The Climb

by Anatoli Boukreev

  The Indonesians had succeeded in this man’s determination. This was enough, we were going down!

  I reevaluated my physical resources; I was feeling well. I had no sense of being at the end of my power. I felt I had much left in reserve. Bashkirov and Vinogradski were strong and clear in their thinking. We were still making choices and directing the situation. Our Indonesian team was running on autopilot. We were on the brink of a dangerous situation.

  I took photos of Asmujiono. It was three-thirty, very late. Bashkirov arrived at the summit. Apa returned to the summit. I sent him immediately down to set up the tent at Camp V. We spent only ten minutes at the summit. Vinogradski was approaching the summit, only meters away, and I ordered everyone down. Vinogradski turned and went to Iwan, who was about eighty meters from the summit poles. I reached Misirin, thirty meters from his goal. I knelt beside him, collapsed in the snow. I told Misirin he had achieved the summit. I was amazed to see him stand, collect his power, and begin the descent. We encountered Vinogradski and Iwan descending one hundred meters below the summit. It had been difficult to turn these men around, they had come so far, but now I insisted. Every minute was important. We would compromise our own plan for survival if we did not descend in the light of day.

  We arrived at the South Summit at 5:00 P.M., moving painfully slowly over the old ropes that Apa had pieced together for the traverse. I came last, the members moving slowly ahead of me. Dawa Sherpa was waiting for us at the South Summit. Misirin fell several times descending the South Summit. Each time he would stagger up and continue. Iwan, using Vinogradski’s oxygen, had disconnected himself from the rope and fell at the juncture of the fixed lines. If Vinogradski had not grabbed him and pulled him up onto the rope, he would have fallen more than one hundred meters. Asmujiono, moving well, descended with the Sherpas. I went to the lead of the group, using my headlamp to light the trail in the twilight. At seven-thirty all Indonesian members arrived with me at Camp V. Bashkirov and Vinogradski arrived about one hour later. Only the Indonesians were now using oxygen. I removed crampons from the members, moving them into the tent. The tent, missing two sections of the poles, functioned like a large bivy sack. We had a stove, pots, gas, a Karrimat, and two full bottles of oxygen in the tent. This was not my dream of an emergency camp. Six of us were in the tent. Already the temperature was dropping. Inside the tent it was far more hospitable than outside. No wind, thank God; Everest would be merciful to us that night. Apa wanted to descend with Dawa. I said he could go, that we would have radio contact in the morning.

  Now began what Bashkirov in his diplomatic way describes as a dramatic night. Evgeny Vinogradski showed his true colors. He began immediately upon his arrival at Camp V to brew hot water and kept this up through the long night. Bashkirov and I alternated changing the oxygen mask on the three exhausted Indonesian summiters. We moved the mask between them, stretching the oxygen throughout the night. Left too long without the precious bottle, one would cry or pray. Bashkirov, Vinogradski, and I quietly worked in turns during the night. We made it by working together.*

  The morning came with a splendid display of color, no wind. We emerged from the tent to spectacular views of Lhotse, Makalu, and Kanchenjunga to the east and south, and to the morning sun bathing the summit of Everest in a blinding glory of light. Now, with caution in the descent, we could survive. The tenuous victory of the summit would be a true victory when all our members walked into Base Camp.

  We brewed one last round of water and gave everyone another drink. All members were collected psychologically. No one had frostbite. We were out of oxygen, but the Indonesians’ acclimatization and the long night of weaning off the bottle had softened the bite of dependence. They were moving slowly, but they were moving. We knew Apa and the Sherpas at the South Col would be coming up to meet us. In the glorious light of morning with the world spread out below us, we began our descent. At the pleasure of Sagarmatha† we lived and descended now without injury or the burden of tragedy.

