The Impossible Climb

by Mark Synnott

  When I woke up the next morning, I expected the expedition to be over, but instead, Alex grabbed his pack and set off up the fixed lines. He didn’t say a word to me, and I wondered if he knew that despite the rancor between us, I still admired him. He reminded me of my dad in that it was almost impossible to get his approval, but when I did, when he made “the face”—raising one eyebrow and then breaking into a huge shit-eating grin—it felt sublime.

  Alex was pushing our high point up a hairline crack when huge fluffy snowflakes began to fall from the sky. I was two hundred feet below, unhooking haul bags for Jared, who was pulling them up while he belayed Alex. Soon Alex disappeared into the gloom and we were engulfed in a blizzard. Frothy waterfalls began coursing down the wall all around me. A trickle began seeping from the crack right above my head, and in the course of ten minutes it turned into an icy shower. I was clipped into two bolts and had nowhere to go, and before I could escape, water was pouring down my collar, soaking me to the skin, and filling my boots. By the time I released the last bag for Jared I was shivering and borderline hypothermic. “I have to get out of here,” I yelled over the wind as I put myself on rappel. The route was overhanging and traversing, so instead of sliding right down to the next anchor, I ended up hanging in space at the bottom of a V of rope—the end, attached to the next anchor, was twenty feet up and to my right. To get to the anchor I would need to jug myself up, but the atmospheric conditions had caused a thick sheath of rime ice to form on the rope. The teeth on my ascenders wouldn’t hold on the icy rope, and I was so cold I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go before my hands stopped working. My only option was to delicately scrape the ice off the bow-taut line with the blade of my knife. By the time I crawled into my sleeping bag I was shivering uncontrollably, but I could still hear the ting-ting-ting of Alex’s hammer ringing against the steel pitons he was driving into the wall high above. The Mutant . . .

  Over the next several days, the storm settled over us like a sickness. But the dark clouds outside were benign compared to the one that churned over Alex and me inside the portaledge. I tried to win him back with kind gestures. I offered to tear my book in half because he had finished his. “I’m good,” he said. I tried to talk to him about his family. “Whatever,” was a typical response. Eventually I gave up. The three of us lived together in a space the size of a dining room table, but Alex and I didn’t speak or make eye contact for days at a time.

  When I came down from getting soaked in the waterfall, my boots had been so wet I had left them outside. Days later, they still sat in the gravel where I had dumped them, now frozen solid, glazed in a layer of ice and snow. It wasn’t like me to give up on taking care of an essential piece of equipment. Until this point, I had slept with them in the bottom of my sleeping bag every night. I wondered if my partners were picking up on the message I was trying to convey: I’m done.

  It took me hours to work up the courage to articulate the thought that had been running like a broken record inside my head for days. I hated Quokka and everything it represented—the voyeurism, the posing, the hype. Most of all, I hated them for driving a wedge between us. It had all sounded great back in San Francisco, but I had been naive about how it would feel to climb with this many strings attached. It was time to pull the plug on this puppet show.

  “Hey, guys,” I finally said. “I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.”

  “Me too,” said Alex, without hesitation.

  We were about to call down to base camp to tell them we were bailing, when the rainfly stopped flapping for a few seconds. “Did you hear that?” I asked. Auditory hallucinations are common when you’re stuck in a tent for days on end, so I figured it was just my imagination. Then a voice became distinct. Alex unzipped the door, and about a hundred feet away stood a man wearing a blue warm-up suit and an old-fashioned orange helmet. A Russian team had arrived to attempt the same face, but we had a two-week head start, so we never thought we’d see them up on the wall.

  We waved, and soon the three of us were shaking hands with Alexander Odintsov, a legendary forty-one-year-old Russian alpinist. While we had been sitting on our butts in the “storm,” feeling sorry for ourselves, the Russians had been firing off the lower wall in less than half the time it had taken us. It was a cold, blustery day, and I’ll never forget Odintsov saying something about the weather being pretty good. “Ha ha, good joke,” I replied, but he just stared at me with a confused look on his weathered face.

