The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  The Caucasus shakedown was an unexpected treat for me. I’d been to the Pamirs twice, but never to this impressive range between the Black and Caspian seas. Instead of hunkering in tents, we were housed in training-camp dorms and fed hearty meals enlivened by endless toasts infused with gallons of vodka. Several of us climbed Mount Elbrus, at 18,510 feet the highest peak in Europe, but little more than a long snow slog. More challenging was the north face of Jhantugan, a steep, technical snow-and-ice route that Robert Link, Steve Gall, and I teamed up to climb.

  On the other hand—perhaps as penance for a free vacation in the Caucasus—Whittaker enlisted several of us in Seattle to pack food and gear for the whole expedition. Yes, it was a voluntary chore, but the clear expectation was that if you lived in the area, you’d pitch in with the packing. That’s an onerous job even for, say, a six-man team of friends. But Jim had decided that all the food for all the climbers would be bought and packaged by the Americans—although in the end, both the Soviets and the Tibetans supplemented our rations with some of their favorite indigenous foods. In the fall and early winter of 1989, we spent numerous weekends and evenings in an industrial warehouse south of Seattle performing this drudgery. Jim insisted on individual man-day food packs, so we had to sort out hundreds of tiny boxes of crackers and raisins, as well as soup packs, tea and coffee packs, cookies, candies, and God knows what else, stuffing them all into ziplock bags and then into bigger bags, each labeled for a specific camp. I tried to argue, to no avail, that this was a waste of time, since a lot of this stuff would never get eaten, as climbers sorted out what they craved and left the rest behind before carrying these hefty bags up the mountain. Some nights after packing I’d go home and dream of conveyor belts loaded with food speeding by. The one side benefit was that I got to keep some of the leftovers. For months afterward, I had a supply of corn nuts, beef jerky, and Grandma’s Cookies stored in my basement apartment.

  We also sorted out individual boxes of gear for each member—everything from boots and socks to gaiters, mittens, and sunglasses, not to mention long johns, shell jackets and pants, down parkas, ice axes, harnesses, sunscreen, and water bottles. The job seemed endless.

  By the time we assembled in Lhasa on March 1, 1990, our team comprised twenty-one climbers listed on the official permit, as well as team leaders, doctors, and base camp staff, several of whom eventually made their own bids for the summit. Our entourage was rounded out by interpreters, a base camp manager, two American cooks, and, eventually, eighty-two yaks, with a Tibetan driver for every four beasts of burden. Our gear and food added up to an ungodly twenty tons. And the expedition budget had finally peaked at $1,100,000—still to this day by far the most expensive expedition I’ve ever been part of. The Peace Climb would also be the largest expedition team I ever joined, and even Whittaker said that he’d never been on so big and complex an operation (and that includes the fairly massive 1963 American Everest expedition when he was the first to reach the summit).

  It took us five days to drive by truck to the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier, where we set up base camp, on the very same site where we’d established our 1987 base. Here we unloaded the mountain of boxes that we had meticulously packed in Seattle. We used some of the boxes to build an enclosure sheltered from the constant wind, which we called “the beach,” complete with lawn chairs.

  Jim had deliberately planned an early arrival at the foot of the mountain, anticipating the logistical snafus that such a complicated trip would spawn. And so they did, right from the start. We’d paid the Soviets handsomely to supply 150 lightweight titanium oxygen bottles. Now, when we unpacked the crates, we discovered that the bottles had arrived in good shape, but minus the masks and regulators, which had been left in Moscow!

  To add to the confusion, our satellite phone, with which we could have sent out urgent pleas to get the missing gear on the way to Everest, wasn’t working. In the end, our deputy leader, Warren Thompson, had to drive back to Lhasa to phone the United States to get the wheels rolling. Even so, Jim had to rely on his friendship with Teddy Kennedy to get the senator’s aides to unsnarl the red tape that was keeping the masks and regulators in Moscow.

  The Tibetans had their own snafu, when the special boots we’d ordered for them failed to arrive at base camp. It was only on March 23 that the boots got trucked to base camp, allowing the “Chinese” contingent to contribute to our load-carrying.