  I now felt secure enough in the stability of the situation to deal with my personal agenda on the mountain. I came to 8,400 meters and began to look for Scott’s body. We had passed by only thirty meters away in the darkness during our ascent. I had searched then but to no avail. I carried a flag inscribed with farewells from Scott’s wife and friends; I was to cover him. I hope Jeannie will know I did the best I could with this mission. I left the flag at the summit, as at that moment I was not sure with the shape of the team members and the task before us that I would be able to find Scott when descending. Now, the worst over, I needed to fulfill my commitment to bury Scott. I found him covered over almost completely by snow. I asked Evgeny to help me with this sad job. We covered him with snow and rocks, and we marked the place with the shaft of an ice ax that we found nearby. This last respect was for a man I feel was the best and brightest expression of the American persona. I think often of his brilliant smile and positive manner. I am a difficult man and I hope to remember him always by living a little more by his example. His flag is flying from the summit.

  Evgeny and I arrived at noon at the South Col. Misirin, Iwan, and Asmujiono had been resupplied with oxygen at the Balcony. Here at the South Col they were convinced they had survived. We had tea and settled in to spend the night.

  The morning of the twenty-eighth I went out across the Col to the edge close to the Kangshung Face where I had left Yasuko Namba in the terrible night last year. I found her partially covered with snow and ice. Her pack was now missing and the contents were scattered in the rocks and ice around her. I collected the small things for her family. Slowly I moved stones to cover her quiet, small body. I left as markers two ice axes I found in the rocks near her body. These small acts of respect are all I could offer her family and Scott’s family in my great sorrow over their loss.

  I think of how ready Iwan, Asmujiono, and Misirin were to die. I think how the families I know who have lost here someone they love are dealing with their sorrow. I know this success will only encourage other inexperienced individuals into the mountains. I wish with all my power there were other opportunities for me to make a living. I am a sportsman, and there are many objectives in the mountains I would like the opportunity to achieve. Like any man who has a skill, I would like to explore the limits of my capability. It is too late for me to find another way to finance my personal objectives; yet, it is with great reservation that I work to bring inexperienced men and women into this world. It is harsh for me to say I will not be called a guide, to make a distinction that will absolve me of that terrible choice between another person’s ambition and his or her life. Each person must bear the responsibility to risk his or her life. This distinction between guide and consultant is one I am sure will be mocked by some, yet it is the only protest I can make about the guarantee of success in these mountains. I can be a coach, an adviser, I will act as a rescue agent. I cannot guarantee success or safety for anyone from the crushing complexity of natural circumstance and physical debility that haunts you at high altitude. I accept that I may die in the mountains.

  Misirin, Asmujiono, Iwan, Apa, Dawa, Bashkirov, Vinogradski, and I descended to the sweet embrace of victory. Many individuals contributed to this success; above all, we were lucky. The Indonesian expedition had an ending that does not burn in my heart.

  *In late October 1996, after climbing Shisha Pangma, Boukreev was offered a ride on a Kazakh climbing team’s bus traveling from Tashkent to his home in Almaty. It is presumed that the driver fell asleep at the wheel while driving late in the night. The bus sideswiped a transport truck, and the left side of the bus upon which Boukreev was sitting was sheared from the frame. The driver lost his left arm, and a young Kazakh climber sitting immediately in front of Boukreev was decapitated.

  *An attempt from the north side was abandoned because of severe weather conditions.

  *Boukreev had discovered the body of Bruce Herrod, a member of the South African Johannesburg Sunday Times Expedition, who had disappeared i
n 1996.

  *Bashkirov and Vinogradski had stopped using oxygen while descending to Camp V. Boukreev stopped using it upon his arrival. During the night, Boukreev had said, “the advisers did not use oxygen… . This was not a problem for us. We were not expending energy. It was not a fiercely cold night; there was no wind.”

  †This is what the Nepalis call Mount Everest.

  POSTSCRIPT

  After their success on Mount Everest, the Indonesian climbers and Boukreev, with the other Russian climbing consultants, returned to Kathmandu for a party of celebration and to conclude expedition business. In mid May, his work with the Indonesians completed, Boukreev and a friend flew again to Lukla to begin a return trek to Everest Base Camp, where Boukreev wanted to look at mountain and weather conditions for a possible Lhotse-Everest traverse: a summit of Lhotse, then a traverse to the summit of Everest.*

  On the trekking trail just outside of Namche Bazaar, where the trail wound down steep hillsides covered with a blanket of rhododendron blossoms to a gorge of the Dudh Kosi, Boukreev encountered Dr. Ingrid Hunt, who had come to the Himalaya to place a bronze memorial plaque in honor of Scott Fischer. Boukreev and Hunt talked briefly, and Dr. Hunt said, tears in her eyes, that she intended never to return to the Himalaya.

