Rock, Paper, Fire

by Marni Jackson

  I had never experienced death and injury in such an intimate way. The loss of life was appalling, but I still felt that climbing was intrinsically valuable. I didn’t know how to respond to the expedition members and their families, and I became defensive when questioned about my decisions. Over the following months I struggled to understand the reasons why such a terrible tragedy had occurred. Without the answers I needed, I felt empty. Climbing had been my spiritual and emotional refuge, but now it left me frightened and uncertain.

  That winter I and three partners traversed the three summits of Mount Index in the Cascades. It was a route that had never been climbed in the winter and it was a difficult one, requiring commitment. We were a compatible team with similar experience, fitness, perseverance, and trust in each other—qualities we had lacked on Mount McKinley, with grievous consequences. I came to realize that these qualities kept us safe, strengthened our friendships, and helped us to be successful. Knowing this, I was able to overcome my fear and accept my climbing life with all its joy, hardship, and tragedy.

  Maria Coffey

  SPIRIT FRIENDS

  THE LITTLE black elf was sitting on the wing, facing him. With one hand it was playing with the canard, threatening to pull it in the wrong direction and send the plane into a downward spiral. Don’t worry, it assured Dick Rutan. You’ve already died. You fell asleep and crashed into a mountain. You’re in transition between life and death; this is normal. Relax, go to sleep now, come with me.

  Rutan had been flying for over twenty-four hours, shuttling back and forth over Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada in a tiny experimental plane, trying to set a closed-course distance record. It was his first long-range flight. After working on the plane for most of the night, he had set off at dawn. The plane had no autopilot, so he was required to maintain a state of constant concentration. He had ten more hours to go.

  Part of his brain urged him to lay his head on the control panel, close his eyes, and let the elf take over. Another part ordered him to take control. He wiped his face with a cold rag, he sniffed smelling salts, but the elf remained. And soon he had more company.

  “I saw a spacecraft,” recalls Rutan in our conversation. “It was big and complicated with little grey men looking at me from its windows. When I turned my head to see it better it would pull up and go away. If I looked straight ahead I could see the spacecraft in my peripheral vision, with all its intricate details. There were airplanes as well, dogfighting me from behind, and a big battle going on down on the ground. I could hear beautiful loud organ music. I had no idea what the hell was happening.”

  This occurred in 1979. Has he come up with an explanation since then?

  “I don’t believe in any spiritual crap,” he says bluntly. But his journey, he notes, took exactly the same number of hours as Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 non-stop transatlantic flight, which he describes in his book The Spirit of St. Louis. During that solo flight, Lindbergh was also visited by what he described as “phantoms.”

  “When I’m staring at the instruments,” Lindbergh writes, “during an unearthly age of time, both conscious and asleep, the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences—vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane . . . These phantoms speak with human voices . . . they are friendly, vapour-like shapes without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there . . . I feel no surprise at their coming. . . Without turning my head I see them as clearly as though in my normal field of vision.”

  Lindbergh believed these visions were “emanations from the experience of ages, inhabitants of a universe closed to mortal men.” They spoke to him, helped him with his navigation during the hardest part of the flight, then disappeared.

  It turns out that many explorers and adventurers, pushed to the edge of their limits, have had experiences they find difficult to explain once they return to their ordinary lives. And that such experiences are more common than people—or science—imagine.

  One of the earliest accounts of a spirit friend was penned in the fifth century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus. He wrote that when the Persians invaded Greece, landing at Marathon, an Athenian herald called Pheidippides ran for two days to Sparta, a distance of 150 miles, to request help against the enemy. Near the top of Mount Parthenium he saw an apparition of the god Pan, who told him to remind the Athenians of how he had assisted them in the past, and to ask them why they had forgotten him. This vision spurred Pheidippides to run even faster to reach his destination and deliver Pan’s message.

