The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  Looking back twenty-five years later, I’d have to say that the idea of blitzing up the buttress without fixed ropes and going alpine-style all the way to the summit verged on the grandiose. At the time, however, speed seemed to Andy and me the only rational response to constant exposure to avalanche risk. Yet we knew that the really strong team that had made the first ascent of the Kangshung Face in 1983 had laboriously built up fixed ropes through their buttress, despite being vulnerable for weeks on end to snow slides and rock falls. Only after they’d gotten massive loads up to a camp on the easier terrain above the buttress did they prepare for a push to the top, and to do so, they established yet another camp at 25,800 feet. It was from that high refuge that the six climbers who summitted finally set out.

  For Andy and me to go alpine-style all the way from Camp I to the top would not only have been hanging it out—it would have been a feat that no one before us had pulled off on Everest. By 1988, other climbers, including Messner and Habeler and Erhard Loretan and Jean Troillet, had made fast, light, oxygenless ascents of Everest, but only by routes that other climbers had previously pioneered. Even by 2013, no party has ever completed a new route on Everest in true alpine style.

  In the end, all our plans for a blitzkrieg of the Kangshung proved moot. The turning point came when Andy and I first went into the lead on the buttress. We started up on September 10, leaving our tent at Camp I at 2:45 a.m. It was a cold, starry night, and in pitch darkness, we jumared up the ropes Jan and Richard had fixed a few days before. It was eerie moving up a steep snow gully with only a tunnellike cone of light from our headlamps to indicate the way.

  We’d been on the route for only fifteen minutes when an avalanche came down from somewhere far above—we could hear it, but saw nothing. Terrified, we hung from our jumars, the front points of our crampons planted in the slope, and hugged the wall. As I wrote that evening in my diary, “All I could see was powder rushing past my light beam as I gripped my jumar and tried to breathe without choking on the spindrift—scary! Finally it stopped. We both started getting the heebie-jeebies.”

  So much for an early start as the solution to the hazards of the route! If an avalanche could cut loose at 3:00 a.m., it could strike at any time. Still, Andy and I pushed upward for a while longer, until we found a section where the avalanche debris had actually buried the fixed ropes. That was enough for us. We rapped off the route and trudged back to camp. It was still before sunrise as we crawled into our sleeping bags, but twenty minutes later an even bigger avalanche tore loose from somewhere up on Lhotse. Our tent was blasted with ice pellets and wind driven ahead of the debris. Andy and I were so freaked out that we decided to abandon Camp I and head down to advance base, where we knew we’d be out of any firing lines. Later that day I confessed my thoughts to my diary: “One more episode like that and I’m gonna seriously consider calling it quits. It’s just not worth it. Too many avalanches, too dangerous, too scary.”

  Yet at the same time, both Andy and I wondered whether we were being wimps. After all, the Americans on the Kangshung in 1981 and 1983 had faced the very same hazards, with lots of close calls, yet persevered on the second expedition to push the route all the way to the summit. There was a consolation of sorts, however, in the example set by John Roskelley. Although we both lived in Washington State—Roskelley in Spokane, I in Seattle—and though we would become partners the next year on Kangchenjunga, by 1988 I had met John only briefly as we crossed paths on Rainier. I knew him better by his stellar reputation.

  Outside magazine had anointed Roskelley as the leading American high-altitude mountaineer. But John arrived at base camp under the Kangshung Face in 1981, spent one day on the route, rapped off, and promptly told his teammates that the whole face was unjustifiably dangerous. Then he tried to convince the team to abandon the Kangshung and move their expedition to the conventional North Col route, and when that appeal failed, he left the team and headed home.

  I had rationalized going to Everest in autumn, after the monsoon, with the premise that the abundant summer snowfall ought to decrease the technical difficulty of the route (snow being easier to climb than rock). I knew that the trade-off was that more snow on the face meant more avalanches. I believed, however, that serac collapses—as great a hazard as snow slides on the Kangshung—should come with equally random frequency in the spring or fall. Seracs cut loose whenever they want to.

