The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  Reluctantly, Conrad concluded that all the evidence argued against any chance of Mallory and Irvine having made the first ascent of Everest.

  • • •

  Time and again over the years, people have asked me whether I think Mallory and Irvine made it to the summit on June 8, 1924. The answer I give shocks most of them. But it’s firmly rooted in the philosophy that I’ve adhered to throughout my mountaineering career.

  My answer is this: It doesn’t matter whether Mallory and Irvine got to the summit. It’s irrelevant. They didn’t make it back down.

  That may seem a harsh judgment, even a dogmatic one. But the cardinal motto of all my climbing—a motto that readers of my previous books have told me strikes a sympathetic chord—is this: Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

  I admire Mallory tremendously, both as a climber and as a visionary explorer. Almost single-handedly, he figured out the puzzle of Everest. But at some point in his quest, he succumbed, I believe, to a deadly obsession with the mountain. In 1922, he had wisely turned back from his summit attempt at 2:15 p.m. If Odell saw him and Irvine still headed upward at 12:50 p.m. on June 8, 1924, then, given the place where his body came to rest, Mallory almost certainly ignored a turnaround deadline on his third expedition. He may well have climbed into the night without a flashlight.

  We’ll never know exactly what happened to cause the fatal fall off the northeast ridge. We may never find Irvine’s body. We know that Mallory carried a small Kodak camera with him, and for decades observers hoped that finding the camera and exposing the film might solve the question once and for all. To the 1999 team’s great disappointment, the camera was not with Mallory’s body, though various scraps of paper and other objects were found in his pockets. It may be that Mallory gave Irvine the camera to carry. By 2013, so thoroughly has the north side of Everest been combed for clues, it seems likely that the camera will never be found.

  Meanwhile, I’m sticking to my guns. An ascent doesn’t really count unless you come back alive.

  Yet ever since I first read about the early expeditions to Everest as a teenager, the saga of those gallant efforts on the world’s highest mountain has stirred my blood. They’re the stuff of myth. And Mallory, for all his flaws, remains the tragic hero of that myth.

  3

  My Way

  Just fifteen months after coming so close to the summit with Eric Simonson, I went back to Mount Everest. Once more, because there was no way I could raise the funds myself to pay for such a trip, I was content to piggyback along on someone else’s expedition. The invitation came through my close friend and fellow RMI guide Andy Politz. The spark was a chance meeting in the Whittaker bunkhouse at the foot of Mount Rainier, as several climbers overheard Andy recounting his epic two-man ascent of the south face of Mount Saint Elias on the Alaska-Canada border in 1984. They introduced themselves to Andy and asked if he wanted to join an Everest expedition they were planning.

  Four of the five guys were from Georgia; the other was a doctor from Aspen. They were strong technical climbers on rock and ice, but lacked high-altitude experience in the great ranges. That was something, they guessed, that Andy could supply in spades. And they wondered if Andy could bring along another mountaineer with Himalayan experience. So Andy asked me.

  The trip was planned not for the spring of 1988, but for the autumnal postmonsoon season, though we’d start our hike in in mid-August, with the monsoon still in full force. By that summer, I was already signed up for a 1989 expedition to Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain, to be led by my RMI boss, Lou Whittaker. When Andy invited me to join the crew from Georgia, I tussled for weeks with the pros and cons of accepting the offer. The cons mostly had to do with taking another protracted leave from my career as a veterinarian, which, though barely launched, was already in danger of being sabotaged by my passion for mountaineering. The pros were simple: How could I turn down another chance at Everest that somebody else would pay for?

  I recognized the irony. In 1987, I was a hired gun on the officially named Arkansas Everest Expedition. In 1988, our team of seven became the official Georgia Mount Everest Expedition. What was behind this strange linkage between me and the South?

