The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

  It was all too clear what a huge disappointment it was to Hall not to get up Everest. But it would not be the end of his quest.

  So only Darrin and I were left to try for the summit on May 15. I could hardly believe that no one else in our team wanted to go for the top. After all our efforts over more than two months, I felt we owed it to ourselves to try for some sort of success, even if only one or two of us could get to the summit. Fortunately, the wind had at last dropped to zero. I decided to sleep breathing bottled oxygen to maximize my recovery for the morning, and to use it on my summit attempt. I had always felt that I would never use supplemental oxygen when I was climbing for myself. But if I was guiding, then it was not only permissible but responsible to use it. That way I’d be in better shape to go to the aid of a teammate or client in trouble. With bottled O’s, I could rest in place for as long as an hour at a time without getting too cold. (This whole question of whether or not to guide with supplemental oxygen would be thrust to the fore during the disaster of 1996.)

  Darrin and I got going at 1:00 a.m. Four members of the Wilcox party had set out an hour and a half before us. The weather was perfect, and I had high expectations, but when I felt the weight of eighteen pounds of oxygen apparatus on my back, I was hit with a new wave of discouragement. Only ten minutes into the climb, gasping for breath, I discovered that my regulator was broken. In disgust, I returned to camp and got another one. Then, still early in the morning, the flow of oxygen abruptly stopped. The gas, I found out, had been leaking out of a faulty hose. I was only too glad to chuck the whole apparatus and go on without artificial aids.

  From the start, Darrin had complained of really cold feet. After I passed him, he faded into the distance behind me. During the previous night he had voiced trepidation about the summit day, and perhaps those doubts took some of the wind out of his sails. After only an hour or so, I saw him turn back and descend to camp. It was a wise decision—discretion the better part of valor. No mountain is worth losing your toes for.

  The weather was indeed perfect, but the snow conditions were terrible—“dry, unconsolidated shit,” I called it in my diary. “Wouldn’t even hold a step.” Fortunately, I had the Wilcox party’s broken trail to follow.

  Climbing with bottled oxygen, Mark Richey, Yves La Forest, Rick Wilcox, and Barry Rugo got to the top between 8:30 and 9:45 a.m. They passed me on their way down, each giving me hearty encouragement. Now I was truly alone on the upper part of the mountain. I struggled on. The psychological strain of the last two months of guiding on a team that was starting to come apart at the seams was now taking its toll. I was physically and mentally fried. I’d already lost close to twenty pounds. Only my congenital stubbornness kept me going.

  The last stretch from the South Summit to the top almost turned me back, as blowing snow decreased the visibility. “The ridge seemed never-ending,” I later wrote in my diary. “But I was too close to quit even 100 yards short. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.” At around 1:00 p.m., I was clumping, exhausted, up the last few steps. “Hardest day of my life!” I would pronounce it in my diary, and twenty-two years later, I can look back and agree: that summit push at the age of thirty-one was indeed the most difficult and strenuous effort of my career to that point.

  All day, I’d assumed I’d have the summit to myself, even if only for half an hour, as I had the year before. But to my annoyance, as the top grew near, I saw a guy standing there. He must have come up from the opposite side, via the northeast ridge. To my further annoyance, he was photographing my every move.

  The down suits Robo had ordered for us were supposed to be “magenta” in color, but the real thing was closer to a garish pink. I later learned that the guy on the summit sized me up and thought, Hmm, climber without bottled oxygen, solo, pink suit—must be French.

  On top, I awkwardly shook hands with the stranger. A balaclava covered his face, all except for the mouth. But there was something awfully familiar about that mouth, that smile. Suddenly it hit me.

  “Andy?!”

  “Ed?!”

  By the most improbable of coincidences, it was Andy Politz, my partner from the Kangshung Face, my RMI buddy from our semilegendary “load wars” on Rainier. He’d gotten to the top about an hour before, as part of an expedition led by Eric Simonson on the northeast ridge. We hugged and whooped with laughter.