  Long distance runner Marshall Ulrich has covered a similar distance—135 miles, on the Badwater Ultramarathon across Death Valley and up Mount Whitney, California—thirteen times. He’s run it in daytime temperatures that hit 130°F. His fastest speed, in 1993, was thirty-four hours. During that race, as he neared the top of Mount Whitney, he saw hundreds of green lizards flowing down the path like a river. In 1999, on the second day of the race, he saw a woman rollerblading a hundred feet ahead of him.

  “She was wearing a sparkling silver string bikini,” he told me, “and she was skating her ass off. She kept turning to wave at me—she was gorgeous. I didn’t even blink—I was thinking, I’m liking this! I kept that hallucination going for over ten minutes.”

  His attempts to conjure her up again failed, but two hours later a one-winged 747 airplane pulled up so close to him that he could see passengers waving at him through the portholes.

  Hallucinations and visions are usually attributed to some kind of temporary or permanent neurological malfunctioning. People who suffer seizures within the prefrontal or temporal lobe sometimes report “sensed presences” or flashes of mystical rapture. Medical historians have suggested that religious visionaries such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Joan of Arc, Saint Paul, and Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, suffered from seizures. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky has written about a rare form of temporal lobe epilepsy he suffered from termed “ecstatic epilepsy.” During the last twenty years of his life, he kept detailed records of 102 seizures, describing the ecstatic feeling of being in “full harmony” with himself and the whole world that he experienced a few seconds before each attack. Such ecstasy came at a cost, as his post-fit symptoms, which lasted up to a week, included pains in the head, “nervous laugh and mystical depression.”

  The Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Michael Persinger, head of the Behavioural Neuroscience Program at Laurentian University, has tried to prove the connection between hallucinations and temporal lobe activity. He developed a helmet that shoots electric currents into specific regions of the brain, generating a low-frequency magnetic field and creating micro-seizures. When currents are aimed into the temporal lobes of his research subjects, they sometimes report dreamlike hallucinations and sense a “spectral presence” in the room.

  In his original experiment, conducted under double-blind conditions, forty-eight men and women were subjected to partial sensory deprivation and exposure to weak, complex magnetic fields across the temporal lobes. Subjects who received greater stimulation over the right hemisphere or equal stimulation across both hemispheres reported more frequent incidences of presences, fears, and odd smells than did the subjects who received greater stimulation over the left hemisphere.

  As the left hemisphere of the temporal cortex is, according to Persinger, the seat of our sense of self, he posits that the spectral presence is actually a transient awareness of the right hemispheric equivalent of the left hemispheric sense of self. While such a “transient awareness” is rare in normal life, he believes it might be caused by periods of distress, psychological depression, and certain drug-induced and meditation states. The experience of a presence, he has stated in one scientific article, is “a resident property of the human brain, and may be the fundamental source for phenomena attributed to visitations by gods, spirits, and other ephemeral phenomena.”

  IN 1989, Lou Whittake
r, a veteran North American mountaineer, was leading the first American expedition to climb Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas. At base camp, he told me, he kept getting the feeling that someone was in his tent with him.

  “I’d look around and think, Who’s here? Then I would feel the presence of a Tibetan woman. There were no Tibetan women at base camp. But she was there every night. She was middleaged, and dressed traditionally. It wasn’t a strong image, more a sensation. There was nothing sexual about it. She was a friendly spirit, able to share my concerns. I felt she was communicating, without words, that everything was okay.”

  While he was on the mountain, his wife, Ingrid, was also in the area, leading a trek as far as his base camp. Eager to see him, she persuaded her group to skip the last resting stage of the trek and go straight from 12,000 to 16,000 feet in one day. It was a mistake. By the time they reached the base camp, Ingrid was suffering from altitude sickness. For the next three days she had such an appalling headache that she never left Lou’s tent. But she wasn’t alone there. In the daytime, when Lou was climbing, she was kept company by a Tibetan woman.