  Andy’s and my friendship went back to 1982, when I’d first landed a job as an RMI guide. Though Andy was the same age as me, he’d worked for RMI since 1979. Still, we gravitated toward each other from the start. We often rode our bikes together to work, up the eighteen-mile road from our summer lodging in Ashford to the Paradise trailhead, gaining some 3,000 feet along the way. In a playful, competitive vein, Andy and I invented what we called the “load wars.” On Rainier, the junior guides were regularly charged with carrying the food and gear for a trip with clients up the grueling four-and-a-half-mile trail from Paradise at 5,400 feet to Camp Muir at 10,000. This was the first leg of our usual two-day ascent of Rainier, and although the hike was physically demanding for the clients, it became routine for us guides. Most of the guys would try to carry as little as possible, but Andy and I took on the challenge of cramming our backpacks as full as we could, just to get in another tough workout. We’d carry loads of as much as 90 pounds. At Muir, we’d ostentatiously unload our stuff, one item at a time, piling it all on the floor—blocks of cheese, frozen steaks, cartons of eggs, heads of lettuce, giant cans of beans. Eyeing the piles, the other guides would vote on which of us had won the “load war.” Another trick Andy and I played on each other was to sneak a heavy rock into the other guy’s pack for the even more grueling ascent from Muir to the summit. Only on top would we disclose the subterfuge. Sometimes we’d say nothing at all, and the victim would find the hidden rock only when he got home and emptied his pack. I think we nailed each other about equally with this sadistic little trick.

  By 1988, Andy had a lot more big-range experience than I did. Besides the new route on Saint Elias and an ascent of the massive Wickersham Wall on Denali, he’d already been on two Everest expeditions and an attempt on K2. In 1985, Andy had been one of the strongest members of a big American team trying the West Ridge of Everest, the line that Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein had so boldly pioneered in 1963. Despite the abundance of talent in that party, they were thwarted by weather and snow conditions, and the summit pair had to turn back at 28,200 feet, just 800 feet short of the top.

  The next year, Andy joined an even more ambitious team trying to make the first ascent of the south-southwest ridge of K2, the route called the “Magic Line” by Reinhold Messner. I’d been invited on that expedition, but had to decline because of vet school. After only three weeks on the mountain, with fixed ropes strung up the lower part of the route and caches of gear laid, John Smolich and Alan Pennington started up the approach gully. The early sun striking the upper face melted out a precariously placed boulder that plunged down the wall. The rock in turn triggered a massive avalanche. Smolich and Pennington never had a chance. Their teammates found Pennington’s body, but not Smolich’s. With their morale shattered, the party closed up shop and went home.

  A fellow RMI guide, Smolich was a good friend of mine. I admired him because he was always training—he’d wear ankle weights during the hike up to Camp Muir. But John was even closer to Andy. After such a shocking tragedy, you’d think that Andy would ponder long and hard before going on another expedition to an 8,000-meter peak. But only two months after the K2 disaster, he returned to Everest for an attempt by the traditional North Col–northeast ridge route. This team, too, failed to summit.

  Decades later, Andy told me why he’d gone to Everest so soon after losing one of his best friends on K2. “It wasn’t cathartic,” he said. “I just felt more relaxed on a big mountain than at home. If we hadn’t made any mistakes on K2, and John and Alan were killed, I think I would have quit climbing. But we made a big mistake on K2. We should have waited at least another day before heading up the route. There was this herd mentality on K2 that year. All the big boys were there.”

  By the �
��big boys,” Andy meant such famous climbers as Jerzy Kukuczka, Renato Casarotto, Alan Rouse, Wanda Rutkiewicz, and Benoît Chamoux. Indeed, nothing like such an all-star cast had ever before assembled on K2, or for that matter, on any 8,000er. There’s no question but that the sense of rivalry contributed to one of the most catastrophic seasons on a single peak in mountaineering history. As I recounted in detail in K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain, by the end of the summer of 1986, thirteen climbers had lost their lives on K2.

