Liesl wrote a clear play-by-play of monitoring our progress by radio and telescope from Base Camp. She reported my cryptic message, “Let’s get together for Snickers and tea,” and my call right after that for a “mandatory group meeting.” Then she wrote, “This was the last we heard from the climbers for the day.”
Liesl knew we’d made some kind of discovery. In her dispatch, she speculated out loud:
It became clear that what seemed like a normal series of radio calls was actually a signal that something was up. From his telescope, Hemmleb could see the five climbers coming together on the bottom edge of the snow terrace where Anker stood. Was “Snickers and tea” a code for something found? We are very aware of other expeditions listening in on our frequency, and had previously agreed that if the body were found we would keep the radio transmissions to a minimum. This “mandatory group meeting” which sent [Andy] Politz some 330 feet down from his search position could only mean that Anker had found something. But what?
At the end of that day, when we’d reached Camp V, we got on the radio, just to let Simo know that everybody was safe and sound. We kept mum about Mallory, but Dave couldn’t resist sneaking in, “Jochen, you are going to be a happy man.”
Liesl closed her dispatch with that provocative teaser. She sent it off, and PBS/NOVA must have gotten it up on the Internet late on May 1, U.S. time. The dispatch proved indeed to be a bombshell. Meanwhile, between April 29 and May 2, the MountainZone site had no dispatches at all. Dave, of course, was busy with the search, and once Simo learned about our discovery, he wanted to decide how best to break the news to the world.
When Simo found out from Erin that NOVA had scooped MountainZone, he was furious. It wasn’t simply that he was the chief reporter for MountainZone; Simo had entered into an exclusive agreement with the company and felt betrayed. The only private way to communicate with Liesl, across the thirteen miles from ABC to Base Camp, was by e-mail. So on May 2, Simo sent her a really frosty e-mail message. After reprimanding her for “cybercasting (as opposed to running an educational Web site, as you professed),” he made this threat: “I am forced to take action in this matter and have no choice but to ask that you either cease cybercasting, or that you will have to leave the expedition.”
Liesl was really shaken up. When I got down to Base Camp, she confided in me, “What did I do to deserve this?” Later, Simo complained that MountainZone and NOVA had an explicit agreement that NOVA would observe a twenty-four-hour moratorium on all news, to give MountainZone the first crack at anything spectacular. But Peter Potterfield and Simonson both subsequently clarified that the twenty-four-hour moratorium came out of this blowup: before May 2, there was no such agreement. In sum, Liesl simply did what any good reporter would do with breakthrough news.
I first met Simo on Denali (Mount McKinley) in 1989, when we were on the mountain on separate expeditions. He was guiding clients, while I was collecting granite rocks for a geological profile of the mountain. Simo’s big, tall, forty-four years old, with dark hair and eyes, a strong mountaineer who’s become a full-time guide. He learned his trade on Rainier under Lou Whittaker, whose RMI (Rainier Mountaineering, Incorporated) was for years the only guide service on the mountain. A few years ago, Eric broke away to form IMG (International Mountain Guides), of which he’s now co-owner. IMG is ambitious; they guide Kilimanjaro and Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica, as well as Cho Oyu, Shisha Pangma, and Everest in the Himalaya. The other guys on our climbing team had worked with Eric either at IMG or RMI.
Simo climbed Everest in 1991 via the north side, on his third expedition to the mountain. He’s paid his dues in the high-stakes game of high-altitude climbing. This year he was not as driven to go high as the other guys. Instead he used his energy to manage the expedition.
Simo’s absolutely brilliant at logistics. I couldn’t believe how well everything ran on this expedition. Eric’s care for the Sherpas is exemplary. He makes sure the Sherpas are treated as equals, puts the highest priority on their safety, and pays the best wages. As a result, his Sherpas are intensely loyal to him. On the mountain he’s extremely thorough, knows the best camp sites, knows the value of having new fixed ropes in place. He’s got expeditionary climbing down to a science.