  On the trip, however, Andy came to a different conclusion. September in the Himalaya, he argued, is a warmer month than April, and higher temperatures made it more likely not only that avalanches would be triggered but that towers and blocks of ice would melt out and go crashing down the face. “It’s a dumb time to be here,” Andy bluntly remarked halfway through the expedition.

  Whoever was right, that Kangshung adventure started to fix in my mind a preference for the spring season over the fall on 8,000ers. In Pakistan, where five of the world’s fourteen highest peaks are located, the monsoon isn’t an issue, and nearly all the expeditions take place in summer. But in Nepal and Tibet, where the other nine highest peaks are found, the monsoon is the crucial factor in the yearly round. After 1988, I would go on twenty-two more expeditions to 8,000ers in the Himalaya proper (as opposed to Pakistan’s Karakoram). Only three of them would take place in autumn—two on Cho Oyu, where avalanche danger isn’t as extreme as on the other peaks, and the ascent route becomes easier with new snow covering loose rock.

  Not all mountaineers agree with me. Some of the greatest, including Jerzy Kukuczka and Erhard Loretan, have pulled off brilliant ascents on 8,000ers in September or October. But in my book, the technically easier snow-covered ridges and faces are counterbalanced by the increase in avalanche danger. And there’s another key consideration. If you go to an 8,000er in the spring, you’re likely to spend April on the lower part of the peak, then May, with longer days and warmer temperatures, up high. In the fall, it’s just the opposite. You spend September getting camps and supplies in place, but by the time you go for the summit, in mid- or late October, the days are short, the first winter winds have arrived, and the temperatures are brutally cold.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the Georgia Mount Everest Expedition was in something like disarray. Privately, I struggled with my mixed emotions. Part of me had already decided I wouldn’t risk another day on the buttress, but the loyal teammate in me felt that I couldn’t crap out and let down my partners. I didn’t say much, but my diary became a record of quivering ambivalence. On September 11, several of us hiked back up to Camp I to check out the route. On a bright sunny day, slides were spilling off the great face with alarming regularity, and through binoculars, we could see that avalanche debris had covered even more of our fixed ropes. “Now I’m back in the ‘no-go’ mode,” I wrote. “What to do, what to do? Should I look at the evidence and trust my gut feelings? But, then again, no major feats have been done without a bit of daring.”

  Yet by dinner time, I’d agreed to go up with Andy the next day and try to retrieve the fixed ropes, so that we could use them on another line to the right of Jan and Richard’s couloir, a route that looked safer. I’d come up with yet another rationalization—that since the slopes had already avalanched over our route, there wasn’t enough loaded snow left above it to slide again.

  In the middle of dinner, a huge avalanche came down right over our route. So much for my rationalization! That settled it for me—I wasn’t going up there on September 12. Andy still couldn’t make up his mind. We spent the rest of the evening hashing out the pros and cons. And we both slept poorly, sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night each time we heard the roar of a new slide out there in the darkness.

  The next day, despite all those warning signs, Andy, Jan, and Donnie Mims went up to clear the ropes. I watched them for hours through the binoculars, my heart sometimes in my throat. I saw Donnie turn around and descend; when he got back to camp, he said he was feeling ill but also spooked by the route. Jan and Andy were bac
k by 10:30 a.m. Their retrieval effort had been jinxed, as they found some of the fixed ropes severed by crashing debris, others stretched as tight as guitar strings. That discovery clinched the case against the route Jan and Richard had first attacked. But it didn’t settle the question of whether there was another line to the right that might be safer.

  We spent the next week in this miserably anxious and uncertain state. Camped under our buttress, Andy and I invented a nickname for a prominent ice cliff looming above us. “Old Blue,” we called it, in homage to Yellowstone’s Old Faithful, because some part of the cliff collapsed every day at 10:00 p.m. The jaunty nickname, however, was a kind of gallows humor meant to defuse the anxiety with which the whole Kangshung Face had infected us.

  We kept shuttling between advance base and Camp I, building up loads for an assault we doubted we had the nerve to launch. In my diary, I started second-guessing the whole enterprise. “Why did Joe [Dinnen, leader of the Georgia team] go for the east face anyway? Slim chance right off the bat! We shoulda gone to the north side from the beginning.”