  Andy would have stayed there and chatted for hours, but I was obsessed with the need to head back down and help our crippled expedition get safely off the mountain. And the weather was deteriorating by the minute. “I’ll give you a call when I get home,” I yelled back as I started down. But only moments later, I thought, Hey, was that a perfect ending to two months on Everest, or what?

  • • •

  From the moment I’d first stood on top of Everest in 1990, my main ambition had been focused on K2. I’d climbed Kangchenjunga in 1989. If I could get up K2, I’d become the first American to reach the summits of the world’s three highest mountains. But that sort of “record” wasn’t really important to me (unless it could help me attract sponsors). Ever since I’d read Charlie Houston and Bob Bates’s classic K2: The Savage Mountain as a teenager, I’d dreamed of tackling that beautiful and forbidding pyramid in the heart of the Karakoram. I had come to think of K2 as the Holy Grail of mountaineering. For me, the peak loomed as an ultimate test of skill and nerve, but at last I felt ready to make the attempt.

  At the end of a psychologically grueling three-month expedition in the summer of 1992, I accomplished my goal by reaching the summit of K2. That expedition was the most dramatic in my life to that date, and it formed a crucial turning point in my career. The trip turned into a genuine epic. On K2, I came closer to dying than I ever had in the mountains, and in pushing on with Charley Mace and Scott Fischer to the top in a gathering storm with hideous snow conditions, I committed what I still regard as the greatest mistake of my climbing life. Surviving the frightening descent from K2 will never cancel out my conviction that going to the top on August 16 was indeed a bad mistake. That’s one area—judgment in the mountains—in which I know better than to cut myself undeserved slack.

  I wrote about the K2 expedition at length in both No Shortcuts to the Top and K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain, so I won’t repeat the story here. What happened that summer, however, had a profound effect on the campaign I planned for 1993. In a nutshell, on K2 I had expended so much effort helping others get up the mountain, and in three cases, helping save their lives, that I nearly lost any chance of making my own push toward the top from Camp IV on the Shoulder at 26,000 feet. In addition, having had to buy a place on an expedition run by a Russian team, whose leader proved to be probably the most selfish jerk I’ve ever had to team up with, I came home from Pakistan that summer disillusioned with big expeditions composed of climbers who were strangers to one another before they gathered at base camp.

  The answer that sprouted in my brain through the fall and winter of 1992–93 was to try to climb an 8,000er solo. As long as I was willing to spend as much energy on a mountain as I had on K2, I thought, why not expend it all on myself, instead of in the service of others—some of whom seemed only minimally grateful? My inspiration was Reinhold Messner’s dazzling feat in 1980, when he soloed the Great Couloir on Everest during the monsoon season without supplemental oxygen—a deed regarded by many as the boldest in the history of mountaineering.

  My plan was to go back to the north side of Everest in 1993 and attack the Japanese Couloir, a snow-and-ice gully that was one of the most direct routes on the north face. On a solo attempt on this route in 1987, Roger Marshall had died while I was on the adjoining Great Couloir, on my first attempt on Everest. The year before, two stellar Swiss climbers, Erhard Loretan and Jean Troillet, had dazzled the mountaineering world by dashing up the Japanese Couloir alpine-style in only forty-three hours.

  My scheme for 1993 was to acclimatize on Everest by making training jaunts up and down the
lower part of the face, then to go fast and light alpine-style to the top and back in three days. At the same time, I recognized how scary a proposition any solo attempt on an 8,000er would inevitably be. Without a partner to rope up with, I knew every crevasse posed a potential death trap. And the psychological trial would be extreme. Still, I was psyched to try it. As I wrote in my diary early during the trip, while I was still in Kathmandu, “Tomorrow begins the biggest, most challenging adventure of my life.”

  Knowing that good snow cover on my route would make climbing faster and less technical, I decided to go to Everest in the autumnal postmonsoon season. (All through the summer, the monsoon smothers the high Himalaya in new snow.) The biggest challenge of mounting a solo expedition was paying for it. I made a rough calculation of the cost for everything from the Chinese permit to airfare to hiring porters and yak drivers, and came up with the ungodly total of $45,000. This, on top of still being in debt from my K2 expedition. The prospect of raising cash to repay my K2 debts as well as fund an Everest expedition overwhelmed me. Although I had now climbed the three highest peaks in the world, that feat had scarcely increased my fame. When Outside ran a short profile about me, the magazine titled the piece “Ed Who?”

