In the spring of 1923, Mallory landed a job teaching history to working men and women in Cambridge University’s extension school. He plunged into this new profession with enthusiasm, commuting between Cambridge and the family home in Holt. During these months, his relationship with Ruth was strained. As evidence, we have only certain ambiguous phrases in the letters. Yet the bedrock loyalty of each for the other was not seriously shaken. In October 1923, he moved his family to Cambridge; there, in Herschel House, he and Ruth set out with a will to furnish and beautify the ideal domicile.
Everest was never far from Mallory’s thoughts. Once again, he had been writing chapters for the official expedition book. And the very lectures he gave in America were predicated on explaining to the uninitiated the appeal of trying to reach the highest point on earth, from the famous “Because it is there” quip to more extended—if equally gnomic—rationales, such as these lines from one of his American speeches:
I suppose we go to Mount Everest, granted the opportunity, because—in a word—we can’t help it. Or, to state the matter rather differently, because we are mountaineers….To refuse the adventure is to run the risk of drying up like a pea in its shell.
In a thoughtful unpublished essay he wrote about this time, called “Men and Mountains: The Gambler,” Mallory faced squarely the question of danger and risk in the mountains. Once more, his words seem eerily to foreshadow the future:
It is clear that the stake [the mountaineer] risks to lose is a great one with him: it is a matter of life and death…. To win the game he has first to reach the mountain’s summit—but, further, he has to descend in safety. The more difficult the way and the more numerous the dangers, the greater is his victory.
In closing, Mallory grappled with the inevitability of disasters such as the one that had befallen him below the North Col: “But when I say that our sport is a hazardous one, I do not mean that when we climb mountains there is a large chance that we shall be killed, but that we are surrounded by dangers which will kill us if we let them.”
That British mountaineers would return to Everest, if not in 1923, then in the spring of 1924, had become a foregone conclusion. And for all his ambivalence, it seems in retrospect inevitable that Mallory would join the expedition. The mountain had become his destiny.
Only months after he had taken his university extension job, he asked Cambridge to give him half a year’s leave on half pay; his alma mater was only too glad to comply. Yet as Mallory faced Mount Everest for the third time, it was not with the joyous anticipation of 1921 or ’22, but rather with a dark fatalism. To his Cambridge and Bloomsbury friend Geoffrey Keynes, he confided what he dared not tell Ruth: “This is going to be more like war than mountaineering. I don’t expect to come back.”
5 Rescue
CA
IT WASN’T UNTIL 9:00 P.M. on May 8 that the Ukrainians high on the mountain, at the top of the First Step, sent out their distress call over the radio. We didn’t monitor the call directly ourselves. At Base Camp, the leader of the Ukrainian expedition, Valentyn Simonenko, would come by our tents every so often to ask how things were going. As the day wore on, he got more and more concerned about his teammates. Then he received the call on his handheld radio, and he told us what had transpired.
The Ukrainians were good climbers—full professionals, to the extent that one can be a professional climber in Ukraine. They were determined to go to the top without oxygen. I don’t mean to second-guess them, but that decision inevitably cut their margin of safety. Without oxygen, simple things like tying knots, rigging belays, and performing little bits of technical climbing all become much more difficult.
Compared to us, the Ukrainians had a very rigid way of climbing. Ten days beforehand, they told us, “We’re going to the summit on May 8.” They had planned their summit push based on a logistical pyramid, with climbers and supplies moving from camp to camp by a predetermined schedule. When May 8 turned out to be the worst day in the last month, they didn’t seem to have the flexibility to change their plans.
The three climbers going for the summit that day were Slava, Vasil Copitko, and Volodymyr Gorbach. They got to the top about 1:30 P.M., which was good time, but then their problems began to multiply on the descent, as the storm intensified. It took them much longer to go down than they anticipated. In the end, only Slava—who’s an amazingly strong climber—made it back to Camp VI. Somewhere above him, Vasil and Volod had stopped to spend the night out. It was Slava who made the 9:00 P.M. radio call from the First Step.
