The Mountain

by Ed Viesturs

When I think about that trio heading toward the summit on October 8, 1983, I can’t suppress a feeling of envy. In 1988, Andy Politz and I flirted with the idea of going for the summit alpine-style in a single push, once we got to the top of our buttress. It would have been a balls-out effort, an ascent of 6,000 feet on unknown terrain, but for weeks I dreamed about it as a kind of ultimate Himalayan coup. As this was only my second Himalayan expedition, I probably overestimated our abilities and underestimated the immense effort such a push would have required. As it turned out, the dream was shattered when we turned back on our own buttress in the face of appalling risks from falling rock and collapsing seracs.

  In 1983, only in the last thousand feet did the Kangshung steepen, reaching an incline of 45 degrees. The snow conditions were ideal, however, for step-kicking with crampons, and the three men made steady progress. Shortly after noon, they intersected the standard route at the South Summit. The Hillary Step went smoothly, and at 2:45 the men stood on the summit. The Kangshung Face had been climbed at last. Momb radioed down to his teammates that the air was so still on top, they could have lighted a candle. Reichardt was wearing only polypro underwear and a wind suit.

  On the descent, at the Hillary Step, the three men met a Japanese team still heading up the standard route. The Japanese were utterly astounded to learn what the Americans had accomplished and where they had come from. In turn, Reichardt and his partners tried to convince the Japanese that they should turn around, as it was too late in the day to push on to the top. The Japanese refused. To Reichardt’s horror, as he descended the ridge leading to the South Summit, a Sherpa from the Japanese team moving just a few steps behind him slipped and fell, without uttering a word, 5,000 feet to his death in the Western Cwm. And that night, two Japanese climbers, who were apparently trying to bivouac near the summit, must have also fallen to their deaths. All that was later found of them were a body and a single boot on the upper edge of the cwm.

  The next day, October 9, George Lowe, Jay Cassell, and Dan Reid repeated the march to the summit without incident. If anyone deserved the triumph, it was Lowe, whose brilliant climbing on the buttress in 1981 had paved the way for success two years later.

  A third trio, including a rejuvenated Dave Cheesmond, prepared for yet another summit push on October 10, but that day a storm descended on the mountain. By the time it ended, three feet of new snow had treacherously loaded the upper slopes. The only prudent course was retreat.

  On the way down, Lowe and Cheesmond performed a deed that few Everest climbers had carried out before 1983. To leave the mountain in as pristine a state as possible, they spent hours chopping the fixed ropes that had been strung up the buttress.

  The joint effort by two American expeditions in tackling the Kangshung Face remains one of the greatest deeds in Everest history. Lou Reichardt later said that the climb was much harder than K2. Not the least of the accomplishments of the two teams was the fact that on such a dangerous wall, no climber suffered a major injury, let alone a loss of life.

  Had the expedition been led by someone such as Chris Bonington or Reinhold Messner, an official book chronicling the adventure would have soon been published. Whether or not the Kangshung team tried to interest an American press in such a book, I don’t know. Unlike Bonington, none of the fourteen men on the 1983 expedition had any track record as an author. Jim Morrissey’s article for the AAJ is a masterpiece of understatement, a mere five pages long. Unless you know the mountain, you might think, reading that lighthearted piece, that the first ascent of the Kangshung Face was a lark.

  The British climbing historian Peter Gillman put the climb in better perspective. “It was a stunning achievement,” he said two decades after the ascent. “Yet today, it’s so underrated. It’s virtually unrecognized—even by Americans.”

  9

  A Little Bit of Will

  With the British success on the Southwest Face and the American on the Kangshung, all the major walls of the great pyramid of Everest had been climbed. There were, to be sure, new routes that no one had yet attempted. But some of the greatest breakthroughs of the 1980s on the world’s highest mountain involved radical new styles rather than new lines. It’s a pattern in mountaineering that has generally held true since the first ascents in the Alps, beginning with Mont Blanc in 1786. As the great Victorian climber Albert Mummery once quipped, “It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages: An inaccessible peak—The most difficult ascent in the Alps—An easy day for a lady.”

  Mummery was exaggerating for comic effect, but the truth of his aphorism holds good today. The ultimate challenge of the 1950s—getting to the top of Everest by any means possible—has been transformed into a fairly routine (albeit extreme) guided outing in 2013. Thus climbers must constantly reinvent the rules by which they play the game to keep it fresh. Often this dictates limiting the resources with which they’re willing to attack an objective. Everywhere in the great ranges, for example, alpine-style assaults—going light in a single push for the summit, without fixed ropes or well-stocked camps—has succeeded and, in aesthetic terms, improved on the slow-going logistical pyramid of the traditional expedition-style approach.

  This kind of progress does not necessarily take place in other fields of exploration. For instance, on Shackleton’s second Antarctic expedition, in 1908–09, three men—Douglas Mawson, Alistair Mackay, and Edgeworth David—man-hauled a pair of sledges across 1,260 miles of polar ice during 122 days, as they tried to discover the South Magnetic Pole. That record would not be matched for another seventy-five years.

  From the first Everest expedition in 1921 through the end of the 1970s, nearly every team that tackled the mountain did so in the spring or autumn seasons. The summer monsoon could be counted on to shut down Everest under a relentless smother of falling snow. Most of the climbers who got high up on the mountain or reached its summit did so in the months of May or October. Even during those prime months, mountaineers found the upper reaches of Everest appallingly cold. Frostbite was a routine occurrence, while there were a number of deaths from hypothermia or altitude sickness.

