by Jon Krakauer
Reynolds and the China Explorer made it back to America safe and sound, but without much in the way of proof that Anye Machin was higher than Mt. Everest. To rectify that, in 1949 an explorer named Leonard Clark traveled to the base of Anye Machin with a crude theodolite borrowed from a Chinese highway bureau and measured the peak to be 29,661 feet high. "I believe without question," he insisted upon his return, "that I have found the highest mountain in the world."
Citing the deaths of General Pereira in 1923 and Bill Odom in a plane crash at a Cleveland air show in 1949, Clark also insisted that Anye Machin was "jinxed" by a curse that had brought misfortune to "every explorer, flyer, and adventurer after even briefly sighting this so-called god mountain." A few years later Clark disappeared without a trace while exploring a South American jungle. Clark's measurement of Anye Machin, sadly, did not fare any better than he did: Careful surveys by the Chinese in the 1970s determined the true elevation of the mountain's highest point to be a humdrum 20,610 feet.
So, was Wallerstein's estimation of K2's height in 1986 as suspect as Clark's and Rock's and Reynolds's erroneous estimations of Anye Machin's height? If not, how could a mountain of such unremarkable proportions as Anye Machin be considered a contender for Mt. Everest's title for the better part of five decades, when, until this year, it occurred to nary a soul that K2-a mountain that stands some eight thousand feet higher than Anye Machin-might also be a contender?
The answer to the first question was maybe-but then again, maybe not. Regarding the second question, it should be explained that, unlike Anye Machin, both Everest and K2 (which was named and first triangulated by the British in 1856, the peak's colorless moniker being a surveyor's designation of convenience that happened to stick) had been expertly surveyed and resurveyed so many times that their order of rank had come to be accepted by virtually everybody as immutable.
Measuring mountains, however, is a fiendishly difficult task, one in which there is ample room for errors to be made. As Louis Baume explains in Sivalaya, a compendium of facts about the world's fourteen highest mountains, "The calculation of the heights of Himalayan peaks is a realm of such erudite complexity that not even angels armed with theodolites and plumb-lines would dare to tread therein."
To calculate a mountain's elevation the traditional way, by triangulation, a surveyor first uses a theodolite to "shoot" the angle of the peak's rise from at least two different locations, each of which has a known altitude. After measuring the distance between the two theodolite stations, he knows the dimensions of two angles and one side of a huge imaginary triangle delineated by the mountain's summit and the two stations. After plugging these three numbers into a simple trigonometric formula, then correcting the result to compensate for the curvature of the earth, he knows the height of his mountain.
Ignoring, for the moment, the whole question of how the surveyor knows the height of his theodolite stations in the first place, let us consider some of the thornier problems he has to grapple with in the procedure outlined above. In crunching the numbers to arrive at the peak's height, for example, the surveyor must somehow take into consideration such wild cards as atmospheric refraction and plumb-line deflection. The latter, in the simplest terms, is the tendency for the immense mass of a range like the Himalaya to tug the liquid leveling bubbles in a surveyor's instruments slightly toward the mountains-in the same way that the moon tugs on the tides-and thus throw them out of whack.
The former phenomenon, refraction, is the tendency for light rays-the same light rays that create the image of the mountain in the eyepiece of the theodolite-to bend as they pass through the atmosphere between mountain and surveyor, causing the mountain to appear higher than it really is. The precise amount of this warp is a crucial but slippery variable that hinges on such factors as the temperature and density of every atmospheric layer through which the light has passed.
Between sunrise and noon, for instance, as the atmosphere warms up and its refraction properties shift, the triangulated elevation of a distant peak can easily "shrink" several hundred feet. And the effect of this variable on a surveyor's figures swells exponentially with each additional mile between the surveyor and the mountain. In arriving at an elevation for Everest from stations on the far plains of India, surveyors have had to correct their height calculations by as much as 1,375 feet to compensate for estimated refraction.