  Saying good-bye to Dr. Hunt, Boukreev continued on the trail toward Everest. He looked at every descending climber, hoping to find someone from a Japanese expedition that had abandoned Base Camp and their attempt to climb Everest. Boukreev had in Kathmandu some amulets and personal possessions that he had collected in the vicinity of Yasuko Namba’s body after he had buried her in a cairn of stones. He wanted to send her personal things to her husband in Japan.

  After a night in Pangboche, Boukreev and his friend departed early. Arriving in Gorak Shep about 3:00 P.M., they stopped for tea at a lodge in the growing shadow of the snow-covered pyramid of Pumori. In the courtyard of the lodge a Japanese man appeared, and he was asked if he might know of anyone who could take Yasuko Namba’s possessions back to Tokyo and return them to her family. Understanding the question, the noted Japanese climber Muneo Nukita with whom Boukreev had been speaking motioned to a man standing about fifty yards away. It was Kenichi Namba, the husband of Yasuko Namba, who had come to Nepal with the hope of having his wife’s body recovered from the South Col.

  With Muneo Nukita acting as translator, Boukreev and Kenichi Namba shared a pot of tea and Boukreev tried, in halting, breaking English, to explain what had happened the year before. He apologized, saying repeatedly that he wished he’d been able to do more. As he spoke, tears ran down his cheeks. He said that he’d felt a personal sense of failure around Yasuko’s death, because he’d not brought to her the aid that he’d brought to Charlotte Fox and Sandy Hill Pittman. He’d made assumptions; he’d hoped for help that never came. He was sorry.

  Kenichi Namba listened quietly, intently, and when Boukreev could say no more, Kenichi Namba said in Japanese that he blamed no one, that his wife had been a mountaineer, that her ambition had been to climb Mount Everest and that she had succeeded. He thanked Boukreev for what help he could bring to the other climbers the year before; he thanked him for going where he could not, to cover his wife’s body and spare her the vulnerability of exposure. For two hours longer they talked, and then, in the fading light of the day, Boukreev said good-bye and resumed his trek, to go again to the mountain.

  *The Lhotse-Everest traverse, which Boukreev wanted to attempt with Simone Moro of Italy, was aborted on May 26 after Boukreev and Moro had summited Lhotse along with eight members of a Russian team that included Vladimir Bashkirov. Bashkirov, a close personal friend who had been an adviser on the Boukreev-led Indonesian National Everest Expedition (1997), climbed without supplementary oxygen. After reaching the summit, Bashkirov collapsed, a victim of altitude sickness. Boukreev radioed the Russians’ highest camp and asked them to bring oxygen up the mountain. Immediately, two Russians headed to the summit with emergency O’s, but they arrived too late. Vladimir Bashkirov died on Lhotse.

  IN MEMORY

  Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits.

  ANATOLI BOUKREEV, 1997

  Inscription written into The Climb for Ervand Ilinski, Coach, Army Sports Club, Almaty, Kazakhstan

  On December 6, 1997, Anatoli Boukreev was honored as a recipient of the American Alpine Club’s David A. Sowles Memorial Award. This award, one of the most prestigious that can be bestowed upon a mountaineer, is given only to climbers who have “distinguished themselves, with unselfish devotion, at personal risk, or at sacrifice of a major objective, in going to the assistance of fellow climbers.” In Boukreev’s case, the award was extended by unanimous decision of the award’s granting committee, for Anatoli’s “repeated, extraordinary efforts in searching for, then saving, the lives of three exhausted teammates trapped by a storm on the South Col of Mount Everest” and additionally for his “valiant attempt, at great personal risk, in going out into the renewed storm in one last-ditch effort to save his friend and expedition leader Scott Fischer.”