  The only answer was to spend the winter trying to get companies to sponsor me. Back then, I was a complete naif about how to do so. In a time before the Internet, the only tools at my disposal were the telephone and the post office. I wrote dozens of letters to companies without getting a single response. Or I’d cold-call a firm such as Coca-Cola, only to get some very junior staffer on the phone. In a breathless rush, I’d tell her what I would offer the company in exchange for their dollars. She would inevitably say, “I’ll give this info to our head of marketing, and he’ll call you back.” And of course, nobody ever called back.

  My whole fund-raising effort would have been a bust but for the timely intervention of two friends with great connections, Gil Friesen and Jodie Eastman. Thanks to them, I ended up with sponsorship deals with MTV and Polo Ralph Lauren. I also had a small stipend from a sleeping bag manufacturer called MZH. In the end, through various deals and promises, to my considerable surprise, I raised enough money to pay for the Everest expedition and settle some of the leftover bills from K2.

  For my team on the mountain, I would have only two partners: Carolyn Gunn, a veterinarian friend from my days guiding on Rainier, who would serve as base camp cook and as doctor, and Tamding, one of the Sherpas from our ’91 expedition. Since he was fluent in Tibetan, Tamding would prove very helpful in dealing with the Chinese bureaucracy and in communicating with our yak drivers.

  The usual hassles—securing a permit, retrieving lost baggage, and hiking for days along roads washed out by monsoon downpours on the approach—threatened to derail my trip, but by August 24, we’d arrived at base camp at 17,000 feet well below the snout of the Rongbuk Glacier. Five days later, we headed up the valley to establish an advance base camp. I had hired only two yak drivers with six yaks, yet even so small an entourage succumbed to its own inertia. On the twenty-ninth, half in amusement, half in exasperation, I recorded in my diary:

  Tons of fartin’ around on the part of yakkers. They are in no hurry to go. Get up, scoot around, sit down, have tea, collect the yaks, smoke a butt, argue & talk, scoot around, weigh the loads, sort the loads, smoke a butt, re-weigh the loads, recollect the yaks, on & on & on. Finally got loaded & moving @ 9:30. . . . The yakkers kept wanting to stop & camp but I pushed ’em on to this site @ 18,290 feet.

  That month my former partners from Kangchenjunga, Jim Wickwire and John Roskelley, were making a two-man attempt on the traditional route via the North Col and northeast ridge. I spent some time chewing the fat with my old pals in their base camp. In the end, however, they got no higher than the North Col. Disgusted by the incessant snowstorms, they threw in the towel in early September. Wickwire later wrote in the American Alpine Journal, “The monsoon arrived late [in 1993] and was said to have been the worst in 40 years.”

  Indeed, the snow that fall seemed incessant. My diary records day after day of griping about the weather. On September 8, for instance, I wrote, “Snow, snow, snow! When will it stop?” With the slopes above me loaded with new snow, I watched as one avalanche after another shot down the Japanese Couloir. Because it was such a direct line, the couloir made a perfect funnel for snowslides. So I decided to abandon the route and focus instead on the neighboring Great Couloir, the route we had attempted in 1987. Although less direct, the Great Couloir promised to be a lot safer. If I could get up it, it would still constitute a solo ascent of the north face.

  During the first week in September, the three of us managed to establish a second camp (we called it Corner Camp) at 19,000 feet, reached by a straightforward hike up the moraine on the main branch of the Rongbuk Glacier. We were still a full thousand vertical feet below the base of the true north face, and a discouraging 10,000 feet below the distant summit of Everest. Huddled inside our tent in Corner Camp on the evening of September 3, Carolyn and I had a close call of the sort I had never experienced before in the mountains. My diary:

  Snowed like a mother most of the night. . . . I was heating water in my bivi tent & Carolyn came over. It was snowing so we had the mosquito netting up to keep the snow out. After a while we both got very dizzy and bolted for the door. Carolyn nearly passed out—her eyes rolled back into her sockets. I held her and kept telling her to breathe, breathe while I tried to regain my consciousness. Whew. We finally both came around again.