Eric is pretty autocratic: he operates best when he’s in control. If you make a mistake, he lets you know it in no uncertain terms. He’ll let you know what he expects of you, whether you are a Sherpa or a team member or even a trekker. Like most Everest expeditions, we brought along trekkers who paid good money to join us at Base Camp, then culminate their journey with a climb to ABC. The day after they arrived, two trekkers simply took off without telling anybody where they were going. Tap, Jake, and I marched up a frozen ravine looking for the fellows at dusk. A night in the open would not only have threatened their lives, it could have seriously impeded our own climbing plans. The two trekkers made it back to camp an hour after dark. Simo ordered them off the expedition, sending them home the next day, no money refunded. Perhaps he overreacted, but I think the move was justified, that it gave out a clear message about leadership and responsibility.
Talk in the dining tent invariably drifted to politics. Simo’s well to the right of most of us, and he liked to tweak our liberal sensibilities. When Jake Norton would start talking about Tibetan independence, which he cares passionately about, Simo would say, “No, Jake, it’s not ‘save Tibet,’ it’s ‘pave Tibet.’”
The blowup about NOVA scooping MountainZone brings up another interesting point. More and more in the future, expeditions to remote places on earth are going to be covered live, in “real time,” over the Internet. And even the proponents of this kind of you-are-there reportorial immediacy have only begun to think out the aesthetics and ethics of that kind of journalism.
My collaborator, David Roberts, told me about his own experience a couple of years back in Ethiopia, where he made the first descent of a major river with a bunch of rafting guides from Sobek. He was writing dispatches every night for the Microsoft online adventure magazine, Mungo Park.
Early in the expedition, the team doctor got terribly sick. He lay there puking and moaning, and his temperature went over 105º F. It was truly a life-or-death predicament. The expedition ground to a halt while its leaders debated whether to try to arrange a helicopter rescue, which would have been a perilous operation. This was Roberts’s dilemma: should he report in real time what was happening to the doctor? Was that the proper way for his wife to learn what was going on? Nothing else was happening on the river, and the team was in the middle of a genuinely dramatic crisis. But Roberts had to ponder the possibility that if he sent out the news, he might launch a rescue effort even without the team leaders calling for one. In the end, he chose to write the truth. Fortunately, the doctor’s fever broke and he was able to finish the expedition.
On May 1, what was Liesl supposed to do, except report what she saw and heard on what had turned out to be the most dramatic day so far, on this expedition that hundreds of thousands of Web users were following online?
In any event, once Simo learned from Erin that NOVA had already put out some kind of hot news on the Internet, he and Dave stayed up late into the night writing their own dispatch. It went up on the morning of May 3, and it was the definitive story. Eric wrote, “I have some huge news to announce, so I hope everyone is sitting down and ready for this one…. I’m pleased to announce that the 1999 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition has found the remains of George Mallory, lost on Mount Everest on June 8th, 1924.” Dave went on to describe the discovery, and to offer a rationale for partially excavating the body: “We didn’t want to disturb him, he’d been lying there for 75 years, but at the same time we thought what better tribute to the man than to try and find out if he had summitted Mt. Everest in 1924.”
For the first time, MountainZone ran a special caveat at the head of the dispatch: “This copyrighted content is exclusive to MountainZone.com and may not be used on any other website or n
ews media.”
As if to make up for being scooped, MountainZone now flooded the Web with news. By May 4, they had posted phoned-in dispatches not only from Dave and Eric, but from Jake, Tap, Andy, and me, each giving our side of the discovery story. At the site, Dave had shot a lot of pictures with a digital camera. Now at ABC he downloaded and digitally transmitted the images via satellite phone to Seattle. Eventually, MountainZone had on its site a dramatic photo of Mallory’s body from the waist up, his bare, alabaster back looming in the center, the powerful muscles flexed, his fingers planted in the scree. At the time, we just thought of the photo as an important aid in documenting our find. We had no idea how controversial that picture would prove to be.
