The Climb

by Anatoli Boukreev

Given my decisions: (1) I was able to return to Camp IV by shortly after 5:00 P.M. (slowed by the advancing storm), gather supplies and oxygen, and by 6:00 P.M. begin my solo effort in the onset of a blizzard to locate straggling climbers; and (2) I was able, finally, to locate lost and huddled climbers, resupply them with oxygen, offer them warming tea, and provide them the physical support and strength necessary to get them to the safety of Camp IV.

  Also, Mr. Krakauer raised a question about my climbing without oxygen and suggested that perhaps my effectiveness was compromised by that decision. In the history of my career, as I have detailed it above, it has been my practice to climb without supplementary oxygen. In my experience it is safer for me, once acclimatized, to climb without oxygen in order to avoid the sudden loss of acclimatization that occurs when supplementary oxygen supplies are depleted.

  My particular physiology, my years of high-altitude climbing, my discipline, the commitment I make to proper acclimatization, and the knowledge I have of my own capacities have always made me comfortable with this choice. And, Scott Fischer was comfortable with that choice as well. He authorized me to climb without supplementary oxygen.

  To this I would add: As a precautionary measure, in the event that some extraordinary demand was placed upon me on summit day, I was carrying one (1) bottle of supplementary oxygen, a mask, and a reductor.* As I was ascending, I was for a while climbing with Neal Beidleman. At 8,500 meters, after monitoring my condition and feeling that it was good, I elected to give my bottle of oxygen to Neal, about whose personal supply I was concerned. Given the power that Neal was able to sustain in his later efforts to bring clients down the mountain, I feel it was the right decision to have made.

  Lastly, Mr. Krakauer raises a question about how I was dressed on summit day, suggesting I was not adequately protected from the elements. A review of summit day photographs will show that I was clothed in the latest, highest-quality high-altitude gear, comparable, if not better, than that worn by the other members of our expedition.

  In closing, I would like to say that since May 10, 1996, Mr. Krakauer and I have had many opportunities to reflect upon our respective experiences and memories. I have considered what might have happened had I not made a rapid descent. My opinion: Given the weather conditions and the lack of visibility that developed, I think it likely I would have died with the client climbers that, in the early hours of May 11,1 was able to find and bring to Camp IV, or I would have had to have left them on the mountain to go for help in Camp IV where, as was in the reality of events that unfolded, there was nobody able or willing to conduct rescue efforts.

  I know Mr. Krakauer, like me, grieves and feels profoundly the loss of our fellow climbers. We both wish that events had unfolded in a very different way. What we can do now is contribute to a clearer understanding of what happened that day on Everest in the hope that the lessons to be learned will reduce the risk for others who, like us, take on the challenge of the mountains. I extend my hand to him and encourage that effort.

  My personal regards,

  Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev

  One of Outside’s senior editors, Brad Wetzler, responded on August 1, saying that the letter was too long to run in their “Letters” section, but offered to edit Boukreev’s response to four hundred words to fit their format. Boukreev declined.

  2 August 1996

  Mr. Brad Wetzler

  Outside

  400 Market Street

  Santa Fe, NM 87501

  Dear Mr. Wetzler:

  In considering your memo of 1 August (attached), asking that I reduce my response to 400 words, I feel much the same way Jon did when he was being besieged by the media. What I have offered in response to Jon’s allegations is not “reducible to sound bites.” It comes to this.

  Jon’s comments about my decision to descend were written when he had on his desk the transcript of an interview where I explained my decision and the fact that Scott Fischer had approved it. This same interview was in the hands of your editorial/fact-checking staff before the September issue went to press. Certainly, Jon is entitled to his own speculations, opinions, and analyses, but I have to wonder, with contrary information at hand, why he didn’t bother to phone me and attempt to clarify matters. My whereabouts were known; he had contact telephone and fax numbers.

  Jon’s comments about the way I was dressed on summit day are clearly invalidated by a simple glance at photographs taken on summit day. I cannot imagine how this became an issue in his mind.