You don’t usually bivouac above Camp VI without serious consequences. Once we learned that Volod and Vasil hadn’t made it back to camp, we knew they were almost certainly in trouble.
I give the Ukrainians credit for having other teammates at Camp V, ready to go to the assistance of the summit climbers. By evening, the weather had cleared, but it was very windy up high. Wind makes a huge difference. You can be fit, well hydrated, well fed, and moving efficiently, but the wind will take whatever strength you have right out of you.
On May 9, as the storm cleared, we moved on up to ABC, to be ready to take our part in whatever rescue the situation called for. In the morning, Slava climbed back up from Camp VI to look for his partners. He found Volod alone near the First Step, in really bad shape, probably already suffering severe frostbite. Volod’s story was that the previous evening, he just sat down and tried to get through the night, because it was dark, he was terribly cold, and he was exhausted. But Vasil decided to continue the descent alone in the dark. That was still a plausible option, until his headlamp went out. Then the route-finding—especially at the exit cracks, where the northeast ridge merges with the Yellow Band—would have become extremely problematic.
Slava got Volod motivated and shepherded him down to Camp VI. To pull this off, still without oxygen, the day after summitting, and not incur any frostbite himself, makes Slava’s performance one of the most phenomenal I’ve ever seen in the mountains. There’s no question he saved Volod’s life. But as they descended, they saw no sign of Vasil.
One of the classic mistakes in high-altitude climbing is to separate, as Vasil and Volod did. Look at all the accidents on Denali over the years—almost every time a party separates up high, disaster strikes. I don’t know whether the two men really made a calculated decision. But when you separate like that, all of a sudden you go from being able to care for someone else, being part of a team, to focusing on your own well-being.
Slava got Volod down to Camp VI, where he spent the night of May 9. Two other teammates climbed up to VI, to help out. Volod’s condition, in the meantime, had gotten worse. He could no longer walk under his own power. So on May 10, his teammates and some Sherpas from an expedition of Georgian climbers made a little seatlike basket out of a rope, to carry Volod in. They carried him the full 3,000 feet down to the North Col, two men on either side of him, rotating the job—another superhuman effort.
Meanwhile, Russell Brice, the experienced New Zealand guide, was organizing the further rescue effort from the North Col. He designated us, the Americans, to be in charge of lowering Volod down the steep ice slopes below the North Col, much more technical terrain than the north face from VI down to IV. Brice chose us, I suspect, because we had the most collective experience in rescue work.
Simo reported on MountainZone that “some expeditions have donated their oxygen and their Sherpas and other expeditions have refused to help at all. One group of Sherpas demanded $200 per person to help with the rescue.” Personally, I didn’t witness any team refusing to help or Sherpas demanding cash, but that was the scuttlebutt. As Simo wrote, an emergency like Volod’s does indeed “bring out the best and worst” in the climbers caught up on the periphery of it.
By the afternoon of May 10, Andy Politz, Jake Norton, Tap Richards, and I had climbed up to the North Col to help. Because the carry down from VI had taken so long, Volod didn’t arrive until 10:30 at night. We realized we were going to have to make a triage call, depen
ding on the Ukrainian’s condition. Could he afford to spend the night at Camp IV, then go down the next day? Or was his case so critical we had to take him down right away, in the night?
It had been snowing sporadically; now it was dark and cold. We brought Volod into our cook tent, gave him some oxygen and an intramuscular shot of dexamethasone, a powerful stimulant. He was on the verge of being comatose, with a pulse of around 60 and a dangerously low blood pressure of 60 over 20.And he was howling with pain. He could just barely talk to one of his teammates. Somebody said Volod’s feet were frostbitten up to the knees, but that may have been an exaggeration.
It became obvious that we had to get him down in the night. The four of us had everything organized by the time Volod arrived. In a rescue operation like this, one person has to take charge and decide how to rig it, then be the point man who calls the shots. This way, it’s simply more efficient.
DR
ON THE 1999 MALLORY & IRVINE RESEARCH EXPEDITION, to use its official title, there were a number of very strong climbers. Andy Politz, Eric Simonson, and Dave Hahn had all climbed Everest before. They were also veterans of dozens of search-and-rescue missions.
