Seven Summits

by Dick Bass; Frank Wells; Rick Ridgeway

  “In that case, I’m going to cache my load right here,” Dick said.

  “What do you have in that pack, anyway?”

  “Why heck, I got the Bud for our summit movie and celebration.”

  Back at Camp Berlin Emmett announced he'd had his shot at the summit and was returning home.

  “I’m feeling guilty with my wife only a few weeks from popping. And guilt is not something I usually subscribe to.”

  Neptune volunteered to go down with Emmett as far as base camp and come back with our ropes. He estimated he could easily get to base before nightfall, rest there, and since he would have a light pack, make it back to Berlin the following day. That would give the rest of us an extra day to acclimatize before again attempting the summit.

  With Neptune and Emmett gone some of the conviviality left with them and we weren't quite the same merry band of storytellers.

  “Feel better today?” Frank asked me.

  “Much. It's amazing what one extra day of acclimatization can do.”

  “I just had an idea then. What if you and I were to climb up to Camp Independencia this afternoon. Then tomorrow when the others head for the summit, they could pick us up on the way. It would decrease the distance I have to climb on the summit day, and maybe increase my chances.”

  It sounded like a good idea so after lunch we set out, arriving at the A-frame with plenty of light to pitch our tent behind the ruined hut and begin the long job of melting snow. Frank was very tired, but I insisted he drink some hot soup, which perked him up a little. Back at Camp Berlin Neptune arrived just before sunset, having made it from base camp to Berlin in one day, a vertical gain of over one mile.

  That night the sky was again jeweled with high-altitude stars and in the early predawn I started the stove to begin the brews. As planned, the lower team arrived at 7:30, and while they rested I served up a round of finger-thawing, as well as belly-warming, cocoa. Chouinard said he was still suffering a headache, but the rest were strong and we again completed the upward traverse to the opening of the Canaleta. This time we were prepared. Strapping crampons and tying with ropes into two teams we entered the gully.

  In an unspoken arrangement I tied Frank on the end of my rope, and Neptune tied Dick on his. Chouinard and Marts, both comfortable without a rope, climbed on their own; this also allowed Marts the freedom to get the best camera angles.

  Climbing a little faster, the others moved ahead while Frank and I set our own pace. I climbed up hard snow the length of the rope, found a place to anchor next to the rock that bordered the gully, and belayed the rope as Frank climbed. Frank was slow but steady, and when he reached the belay I again led the rope length while he rested.

  An hour passed. Frank looked up to see Neptune and Dick several hundred feet higher, on the ridge that lead to the summit. Neptune's bright yellow parka was vivid against the cobalt sky. Frank knew he still had a long way, and lowering his head, returned to the task. He wasn't certain he could make it, but he kept telling himself to go at an even pace, to put one foot forward, balance, breathe five, six, seven times, then move the next foot. He could see I had stopped at the base of a large sweep of boulders, and was coiling the rope.

  “We're off the snow from here,” I said. “We'll leave the rope.”

  “How much further?”

  “The others have disappeared over the ridge. I think they're on top. We should get there in an hour, I’d guess.”

  I led up the slope, balancing one rock to the next, waiting when Frank lagged. Soon we could see a figure in a maroon parka coming down. It was Chouinard. Had he turned back?

  “You two better get up there,” Chouinard shouted when he was a little closer. “They're waiting for you.”

  “You made it?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve still got a terrible headache so I’m going down instead of waiting.”

  The altitude was now nearly 23,000 feet, and Frank could feel with each step the weight of his boots. I was just ahead, zigzagging between rocks. Frank picked out a rock thirty feet ahead, and started working toward it, as though it were the only goal that existed. When he reached it he breathed several times, then looked for another higher rock and drummed up the resolve to make it to this next goal. He wasn't sure he could keep going. He recalled what Dick had said about his climb the year before, how he had climbed several times toward what he thought was the summit only to discover it was a false crest. Frank now wondered if he had it in him to go from one false summit to the next.