  Personally, I got off to a bad start on the expedition. At base camp, I had a persistent neck ache that made it hard to sleep, as well as a nagging sore throat not unlike the one that had afflicted me in 1987. I could attribute the sore throat to sleeping in the cold, damp hotels of Tibet, but the neck problem had started mysteriously many months earlier in Seattle. Now it turned into a neck spasm that radiated pain down my right arm and that would not go away. Fearful that I wouldn’t pull my weight on our team, I actually considered telling Jim about my ailment and bowing out of the expedition. “I’m depressed ’cause I’m not my usual 100% self and it irritates me!” I wrote in my diary. Also: “What a cold, windy base camp this is. I’m spoiled by Kangch. The group size of this trip gets to me also.”

  The snafu with the oxygen masks and regulators, however, had no bearing on my own agenda for Everest. Even before leaving the States, I’d resolved again to try to get to the summit without bottled oxygen. Not that the prospect didn’t daunt me. In Beijing, on the way to Lhasa, I’d dwelt on the obstacles of the northeast ridge route our party would tackle. “The last bit of ridge just below the summit is quite steep!” I wrote. “Also the Second Step looks difficult. I’d have to say right now that this route is gonna be a bitch to do without O’s.”

  The yaks and drivers arrived on March 15, and soon we had an orderly flow of supplies heading up the East Rongbuk Glacier, with three camps along the way. The highest, at 21,500 feet, served as our advance base camp. On my first carry up the glacier, I anxiously hoisted my pack, only to discover that my neck spasm had completely vanished. The anxiety evaporated at once. On March 20, despite still feeling less than shipshape because of my sore throat, I roped up with Steve Gall as, followed by three Soviets, we forged the route up to the North Col at 23,500 feet. I led all day, putting in five fixed ropes to complete the safety line up the steep slope from the glacier to the col. Gasping for air, I cheered out loud as I crossed a last bergschrund and stood on the pass at which we had all stared from below three years earlier. This, despite the fact that other parties in previous years had left the col a mess; the place, as I wrote in my diary, “was a pit—old tents, trash, shit, etc.”

  Jim was holding our huge team together through sheer managerial acumen. Not an easy task, for each contingent had its own leader, Vladimir Shatayev for the Soviets, Losang Dawa for the Tibetans, Jim for us Americans. The Soviets, in particular, tended to march to their own drummer. Carrying far lighter loads from camp to camp than we Americans did, the Soviets bombed into the lead, then criticized us for being slow. They seemed to be caught up in an internal competition to prove who could move from camp to camp the fastest, whereas we Americans understood the need to supply the camps properly. One of the Soviets went so far as to carry no water on a long day’s climb; then, during rest breaks, he would ask us to hand over our water bottles so he could hydrate!

  All of us Americans started to resent the Soviet style. In my diary on March 20, I griped, “The Soviets think they’re studs. They don’t drink all day; they climb when they’re ill. It’s some macho thing they need to prove. As Steve [Gall] says, ‘They’re vying for the Lenin Award’!”

  We’d planned to establish Camp IV on the North Col, but on March 21, a fierce blizzard swept across the mountain, forcing all of us back down to base camp. And on that day, a crisis struck that could have wrecked the whole expedition.

  Despite having turned sixty-one just before the expedition, Jim was determined to pull his own weight as a team member. He had carried a load up to Camp III on the nineteenth, even though the effor
t exhausted him. Then, on the long descent to base camp in the blizzard two days later, stumbling in whiteout conditions, Jim felt a sharp pain in his calf muscle. During the next few days, the calf swelled with inflammation. The team doctor examined Jim and concluded that he probably had thrombophlebitis, a blood clot in the calf that, if it migrated to the heart or lungs, could kill him.

  All climbers know the tragic story of Art Gilkey, who was stricken with thrombophlebitis in a high camp during the 1953 American K2 expedition. Gilkey was convinced at first that he suffered from nothing worse than a “charley horse,” but Charles Houston, the team leader and doctor, made a careful examination and diagnosed the potentially fatal blood clot. Soon Gilkey could no longer walk. In a desperate effort to lower their comrade in a makeshift litter, the whole team nearly came to grief in a series of linked falls, saved only by Pete Schoening’s “miracle belay.” Then fate gave the men a gruesome reprieve, in the form of an avalanche that swept Gilkey off the Abruzzi Spur. Freed from the impossible task of lowering the litter on steep technical slopes, the others staggered back to base camp alive.