All of the head-scratching mentioned thus far, however, is just the final piece of the puzzle. If you haven't first correctly assembled the rest of the puzzle-which gives you the height of your final theodolite stations-shooting your mountain will be a waste of time.
The crux of the problem in determining a mountain's height above sea level is figuring out, as Wallerstein describes it, exactly "where the sea would be if it were lapping at the mountain's base instead of a thousand miles away." The survey stations from which Everest's height was triangulated by the British lay more than a thousand miles from the survey's starting point, at the city of Madras on the southeast coast of India; in the case of K2 the survey stations were more than seventeen hundred miles from Madras. Before either mountain could be measured, the altitude of the final survey stations had to be established by a complex chain made up of thousands of independent triangulations carried link by laborious link across the whole of the Indian subcontinent. That sort of work, says David N. Schramm, former head of the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, "is like building a house of cards. Each level of data is built on the previous one. If one level is off, the deck collapses."
In his 1986 measurement of K2, Professor Wallerstein was able to completely sidestep the elaborate "house of cards," from which all earlier K2 surveyors had made their calculations, by relying on a seventy-five-pound suitcase-size instrument called a Doppler receiver. This particular Doppler receiver was designed to analyze radio waves beamed down by a network of six satellites originally put into orbit by the U.S. Navy as a navigational aid for submarines. By measuring subtle shifts in the "pitch" of these signals as a satellite passes overhead (the same oft-observed Doppler effect that causes the sound of a siren to fall off sharply in pitch when a police car whizzes past) the instrument can determine the latitude, longitude, and altitude of wherever it's been plunked down to a much, much greater degree of accuracy than could ever be determined by even the most careful chain of triangulations from a seacoast: If ten or twelve satellite passes are monitored and averaged out, a Doppler receiver can figure out where on the earth's surface it is to within a spherical meter of its true position.
Accurate though Doppler receivers are, they are also prohibitively expensive (a good one costs upwards of eighty thousand dollars) and in relatively short supply. Since nobody had any reason to suspect that the accepted elevations of Everest and K2 might be way off the mark, the instruments had always been reserved for more demonstrably practical applications-pinpointing mineral reserves, locating downed aircraft-than checking the height of the Himalayan giants. When Wallerstein and Lance Owens came across a used Doppler receiver at a bargain price, however, they decided to take the instrument with them to K2, just for the hell of it.
On June 8, 1986-a clear, crisp day on the Karakoram plateau of southwestern China-Wallerstein erected the antenna of his Doppler receiver on a small knoll at the base of K2, turned it on, and took a fix on his altitude from a satellite speeding by seven hundred miles overhead. Then, by means of that precise base elevation and an ordinary theodolite, Wallerstein triangulated the altitude of several surrounding landmarks that he knew had last been surveyed in 1937 by the British explorer Michael Spender.
Upon returning to Seattle, Wallerstein discovered, much to his surprise, that the elevations Spender had recorded for those landmarks were all about nine hundred feet lower than his. Since Spender had used the summit of K2-which he assumed to be 28,250 feet high-as the sole benchmark from which every other elevation in his survey was derived, Wallerstein concluded that the long-accepted elevation of K2
must also be about nine hundred feet too low: By his calculations, K2 might actually be higher than Everest, maybe by as much as several hundred feet.
Upon arriving at those numbers, Wallerstein-who is a distinguished astronomer and a conscientious scientist, but has little experience as a surveyor-emphasized that, because of the limited nature of his survey, he wasn't saying K2 was higher than Everest, only that it might be. The primary aim of the expedition Wallerstein joined was to climb K2 (the team got to 26,500 feet on the peak's north face before being defeated by the same storms that contributed to the deaths of thirteen people on the other side of the mountain), not measure it, so Wallerstein was obliged to spend the bulk of his time in China hauling loads of food and climbing gear up the lower reaches of the massif. By the time his load-carrying responsibilities were completed, he only had a few days left to conduct his survey.