  Clouded in the amnesia of high altitude, Frank was forgetting that Dick had been on the other side of the mountain, that this side might be different. He glanced up and saw me going over the edge of the ridge, with only sky behind. He lowered his head again, hunched his shoulders and took another step, trying to set his mind to the long task ahead. He made three more steps, breathed several times, and glanced up.

  Who was that? Was it Dick, looking over the edge? And what was that next to him? An aluminum cross?

  “Get your bod up here, Pancho,” Dick yelled. “We're freezing our buns off waiting!”

  Frank leaned on his axe, breathing hard. When he thought he could speak he said, “You mean this is it?”

  “Five more steps, Frank.”

  One, two, three … rest, a few more breaths … four, five. Dick grabbed him in a tight bear hug, and Frank slumped down onto the ground.

  “Got to sit here. Just for a minute.”

  Frank sat next to the cross, breathing hard. After a few seconds he looked at Dick and holding his hands over his ears as though he were afraid his head might explode exclaimed, “You mean I made it? I mean, I made it!”

  “I’m telling you, Pancho, this is the beginning of a streak. We're going to knock ‘em all off. Where's Marts, anyway? Steve, get over here with that camera and turn it on. This is history.”

  With the camera going Dick reached in his pack and pulled out the sixpack of Budweiser. When Frank had sufficiently regained his breath Dick looked at him with a wide Texas grin and said, “Frank, this Bud's for you!” and popped the top. Nothing. “Keep the camera rolling,” Dick said as he reached for another can. He popped it, and—nothing. All six cans were frozen solid.

  “So much for the Bud idea,” Dick laughed. “You got any other sponsors you're working on?”

  Arm-in-arm they gazed around the points of the compass to the sea of snow summits extending north and south along the crest of the Andes. Every peak was below them, and not just those they could see, but those beyond as well. For at that moment, Frank Wells and Dick Bass were the two highest men standing on any point of land in the western hemisphere of the world.

  “I told you all I needed was a little practice,” Frank said.

  “One down and six to go,” Dick rejoined, and then he let out his Tarzan call.

  “Aah-eah-eaahhh.”

  7

  EVEREST ‘83: THE ICEFALL

  During the one year it would take to complete the Seven Summits odyssey Frank felt there would be two times when he would be, without doubt, sticking his neck out. Most of the climbs were not that dangerous. He shouldn't have any trouble on McKinley, for example. Kilimanjaro would be just a walk-up, as would Elbrus (Frank's earlier problems notwithstanding). Kosciusko was a walk in the park. The climbing on Vinson, too, should be relatively straightforward, based on reports of the first ascent party. But while the mountain itself might not pose any extraordinary hazard, getting there was another matter, and of the two things Frank feared, one was flying over 1,500 desolate miles of Antarctic ocean and ice in a 1942 DC-3.

  The other was climbing through the notorious Khumbu Icefall on the south side of Everest. All the slopes of Everest would require vigilance, of course, since any climbing above 26,000 feet—8,000 meters, the so-called death zone—was hazardous simply because it's so easy to make mistakes when your brain is muddled from lack of oxygen. But that didn't bother Frank nearly as much as this other hazard he would face lower on the mountain, at the very
beginning of the climb.

  The Khumbu Icefall is a jumble of huge ice blocks, called seracs, which are formed when a glacier passes, during its inexorable downward march, over steep underlying bedrock. This causes the ice to split and fracture into these seracs that then sometimes shift or collapse, usually without warning. On the Khumbu Icefall, pressure occasionally builds over a large area, and sections an acre or more in size will slip, sending the seracs pell-mell. Anyone luckless enough to be in the Icefall when that happens will almost certainly be crushed, and Frank knew that of the people who have been killed attempting Everest from the south, most died in the Icefall.

