The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

On the eve of my attempt, I was really keyed up and anxious. On May 1, I wrote, “Spent rest of day fidgeting & restless—can’t relax.”

  I got to Camp IV on the North Col without any trouble, but was stranded there for two days in high winds followed by heavy snow. I’d been under constant tension for weeks, and now it exploded in a single diary outburst:

  I’m slowly going wiggo!! . . . We’ve been fighting this bullshit for 2 months. Spent the whole day vegging in the tent, snoozing and dreaming of sun, warmth, beaches and beautiful women. I’m so tired of this bullshit weather and bullshit politics. All I want is 3 good days to climb this thing, then let’s get the fuck outta here. I’m nearly @ wit’s end.

  Finally, as the weather cleared on May 6, I climbed from Camp IV to Camp V. Even though Slava and Ian were using bottled oxygen, I broke trail all the way. I felt terrific. Our loads were heavy, but we’d catch a break higher, as we’d arranged to use the sleeping bags left by the guys coming down from the successful first attempt. On May 7, it took me only three and a half hours to climb to Camp VI. There I crossed paths with Robert and Steve on their way down. Their pairing up was truly fortuitous, since they’d become very close friends during our training climbs and on the expedition itself. I congratulated them heartily, even though I felt wildly envious that they’d already made the top. My qualms were ratcheted up a notch when they told me that they doubted that I could go all the way from Camp VI to the top and back without bottled oxygen. After we parted, I stood there and watched them descend toward warmth, safety, and comfort, all too aware of the huge challenge I still faced before I could relax.

  On May 8, just as I’d planned, we got started at 1:30 a.m. I carried only essentials in my pockets—two water bottles, some energy bars, spare mittens, and a camera. Anything else would have only slowed me down. It was a beautiful night with a full moon. Right off the bat, Andrei, who was also climbing without bottled O’s, complained about the cold, but I felt warm and cozy in my full down suit and face mask. Once more, I took the lead. Climbing at different speeds, we were soon separated from one another in the dark. But just below Camp VII, a strange thing happened. I lost the packed trail of the route, veering too far to the right, where I found myself tiptoeing along on scary downsloping plates of rock. Fortunately, I recognized the error, climbed up and left, and found the steps again. Despite my “detour,” I reached Camp VII at 4:45. Only a thousand vertical feet still to go, and nine hours till my turnaround deadline.

  In the four-man tent at Camp VII, we found Sergei and Grigori, resting after their descent from the top. Andrei and I crawled in, hoping to brew up drinks and escape the cold, but then Slava arrived, and the shelter felt claustrophobic. Unable to breathe, I left the big tent and crawled into a smaller one, where I waited alone for the sun to rise.

  With first light at 7:45, I started upward again, in advance of the Soviets. Nowadays, on ascents of the northeast ridge, the crest is strung with fixed ropes, and all you have to do is slide your jumar up the lines. But in 1990, there were no ropes fixed so high, so I was solo climbing on a wildly exposed ridge. The track clung to a path slightly below the crest on the right. It was nasty, scary going on downsloping ledges. At one point I seriously thought about turning around. There was a wide gap in the rock face that required an awkward step across, and I had my doubts about whether I could reverse the move on my way down. “One slip and I’d be history, tumbling down the face,” I later wrote in my diary. But I’d come too far and put in too much effort to give up now. Instead, I moved as cautiously as I could, checking each footstep before I committed my weight to it.

  All through the expedition, I’d agonized over the Second Step, the last real obstacle on the route, where a 90-foot nearly vertical cliff interrupts the ridge. As mentioned in chapter two, in 1975 a Chinese expedition had bolted an aluminum ladder to the 40-foot crux at the top of the cliff, and ever since, every climber had surmounted the ladder rather than the underlying rock. When I got to the Step on May 8, however, I was gratified to find not only the ladder but some old fixed ropes in place, to which I clipped my jumar for added protection.

  As I climbed the ladder, I was stunned at the thought that someone had hauled this heavy contraption all the way up to here in 1975. With a large enough team, I supposed, almost any feat could be accomplished, but the guys who took turns carrying the ladder to 28,240 feet and attaching it to the cliff had no doubt sacrificed their own chances of reaching the summit.