  The tension was taking its toll on Andy’s and my friendship, as well. We started bickering over all kinds of trivial issues. On September 13, Andy’s emotions overflowed. On a short walk away from camp, he suddenly put his arms around me. He had tears in his eyes. He said that I shouldn’t let anybody else influence my personal decision about the route, and that I was probably the smartest guy of all if I chose not to go back up on the buttress. Andy kept thinking about Lisa and Bam Bam. Yet he felt committed to a last try. Still, he openly voiced the fear that “the big one” might come down while he was on the face and that he wouldn’t come back alive. He had resolved that this was to be his last major expedition, and he didn’t want to throw in his cards without a fight.

  The clincher came on September 21. After several days at advance base, six of us hiked back up to Camp I to check things out. My diary recorded the shock of our arrival: “An avalanche air blast had destroyed both tents and ravens did a number on all of our food—about 50 days worth. All that was left was tea, cocoa, & nutritional supplements—no meals, no lunch food! How depressing! We cleaned things up and carried some wet gear down to ABC.”

  It’s a testament to our commitment, I suppose—or perhaps to our pigheaded denial—that Andy, Richard, and I clung to the hope of one last blitzkrieg shot at the route. By now, the other four Georgians had thrown in the towel. On September 26, the three of us hiked back to Camp I with heavy packs, hoping to make an alpine-style stab the next day. But high cirrus was starting to form over the mountain, and I knew that those kinds of clouds usually presaged really bad weather.

  Andy wanted to go up on the buttress just to retrieve two racks of expensive cams we had hung from our highest anchor. (Camming devices for protection had recently come on the market, and they were not only expensive, but they seemed like the most precious piece of gear we could arm ourselves with in the mountains.) I tried to talk him out of it. “It wasn’t worth risking my life just to go up for that [gear] so I headed to camp,” I wrote in my diary. “Soon afterward, Richard and Andy arrived, saying I was right and it wasn’t worth the risk.” More than two decades later, Andy still rued the loss of those cams.

  So ended the 1988 Georgia Mount Everest Expedition. On that scary buttress, which is still unclimbed today, we got to only 19,000 feet—a monumental 10,000 feet short of the summit. As I headed back to the States, I couldn’t help toting up my Everest record to date. O for two—two tries, two failures. But my deeper feelings were captured in the last line of my expedition diary: “All I can say is—thank God I’m alive and goin’ home!!”

  • • •

  Only five months after coming back from the Kangshung Face, I was off to Nepal again, on the expedition to Kangchenjunga that Lou Whittaker had organized. At last I’d had to face the choice that would become the turning point in my life—whether to pursue a vocation as a veterinarian or somehow become a full-time mountaineer. Before heading off to Kangchenjunga, I’d reluctantly resigned from the two jobs I held at vet clinics run by friends. It was a scary decision: after all, I’d spent four grueling years at Washington State University earning my doctorate, on top of four previous years at the University of Washington pursuing a degree in zoology just to get into vet school. To throw away a potentially lucrative and stable career just to go gallivanting on the world’s highest mountains seemed perilously close to shooting myself in the foot. By 1989, there were still virtually no Americans making a living from climbing alone, as opposed to serving as tech reps for gear companies, working as mountain guides, or being instructors at Outward Bound and NOLS. A true professional climber has to earn his living by attending trade shows, endorsing and helping design products, letting his picture be used for advertising, going on the road to do slide shows, and proclaiming the virtues of the company that is sending him out there. One sponsor alone seldom provides enough cash to live a normal life and pay for expeditions to boot. In general, it’s harder work hustling sponsors than climbing the toughest mountains.

  Kangchenjunga was a long, arduous expedition, but on May 18, 1989, I stood on the summit of the world’s third-highest mountain with my teammates Phil Ershler and Craig Van Hoy. At last I’d succeeded on an 8,000-meter peak. From the top of Kangchenjunga, I could see Everest eighty miles to the east, and the sight renewed my longing to tackle the 300 feet that had stood between me and the summit in 1987. No sooner had I returned to base camp than Lou told me that his twin brother, Jim—lastingly famous as the first American to reach the world’s highest point, in 1963—was organizing a massive, multinational trip to Everest for 1990, and that Jim wanted me on the team.