  Two years later, despite their lack of big-range experience, the Georgia gang had gotten a permit not for the traditional South Col or north-face routes on Everest, but for the massive Kangshung Face on the east—the last of Everest’s three major faces to be climbed. A Herculean effort by some of the best American climbers in 1981 and 1983 had culminated in the first ascent of the Kangshung, with six climbers reaching the top. And in the spring of 1988, just three months before we started our hike in, a four-man team had put up a new route on the left side of the face. That turned into an epic, as only one climber, the Englishman Steven Venables, pushed on to the summit, nearly dying in the process. The American Ed Webster would probably have topped out, too, but on his summit day, he briefly took off his mittens to shoot a photograph, and in a matter of seconds suffered such severe frostbite that he would later lose several fingertips to amputation.

  The Georgia crew wanted to try a variant on the Venables-Webster route, even farther to the left. If Andy and I were taken aback by the ambition of our teammates, I don’t recall it. I was just eager to get back to Everest, and seeing another whole side of the mountain had its own appeal. Privately, I gave us a 50-50 chance of success. But I thought that making an attempt on such a formidable route could only make me a better climber. On the approach, we rationalized to ourselves that all the technical difficulties of the route lay in the initial 2,000-foot-high buttress of mixed rock, ice, and snow. We thought the Georgians’ technical skills would help us surmount that barrier. From the top of the buttress, it looked like straightforward climbing on moderately steep snow and ice, another 7,000 feet to the South Col. Then from the South Col to the summit, we’d be following the “standard” route first climbed by Hilllary and Tenzing in 1953.

  What we didn’t have the experience to weigh properly beforehand was the difference between the Kangshung Face in the spring and in the fall, postmonsoon. Before heading to Everest, in fact, we didn’t even consult any of the Americans who had been on the face. For my part, that omission was natural. In 1988, I was still a newbie, a nobody. Who was I to talk to a famous climber like Ed Webster? But Andy had been on the West Ridge with Ed. It may be curious in retrospect that Andy didn’t bother to consult Ed about the face, but it didn’t seem so at the time. Even if we had talked to some of the Kangshung veterans, I’m not sure that it would have altered our approach. We pretty much had to have a go of our own to see how things would pan out.

  After a lengthy overland journey by truck, we started the hike in from the remote village of Kharta on August 17. Full of optimism, we had no inklings of just how thoroughly Everest would smack us flat.

  • • •

  I’d turned twenty-nine two months before the trek. I was still single, without a serious relationship in my life. But it surprised me to learn early on during the trip that I was the only guy on the expedition who wasn’t married. Andy was not only married, but six months earlier, his wife, Lisa, had given birth to their first child. Named Jonathan, he was nicknamed Bam Bam, because he was already pretty big and almost hyperactive. He took after Andy in that respect. My RMI buddy was built like a gorilla. As far as I knew, he’d never lifted weights in his life, but without his shirt on, he looked like he worked out every day. I surprised myself by managing to stay even with Andy in our load wars.

  All during the expedition, Andy talked about his wife and kid. It was clear that fatherhood had profoundly changed his feelings about risk in the mountains. (I would find out the same thing for myself nine years later.) Andy clearly missed Bam Bam, and he’d told me that this was going to be his last expedition—how wrong a prediction that would turn out to be!

  Because of our various schedules, the Georgia crew hiked in to base camp before we did. They traveled through Tibet to get to the mountain, while Andy and I came in from Nepal, bringing high-altitude tents and other supplies that we had bought in Kathmandu. That journey was fairly epic in its own right, as the roads in Nepal had been washed out by the monsoon rains. Unable to drive all the way to the border, we had to hike for several days through torrential downpours made more miserable by leeches and sweltering heat. Low on cash, we lived in squalor as we overnighted in the cheapest roadside inns we could find. And because the Georgians’ budget was so tight, we couldn’t hire enough porters to haul all our loads, so Andy and I had to make the soggy trudge burdened with 60-pound packs ourselves.

  Andy had met the guys on Rainier, of course, and he’d made a trip to Georgia before the expedition to work out logistics, but my teammates were complete strangers to me before we met at base camp. We’d decided not to hire Sherpas for the climb, but a team of yak herders carried all our gear from Kharta to the foot of the mountain. The herders came across on the surface as friendly and helpful, only to rob us blind of rope and other essentials behind our backs. We spent lots of time and energy guarding our gear. I’m always happy to trade or give away valuable equipment to porters and Sherpas after a climb, but having it vanish before the climb added to the stress of our ambitious objective.

