Above the Clouds

by Anatoli Boukreev

  He began a ski program at Mountain Gardener with a group of novices aged eight to thirteen and implemented his personal system of aerobic-fitness and endurance-training routines. Starting the program from scratch burdened Anatoli with the responsibility of providing equipment for his growing athletes—a big problem on a $100-a-month salary. In the former Soviet Union, the supply of consumer goods dropped off right outside Moscow. For ten years Anatoli’s kids ran and exercised in work boots. The supply officer at the Talgar Sports Camp was impressed with the local coach’s determination. Alex Severnuk passed on to Anatoli used skis from the store of supplies earmarked for the relatively well-heeled Moscow and St. Petersburg clubs. His patronage paid off. During the time that Anatoli was their coach, five of his protégés became champions of Kazakhstan in their respective distance races. Three girls represented Kazakhstan as members of the combined team from all republics of the Soviet Union and competed for places on the Soviet team in Olympic trials. Over the same period, an astounding number of mountaintops were put behind Anatoli. He summited more than two hundred 5,000- and 6,000-meter peaks and made thirty ascents of the 7,000-meter giants in the Pamirs and the Tien Shan.

  In 1986 the Soviets began a series of competitions aimed at selecting athletes for their second International Expedition. Vladimir Frolov, a current member of the Sports Club whom I met in Kathmandu after he had summited Everest in 1997, gave me a sense of what those competitions were like:

  In the old system, the main focus was on team climbing, a spirit of comradeship, a reliance on the strength in a teammate’s shoulders and a sense of responsibility for one another. In general, it was good. I personally experienced the value of our system when climbing with friends. You knew you were not alone on a peak, there were others who were ready to help if something happened. We are proud of being brought up in this tradition, proud of what our Soviet climbers have achieved.

  But there was also quite another side to all this. The words “be responsible for one another” were taken literally. Climbers watched each other vigilantly when climbing, or even drinking beer. Some men looked for one false step to remember something negative that could be used at an opportune moment. These things happened.

  When the big Himalayan expeditions became a reality, after the Iron Curtain had lifted a little to let our people climb the highest mountains, the big question was “Who will have the opportunity to go?” The state provided money for those expeditions, but not enough for every qualified climber to go. Individuals had to compete with one another and with the system. Some chose the wrong methods to eliminate rivals: blackmailing, slander, and libelous anonymous letters to the authorities. This is not an exaggeration.

  Illinski sent nine men to the competitions in the Caucasus where one hundred twenty candidates from all the major clubs were reduced to sixty climbers in twenty days of grueling events. All nine of the Almaty team survived the cut. Medical tests followed at the cosmonauts’ training center outside Moscow. Rock-climbing champion Evgeny Vinogradski and Anatoli told hair-raising stories about those exams. No one had any secrets after the investigation. The worst test required each man to jog on a treadmill in a compression chamber. Gradually the chamber changed the atmosphere to simulate conditions at 8,500 meters. Altitude tolerance was evaluated with cardiac monitors, kidney-function tests, and respiratory flow rates. If you passed out, you failed, and many did. Each man was required to collect his urine output for twelve hours after the session in the chamber: for that, one-liter bottles were issued. Rinat Khaibullin remembers:

  The next morning we showed up holding modest specimens; none of us had more than a liter. Then Anatoli walked in with three full bottles. At first we thought he was playing a joke and we were incredulous at the boldness of his levity. No one could keep a straight face. Tolya just shrugged his shoulders and grinned sheepishly. We sobered up when the doctor walked in the room to find out what was going on. Moscow officials took themselves so seriously, fooling around like that would have been a ticket home.

  Sixty athletes were reduced to thirty-five by the physical exam, then to twenty-six in a series of high-altitude training races. All kinds of political intrigue followed. Raisa Gorbacheva lobbied to include a woman on the team. Katerina Ivanova performed well in competitions with the men. She moved to Almaty to train under Illinski. In the end, chauvinism and concerns about female endurance overrode Gorbacheva’s patronage. The Moscow and St. Petersburg coaches resented that the competition results left such a heavy representation from Almaty. When it was suggested that the thirty-one-year-old ski coach from the Kazakh backwoods might be eliminated, Coach Tchorny balked. He pointed out that not only had Anatoli won both high-altitude endurance races up two 7,000-meter peaks and completed a twenty-five-kilometer traverse above seven thousand meters, he had finished among the top five men in every other selection category.