Furthermore, the solar battery recharger the expedition had counted on to keep the Doppler receiver powered up failed to work. As a consequence, the machine was able to record just one satellite pass before its batteries were drained. Although the thirty-two separate readings the receiver made from that solitary pass were very clear, without subsequent passes their accuracy could not be confirmed.
Despite these shortcomings, and Wallerstein's own caveats about the speculative nature of his upwardly revised measurement of K2, the news that K2 might well be higher than Everest created quite a stir, especially in Italy. Immediately after Outside magazine and The New York Times simultaneously broke the story, Wallerstein was deluged with interview requests from Italian newspapers and television stations. In addition to the Italians, most mountaineers around the world (with the possible exception of those who had climbed Everest) were rooting hard for K2, feeling that because it was both a prettier mountain and a much harder one to climb, K2 deserved to be higher. Throughout the brouhaha, nevertheless, Bradford Washburn-who had played a key role in bursting Anye Machin's bubble-insisted that when the dust cleared Mt. Everest would still be on top. And if not? "Well," the eminent surveyor allowed, "then I think Ed Hillary might be a little shook up."
Within a week of the publication of Wallerstein's findings, several teams announced plans to settle the matter once and for all by resurveying both K2 and Everest using Doppler technology. The first of these expeditions to come back with the goods, ironically, was an Italian team led by Ardito Desio, the same Ardito Desio who led the Italian expedition that had made the first ascent of K2 back in 1954. After taking meticulous satellite readings beneath both Everest and K2-and ignoring what must have been a strong temptation to fudge the numbers in K2's favor-Desio announced his findings on October 6, 1987: Everest, 29,108 feet; K2, 28,268 feet. Hillary and Tenzing, no doubt, breathed a mighty sigh of relief.
SPRING HAS SUPPOSEDLY ARRIVED IN THE FRONT RANGE OF COLOrado, but the sky hangs low and an icy breeze slices through Eldorado Canyon as Adrian Burgess, a thirty-nine-year-old Englishman living in Boulder, muscles his way up the steep red sandstone of a climb called C'est La Vie. One hundred and thirty feet up, he stops at a sloping ledge, secures the rope to a pair of bolts, and belays his three partners, one by one, up to his stance. The last of these climbers is Adrian's identical twin, Alan.
As Alan arrives at the exposed perch, the wind picks up dramatically and a squall commences to dust the belay ledge with snow. Alan eyes the 5.11 microholds that kick off the next pitch, then levels his gaze at Adrian and says, " 'Bout time for the Bustop to be opening, don't you think, Youth?"
The Bustop is a bar that enjoys a great deal of Alan's business whenever he's in Boulder visiting Adrian in between the Himalayan expeditions that have held sway over the twins' lives for the past nine years. Alan favors the Bustop, he says, because it's just up the street from Adrian's home. It probably doesn't hurt that the Bustop offers two beers for a buck during happy hour, and happens to be a topless joint besides.
After an efficient retreat from the walls of Eldorado, the Burgess entourage rolls stylishly up to the entrance of the Bustop in a rusting slab of Detroit iron-Adrian's greatest material asset-to which a bumper sticker has been affixed that reads "A Fool and His Money are Soon Partying." Inside the bar's cavernous, dimly lit chambers, most of the dancers seem to know Alan; several smile warmly and greet him by name as he leads the way to a table overlooking the runway. Our waitress is a woman named Susan who Alan first met in Periche, a high Sherpa village on the trekking route to Mt. Everest. Probably nowhere but in Boulder, it occurs to me, would one encounter strippers who spend their vacations trekking in Nepal.
When we sit down, Adrian appears ill at ease, "It's Lorna," Alan tells me under his breath. "Aid's not supposed to come in 'ere." Lorna, the well-to-do niece of a United States congressman, is Adrian's wife of seven years. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, Alan surreptitiously slips one of the Bustop's distinctive matchbooks into the pockets of Adrian's coat, on the off chance that Loma might someday come across it and demand an explanation. "Want to keep the lad on 'is toes," Alan whispers with a wicked grin.