  Jon’s comments about my not using oxygen are equally as confounding. Anyone familiar with my climbing résumé, which I had provided to Jon, would know that it is my habit to climb without oxygen and that I have performed exceptionally without it. Too, as I mentioned in my letter of 31 July, I was authorized to climb without oxygen, because Scott Fischer was comfortable with my climbing history and capacities. I think my work and efforts on 10 and 11 May, 1996 are an endorsement of Scott’s confidence.

  When you consider the comments in their entirety, you wonder. With evidence on his desk that was either contrary to the allegation made or begging of their veracity, why weren’t facts checked, calls made, clarifications sought?

  In writing my letter of 31 July and in responding to your memo of 1 August, I in no way want to suggest that my actions or anyone else’s on the mountain that day are above scrutiny. All of us, I know, have replayed the “what if” scenario a thousand times. What I do take issue with, as I’ve spelled it out, are analyses that have no basis in fact and innuendo.

  If what was at issue here was the matter of a route map improperly drawn or an elevation improperly stated, I could live with the restriction of 400 words. But, more is at stake here, and I respectfully ask you to reconsider and run my letter in its entirety.

  My personal regards,

  Anatoli Boukreev

  On August 2, Wetzler responded, offering again to edit Boukreev’s original letter to help sharpen his “arguments” and to make it “probably” into a “more forceful piece of writing.” This time Wetzler offered a space of 350 words. Boukreev, again, declined.

  5 August 1996

  Mr. Brad Wetzler

  Outside

  400 Market Street

  Santa Fe, NM 87501

  Dear Mr. Wetzler:

  Thank you for your letter of 2 August and your consideration of my request.

  Your offer of an edit is generous, but there is no way in which I could possibly respond to Jon Krakauer in 350 words. The issues here are complex. They involve allegations which have no basis in fact, innuendo, matters of journalistic integrity and professionalism, expression of personal feeling, and my desire to encourage a fact-based analysis of events on Everest.

  To edit my letter for the purposes of being argumentative or more forceful would be to dilute the details and compromise my intentions.

  I appreciate your attention to this matter.

  Anatoli Boukreev

  Nine months later, in April of 1997, Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, an expanded version of his earlier Outside article, appeared. Despite the extensive interviewing he had done after his original article, Krakauer’s stance about Boukreev’s role in the events on Everest had changed little. In the book, however, he quoted Boukreev’s comments from the Wilkinson interview he had been provided in June 1996. “I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour… . It is very cold, naturally, it takes your strength… . My position was that I would not be good if I stood around freezing, waiting. I would be more useful if I returned to Camp Four in order to be able to take oxygen up to the returning climbers or to go up to help them if some became weak during the descent… . If you are immobile at that altitude, you lose strength in the cold, and then you are unable to do anything.”

  Krakauer continues his narrative, saying that for “whatever reason, he raced down ahead of the group.” As he had in his original article, Krakauer led readers to suspect that Boukreev had acted unilaterally, out of concern solely for his own
well-being.

  A comparison of Krakauer’s quote to what Boukreev had said in his interview with Wilkinson (see here) reveals that Krakauer dropped out Boukreev’s explanation for his early descent. “I asked him, with my concerns and in my position, what did he want me to do?—What did he say?—We discussed the need to have support below. We talked about my descent. He said that he considered it a good plan. That everything was good at that moment.”

  Again, Boukreev was surprised at Krakauer’s characterization of his descent, trying to fathom why Krakauer was ignoring the fact that he had not made an independent decision but had taken the action his expedition leader, Scott Fischer, had wanted. Boukreev was even more surprised after hearing about an interview that his coauthor, Weston DeWalt, had conducted in March 1997 with Jane Bromet, Fischer’s publicist at the time of the tragedy and someone with whom Fischer had spoken about the details of expedition planning. The interview had gone in this way:

  BROMET: You know there is something I want to tell you. I don’t know if I should or not, but what happened with Anatoli going back up, that was, you know, one of the cards that got turned over; I mean, that was the plan.