  The award was granted at the American Alpine Club’s annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, and its announcement was met with sustained applause. Boukreev’s peers, experienced and qualified high-altitude mountaineers, had for more than a year considered the circumstances of the May 10, 1996, Mount Everest tragedy and recognized Anatoli for his heroism.

  Boukreev, who had departed the United States for Nepal a few weeks before the award presentation, asked that a brief note be read to the gathered audience of more than four hundred. In characteristic understatement, Boukreev offered a modest thanks: “I feel like the American Alpine Club has gone to great effort to understand a man from another culture.”

  Boukreev had gone to Nepal to rendezvous with Simone Moro, thirty, of Bergamo, Italy, one of that country’s most respected high-altitude mountaineers. They were planning a winter ascent of Annapurna I (8,078 meters) by way of the South Face. Moro said that Anatoli was in good form when he arrived in Kathmandu, happy to be back in the Himalaya. Indeed, it was in the mountains that Anatoli was most at home, most himself. A few months prior to the Annapurna expedition he had responded to a Kazakh reporter who asked if he was ever afraid in the mountains, “Honestly, I do not experience fear in the mountains. On the contrary … I feel my shoulders straightening, squaring, like the birds as they straighten their wings. I enjoy the freedom and the altitude. It is only when I return to life below that I feel the world’s weight on my shoulders.”

  Helicoptering on December 1 to the Annapurna Base Camp, Boukreev, Moro, and Dimitri Sobolev, a Kazakh cinematographer who was going to document the expedition, were cautiously optimistic about the expedition’s chances for success. A heavy load of unconsolidated snow caused them to alter the planned assault route, but they were encouraged by the prospect of improving weather.

  For three weeks, often breaking trail through chest-deep snow, Boukreev, Moro, and Sobolev labored to establish their Camp I at 5,200 meters. From there, it had been decided, they would fix ropes to the top of a ridge at just over 6,000 meters. Along that ridge they planned to traverse to the summit. It was a longer, more arduous route than the one they had originally chosen, but the thought was that they could reduce their exposure to the threat of avalanche by minimizing their time on Annapurna’s slopes.

  On December 25, 1997, Christmas Day, Boukreev, Moro, and Sobolev awoke at Camp I with the first light of the rising sun. Moro said that Anatoli was relaxed, telling jokes, and in high spirits. Throughout the morning the climbers fixed ropes, moving toward the ridgeline above them. At 12:27 P.M., Moro was at 5,950 meters. Below him Boukreev and Sobolev were advancing up a gully or couloir, Boukreev with a coil of rope over his shoulder, the rope with which they were going to fix the last fifty yards of the route to the ridge top.

  Moro, just
coming to a full standing position after bending to his rucksack, heard a loud, explosive sound and looked over his shoulder to see a house-sized block of ice coming toward him. A cornice, not visible from the climbing route below, had torn loose from the ridge above. In the three seconds before the leading edge of the avalanche hit him, Moro had only the time to look down the couloir and yell one word, “Anatoli!”

  Boukreev, who was at approximately 5,650 meters, and Sobolev, who was just below him, looked toward the cry of warning and saw a wall of ice and snow cascading down. Moro said that Anatoli caught his eye, and in a calm, quick maneuver began to sidestep up the sloping walls of the gully in which he and Sobolev had been climbing.

  Moro was swept down the mountain by the freight-train force of the avalanche, and it spewed him out just above the expedition’s Camp I tent. Knocked unconscious, Simone was half-buried as the mass of the avalanche settled in a quaking shudder. When he came around several minutes later, Moro struggled to his feet and called for about twenty minutes into the avalanche debris field, but there was no response from either Anatoli or Dimitri.

  The palms of his hands shredded down to the tendons by the friction from the fixed ropes, Simone went into the Camp I tent to get a new pair of gloves, and then he began a torturously painful six-hour trek to the Annapurna Base Camp. Mercifully, a Sherpa who had been given the option to abandon the camp had remained behind. A helicopter was summoned, and Simone was flown to Kathmandu for medical attention. Before going into surgery he made a phone call to the United States.