  There was nothing for Jim to do now but leave the expedition and seek a thorough diagnosis at a hospital. Stymied by delays and red tape, he was driven three hundred miles to Kathmandu, where, in an emergency room, he was put on heparin, an anticoagulant. When Jim’s condition failed to improve and the supply of heparin ran out, he had to fly to Bangkok, the nearest city with doctors competent to give him a genuinely expert diagnosis.

  In his absence, Warren Thompson, our deputy leader, was put in charge, but Thompson was a less forceful leader than Jim, and the discipline of the whole expedition began to fall apart. The Soviets scarcely heeded the orders of Shatayev, their own official leader, while they blithely ignored Thompson’s advice and instructions.

  Communication among our three teams presented another tedious obstacle. Each night, we’d have long radio calls from camp to camp. The interpreters had to translate our comments from Russian to Tibetan to English, through all the necessary permutations. Higher on the mountain, we had no resort to interpreters. Some of the Russians spoke a passable English, but none of the Tibetans did, and we linguistically challenged Americans could hardly fathom a word of the other two languages. We made do with a lot of gesturing and sign language. Somehow our high-altitude version of charades often got the message across.

  In Bangkok, Jim was examined by a specialist, who concluded that he didn’t have thrombophlebitis after all, but only a torn calf muscle. The whole trip out to a pair of hospitals had been unnecessary, but you can’t blame the expedition doctor for being overcautious. It took Jim six more days to get back to base camp. As he later wrote,

  Completely wasted and no longer acclimatized, I crawled out of the jeep and limped into the waiting arms of my teammates. My heart was pounding erratically; I couldn’t just feel it, I could hear it. But when they sat me down to a sumptuous dinner, preceded by vodka and caviar, I felt like a king.

  With Jim back at the helm, our snafu-ridden machine began to operate more smoothly. To maximize the chances of success, Jim had planned not only the usual Camps V and VI above the North Col, but a Camp VII way up on the northeast ridge, at around 28,000 feet. No expedition had ever camped so high on the route, but from tents pitched there, on summit day climbers would have to gain only a thousand feet of altitude. Jim’s rationale was based on the observation that before 1990, no climber had ever gone from Camp VI to the top and back without completing his descent after nightfall.

  Members from all three countries contributed to the effort to place Camp V at 25,600 feet, but as usual, we Americans bore the brunt of the work. On April 12, in extremely high winds, I carried a load to within 200 feet of the Camp V site, but the whole day unnerved me. As I wrote in my diary,

  Physically and mentally exhausting. Ridiculously dangerous. . . . After snow ends, climbing is on blocks and scree “trail.” Very windy. I was going really slow on the scree. Finally dumped my load because of wind/exhaustion. Going down was frightening. . . . The wind nearly took me off on the ridge. I had doubts about getting down to Camp IV!

  It wasn’t until the end of April that we got Camp VI established at 26,900 feet. The site was to the right of the north spur proper and below the northeast ridge. It was a marginal place for a camp, with makeshift tent platforms built by previous expeditions out of rocks and gravel. Those platforms were covered with the remnants of old shattered tents. We pitched our own tents right on top of the debris, anchoring them with ice screws and as many large stones as we could find.

  I made my first carry to Camp VI on the twenty-fourth. At last I was starting to feel really fit, as my sore throat had finally gone away. From the site, I assessed the climbing above. “Summit looks close but deceptive,” I wrote in my diary. A few days later, we had tents and gear in place at Camp VI. The plan was for the first summit party to carry everything they needed up to 28,000 feet, where they would establish Camp VII. They would sleep there, then go to the summit the next day.