  Instead of a harness, Odintsov wore a carpenter’s tool belt, similar to the one I used to wear when I worked as a framer in Colorado. But the leather pouches were filled with homemade titanium pitons rather than sixteen-penny nails. When he noticed how intently I was observing his unusual approach to carrying essential equipment, Odintsov reached into his pouch and pulled out a few of the pins. He seemed to know each one personally and even had pet names for some of them. “This one I made myself,” he said in Russian-accented English, holding up a scrappy chunk of metal, “and this one I call the Figure of One.” Most shocking was the fact that he carried the pins loose in his tool bags. If he fell, and the carpenter’s belt didn’t rip right off his body, surely some or all the pitons would spill out and tumble down the mountain.

  “What if you fall?” I asked.

  “Don’t fall,” he replied, stone-faced.

  Soon we were joined by the rest of the team: Yuri Koshelenko, Igor Potan’kin, and Ivan Samoilenko. “Hello, Mark,” said Samoilenko, greeting me with a warm smile and a firm two-handed shake. “You were right, this is a good cliff!” A few months earlier I had bumped into Samoilenko at an outdoor industry trade show in Salt Lake City. We got to talking about upcoming projects. When he pulled out a picture of Great Trango’s east face, I unveiled, unwisely, I now realized, a closely guarded photo of the face on which we were now getting reacquainted.

  Odintsov told us about their “project”—to establish Russian routes on the ten biggest cliffs in the world. Great Trango was number five. Alex had met Odintsov in the Aksu in 1995, year one of the project, where they both established first ascents on Peak 4810. Odintsov followed up with another new route on the west face of Rocky Aksu in 1996, then scaled Norway’s Trollveggen in 1997. In 1998, he and his team put up a futuristic new line on the north face of Bhagirathi III, in India.

  That night, we all sat in a circle on a flat spot outside our portaledge, passing around a small tin cup, which the Russians kept filling with grain alcohol. The mood was warm and jovial, like a bunch of old friends telling stories at their local pub. I sat next to Koshelenko, and when he passed me the cup, he put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. I can’t remember what he said, but his warmth and goodwill felt like the first rays of sunshine after a long, nasty storm. I looked across the circle at Alex and Jared, both of whom were beaming—it didn’t take much grain alcohol to get a buzz at this altitude.

  The plan to bail was never mentioned again.

  For the next several days we climbed alongside the Russians, who had found their own crack system running parallel to ours. We’d climb side by side during the day; then at night we’d meet in camp for more grain alcohol and stories. “What do you guys think about us all joining into one big team?” said Alex one evening, holding the tin cup in his battered hands.

  “This is a fine idea,” said Odintsov.

  But Jared and I weren’t so sure. The Russians climbed in a militaristic style they had been taught back in the Soviet days, when mountaineering was an official government-sanctioned sport like track and field or gymnastics. Accordingly, each team member had a specific job. Only Odintsov and Koshelenko led pitches; the others provided a supporting role. As part of a seven-man team, Jared and I figured that we’d be relegated to schlepping bags, cooking, and setting up camp. So we vetoed the proposal. Technically, it was a democratic vote, two against one, but all of the Russians and Alex were for it, so it could have been interp
reted as five against two. It was the one awkward moment we shared with the Russians.

  On July 24, we set off up the ropes we had fixed on the upper headwall. It felt good to be committing to the final leg of the climb after festering on the ledge for the past eleven days. If all went according to plan, we’d be on the summit in a week. As we hauled our six pigs behind us, the Russians cheered us along as they tinkered away on their route a few hundred feet to the right. Later that evening, we set up our first hanging portaledge camp at 18,450 feet below a gray, left-facing open book that soared for hundreds of feet toward the route’s most notable feature—a massive roof system that guarded access to the summit ridge. As the sun set, we stared out the door of the rainfly at the towers lining the west side of the Trango Glacier—Uli Biaho, the Cat’s Ears, Shipton Spire, and the Mystery Phallus—while they slowly darkened into jagged silhouettes haloed by a rising moon. We sat quietly—Alex and I sharing the top bunk, Jared down below—letting the magic of life in the vertical realm wash over us.