  In the spring of 1989, twenty-six men headed for the Himalaya; Anatoli was one of them. They spent three weeks trekking through the jungles of Nepal with two hundred porters and just about as many “assistant coaches” on sabbatical from Moscow and laid siege to the third-highest mountain in the world. Their successes were staggering. Kanchenjunga had bowed her head sixty-three times before. But that spring there were more than one hundred successful summit attempts on all four peaks of the massif, all of which are higher than 8,400 meters. Anatoli, Serge Arsentiev, and Vladimir Balyberdin surprised the coaches. After hauling heavy loads of oxygen canisters to a supply camp, they pioneered a route to the summit of Central Kanchenjunga. In the end, Anatoli and eight other men traversed the massif from end to end. Tchorny refused to let Anatoli attempt the climb without supplemental oxygen. Though he respected Tchorny, Anatoli later expressed his resentment of the inflexibility that had denied him the opportunity to succeed without it.

  For Anatoli the first taste of the world beyond Soviet borders was intoxicating. Kathmandu was full of international climbers. Starved of a world perspective, he soaked up information like a sponge. In 1989 some of it was late news, but the details of ascents by mountaineering avatars like Messner, Kukuczka, and Loretan captured his imagination. At age thirty-one he entered that short window of time when peak power and experience let climbers dream of their most daring accomplishments. The top of Kanchenjunga let him see where he stood in the world.

  Weeks later, in a capital enjoying the dizzy pinnacle of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev presented Anatoli with the Order of Personal Courage, then awarded him the gold pin of an Honored Master of International Sports. Those were the highest honors his country bestowed on private citizens and athletes. From that vantage point Anatoli’s future as an alpinist was assured. He was determined to follow Messner’s magic road, to carry his nation’s flag to the summits of the world’s fourteen highest peaks. Past that, he aspired to perfect a level of endurance and strength in himself that would raise the standard of human achievements a rung higher for all men in the mountains. Fate had other challenges in mind.

  After Kanchenjunga, resuming a normal routine was difficult for Anatoli; life as a coach paled in the shadow of his experiences. He spent the summer of 1989 climbing in the Pamirs. Returning home, he was in a serious auto accident and was airlifted to Almaty. X rays diagnosed a cracked vertebra and two fractured ribs. After five days in the hospital, he strapped on a neck brace and walked the twenty kilometers home to Mountain Gardener.

  During that time his four-year relationship with skier Olga Sevtevka ended. She had been one of his athletes and had become his first love. Olga waited through the four years of training that interrupted their lives before Kanchenjunga, but when Anatoli returned and could only talk of future climbs instead of a car, a home, and a better salary, she ended the relationship. He resumed training, setting his sights on an October race up Mount Elbrus sponsored by Alpinist. In the more relaxed political atmosphere, Kanchenjunga teammate Vladimir Balyberdin chartered a new cooperative aimed at developing private-sector support for Soviet mountaineers. An in
vitation from Balyberdin brought respected American rock climber and adventure photographer Beth Wald to the Caucasus to watch the competition.

  Anatoli won the Elbrus race and caught Beth’s eye. He met her during the later part of her Russian tour, and their friendship blossomed. Beth Wald became Anatoli’s champion in the United States. Until the end of his life she was his advocate and a valued personal friend. She introduced him to the American public in an article called “Back in the USSR” published in the October 1989 issue of Climbing magazine.