On the morning of May 3, at ABC, an Italian-American climber, Fabrizio Zangrilli, walked over to our camp and said, “Hey, you guys found Mallory. I just heard it on the BBC.” That was our first inkling just how big the news was playing around the world. We went into Fabrizio’s radio tent and got the BBC on the shortwave. The story came up on the hour. There was Erin’s voice, talking about the discovery, and suddenly Sir Edmund Hillary with a short comment. It was amazing how fast the media had moved.
At noon we started down to Base Camp, at 17,200 feet. We got there about dusk. Everyone was ecstatic, giving us big hugs. Jochen came over and served me tea and some little Snickers bars, while the camera rolled. That evening we celebrated with a liberal dram of Scotch for all.
The same evening, we filmed our initial scrutiny of the artifacts. The mood in the tent was pensive, as each of us weighed the scope of the discovery. The next day, we were concerned about moisture damaging the objects, so I built a drying table to spread them on. Then Jochen took over the process, as planned, inventorying, measuring, and describing each object. He was very fussy about the procedure that had to be followed. First he had to hear our account of the find, then he examined and catalogued each artifact, then he reviewed the video. Like a connoisseur savoring a wine, Jochen relished every detail.
Jochen, Liesl, and I opened the letters that Mallory had wrapped in his handkerchief and read them carefully. The next day, Liesl made a transcription on her laptop, as backup in case anything happened to the originals.
Meanwhile, we learned from Erin in Seattle that there was a huge demand for photos of Mallory’s body. For expedition climbers, used to going off to remote places where we’d be out of touch with the rest of the world for months at a time, it was hard to realize what the wonders of modern technology might mean. But it began to dawn on us that while we were still on the mountain, with the trip far from over, pictures we had taken could be digitally transmitted to the U.S., sold, and published. We realized there might be a hefty chunk of cash coming in for the photo rights.
We had a group meeting at Base Camp to discuss how to handle photo rights. Prior to the expedition, the climbing team had agreed to pool the proceeds and divide them equally. Liesl suggested we turn the digital images over to Gamma Liaison, a well-respected agency she had worked with in the past. That seemed like a good idea.
It quickly became clear that a bidding war for exclusive photo rights had already begun among the magazines and newspapers on at least three continents. For young guys like Tap and Jake, struggling to make ends meet as climbing guides, you could understand the temptation to sell to the highest bidder. From one photo, they might make as much money as they could in three weeks of guiding on Denali. Dave wanted to sell the pictures to as many publications as would run them, to give himself the maximum exposure as photographer, a profession he’s serious about.
I felt we should aim for the publication with the highest credibility, in hopes that it would put the most positive spin on mountaineering. Climbers get maligned all too often. Every time some drunk falls off a road cut, the media call it a climbing accident. Or people see Cliffhanger, and they think that’s what climbing’s all about. I make my living at climbing, and I’m very sensitive about how our sport is portrayed. I didn’t want our expedition to be seen as a bunch of thrill seekers or treasure hunters.
For the same reason, when the guys talked about what they’d do with the money, I said that I planned to give mine to some charity that would help out the people of Tibet. I was always mindful of how fortunate I was to be here climbing on this great mountain, which we couldn’t have done, for instance, without the help of our Tibetan yak herders. I’m comfortable with the living I make climbing. I saw the find as a way to generate goodness.
In the end, the photo went to the highest bidder. Newsweek won the auction in the U.S.; for a while, we were hearing numbers upward of $14,000, though in the end they may have paid a lot less. Unfortunately, in the U.K. and Australia tabloid newspapers won out.
For about a week, however, we were flying high—everybody seemed happy about our discovery, everyone showered us with congratulations. Then we began to hear the first notes of discord. They came principally out of Britain, and we were shocked when we learned that what we had done at 26,700 feet had elicited not only praise, but savage criticism.
DR
THE NEWS ABOUT MALLORY indeed galvanized the world. Newsweek ran a responsible story with its exclusive photo of the mummified body, but refused at first to pay for the picture, because Time had “bootlegged” the same image, running a picture of the cover of the Australian paper that had broken the story, complete with “exclusive” photo. Unfortunately, the British and Australian tabloids covered the discovery with all the sensitivity of a two-headed baby tale or Princess Di séance.