  Sometimes Frank wished he shared Dick's seemingly cavalier attitude about things like the Icefall. Dick in general seemed to approach uncertainties with a congenital optimism, a belief that when it came to big-ticket items like whether you live or die through the Icefall you were in the hands of your maker anyway, so it made no sense to worry. But that wasn't to say Dick was predisposed to cast his fate heedlessly to the elements. They both realized the risk in the Icefall was proportionate to the number of times a climber passed through it, and before leaving for Everest both of them promised their wives they would make the roundtrip only once.

  The job of fixing a route through the maze of ice blocks was left to the other climbers, who didn't mind the arrangement, since neither Frank nor Dick would be of much use in the Icefall, as they lacked the necessary skills to rig ladders over the myriad crevasses and ropes around the labyrinth of seracs.

  The Khumbu Icefall is unique in mountaineering as the only place that requires extensive use of aluminum ladder sections to span the dozens of crevasses. It wouldn't be necessary to rig the ladders if a team only had to go through once (although it would take longer, it would be possible to climb down, over or around the crevasses without ladders), but since the Sherpas had to make so many carries of food, fuel, oxygen, and equipment up and back, the ladders were essential. So along with the basic logistics—ten tons in all—there were added 40 eight-foot ladder sections.

  As climbing leader, Phil Ershler had done a yeoman's job overseeing preparations, and after Frank and Dick returned from Aconcagua, the only tasks remaining were to arrange shipping to Nepal and to see if any sponsors could be found interested in backing the Seven Summits. The Budweiser deal had fizzled when the marketing people pooh-poohed the idea, so Frank sent a query letter to ABC Sports, which he knew was interested in the possibility of covering an Everest climb.

  For the previous year, ABC’s American Sportsman series, headed by producer John Wilcox, had been working with a high-octane group of American mountaineers who proposed to climb Everest's West Ridge from the Tibet side, and the network had in mind a videotape coverage of the climb that would climax with a live transmission to North America, via microwave and satellite uplink, direct from the summit. Frank knew the expedition planned to be on Everest the same time his party would be (but on the opposite side), and he also knew ABC was having trouble obtaining from the Chinese permission to install an earth station in Tibet for the satellite uplink. Frank didn't want to do anything to jeopardize the other expedition's chances of securing sponsorship from ABC, but when he learned the deal was being dropped by the Chinese, Frank sent a proposal to the ABC producer that they cover the Seven Summits expedition rather than abandon the whole idea.

  ABC already had a considerable investment in research and planning and rather than dump the money they accepted Frank's proposal. In exchange for rights to videotape the climb, ABC would partially underwrite the expedition. ABC explained that because time was now short they would not be able to install the several microwave relays necessary to get one hundred percent live coverage from the top of Everest to the satellite earth station they would install in Katmandu, so instead they proposed to have one of the team carry to the summit a small video camera and a two-pound microwave transmitter, and beam a signal to a receiving dish twenty miles away where it would be recorded, helicoptered to Katmandu, then beamed to New York. Not quite live, but as a live signal would arrive in New York at about 2:00 in the morning anyway, a few hours delay would probably increase the ratings.

  Frank and Dick were delighted, and the other climbers approved although some voiced concern it might be a burdensome intrusion to have the extra television people. ABC assured them that they would send only experienced climbers. For the last six years I had worked on several mountain climbing shows for ABC, and I had been discussing for some time the possibility of working on the Everest show. When the coverage moved to Frank and Dick's expedition, I was offered the position of field producer and also on-air commentator, filing reports and on-location interviews. With the addition of two cameramen, David Breashears and Peter Pilafian, the crew was complete, and as there were only three of us and we were all experienced climbers whom many of the climbing team already knew, there was agreement among the expedition members to accept the TV sponsorship.