  By starting the expedition in mid-August, we were confronting the tail end of the monsoon at its most sodden. We figured that we could endure any amount of rain in the lowlands, then be ready to roll in September on the Kangshung Face. But the hike in proved tougher and scarier than I’d expected, with hairy river crossings on makeshift bridges. And the rain became a daily tribulation. As I wrote in my diary on August 23, “Will it ever stop raining?? Everything is wet! Gore-Tex is wet, shoes & socks are wet, the inside of the tent is wet—give me a break! Not even an hour’s worth of sunshine to dry stuff out. Yak shit everywhere you step.”

  The next day we reached base camp, where I met the five members of the Georgia team. They seemed like nice guys, and from the start it was evident that they were going to be stronger climbers than our Arkansas partners the year before. They fully expected to play equal roles with Andy and me in fixing ropes through that formidable buttress at the bottom of the face. A good thing, since we could see at once how much more serious the Kangshung Face was than the north face rising above the Central Rongbuk.

  The east face of Everest looks nothing like the other two better-known faces of the great mountain. Essentially, the Kangshung unfolds as a massive, uninterrupted precipice spilling almost 12,000 feet from the summit to the glacier. The upper slopes, though festooned with crevasses and seracs, lie back at a reasonable angle, and are made entirely of snow and ice. It’s the lowest part of the face, where the angle radically steepens, baring a series of fiendishly technical rock-and-ice buttresses, that makes the Kangshung so formidable. And there’s no line anywhere on the massive wall that you can count on to be free of avalanches and falling rocks. The big snowslides that spill from the massive slopes high above the buttress seem fairly predictable, triggered by certain patterns of snowfall and wind direction. But what worried us most were the cliffs of ice that were poised above us, like so many swords of Damocles. They could calve loose at any time, and when one of those monsters came down, there was nowhere to run, no place to hide.

  I have to admit that I was daunted as I first walked the glacier below the wall, no matter how many photos of it I had perused. So was Andy, and so were the Georgia climbers. Still, each of us tended to internalize his fears, and we kept up a brave, positive front when we talked about the route. Since we planned to attack a line at the far southern or left-hand edge of the face, we spent the first twelve days relaying loads to an advance base camp and then to Camp I,
on a rocky moraine at 17,300 feet directly below our buttress—but far enough away from it that we could be sure (or so we hoped) that no avalanches would engulf our tents. With the first days of September, the monsoon at last started to peter out, and we had a number of beautiful mornings when the whole face gleamed under intense sunlight. Our morale soared with the sun’s rays.

  As I wrote in my diary on September 3, “The route really looks good/doable! But that’s with binoculars.” Our optimism extended to style, as well. That day, Andy announced that he was going to climb without bottled oxygen. I’d already made the same decision myself. As I told my diary, “I’d rather fail without O2 than make the summit with O2.” The Georgia crew had no such compunctions. They figured the route was going to be tough enough that any aid with altitude would be welcome.

  On September 4, two of the Georgians, Jan Schwartzberg and Richard Tyrrell, started up our route. It was not a promising beginning. Fixing rope as they climbed, in two days they got only 1,200 feet of lines in place, even though the initial couloir was quite easy. As I wrote in my diary, “We could walk around what they fixed.” Even so, while they were on the face, a big avalanche came off Lhotse, just left of our route, and “dusted” the buttress the guys were climbing. “I’m sure Richard & Jan got quite a scare—I would have,” I wrote in my diary. When they rejoined us in camp, they were worn out and voicing second thoughts about our route.

  As were Andy and I. Already we were pondering a whole new approach to the Kangshung, which I outlined in my diary. “I’m starting to get mixed feelings about our route,” I wrote. “We’ve got to climb very early in the morning & fast to be safe. Maybe it’s too risky to try to fix the route and carry loads? Maybe Andy & I should try to flash the route alpine style? We’d be hangin’ it out but would only have to go up & down once.”