  “You know, I want to spend more time at home with the family,” said Alex. His sons, Max, Sam, and Isaac, were ten, seven, and three. I knew how he was feeling because I now had a six-month-old son of my own. Alex loved his family, and he felt guilty about spending so much time away from them. And so did I. We wanted it all—to climb big first ascents and be stand-up family men in the gaps between expeditions.

  “I’ve been thinking about a new career, one that doesn’t require so much travel,” he continued. “It’s one of the reasons I’m so psyched about this project. I think this could really be a good opportunity for all of us. I love writing, and I see this website as a way to showcase what I’m capable of outside of climbing.” The Trango website had given Alex a powerful new conduit through which to connect with his legions of fans. He knew the Internet offered a whole new platform from which to inspire his followers to pursue their own dreams, and he was working hard to make sure he was leveraging this opportunity for all it was worth. Alex would stay up late into the night meticulously crafting his dispatches. Quokka had asked us to write about hauling, knowing it was the element of this whole enterprise everyone hated the most. The difference between how Alex and I approached the assignment revealed our very different personalities and writing styles.

  Here’s what I wrote:

  Luckily I found a way for you to simulate this experience if you’re interested. First, you’ll want to find the right location. I was thinking about a cement wall on the south side of a K-Mart in Arizona. In mid-July. Make sure it is at least 90 degrees. Place a chair about ten feet from the wall so that the sun is beating on your back and neck. Now put on a 75-pound weight belt, but make sure it is loose so it slides around a bunch on your hips—the chafing is very important. Take a bungee cord, tie one end to the weight belt, and find some way to attach the other end to the wall. Make sure it has just enough stretch so you can drop into a deep knee bend. . . . Standing in front of the chair, lift your left foot and place it on the seat. Rock your full weight onto the left foot, so that you’re up on your tippy toes with the right. Now drop back onto the right foot, making sure the bungee is pulling hard on the weight belt—again, chafing is important. Repeat this process ALL DAY LONG. . . . Now imagine you’re doing this for fun. Actually, this is what you’ve been dreaming about all year. And the good times aren’t reserved just for today. You’re going to be sitting behind K-Mart ALL SUMMER. . . . This is serious blue-collar work, for which there is little tangible reward. You could jug loads all day and there would still be plenty of stuff waiting to be brought up. Such is the nature of a heavy-handed big wall climb. You would have to be numb in the head to actually enjoy this stuff.

  * * *

  —

  AND HERE’S ALEX’S take on the same subject.

  Hauling inevitably elicits predictable groans and grunts from most climbers, but I actually find solace in the rhythmic cadence of throwing my weight against the resisting bag, over and over again until it gradually flops up onto the ledge like some great inanimate leviathan. I play mind games, of course. I chant the complete names of my wife and sons in sync with each haul, resting only once the entire family has been named. Kind of nice really—meditation on a subject very dear. While hauling the seventh bag to the top of the lines today, my reverie was interrupted by a passing shadow. A huge raptor with a wingspan easily reaching six feet was effortlessly gliding past on the updrafts. I’m not sure what the Balti name is, but no matter—such majestic creatures transcend encumbering monikers. Goraks, raven-ish birds that are ubiquitous throughout the Himalaya, are with us constantly. They dive and soar with such seemingly joyful purposelessness, I can’t help but conclude that sheer mischievous fun is the motive.

  Now that we were getting closer to the summit, Quokka was pumping up its PR efforts, and most days we had to give interviews to American radio stations. Our handheld Yaesu radio had been configured to patch through the satellite dish in base camp, allowing us to use it like a telephone. One night at high camp we called a station in San Diego to do a morning show with two Beavis and Butthead–type comedians whose shtick was to entertain their listeners, as they sat in rush-hour traffic, by riffing off each other and making their guests look like idiots.