  Through the fog of my dizziness, I had dimly realized what was happening: carbon monoxide from the stove, trapped inside the tent by the snow and two layers of roofing cloth, was poisoning us. I had read about other climbers and explorers dying from the very same insidious peril. Because carbon monoxide is odorless, you don’t detect it. The feeling is very much as if you’re simply falling asleep. And if you do give in to sleepiness, a simple mistake becames a fatal one.

  By September 12, I had a real plan of action. I would climb with Tamding to a Camp II at 21,400 feet, finally coming to grips with the north face itself. This part of the route was dangerously crevassed, so by roping up with Tamding on my first probe, I could safely scout and mark the most hazardous places. Then Tamding would descend to base camp. The next day, I’d try to push all the way up to 25,000 feet by myself and, with luck, establish a Camp III there. Then come all the way back down to ABC to rest up for my summit push.

  The first part of the plan went according to Hoyle, although I wrote on the morning of September 13, “Didn’t sleep great last night—too much goin’ thru my head.” Finally the weather had turned, with a clear, sunny morning. The great irony of the high Himalaya is that on such a day, you can actually be too hot! All day on the thirteenth, I sweltered under the blazing sun. The next day, I reached 23,500 feet before retreating to Camp II. And then it started snowing again. Even in my relatively secure perch low on the face, I worried about avalanches. I had carefully placed my camp in the middle of a field of huge crevasses, which I hoped would swallow any avalanches hurtling down the Great Couloir.

  Nonetheless, all afternoon and through the night, I heard those avalanches crashing down from far above me. I got almost no sleep. In the dark, my imagination ran wild as I began to question the safety of my tent site. At times, the only way I could ease the anxiety was to put in my earphones and turn up the volume on my Walkman. The next morning, I was only too glad to bolt from Camp II back down to the safety and comfort of ABC.

  It was, I had to admit, a discouraging start. As I would later learn, almost no one was having success on the north side of Everest that year, thanks to the snowfall. But I gave myself a pep talk in my diary on the fifteenth: “Now it’s my turn! I feel ready mentally—just need a break in the weather so the snow can settle & I can go for it. . . . The familiarity of the Great Couloir [from my 1987 attempt] makes it a bit more comforting.”

  Well, it was not meant to be. During the next three weeks I ma
de six separate attempts on the Great Couloir. On every thrust, I was defeated by the snow conditions above my high camp, so I’d retreat to base camp. The fickle weather only added to my doubts. Those three weeks were an ordeal by uncertainty, with fear the steady undercurrent. I vented my exasperation in diary entries.

  Sept. 19

  Snowing again! What’s the deal? . . . This snowing shit is pissing me off big time. I come up, flail, get hammered by snow & bail on back to ABC.

  Sept. 23

  Same shit—different day! Ugh! Bored, irritated, frustrated, peeved, etc, etc. Can only read so much & listen to music for so long.

  Sept. 24

  This seems like a surrealistic dream—each day is the same, blending into the next, no difference. Days go by & nothing happens. Someone/something is trying my patience.

  Sept. 27

  My mood cycles from very depressed to optimistic (on sunny days). Just hangin’ around every day is killing me—what a waste of time!

  I was playing a chess game with the weather. At base camp, I felt safe, with plenty of supplies to wait out the storms. But I’d begin to wonder whether it was clear and sunny at my highest camp, and the temptation was to head up and see. At Camp II I had only a minimal supply of food and fuel, so each trip up I had to carry more. I knew that even after a storm had passed, I needed to wait at least twenty-four hours for the fresh snow to consolidate. Then I’d race back up to Camp II.

  In my little tent among the crevasses, I’d fall asleep full of hope and anticipation. Usually my alarm would wake me up around 1:00 a.m. Outside, everything was completely silent. It’s not snowing! I’d think, only to zip open the tent door to see yet another dump of snow. The new snow that had settled on my tent walls had muffled the sound of the fresh storm. I’d sit it out for another day or two, then in frustration race back down to base camp.