  Climbing the vertical ladder took a tremendous effort. On top, I lay in the snow, panting like a fish out of water. Recovering from a burst of anaerobic exercise at sea level takes only a few seconds of breathing. But here, with only one-third as much oxygen in the air, I needed desperate minutes of sucking in huge volumes of air to recover. Climbing at extreme altitude, I had learned to pace myself so that I was always just on the verge of going hypoxic: not too fast, but also not too slow, or I’d never get anywhere. Usually this meant taking as many as a dozen or so breaths for every step. But on the ladder, resting and pacing were not possible, so that my ability to keep myself oxygenated was taxed to the limit. Along with the physical ordeal, I felt a surge of anxiety and claustrophobia.

  The slope just above the Step led to the base of the final summit pyramid. Here the snow was as bad as I’d ever experienced anywhere—dry, with no consistency, like loose sand. Each step forward also meant slipping backward half a step. I had taught myself to break an ascent into smaller, more manageable chunks, with intermediate goals along the way—a boulder twenty yards higher, then a ridge in the snow a bit farther along. I could see, however, that the rock of the final summit pyramid would provide more solid footing. Getting to those rocks became one of my goals. The summit itself was still too far away to think about.

  All at once, Slava came up behind me and passed me, since he was breathing a rich mixture of oxygen from his tank. We exchanged only nods of encouragement, but with Slava now breaking trail in the sandlike snow, I felt a huge relief. Then Andrei also passed me, even though he was climbing without bottled oxygen. I had to admit, he was one strong mother! The gap between me and them lengthened.

  Suddenly, a strange feeling came over me. I felt extremely sleepy, and with it, a heightened sense of dread. I couldn’t shake the drowsiness. The fact that it was warm and windless may have added to my lethargy. Some rational part of my brain called out, This is it! Time to turn around. But the weather was still so good, and I was so close. I pushed on, but whenever I paused to catch my breath, I dozed off for a few seconds. What was happening? Was I suffering the effects of the last few nights of anxious anticipation without solid rest, or something more ominous? Again a voice told me, You should turn around now, or you’ll die on the descent.

  But I was only 200 feet below the summit—even closer than Eric and I had gotten in 1987, on easier terrain. I ran through everything in my head. The weather was good and it was early in the day, but still I told myself, You could turn around. You could come back another time. The mountain will still be here. Yet the thought of having to put in all this effort a fourth time just to climb the last 200 feet was hard to face.

  I pushed on. At last I reached the summit pyramid. Now I could start climbing rock gullies instead of crappy snow. This took more concentration, but it was more interesting, and suddenly I snapped out of my mysterious sleepy stupor. As I worked my way up the gullies, I kept looking down to memorize the route, so as not to lose my way on the descent.

  After a while, Andrei and Slava appeared—they’d reached the top and were on their way down. Since we were unroped, I carefully stepped to the side to let them go past me. I congratulated them. They said, “Summit not far.”

  I trudged onward and finally emerged onto the final summit ridge. I felt fine. But I was moving so slowly—fifteen breaths for each step. The highest point of snow ahead of me looked like the summit, but I knew there might be a higher point beyond that, so I kept my hopes in check and plodded on.

  Then
, all at once, I realized there was nowhere higher to go. I’d reached the summit of Mount Everest. A sense of incredulity washed over me. I was alone in the universe. At that moment, there was no one on Earth who stood higher than I did.

  I felt tears freezing to my cheeks. I took out my camera and shot several self-portraits. This was no easy task, as I needed to use my ice axe stuck into the snow as a monopod. Balancing my camera on top of the axe, I set the auto-timer and got myself into position, hoping to appear somewhere in the frame. I took several shots to make sure I got one good one. Believing that I would never again stand on the highest point on the planet, I wanted the moment to last and last. But I also sensed the urgency of starting back down. After less than half an hour on top, at 12:30 p.m. I began the descent. As I took the first steps, following my own tracks, I warned myself, Be careful. Don’t let up now.