  “So who exactly works at the 7-Elevens in Pakistan, anyway?” asked one of the guys.

  “You’ve been watching too much Simpsons, dude,” replied Jared.

  “How do you guys go to the bathroom up there?” asked the other.

  “You ever heard of a mud falcon?” I replied.

  The next day, we were interviewed by Bob Edwards of National Public Radio (NPR). The conversation was refreshing compared to the gutter talk we’d spewed across San Diego, and the piece, which aired on Morning Edition, played on hundreds of radio stations across the United States, reaching millions of listeners. Afterward, the website went viral—although that term hadn’t been invented yet. Quokka was inundated with e-mails, which Brito would sometimes beam up to us. Most of the e-mails were complimentary, people wishing us good luck and asking questions like “Is there less gravity at altitude?” But there were some haters. These folks all said the same thing: “What kind of an egotist goes out and risks his life for something so pointless?” “Who is going to rescue you (and pay for it) when it all goes wrong?”

  One thing was certain: Expedition reporting had come a long way since George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were dispatching letters with carriers on the 1924 British Mount Everest expedition. In 1953, news of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first ascent of Everest was sent via a runner from base camp, who took four days to reach the nearest telephone. Thirty years later, high-altitude filmmaker David Breashears broadcast the first live TV images from Everest’s summit. Now, at the dawn of Y2K, there we were documenting an entire two-month-long expedition in close-to-real time.

  * * *

  —

  ALEX GOT SICK to his stomach and couldn’t climb one morning. Jared and I left him to sweat it out for the day and headed up the fixed ropes hanging above camp. When I was fifty feet up, I looked down between my boots, which were still wet, and saw Alex hanging a brown-spackled pair of long johns out the door of the ledge. That afternoon, 1,000 overhanging feet above camp, Jared tackled the most spectacular pitch of the entire route—a twenty-five-foot horizontal ceiling, split down the middle with a razor-thin crack. Jared nailed his way out the roof, slamming knifeblade pitons, like a blacksmith, one after another into the upside-down crack. Free climbing was out of the question, so Jared aid climbed using the same techniques developed by Royal Robbins and Warren Harding forty years earlier during Yosemite’s golden age. What I remember most from that lead was the sound of the pitons being driven into the rock. With each hit, the tone would rise as the iron bit deeper and deeper into the rock. The ringing peal of metal against metal echoed within the cathedral-like amphitheater below the roof, and from years of pounding
iron into rock, I could tell how solid each piton was from the tone it gave off as it inched into the mountain. Hours later, when Jared turned the lip of the roof, he let loose with a cry like a wolf howling at the moon that I’m sure they must have heard in base camp a mile below: “Aaay-oooooo.”

  Alex was sleeping when we got back to the ledge that evening, and we did our best not to disturb him as we slid inside and boiled water on the hanging stove for our nightly freeze-dried meals. In the morning, I awoke to Alex’s alarm at four A.M. I looked out from the mummy hood of my sleeping bag and there he was, firing up the stove for our morning brew as per his usual. He made eye contact, and I was surprised to see he was making the face, one bushy eyebrow up in the air, a childish grin stretching from ear to ear. “So, should we go for it?” he said matter-of-factly, as if he hadn’t been ill for the past twenty-four hours.

  When I poked my head out the door of the ledge I saw long wispy mares’ tails blowing in from the south. We all knew, from hard experience, that these clouds were the leading edge of a storm front that was blowing in from the Indian Ocean. So while Alex made coffee, Jared and I loaded our packs with the essentials for a fast and light push for the summit—stove, sleeping bags, bivy sacks, pads, and a light rack of climbing gear. It was time to leave the portaledge, the pigs, and all the other detritus behind, and go full out for the summit.