  Thanks to Beth Wald’s vision, work, and initiative, Anatoli and two other Russians, Alex Rogozhyn and Anatoli Shkodin, were provided with an opportunity to come to United States in the spring of 1990. Leaning on personal connections in the elite community of American mountaineers and rock climbers, Beth found venues for a series of slide shows and sponsors in six Western cities. A Soviet-American cultural exchange was on. She went out on a limb, lobbying respected alpinist Michael Covington to provide Anatoli with work on a McKinley expedition. “In 1990,” Anatoli said, “that opportunity was about as likely for a Russian climber as flying to the moon.”

  His impressions of America were varied. After a long trip to New York from Moscow, bad weather forced the cancellation of the flight to Denver. The airline company provided the three Russians with a hotel room near the airport in New York. Tired from travel, Anatoli fell asleep early. He woke up at 4 A.M. because of the TV noise. Alex Rogozhyn stayed up all night watching “sex,” he reported in his diary. The bill for Alex’s entertainment was $21 and Anatoli was nonplussed:

  Twenty-one dollars is a huge sum of money for us, one-third of a month’s salary. So thanks to Alex, we learned our first lesson here. You can have anything, but you must pay for it. Things are concrete, not abstract. There is some sort of cruelty in a system that does not make allowances for human weakness. At the same time choice allows a person to be stronger; maybe that is good.

  Later Anatoli noted he was impressed with the “high level of culture” he observed while wandering the streets in Berkeley and Boulder—every house was different, nature was protected, and the environmental accommodations invited people to exercise. He liked the music of Dire Straits and the Grateful Dead. Mountaineers Galen Rowell and Gary Neptune earned his respect with their endurance and skill. “The trip to Yosemite was like a fairy tale,” he wrote. The Black Hills of South Dakota reminded him of the southern Urals. He was embarrassed more than once by his rock-climbing performance with Beth’s high-powered friends, and he vowed he would return to America able to do better. The variety and quality of the sports equipment he saw left him openmouthed with desire. Anne Kirck at North Face and Gary Neptune outfitted him with skis, Gore-Tex clothes, and One Sport boots. Their generosity humbled him. He was embarrassed by his own overreaching need and by the “desire” that came from nowhere looking at the never-ending supply of good gear. Elliott Robinson recalled Anatoli’s introduction to the Bay Area:

  I met Tolya in Berkeley at a dinner party during his first trip to America. He told me that night that he had no plans to go to Yosemite. We had such a blast struggling to talk with one another, describing our regions. Somehow my effort to speak English with a broken Russian accent worked, and I became Tolya’s translator.

  Among other things I learned was how personally he loved the mountains above Almaty. He described a beautiful wilderness that went on forever, forest and mountains where you could still encounter snow leopards. It amazes me I got so much out of that conversation because we really did not speak the same language. Anyway I insisted that he see Yosemite, a region I felt as strongly attached to.

  We decided to climb El Capitan. What made it all the more enchanting, besides the weather and language, was Tolya’s absolute vigor in a new environment. His experience had been in the mountains, not on the cliffs. Between our instincts we pulled off a spring climb of the East Buttress of El Capitan in a rainstorm, with the temperature dropping. Despite a struggle with “friends,” a piece of equipment that was new to him, he went up in beautiful form. I can still hear him roaring like a bear as we scurried down the slabs to the east ledges during our descent. That trip we experienced the rain and cold as they are best enjoyed, without the protection, convenience, and predictability that people now impose on nature.

  In the years that followed, his acquaintances with the likes of Kevin Cooney, Elliott Robinson, Bob Palais, Jack Robbins, and Neal Beidleman evolved into trusted friendships. Anatoli climbed with all of them. But some made a special effort to meet him on Russian turf, and that cemented a deeper understanding. Reflecting on what he found unique about Anatoli, Elliott recalled:

  He could jog all day. But when I went with him, his pace was my pace. He never made me feel like I had less power than he did. Tolya always brought me closer to the world, and with him I experienced it in a more wild and genuine way, whether it was looking back over the distance we could cover when I accompanied him on a small fraction of his long runs through the East Bay hills or on our tours of Moscow. For Tolya a trip to the Kremlin or churches wasn’t so important. What was important was riding in his friend Victor Danilin’s boat down the Moscow River to an island in the industrial part of town where we met a few friends and drank tea. Or a hot sauna at Serge Zaiken’s workplace (for the life of me, I still believe that Serge worked in the firm that maintained Moscow’s sewers) and a few glasses of Armenian brandy. And of course, his ever-present guitar and Vysotskii or Rosenbaum ballads brought the Russian spirit to life.