  “I always felt this local woman with me,” she recalled to me. “She was wearing a headscarf and a long dress. She was shadowy and two-dimensional, like a silhouette. It was a good presence, very comforting. She would put her hand on my forehead and help me roll over. She was just kind of hovering around and helpful the whole time. She didn’t speak but there was always a feeling of kindness, that this was a good person who was going to take care of me. It was like we were communicating mind to mind, without words. I thought, Oh my God, I’m really sick, I’m hallucinating, I’m losing it, I’ll probably die. I didn’t tell Lou about it; I was in such a lot of pain, we hardly spoke to each other the whole time I was there.”

  Once she managed to stagger down to a lower altitude, her symptoms abated. Two months later, when Lou returned to North America after the expedition, they talked about her visit to base camp. Hesitantly, Ingrid told Lou about the presence in the tent.

  “That’s weird,” he replied. “I had the same feeling. This woman was there with me in the tent for the whole three months.”

  They are both convinced that it wasn’t a hallucination. It was a real presence. Nothing like this has ever happened to them again and they have told few of their friends about it.

  “Most of them would think we were making it up,” says Lou.

  HEARING THE Whittakers’ story, Dr. Pierre Mayer shrugs and says, “Hypnagogic dreams.” Mayer, an expert in respiratory medicine and sleep disorders, has taken part in several mountaineering expeditions to the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas. As director of the Sleep Disorders Investigation Centre and Clinic of Montreal University Hospital, he is conducting research into dreams and hypoxia. At altitude, he explains, it is common for sleep cycles to be irregular and disturbed, something that in Ingrid’s case was compounded by illness. Such disturbances made her and Lou more prone to having hypnagogic dreams, which are often reported as hallucinations, varying from poorly formed shapes to vivid images of people and animals. They happen mostly at the onset of sleep or during periods of relaxed wakefulness. Similar dreams, known as hypnopompic states, occur at sleep offset. Both can be experienced in successive sleep cycles.

  But this doesn’t explain why the couple both sensed the same Tibetan woman. Lou Whittaker has his own theory about the visitation.

  “There is such old history on Kanchenjunga. I think she was a strong spirit that had enough influence to break through our reserves and make us feel that she was there.”

  LIKE LOU AND Ingrid Whittaker, many mountaineers have sensed unexplainable presences in the high mountains. In 1983, the Australian mountaineer Greg Child was high on Broad Peak in Pakistan when his climbing partner, Pete Thexton, became seriously ill. For hours, through darkness and a storm, Child struggled to get Thexton down the mountain. Throughout the ordeal he had the sense of a presence behind him, gently guiding him in the right direction. “I kept turning around, puzzled to find only darkness behind me,” he writes in his book Thin Air. “But there was definitely someone, or something, there.”

  Five years later, the British climber Stephen Venables became the first person to ascend Everest by its Kangshung Face. He was forced to spend a night just below the summit, where he was kept company by an old man. As he began his descent, in an exhausted state, the man encouraged him to keep going. Together they crawled down to the South Summit, where they were joined by Eric Shipton, the long-dead explorer, who helped to warm Venables’s hands.

  According to a close friend of Steve Swenson, from Seattle, during a night he spent close to the summit of Everest in the 1990s, Swenson saw several “disembodied heads.” He was nagged to stay awake until sunrise by the heads of a Japanese woman and a Punjabi man, who then encouraged him to hurry as he broke camp. Finally, a third head gave him directions as he climbed down the mountain.

  During an expedition on Kanchenjunga in 1978, Joe Tasker climbed alone to a snow cave on the mountain, where he sat waiting for the arrival of “an indistinct group of people I imagined were also on the climb with us.” His climbing partners, Doug Scott and Peter Boardman, admitted to the same sensations. After reaching the summit, when they were heading back to the cave, Boardman was at the back of the group, convinced that there were others following him.

  “It was not a thought that needed verification,” writes Joe in his book Savage Arena. “He was simply aware of the presence of someone behind him, just as firmly as he knew we three were in front of him.”