  The concept behind the Everest International Peace Climb, as Jim called it, was both ambitious and political. As he later outlined the plan in the American Alpine Journal,

  Our goal was to place three climbers, one from each country, on the top of the world. They would demonstrate that through friendship and cooperation high goals can be reached. We chose our enemies to climb with—the Soviets and the Chinese. This was before glasnost, before perestroika, before the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, before Gorbachev went to Beijing. We would hold the summit of all summit meetings, enemies becoming friends.

  After 1963, Jim Whittaker had become a household name. For decades he remained by far the best-known American climber. And his celebrity nudged him into political realms, starting in 1965, when the National Geographic Society asked him to lead an expedition to the newly named Mount Kennedy in the Yukon, just east of the Alaska border. The peak had been discovered by Brad Washburn’s team in the winter and spring of 1935, as they made a monumental traverse of the unmapped Saint Elias Range. They had named the peak East Hubbard, as it was a slightly lower satellite of another mountain named by a surveyor back in 1891. Washburn saw at once that though East Hubbard boasted a spectacular north ridge angling 6,000 feet from glacier to summit, it would be an easy walk-up from the south. After President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Washburn and the NGS engineered the renaming of East Hubbard to Mount Kennedy. The peak was so remote that by 1965, it remained unclimbed. The publicity coup would be to persuade Bobby Kennedy to join a team making the first ascent.

  Although he had never climbed a mountain of any size before, Bobby was in good shape. With all kinds of help from a supporting cast of “real climbers,” he slogged with Whittaker to the top, unfurled several flags, and left some of his brother’s prized memorabilia in a snow pocket on the summit.

  The trip sparked a lasting friendship between the Whittaker and Kennedy families, resulting in shared vacations at Hyannis Port and on Puget Sound. Jim threw himself into campaigning for Bobby during the 1968 presidential race, and after Bobby’s assassination in Los Angeles, Jim toyed with the idea of running for the U.S. Senate himself.

  Though that never happened, by 1989 Jim had an extensive network of contacts in high places all across the globe. And to put together the Peace Climb, he would have
to pull out all kinds of logistical and political stops, at the cost of very big bucks.

  In early 1989, at the age of twenty-nine, I was a pretty apolitical animal myself. Promoting cooperation among China, the Soviet Union, and the United States appealed to me less than getting another chance to go after Mount Everest, but at the same time, I realized that the Peace Climb might help me attract attention and sponsors in the future. The third time on Everest, I hoped, would be my charm. As it turned out, and as even Jim had to admit, the expedition would produce as much cross-cultural tension as it did friendship. Long-drawn-out expeditions composed of good friends can be stressful enough. Putting together climbers from three different cultures with three different climbing styles amounted to a built-in recipe for conflict.

  Jim ended up making multiple trips to Moscow and Beijing just to persuade the Soviets and the Chinese to join the expedition. For years, Soviets had not been allowed into China, and thawing that hostility presented Jim with one of his toughest hurdles. But once the rosters of climbers were in place, everybody got together for shakedowns on Mount Rainier and in the Caucasus.

  On Rainier during the summer of 1989, we set up a massive base camp on the Nisqually Glacier, not far from the Paradise trailhead. From there, the climbers assaulted various routes on the peak. The Russians expressed surprise that we had such a significant mountain right in our backyard. But here, during these “practice” climbs, it became evident to everyone that the Chinese climbers weren’t up to the standards of the Soviets and the Americans. To save face, the Chinese Mountaineering Association (CMA) eventually substituted Tibetans for Chinese on Everest.

  Throughout the expedition, I relished the bitter irony behind this switch. Since 1959, when the Chinese invaded Tibet, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee, the Beijing government had relentlessly oppressed the Tibetan people. But now, the CMA decided that it had to be Tibetan climbers who represented China in the eyes of the world. Those Tibetans had plenty of high-altitude experience, and they were tough as nails. I befriended a couple of them and was delighted to run into my former partners on later expeditions in the Himalaya.