Yet by May 10, it had become clear to them that the strongest mountaineer on the team was Conrad Anker—even though he had never been higher than 24,000 feet before. Most of the other members were professional guides. Conrad had done some guiding, but had purposely turned his back on that modus vivendi. At thirty-six, nearly two decades after he had started to climb, what motivated him above all else was the chance to put up difficult new routes on little-known mountains among the remote ranges of the world.
By the spring of 1999, Conrad Anker was no household name on the American outdoor scene. He made his living principally as a sponsored climber for the North Face, the equipment firm that had pioneered the practice—novel in the U.S. at the time, though common in Europe—of paying top-notch mountaineers a regular salary to design and endorse North Face products, schmooze with clients, make appearances at retail stores, and climb at the highest level the rest of the time.
Within the North Face stable of sponsored athletes, a rather keen rivalry at times prevailed. To this competition, Anker seemed oblivious. Meanwhile, as he racked up one sterling coup in the mountains after another, celebrating his deeds only in the occasional understated note or article in the American Alpine Journal, his reputation among the cognoscenti grew. By 1999, he was recognized as one of the finest three or four exploratory mountaineers in America.
Though he spends most of his down time in Telluride, Colorado, Conrad’s heart still resides in the house in Big Oak Flat, California (in the Gold Rush country, just west of Yosemite Valley), where his parents live. His mother, Helga, is German, his father, Wally, an American of mixed German and Scotch-Irish descent. Despite his vagabondage, Conrad remains very close to his parents, whom he calls “my best friends.”
“My mother likes to say that I began climbing in the womb,” says Conrad—because while she was pregnant with him, her third child, she and her husband hiked the rim of Yosemite. As a child, Conrad tagged along on extended back-packing trips with his family. He feels today that those outings gave him a solid grounding as a mountaineer. “Nowadays a lot of people come to the sport by training in a climbing gym,” he says. “They may know how to pull up an overhang, but they don’t know what an afternoon cloudburst can do to you if you don’t pitch a tarp. I learned that at a ripe young age.”
Despite his apprenticeship in backpacking, Conrad did not begin to rock-climb until the relatively late age of eighteen. He showed great promise from the start, leading pitches of 5.7 difficulty (on a scale ranging from 5.0 to 5.14) in sneakers only weeks after he first tied on to a rope. His first expedition was an attempt on Mount Robson, the majestic and dangerous peak in the Canadian Rockies: “We failed miserably.”
In 1987, the American Alpine Club gave Conrad a $400 Young Climber’s Grant to pursue an expedition to the Kichatna Spires, arguably Alaska’s most jagged and daunting low-altitude mountains. With three companions, he made a five-day first ascent of the southeast face of Gurney Peak, thus entering the elite of American mountaineers capable of pulling off cutting-edge climbs in major, bad-weather ranges.
Meanwhile, Anker desultorily pursued his education, finally graduating from the University of Utah at the age of twenty-six, with a degree in commercial recreation—“basically hotel and resort management,” he explains. “I didn’t go straight through. I took every spring off for an expedition, and I worked to help pay for college.”
Like most passionate climbers, Conrad in his twenties chose jobs not with a view toward career potential, but according to how much freedom they gave him to take off at the drop of a hat—“anything,” he clarifies, “that I could work at, save up some money, then quit to go climbing.” In this fashion, he paid the bills for five years by working construction. During college, he had tended the counter at the North Face store in Salt Lake City, selling carabiners and Gore-Tex jackets—his initial connection with the company that would later pay him to climb.
A brief sortie into entrepreneurship—with a climbing buddy, Conrad started Alf Wear, a two-man firm peddling fleece hats and river shorts—left him dissatisfied. He credits his father, a bank examiner, with giving him a crucial push. “My father told me to go climbing, to make the most of it, because you can always sell hats when you’re sixty-five. So I sold the company for $10,000, which seemed like big bucks at the time.”