  Anatoli left America in 1990 with a network of people who became the keel of social support that sustained him through the storm of financial chaos that was brewing in his country. The fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union pushed him toward a world driven by commerce. Anatoli spent the next years trying to reconcile the necessities of earning a living with his idealism.

  The following chapters are Anatoli’s accounts of his life and climbs from Kanchenjunga until Annapurna. Resting after each expedition, he wrote as a way to decant his experiences. While he recovered his strength and the memories were fresh, he drafted long narratives from terse day journals, charts, and philosophical ruminations. He talked a lot to friends about writing a practical guide for those who aspired to be climbers, a book that would discuss training methods and acclimatization. Due to changing political fashion, Russian mountaineering history seemed destined to disappear before it had been written. That was an insult to Anatoli and it ignored the sacrifices of many great men. Every piece he wrote included a tribute to the climbers who had pioneered the science of Russian mountaineering.

  By 1997, no borders restricted his passage. In the arc of his accomplishments Anatoli had transmuted the painful contradictions of his county’s recent history. In nine years of international climbing, he earned a voice among the world’s alpinists and set a standard of endurance that will be hard to raise. Idealistically, he believed in the fundamental value of mountaineering and thought it cultured something valuable in the human psyche, something that was too fast becoming an anachronism. In an environment that most people find restrictive and intimidating in its harshness, Anatoli was free. And I believe that of all things he loved freedom best. Two months before he died he prepared these remarks for an audience at the Festival of Mountain Culture at Banff, Canada:

  Mountaineering is a model of the ordinary life of all human beings placed in an extreme environment. We strip away all the polite layers that make it easy to ignore the truth. We work hard, deny ourselves comfort, and face the uncertain future with our skills. What comes of this effort is that we can know ourselves better. That is what we offer the public. Everyone in his or her life must ask the questions “Who am I?” “What am I doing here?” If we are honest and fair, this is what we can report from our adventure that is important.

  It is the rare man or woman who faces the existential paradox of meaning and mortality as squarely as the alpinist. Athleticism allowed Anatoli to experience a greater measure of wha
t is possible for a human being on earth. Ultimately, we die because we live. He dreamt the avalanche nine months before it came, dreamt it in disturbing detail. Only the name of the mountain was missing. We could not stand on the edge of that abyss with much composure. Reeling, resisting, I groped for some alternative. Sadly teasing, he asked me to come to him.

  “How long would I lie here on your couch doing nothing before you could not love me? Mountains are my life … my work. It is too late for me to take up another road.”

  Somehow from his mouth the word work lost all mundane character and was elevated to an existential act of creation. Human life was separate neither from the mystical nor from reality.

  “Will you suffer?”

  “I am not afraid.”

  That reply exhausted every option.

  In the wake of the avalanche, “Why?” echoed loudly in my ears. Many answers came back to me. Close to the second anniversary of Anatoli’s death, I received a letter from Vladimir Frolov.

  In the old school he was one of the strongest climbers, one of the most deserving. Everyone knew it. Once I asked him about his methods of training. They were a way of life: a whole complex of ways to be stronger. He was a great example for the younger generation. His mentality and discipline made him stand apart from his contemporaries. He was better than most of them. To tell the truth, they did not like him very much; he was a rival and his Western point of view exasperated them. Not so for my generation; for us he was an example of how it is possible to find your own way, free of the bias that exists in our society.

  Petty intrigues were beyond Anatoli’s ideology; his philosophy was above slander and libel. What was important to him was the love of mountains and climbing. He was the first “white crow” to show himself as different from all those who had gotten used to obeying the system. He just wanted to climb and he did. He loved the Himalayas. For him that was enough.