  ABC next designed a production strategy. Steve Marts would still film the climb for Frank and Dick's Seven Summits documentary, but would also help when he could with the ABC coverage. Breashears, as high altitude cameraman, would go in with the team to tape the trek to base camp, rigging of the Icefall, and perhaps push to camp 2. Pilafian and I would go in later, when the bulk of the coverage would commence. In addition to us, there would be many more personnel both at the receiving station twenty miles from Everest and at the satellite uplink in Katmandu, including a team of Panasonic engineers, who were supplying camera and video recording equipment. Executive producer John Wilcox would shuttle between the receiving dish field location and the Katmandu nerve center. ABC’s sport commentator Bob Beattie would be in Katmandu filing overview commentary, and in my final meeting with ABC I was instructed to end my reports with the line: “And now back to Bob Beattie in Katmandu …”

  The day before departure Frank packed his gear himself, a new level of competence that greatly impressed Luanne. But Luanne wasn't the only one who noticed a change in Frank. At the Seattle airport, where Frank met with the rest of the team, Jim Wickwire had come to send them off, and noting that Frank was wearing cord pants and Nikes instead of Ralph Lauren slacks and Gucci shoes said, “Wells, you're even starting to look like a climber.”

  Dick was the only one missing (he would fly over a few days late because of last-minute business with Snowbird), so Frank handled the necessary chores in Katmandu, the bulk of which involved working with Gerhard Lenser, who was already there, to secure the final permits from the Nepalese for the ABC shoot.

  As the team approached Katmandu they could see out the starboard side of the plane the great rampart of the Himalaya rising suddenly like a stupendous dam holding the Tibetan Plateau from spilling across the Gangetic Plain. To the east was what looked at first glance to be a great billowing cumulonimbus but closer scrutiny revealed to be the ridges and ice walls of the singular Kanchenjunga Massif, the third highest peak in the world. Moving their eyes back along the crest of the range they could see nestled among other high peaks a dark pyramidal summit that was the only one with a long snowplume banner tailing from its peak: only Everest punctured the jetstream.

  Frank was about to land in a Marco Polo city plucked from the thirteenth century and set into the twentieth, a place with a thin skin of modernity over a body of timeless Hindu and Buddhist ritual. Katmandu had cars, but if your car happened to hit any of the hundreds of sacred cows that wandered the streets you were certain to go to jail (and the only way out was to prove to the court that the cow had intended to commit suicide). It was a city with an airport serviced by the latest jet aircraft, but they were planes that each year in a solemn ceremony were smeared with the blood of a goat or chicken sacrificed for the well-being of the plane and those who rode in it. It was a city where on Friday you could pick up a phone at your room in the Sheraton and get a satellite connection to New York, then on Saturday catch a taxi to the river to watch the weekly animal sacrifices at the Hindu temple. It was
also a city, as Frank was about to learn, with a bureaucracy as byzantine as its medieval character.

  Lenser had been in Katmandu for about a week and as far as Frank could determine, if he had accomplished anything it was to reverse whatever progress Frank felt he and Dick had made from the States toward expediting the expedition's passage through officialdom and onto the mountain. Frank once again felt his patience wear thin, but he knew the best policy was to restrain himself and wait for Dick.

  When Dick arrived, Frank brought him up to date. “Gerhard says things are complicated because we need permits from all these different ministries for the satellite broadcast. We had things going pretty well until a couple of days ago when one of our guys was down at the airport trying to spring some gear out of customs and to speed things along signed some form with Gerhard's name, knowing Gerhard would approve it anyway. But when Gerhard found out he flipped, and then went around and told all the Nepalese what happened. So now the Nepalese are going crazy.”

  “That's because they think we're not taking them seriously,” Dick said. “It's a matter of pride.”

  “They're already confused,” Frank continued, “about us being the German Everest Expedition, aka the Seven Summits, with one German leader and twelve Americans who now want to import a twenty-thousand pound earth station to stick on top of the Sheraton. Worse, someone told ABC the way to do it is through diplomatic channels so they had the State Department contact the Nepalese foreign ministry and now the mountaineering ministry is up in arms because they think we're trying to go around them, and so Gerhard is saying ten times a day, ‘See, you need me to take care of all this, to get your permit.’ “

  “Well that explains it then.”

  “Explains what?” Frank asked.

  “It's a question of money. Gerhard probably wants it for his German Himalayan foundation.”