  DEWALT: What do you mean “the plan”?

  BROMET: I mean Scott told me—you know, one of the scenarios—that if there were problems coming down, Anatoli would make a rapid descent and come back up the mountain with oxygen, or whatever.

  DEWALT: You’re telling me that Scott told you this prior to the final assault?

  BROMET: Yes, at Base Camp, yeah, several days before [I left Base Camp].

  DEWALT: Just so I understand. Scott told you if they got into trouble, he would send Anatoli down to prepare to resupply the climbers coming down.

  BROMET: Yes, that’s what he told me.

  DEWALT: When you were interviewed by Jon Krakauer, did you tell him this? Exactly what you told me?

  BROMET: Yes.

  On May 29, 1997, a review of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The highly regarded writer and mountaineer Galen Rowell said of Krakauer’s coverage of Boukreev’s role in the events on Everest:

  “Anatoli Boukreev comes off as an intransigent Russian guide who doesn’t help clients and irresponsibly refuses to use supplementary oxygen. In this telling he emerges from the crisis more as an errant worker finally doing his job than as the mythical hero he would surely have become in a past era. While Mr. Krakauer slept and no other guide, client, or Sherpa could muster the strength and courage to leave camp, Mr. Boukreev made several solo forays into a blizzard in the dark at 26,000 feet to rescue three climbers near death. Time magazine failed to mention him in a three-page news story after a New York socialite implausibly wouldn’t acknowledge that he saved her.

  “Mr. Boukreev is roundly criticized for descending far ahead of clients. Although Mr. Krakauer grants Mr. Boukreev certain strengths, he never paints the big picture of one of the most amazing rescues in mountaineering history performed single-handedly a few hours after climbing Everest without oxygen by a man some describe as the Tiger Woods of Himalayan climbing. Mr. Boukreev has topped many of the world’s highest peaks solo, in less than one day, in winter, and always without oxygen (because of his personal ethic). Having already done Everest twice, he foresaw problems with clients nearing camp, noted five other guides on the peak, and positioned himself to be rested and hydrated enough to respond to an emergency. His heroism was not a fluke.”

  *Boukreev meant here “regulator.”

  AFTERWORD

  Scott Fischer, before departing for his 1996 Everest expedition, said to his office manager, Karen Dickinson, “Who knows what might happen up there?” And now we ask: What did happen up there?

  Of the thirty-three climbers who ascended Mount Everest from its south side on May 10, 1996, only twenty-eight climbers returned. From the Mountain Madness expedition, Scott Fischer lost his life. From Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants expedition, Rob Hall, one of his guides, Andy Harris, and two of his clients, Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba, lost their lives.

  Three of the surviving climbers, Sandy Hill Pittman, Charlotte Fox, and Tim Madsen, narrowly escaped death; two of the survivors, Beck Weathers and Makalu Gau, suffered extensive frostbite and, later, the loss of extremities.

  Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa’s description* of Scott Fischer’s condition in the evening hours of May 10 have strongly suggested that Fischer had been stricken with HACE, high-altitude cerebral edema.* Whether or not Fisher had a pre-existing physical condition which contributed to his deterioration can only be a matter of speculation.

  Fischer died approximately five hundred vertical meters above Camp IV. The heroic efforts of Lopsang, who struggled single handedly for more than five hours to get his friend and mentor down the mountain, have gone virtually unheralded.

  Both Beidleman and Boukreev have wished they’d seen some definitive sign indicating serious distress on Fischer’s part. Both have said that they would have made every attempt to turn him around if they’d had any idea of what was to come. Lopsang, after hearing of Fischer’s death, blamed it entirely upon himself.†

  Some pundits have looked for an explanation for Fischer’s death in his personal history, mining his character as if a cause could be extracted from some flawed vein of his personality. Those explorations have done little more than denigrate a man whose life was no more complex than any of those who were on the mountain, or any of us who have chosen to write about the events of May 10, 1996. The “revelations” have contributed little to an understanding of what happened.