  Back at base camp, Jim was now deliberating about which climbers to send up on the first summit attempt. To make the ideal statement about international cooperation, he intended to select two Americans, two Soviets, and two Chinese for that team. But to maximize the chances of success and to ensure that all members reached the summit together, he insisted that those climbers use supplemental oxygen.

  I’d worked my ass off for almost two months on the expedition, and it had paid off not only in terms of getting into great shape, but in winning Jim’s confidence. On April 25, he told me he wanted me to be on the first summit team, along with Robert Link, my buddy from RMI. Years later, in his autobiography, A Life on the Edge, Jim wrote, “Among the Americans, Ed Viesturs was unnaturally strong. In miserable conditions that drove others back down, he made carry after carry to the high camps, without supplemental oxygen. But that was the problem; he wanted to summit without oxygen.”

  All of us had gone all the way down to base camp to rest up for our summit attempts in the relatively rich air of 17,000 feet. There, Jim took me aside and told me he really wanted me on the first team, but if I were to be chosen, I’d have to agree to use bottled oxygen.

  “Sorry, Jim, but I’m not climbing with oxygen,” I said. “It’s fine with me if you choose somebody else.”

  “Go to bed and sleep on it,” Jim answered.

  “Jim—I’m not going to change my mind.”

  Jim may have thought I was just being stubborn, but I learned later that he respected my decision. I was fully aware of the sacrifice I was making. There was no guarantee there would even be a second summit team. But having decided on both my previous Everest attempts and on Kangchenjunga the year before not to use bottled O’s, I was resolute. As in the Frank Sinatra song, I wanted to be able to look back decades later and say, “I did it my way.”

  In the end, Jim chose Robert Link and Steve Gall for the first attempt. Joining them were the Tibetans Da Cheme and Gyal Bu and the Soviets Sergei Arsentiev and Grigori Luniakov. On May 2, they started up the mountain. They were stalled for a day in a blizzard at Camp V, then reached Camp VI on May 5. The next day dawned clear and calm. They pushed on up the northeast ridge, pitched tents at 28,000 feet as they established Camp VII, and got an early start on May 7.

  Within that team of six, however, fierce antagonisms had already broken out. It turns out that Sergei and Grigori had never intended to use bottled oxygen. They were strong, highly motivated climbers, having been principals on the massive Soviet team that had pulled off a traverse of Kanchenjunga’s five summits the year before. Now, to save their places on the first team, they lied both to their own leader, Vladimir Shatayev, and to Jim, agreeing to use supplemental oxygen. There were suspicions among the rest of us that the Soviets might try to pull off this ruse: we knew they wanted to get to the top without oxygen. But nobody ratted them out to Shatayev or Jim.

  In the end, Sergei and Grigori, climbing without bottled
O’s more slowly than Steve and Robert and the two Tibetans, jeopardized the whole climb. On the summit, the Tibetans and the Americans had to wait for forty-five minutes before the Soviets arrived. That vigil meant risking hypothermia and frostbite.

  When they learned what had happened, both Shatayev and Jim were royally pissed off. An embarrassed Shatayev vowed, “Don’t worry, Jim. It will be taken care of when they get back to Moscow, I promise you.” But if Sergei and Grigori were ever reprimanded or punished back home, we never heard about it.

  For the second team, Jim paired me with Ian Wade, our climbing leader, and the Soviets Mstislav (“Slava”) Gorbenko and Andrei Tselinshchev. We set off from base camp the day after the first team. I’d already decided not to spend a night at Camp VII, but to go from Camp VI all the way to the top in one push. That would mean, I knew, getting a really early start on summit day, sometime around 1:00 a.m. I calculated that if I could climb only 200 vertical feet an hour above 27,000 feet, it should take me ten hours to get to the top. If so, I’d be well within my 2:00 p.m. turnaround deadline.

  Not only Jim, however, but many of my teammates were dubious about my plan, as they argued that no one had pulled off such a round-trip summit day without having to bivouac. I thought that was simply because other climbers hadn’t left Camp VI early enough. After endless discussions over the radio, I was allowed to try the climb the way I wanted to. Andrei and Slava also decided to make the attempt from Camp VI. Ian opted to add a night at Camp VII and go for the summit the day after us, with four of the Tibetans.