as climbing… . [Lopsang’s] climbing no one could question. But, his leading, I don’t know.” Todd’s intuition about a young sirdar who hadn’t much leadership experience: “That he’s going to make all sorts of mistakes and could well blow it big time.”

  Over dinner we discussed the outstanding problems of oxygen and the missing high-altitude tent and divided up responsibilities for making sure that all the necessary provisions would get to Base Camp. I needed to buy some extra polypropylene climbing rope. P. B. Thapa was given the responsibility of packing the supplies and getting them to the airport on March 25 when Ngima and I were scheduled to fly with our provisions to Syangboche (3,900 m), where we would connect with porters and yak teams, who would ferry our supplies to the Everest Base Camp.

  Quickly, I was able to do my jobs, and then I had some spare time before I was to depart. I spent most of my days with friends from Russia: Vladamir Bashkirov, a highly regarded alpinist, and Sergei Danilovi, a helicopter pilot who was flying under contract to Asian Airlines. Danilovi is a fun-loving character and a c
hampion pilot. I think his job, flying into the mountains almost every day, is as dangerous as being a high-altitude guide, and I have great admiration for him.

  Boukreev’s time with his Russian friends was a way to stay connected to home and language. For at least two months, at the Everest Base Camp and going up and down the mountain, he would live and work almost exclusively in the company of Americans and Sherpas for whom English would be the lingua franca. He’d been practicing his English fairly religiously for the past two years and had come a long way from his earliest expeditions with Americans and climbers from the U.K., when he had relied almost exclusively on hand signals and the fundamentals of yes and no. Still, subtleties of jokes, gossip, and social conversation were often lost on him. But, as he once told a friend, “I think it is not so necessary that a guide chat good, but that he can climb good.” As the expedition wore on, he would see that precept called into question.

  On the Sunday night before Ngima and I were to leave Kathmandu for Everest, I had dinner with Scott again, and this time we were joined by Lene Gammelgaard, who had flown in from Denmark, arriving a few days before the rest of the clients were due from the States. When we were introduced, she explained we had met before, in the spring of 1991 at the Dhaulagiri Base Camp. Frankly, I did not remember, because in our Base Camp several trekkers from Denmark had come to visit. I didn’t want to offend, so I pretended to remember. Scott, who was listening to our conversation, knew I was not telling her the truth, and he smiled broadly and said to me quietly, “Anatoli, you are amazing.” I think he thought it would be impossible to forget someone as dramatic as Lene.