Freed to pursue his passion, Conrad developed into not only a first-rate mountaineer, but an exceedingly diversified one. Most climbers focus on a specialty: pure rock-climbing, alpine walls, expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks in the Himalaya. Conrad has excelled in all the branches of the mountaineering art. By now, for instance, his résumé includes numerous one-day ascents of eight different routes on El Capitan, in Yosemite, normally the province of rock-wall specialists who barely know how to hold an ice axe. Yet Conrad has also pulled off fiendishly difficult climbs on the “Big Three” Patagonian towers, Cerro Torre, Torre Egger, and Cerro Stanhardt; soloed serious new routes in the frozen wastes of Antarctica; and put up elegant first ascents on such formidable mountains as Latok II in the Karakoram of Pakistan and Mount Hunter in Alaska.
Anker’s sometime partner, photographer, and veteran mountaineer Galen Rowell hails this versatility: “Conrad can ski down virgin faces of big peaks in subzero Antarctica, climb El Cap routes in a day for fun, sport-climb 5.12, speed-climb up Khan Tengri in the Tien Shan faster than the Russian Masters of Sport, climb the north face of Everest or Latok, ice-climb the wildest frozen waterfalls, run mountain trails forever, plus enjoy hanging out with his friends talking about other things besides mountains.”
The formative influence on Conrad as a climber, the one partner who served as a true mentor, was Terrance “Mugs” Stump, whom Conrad met in 1983, climbing outside of Salt Lake City. More than ten years Conrad’s senior, Stump was already a legend, known for visionary ascents in the great ranges, often performed solo, with no self-publicizing fanfare whatsoever (he did not regularly write notes for the climbing journals). Stump had been a star defensive back for Joe Paterno at Penn State, had played in the Orange Bowl, but had wrecked his left knee playing football. He discovered his true métier only in his late twenties.
“He was really motivated to become a true climber,” remembers Conrad. “He’d say, ‘You can’t sell out, guiding bumblees up glorified ski runs. You’ve got to do real climbing, you’ve got to climb this and this and this, that’s where it’s at.’”
Conrad quickly progressed from protégé to equal partner. “Nietzsche has a passage in which he talks about the ‘ball of knowledge.’ We wouldn’t be where we are as human beings if it weren’t for the collective knowledge that’s passed on from one generation to the next. It was like that with Mugs and me. He had this ball of energy and knowledge. Some days he would pass the ball to me, and I would climb better than he, and other days he w
anted it back. We were really well paired, we had the same sense of humor, and he set me on the path to becoming a professional climber.”
For four years, Mugs and Conrad lived together in Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake, in a house provided them by John Bass (nephew of Dick Bass, the first man to climb the Seven Summits, or highest points on all the continents), who had the remarkable idea of supporting American mountaineering by giving promising climbers such as Stump and Anker a helping hand.
Mugs and Conrad climbed together often, ranging from Yosemite to Alaska. Their “epic” occurred on the Eyetooth, a savage pinnacle of ice and granite southeast of Denali. A ferocious storm kept the two men trapped on a portaledge—an artificial tent platform hung from pitons over the vertical void—for seven days and nights. “We ran out of food,” recalls Conrad. “We probably could have rappelled off, but Mugs was into hanging, so we just relaxed and stayed there till the storm was over.”
Stump had come of age during the time before American climbers could live off sponsorship. He became a professional climber only by guiding nearly full-time. Rather than settle into the rut of guiding the same trade route over and over, like the standard walk-up on Rainier or the West Buttress on Denali, Stump took ambitious clients onto less-traveled routes. It was on one such outing, in 1992, descending Denali’s South Buttress, that Stump, scouting a crevasse that blocked the path, had the upper lip collapse beneath him. He was buried under tons of debris, his body never found.
Mugs’s death was perhaps the most devastating setback of Conrad’s life. In a sense, he has never gotten over the loss. Much of his resolve not to make a living as a guide springs from Mugs’s “pointless” accident on an easy route, as he tended clients. “On Everest this year,” says Conrad, “the day we packed up Base Camp was the seventh anniversary of Mugs’s death. I took all the leftover juniper from the puja, half a gunny- sack-full, and torched it up into one big billowing cloud.”
The Lost Explorer Page 10