At first, even among seasoned mountaineers, there was great excitement about the possibility that the find lent credence to the notion that Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit. Andy Politz’s insight—that Mallory’s having put his goggles in his pocket meant that the accident had come at dusk or after—got all too easily translated into a scenario in which the pair fell as they descended after reaching the top.
Thus the German magazine Stern, running its own exclusive, titled its cover story, above a portrait of Mallory inset against a Himalayan ice scape, “War er der Erste?”—“Was he the first?” Stern also was at pains to portray its own country’s fair-haired boy, Jochen Hemmleb, as the genius behind the discovery: a call-out from the article read, “Directed by the German over the radio, the search-troop found the dead body.”
By May 3, only two days after the find, NOVA had an interview with David Breashears up on its Web site. The director and cinematographer of the groundbreaking Everest IMAX film, as well as of a 1987 documentary called Everest: The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine, Breashears had been to the mountain on fourteen expeditions, summitting four times. He said, “I think it’s incredibly exciting that they’ve finally found George Mallory’s body.” Breashears went on to speculate that it was not surprising the camera wasn’t found with Mallory, for it would have made more sense that Irvine would be in charge of taking pictures of the leader—“the man of Everest … George Mallory.” Breashears held out hope that a subsequent search would come up not only with Irvine’s body, but with the camera that could solve the mystery for good. He closed with a tribute in the same vein as Conrad Anker’s awe-struck pensée as he had sat beside Mallory’s body: “All those years that I’ve been going to Everest … thinking about these incredible men trying for the summit of Everest in 1924, in cotton wind suits and tweed jackets, for me, I feel a bit reassured and a bit resolved that we know where George Mallory is.”
Breashears later vividly took issue with the Hemmleb- as-director spin on the story: “All Hemmleb did was feed some data into the computer and think he’d reinvented information. Mallory wasn’t a dot on the ocean floor, and those guys weren’t submersibles. Conrad Anker was the only real climber on the team. The reason they found Mallory is because Conrad used his climber’s eye to figure out where to look.”
At first, especially in England, the discovery was hailed as a splendid event, renewing the nation’s sense of pride in its Everest pioneers. “Admiration grows with
hindsight,” editorialized the Times of London. “Mallory was in a long tradition of English adventurers and sportsmen whose nonchalance and gentlemanly demeanor masked fierce ambition.”
“There remains something wonderful about the spirit of play,” echoed the Guardian, “that carries people into contests where there is no material reward, no point but the thing itself.”
With the publication of the photos—the one showing Mallory’s bare back, his fingers clawing at the scree, his face frozen into the ground, the other zooming in on the man’s vulnerable, naked left leg cradling the hopelessly fractured right one—another note emerged in the public response. Some viewers found an eerie fascination in the images, like Boris Johnson of the Daily Telegraph, who wrote, “Something about these pictures causes the nape to prickle. Not that they are gruesome: no, there is something about that bleached torso which is already sculptural, at one remove.”
Yet other commentators, including some of the most famous climbers in the world, were outraged by the publication of the photos. “I’m absolutely appalled by this. Words can’t express how disgusted I am…. These people don’t deserve to be called climbers,” Sir Chris Bonington told the London Observer. Bonington had led the landmark 1975 first ascent of the southwest face of Everest, then, ten years later, had become at fifty the oldest man to summit (though his record stood for only nine days). Sir Edmund Hillary, whose first response had been positive, changed his mind, deploring the notion that “the expedition members should flog off the photograph of this heroic figure.”
Mallory’s grandson George Mallory II, who had climbed Everest by the north ridge in 1995, weighed in: “Frankly, it makes me bloody angry…. It’s like digging for diamonds, without having to do any of the digging.”
Even Audrey Salkeld, who had spent years becoming the leading expert on Mallory, and who was serving as a consultant on the NOVA film, was disturbed: “I’m horrified it’s got to this stage,” she told the Observer. “I feel very uncomfortable about it.”
The Lost Explorer Page 6