Fortunately, Adrian is a virtuoso at staying on his toes, and so, for that matter, is Alan. But then, when you're allergic to work, you subsist on charm and the occasional petty scam, and when you spend a sizeable chunk of every year dodging death on the roof of the world, you get in plenty of practice.
The Burgess twins occupy a unique niche in modem alpine society. In a subculture that has come to be dominated by cleanliving, hard-training, high-profile Frenchmen and Germans and Austrians who pose for Alfa Romeo ads and lend their names to lines of chic clothing, the twins remain low-lying pub-crawlers and brawlers, forever staying just one step ahead of the authorities. They are among the last of a breed of working-class British climbers for whom how much one drinks and with whom one fights have always been as important as what mountains one climbs. Although their names mean absolutely nothing to most of the world, within that small, ingrown, multinational fraternity obsessed with finding harder and harder ways up higher and higher mountains, the Burgess boys are luminaries of the brightest magnitude.
Rail thin and tall, with perennially pale skin, long English faces, and dirty blonde Prince Valiant coifs, Adrian and Alan Burgess wouldn't look at all out of place playing rhythm guitar in a midsixties British rock band-the Animals, maybe, or The Who. The twins were born and raised in the working-class village of Holmfirth, at the edge of the vast Yorkshire moors-the same empty, brooding tracts that gave birth to the novels of the Bronte sisters. In the case of the Burgess brothers, their childhood rambles across the moors brought them in contact with rough-and-tumble northern English climbers. These older climbers filled the twins' impressionable young heads with tales of the bold deeds and outrageous acts of Don Whillans, Joe Brown, and other hard-drinking gritstone heroes, irrevocably fixing the course of the Burgess's lives.
The twins took up climbing at the age of fourteen, and immediately began to pursue the sport with a vengeance. At seventeen they went to the Alps for the first time, and were shortly polishing off many of the most fearsome routes in Chamonix and the Dolomites; they had heard their British elders spinning yarns about legendary climbs like Les Droites and the Freney Pillar, and assumed that getting up big-name nordwands by the skin of one's teeth was the norm on the Continent. When they were twentyfour, in 1973, they expanded their alpine horizons by driving overland to India in a beat-up mini van, where they pushed a difficult new route up an 18,000-foot Himalayan peak called Ali Rattna Tibba.
During the early seventies, the Yorkshire lads worked off and on in England's burgeoning outdoor education racket, conducting Outward-Bound-style courses for juvenile delinquents. "They were what you Americans call 'oods in the woods programs," Adrian explains, "only in our case it was 'oods leading the 'oods in the woods."
The twins moved to Canada in the midseventies, where they landed construction jobs in Calgary by presenting themselves as highly skilled carpenters, when in truth all they knew about building was what they had has
tily gleaned from a library book the night before applying for work. It was also in Canada that Alan obtained landed immigrant status, with the attendant rights and benefits, by claiming to be an ace VW mechanic, the skills of which no one else in the city apparently possessed. Work, however, even in the outdoors, proved to be a lot less fun than climbing, so the Burgesses decided it was something they could do without. Aside from a few momentary lapses, the twins proudly point out, neither has held an honest job since 1975.
That was the year they began to wander the globe in earnest, pubbing and brawling in the finest Whillans tradition. They were arrested in four countries, and reprimanded in many more. In Lima, Peru, they precipitated a slug-fest in a bordello after accusing the establishment of false advertising. In Talkeetna, Alaska, the locals are still peeved about the time the Burgesses and six British cronies absconded with thirty cases of beer from the Fairview bar and narrowly escaped going to jail.
In the course of their travels, the twins also bagged route after harrowing route, from Fitzroy to McKinley, Huascaran to the Howser Towers, Les Droites to Logan to the Grandes Jorasses. "Our lives pretty much turned into one long run of trips," Al reflects with an air of incredulity. "There've been so many that it's sometimes 'ard to tell 'em apart."