  On Everest, in 1975, Doug Scott sensed a presence that spoke to him and guided him while he was climbing difficult sections. Nick Estcourt, who would dream his death on K2 three years later, had a more dramatic experience. Early one morning, he was moving up the fixed ropes between Camps 4 and 5. When he was about 200 feet above Camp 4, he got a feeling that he was being followed. Turning around, he saw another climber. He assumed it was one of the team, trying to catch up. He stopped and waited. The climber was moving extremely slowly. Estcourt shouted down to him, but got no reply. Eventually he decided to press on. Several times he turned around. The figure was still there.

  “It was definitely a human figure with arms and legs,” he recounted to Chris Bonington, the team leader, who wrote about the incident in his book Everest the Hard Way. “At one stage I can remember seeing him behind a slight undulation in the slope, from the waist upward, as you would expect, with the lower part of his body hidden in the slight dip.”

  After a time, Estcourt turned around to find the slope below him empty. He could see all the way back to Camp 4—it was impossible that the person could have retreated without him knowing. And if he had fallen, he would have seen traces of that as well. When finally he returned to the rest of the team, he quizzed them as to who had been on the rope behind. No one, they told him.

  At the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience in Lausanne, Switzerland, scientists have been studying the link between mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience. They point out that the fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—occurred on mountains, and included such components as feeling a presence, seeing a figure, hearing voices, and seeing lights. These similarities of experience suggest to the scientists that exposure to altitude might affect functions relying on brain areas such as the temporoparietal junction and the prefrontal cortex. Prolonged stays at high altitude, especially when linked to social deprivation, can lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions, which are commonly found during ecstatic experiences. Also, the physical and emotional stresses of climbing at altitude release endorphins, which are known to lower the threshold for temporal lobe epilepsy, which in turn might evoke such experiences.

  In their book High Altitude Medicine and Physiology, British doctors Michael Ward and Jim Milledge reported that tests conducted on climbers during Himalayan expeditions indicate that above 18,000 feet thought function and perception bec
ome increasingly impaired, and above 28,000 feet, hallucinations are common. Dr. Charles Houston, a legendary American mountaineer and the co-discoverer of highaltitude pulmonary edema, told me such hallucinations could be caused by miniature temporal lobe seizures, triggered by fatigue, low blood sugar, personal crisis, or anxiety. They could also be the result of hypoxia, in which there is a diminished supply of oxygen to the brain. By scanning the brains of hospitalized patients suffering from hypoxia due to other causes, scientists have shown neural irregularities, including fluid pockets and swelling of the brain, or edema. When the brain is hypoxic, control of the cortical function is weakened, which impairs the climber’s judgment, but also creates a type of euphoria that makes difficult tasks seem easier. This euphoria is similar to the state of enhanced ability and senses brought about by the flood of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, and adrenaline during high stress.

  Greg Child has a simpler theory. “Going to blow-yourmind high altitude creates a world inside of ourselves. When you’re down here you’re not so tuned into the same things as when you’re up high or in some extreme circumstances, wondering if you’re going to make it through the next few hours.”

  British mountaineer Adrian Burgess, in our interview, put it even more succinctly: “The higher you go, the more weird things get.”

  MOUNTAIN GHOSTS have appeared at lower altitudes. One winter in the late 1960s, Dougal Haston, a Scottish climber, was staying with a friend in an alpine hut in Argentière, near Chamonix, France. They were its only occupants. At around 2:00 A.M. Haston was woken by the sound of someone walking heavily across the floor of the room above them, then clumping down the wooden stairs. The latch to their room rattled. The footsteps went back up the stairs again. Then, silence. Haston believed in ghosts, but didn’t want his companion to think he was crazy, so he said nothing. In the morning, however, his friend asked him if he had heard strange sounds in the night. They decided to search the place but found no trace of anyone having been there.