  It took several hours for me to get back to Camp VI, but I arrived well before dark. The typical afternoon clouds had drifted in during my descent, and visibility was marginal by the time I arrived at the tent. It was too late and I was too tired to descend any farther. Slava and Andrei had already headed down to a lower camp, so I had the tent to myself. I was perfectly content to be alone for a night at Camp VI, after having spent most of the day climbing alone. Not having had to share my moments on the summit with anyone else seemed perfect, too.

  I was overjoyed and relieved, yet extremely tired. Even though I had eaten only a couple of energy bars during the last seventeen hours, I had no appetite. I knew, however, that I had to rehydrate. I spent several hours melting snow for drinks and filling my bottles, dozing off again and again as the stove purred away. Finally, fearing that I might burn the tent down, I turned off the stove and collapsed into my sleeping bag. My last thought before sleep was, After three long attempts, I’ve done it. I’ve climbed Mount Everest.

  • • •

  The next day, May 9, as I began my descent, with the weather still holding good, Ian Wade, who’d overnighted at Camp VII, made it to the top. So did four Tibetans, including their only female team member, Gui Sang. And on May 10, Mark Tucker, the fifth American in our team; four Soviets, including their only woman, Yekaterina Ivanova; and one more Tibetan all topped out. All told, twenty of our climbers had reached the summit, a new record.

  Jim Whittaker could not have been more proud of our team’s effort. Ignoring all the rancor and dissension that had marred our two and a half months on the mountain, he summed up the Peace Climb for the American Alpine Journal:

  We took some of the strongest mountain climbers in the world and had the most successful climb in Everest’s history. What if we took the best scientists, engineers, agriculturists—regardless of nationality—and sat them down with interpreters to solve the problems of global warming, acid rain, starvation? We could save the planet!

  Such utopian musings were far from my mind as, during three exhausting days, I made my way down the mountain, passing through seven camps before I got back to our base on the Rongbuk Glacier. The overwhelming feeling for me was relief. Pride and joy would come later.

  The last entry in my diary, reflecting on my determination to try Everest without supplemental oxygen, was “I proved to myself that I could do it. Now I can think of other goals.”

  During those last days of May, a return to Everest in the future seemed like the least likely event on my horizon. But I knew that those other goals would include high mountains. I’d reached the top of the first- and third-highest peaks in the world. What about the second—the formidable K2? And what about my career? Had I turned my back for good on being a veterinarian? Had Everest turned me into a full-time mountaineer? And if so, how could I possibly make ends meet doing what mattered most to me in life?

  4

  Fast and Light?

  After the mysterious disappearance of Mallory and Irvine in June 1924, nine years passed before Everest was again attempted. Between 1933 and 1938, four expeditions—all of them British, and all attacking the northeast ridge pioneered by the 1922 and 1924 teams—tried to climb the world’s highest mountain. It was on May 30, 1933, that Percy Wyn Harris found the ice axe lying on a slab at about 28,000 feet, short of the First Step on the final ridge, a discovery that only deepened the mystery of 1924.

  That same day, Harris and Lawrence Wager, climbing without bottled oxygen, surmounted the First Step and pushed on. Recognizing from a distance the formidable obstacle that the Second Step posed, they opted to traverse below the crest, angling westward along slabs at the top of the Yellow Band, just as Somervell and Norton had in 1924. They found the going terrifying: loose powder snow covering downward-tilting slabs of unstable gray rock. Though they were roped up, the men knew that a fall by one would almost surely spell death for both of them.

  At 12:30 p.m., on the near edge of the Great Couloir, they called a halt at 28,200 feet. The summit still loomed 800 feet above. Harris and Wager recognized that to push for the top would inevitably mean descending in the dark, a risk they wisely declined to take. With disappointment tempered by relief, they turned around.

  Theirs had been a superb achievement. They had exactly matched Norton’s high point from 1924—the highest place on earth yet reached by human beings, unless Mallory and Irvine had somehow forged higher before falling to their deaths.