  Fischer’s deteriorating health, complicated apparently by a lack of oxygen, the hour at which he was stricken, his position on the mountain, poor communications, the weather that arose and the conditions and abilities of his team members who could have offered help were, in combination, the factors that led to his death. To cite a specific cause would be to promote an omniscience that only Gods, drunks, politicians, and dramatic writers can claim.

  What is known is that one of the United States’ most promising high-altitude guides died an early death. Several of the Mountain Madness climbers who signed up with Fischer, despite their individual problems with the expedition and how it was run, have said they would have made another climb with Fischer; that it should be remembered that they chose Fischer, it wasn’t Fischer that had chosen them. Martin Adams said, “He was the rodeo king of high-altitude guides; we had our differences, but I trusted him; I would have gone with him again.”

  A year after Fischer’s death, when you called his home and no one was there to answer the phone, you would hear his voice on the answering machine. When asked about this, his wife, Jeannie, said, “The kids like to call our number to hear their father’s voice.” The losses have been immense, and the full measure of the man is greatly missed.

  As for the Mountain Madness clients who were imperiled in their descent and narrowly escaped with their lives, two factors seem to have significantly contributed: their delay in departing the summit and the problems encountered along the route of their descent, most notably the taking of valuable time to offer aid to Yasuko Namba, a Rob Hall client who had faltered on the fixed ropes and collapsed immediately above Camp IV. The time on the summit and the time lost while tending to the problems of Yasuko Namba had cost the Mountain Madness climbers more than an hour. At the bottom of the fixed ropes, at 8,200 meters, Camp IV (less than forty-five minutes away) had been visible for a moment and then the climbers were enveloped by the storm. Had they arrived an hour earlier, the situation could have developed very differently. Martin Adams said, “People mistakenly think it was the storm that caused the problem. It wasn’t the storm that caused the problem; it was the time.”

  As for the deaths of Rob Hall, his guide Andy Harris, and Hall’s two clients, Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba, little light has been shed on their deaths by the surviving members of the Adventure Consultants expedition. Why Hall was on the mountain so late with his client Doug Hansen, who it has b
een reported did not summit until after 4:00 P.M., has been a source of ongoing mystery. Jon Krakauer has speculated that his expedition leader may have been “playing chicken” with Scott Fischer, waiting to see who was “going to blink first and turn around,” but by shortly after 3:00 P.M. Hall was aware that all of Fischer’s clients had made the summit and Fischer was within tagging distance. If it had been a contest for Hall, the winner had been declared well before 4:00 P.M. Others, including members of Hall’s expedition, have speculated that Hall’s encouragement of Hansen to go for the summit had caused him to stretch his turn-around time well into the danger zone.

  What happened to Harris and Hansen, also, can only be matters for speculation. Physical evidence, the discovery of Andy Harris’s ice ax between the Hillary Step and the South Summit by members of the IMAX/IWERKS team that summited on May 23, have caused some to theorize that Harris had stopped his descent, headed back up the mountain to offer assistance to Hall (and perhaps Hansen), and had fallen off the mountain in the same exposed, unroped area where Jon Krakauer on his descent had foundered and Mike Groom had come to his aid.

  As for Doug Hansen, all that is known is that Hall was with him above the Hillary Step, but was not with him when Hall bivouacked at the South Summit and was transmitting messages to his Base Camp. Somewhere between those two points Hansen had vanished.

  The tragedy of Yasuko Namba’s death is, perhaps, the most disturbing of all, but only because the evidence is so compelling that she, perhaps, could have survived. Struggling alone on the fixed ropes just above Camp IV, she had luckily been discovered by Neal Beidleman who, with the assistance of Tim Madsen, had managed to get her to the South Col. There, along with fellow expedition member Beck Weathers, she had huddled in the dogpile as the storm swirled around her. When Mike Groom, an Adventure Consultants guide, made his dash for Camp IV along with Beidelman, Schoening, and Gammelgaard, Namba, like Weathers, hadn’t the strength to follow. Groom, when he found Camp IV, was unable to recruit members of his expedition for a rescue effort.