  Two days later, Frank Smythe made his own attempt along the same perilous traverse—solo, after his partner had to turn back in the grips of altitude sickness. Just as Harris and Wager had discovered, the going got scarier with each successive advance. At almost the same point his teammates had turned around, so did Smythe. He later wrote,

  I was a prisoner, struggling vainly to escape from a vast hollow enclosed by dungeon-like walls. Wherever I looked hostile rocks frowned down upon my impotent strugglings, and the wall above seemed almost to overhang me with its dark strata set one upon the other, an embodiment of static, but pitiless, force.

  Smythe barely made it down the mountain alive, suffering not only from exhaustion but from hallucinations ranging from the delusion that he had a partner walking just behind him to seeing objects floating in the sky. (UFOs, fourteen years before Roswell?)

  The team retreated to base camp just as the monsoon started to arrive, discouraged and worn out, but proud of their thrust toward the summit, and of the fact that no member of the expedition had lost his life.

  • • •

  During those expeditions in the 1930s, four preeminent British mountaineers came into their prime, and they brought with them a whole new style of alpinism in the great ranges. Had one of those attempts on Everest succeeded, it would have changed the course of mountaineering for good. The four men were Noel Odell, the last person to see Mallory and Irvine alive in 1924; Frank Smythe; Eric Shipton; and H. W. “Bill” Tilman.

  Odell was a member of only the last of the four 1930s teams, but his bravura performance in 1924 gave him an authority on Everest matched by no other veteran. Tilman participated in two of the trips, leading the 1938 expedition. Though never the official leader, Smythe was one of the strongest climbers on three of the four ventures. But Shipton, who led the 1935 attempt, was the only man to take part in all four expeditions. If ever a mountain came to “belong” to a single individual, it was Everest and Eric Shipton in the 1930s.

  The revolutionary new style that these men brought to the Himalaya would come to be known by the pithy epithet “fast and light.” Since early in the twentieth century, when the first attempts on 8,000-meter peaks were launched, most of the efforts were organized along massive, quasi-military lines. The Italian expedition to K2 in 1909, for instance, led by Luigi Amedeo, duke of the Abruzzi, fielded twelve Italian principals, including four professional guides from the Val d’Aosta, a topographer, a doctor, the renowned photographer Vittorio Sella, and Sella’s assistant. In the lowlands, the team hired no fewer than 260 porters to haul the team’s tons of gear up the Baltoro Glacier to its base camp near Concordia.

  It was Tilman and Sh
ipton, above all, who pioneered the fast-and-light alternative. As they perfected their style on small exploratory expeditions all over the Himalaya, in the process forging one of the storied partnerships in climbing history, those two men made a stirring case for an approach to tackling the biggest and highest mountains in the world that, ultimately, would not come into vogue for another forty years.

  The early chapters of Tilman’s official 1938 Everest account comprise a diatribe against the traditional slow-and-heavy style of Himalayan expeditioneering. The gathering tension between Great Britain and Germany, which would erupt in World War II within the coming year, and which had already rent a schism in the climbing world, compelled Tilman to train his guns on the ponderous German expeditions to Nanga Parbat and Kangchenjunga that were also taking place during the 1930s. And Tilman keenly realized that the slow-and-heavy military style brought with it all the ugly trappings of nationalism. “I think it is true,” he wrote, “that the big German expeditions received financial as well as moral backing from their governments and certainly the Tibetans themselves are convinced that we are sent to climb Everest at the bidding of our Government to enhance national prestige. One result of this is that mountains tend to become national preserves.”

  How prescient these words are! Alas, from 1950 through 1964, when all fourteen 8,000ers received their first ascents, all but one of those campaigns was conceived in terms of massive buildups of supplies and camps, employing hundreds of porters and Sherpas, organized with military rigor, and tacitly aimed at proclaiming national glory. It was the Austrians and Germans against the French, the Brits against the Swiss, the Italians against the Americans, and the Chinese (who bagged Shishapangma, the last of the fourteen to fall) against the world. The sole exception to the slow-and-heavy style was the first ascent of Broad Peak, the twelfth-highest in the world, by four Austrians in 1957, including the legendary Hermann Buhl and Kurt Diemberger.