  No one seemed to have even contemplated the idea of trying to climb Everest in the winter, until a tight-knit band of Polish hard men (and a few women) began toying with the notion in the mid-1970s. If temperatures of minus 30 occurred routinely in May or October, how much colder must the mountain be in January or February? Attempting the first winter ascent of Everest was a truly visionary scheme for that era, and many experts in other countries thought the mission foolhardy. Yet it had the same logic as the inevitable progress in mountaineering lampooned by Mummery. In the Alps, first winter ascents came into vogue early on. In 1882, a plucky band of Italians made the first winter ascent of the Matterhorn. The ultimate prize came in 1961, when Toni Hiebeler led a team of four Germans making the first winter ascent of the Eiger Nordwand, the most dangerous face in the Alps. Climbers around the world gasped with admiration at the German achievement, but nowadays not a winter goes by without numerous ascents of that wall. (The first solo winter ascent of the Nordwand took place in 1983, by a Slovak climber, Pavel Pochylý, whom most of us have never heard of.)

  My co-author, David Roberts, was invited on the expedition that made the first winter ascent of Mount McKinley in 1967. Even though David had participated in the first direct ascent of the Wickersham Wall, McKinley’s biggest face, four years earlier, he declined the invitation for two reasons. One, he thought the expedition would be the most miserable ordeal by cold he could imagine, and two, he thought the team didn’t stand a chance in hell of succeeding. He was right on the first count, as Dave Johnston, Art Davidson, and Ray Genet (good friends of David’s) nearly died during a forced six-day bivouac at Denali Pass.

  When word got out in the late 1970s that a group of Poles was gearing up for a winter ascent of Everest, much of the climbing world was aghast, and few of their contemporaries outside Poland gave them much chance of succe
eding. But that band of cold-weather masochists had been gearing up for such a project for more than half a decade. In 1973, two of them, Andrzej Zawada and Tadeusz Piotrowski, got to the summit of Noshaq in the Hindu Kush in winter—the first 7,000-meter peak ever climbed in the coldest season. The next year, Zawada and Andrzej Heinrich reached 27,000 feet on Lhotse in the winter but had to turn back short of the summit.

  Why would it happen to be Poles who became the unmatched pioneers of winter ascents on the world’s highest mountains? In her superb book Freedom Climbers, Bernadette McDonald gives some cogent answers. World War II had squeezed Poland between brutal invasions on either side—Germans from the west, Soviets from the east. And postwar life under Communist oppression became an ordeal by poverty, hunger, and imprisonment for the slightest acts of rebellion. In this milieu, Polish climbers found an avenue of escape. As McDonald writes, “Ironically, the system that stifled them at home provided their ticket to freedom. The centralized government was happy to grant them permits to climb abroad, for their international successes brought glory to Poland.”

  For Polish mountaineers, an expedition to the Himalaya loomed as almost prohibitively expensive. And their gear was far inferior to the equipment that Americans, Brits, and Western Europeans brought to the great ranges. Much of it was homemade, or had been designed for purposes different from mountaineering. For climbing in storms the Poles used welding goggles. Their currency had no value outside Poland, and this made it even harder for them to buy gear manufactured outside their country, so they improvised or traded with Westerners. Even buying plane tickets to Nepal or Pakistan was a near impossibility for the Poles, so they loaded up cargo trucks and drove to the Himalaya!

  Yet the very hardships of normal life in Poland bred a toughness in its climbers that mountaineers leading relatively cushy lives in Seattle or Chamonix could scarcely comprehend. And no Himalayan challenge posed a more stirring test of endurance under extreme conditions than a winter attempt on Everest.

  The leader of the expedition was Andrzej Zawada. By the fall of 1979, he was fifty-one years old, but an inborn spirit of rebellious iconoclasm still burned in his soul. As a teenager, he had joined the partisans undermining the puppet dictatorship that ran Poland under the thumb of Moscow. At seventeen, he landed in prison, where he heard the screams of some of his best friends as they were tortured and even executed. Later, as the star climber of the Warsaw Mountain Club, he managed to run afoul of his own organization, when he planned and carried out a winter traverse of the Tatras, the alpine range that straddles the border between Poland and Slovakia. (The club had forbidden the traverse as too dangerous.).

  Zawada had been one of the pair who made the first winter ascent of Noshaq in 1973, as well as one of the two who reached a high point on Lhotse of 27,000 feet in 1974. Everest was the next logical step.

  To train for the Himalaya, the most committed Polish climbers deliberately bivouacked in the Tatras in winter. Their attitude toward the practice was the complete opposite of mine. As mentioned in chapter eight, I’ve always done everything I could to avoid bivouacking. But among the Poles, according to McDonald,

  Bivouacking became so commonplace (and popular) in the 1970s that top climbers began to compete with each other to see who could do it most often. Specific rules developed: bivouacs inside tents didn’t count; using a bivouac sack subtracted one point; sticking one’s legs in a backpack scored the highest points. The eventual leader of the “bivy competition” was Andrzej Heinrich, a notoriously tough Himalayan climber who boasted hundreds of bivouacs.

  Geez, that’s a good definition of hard man!

  • • •

  In 1977, Zawada first applied to the Nepalese authorities for an Everest permit in winter, but he had to wait two years before it came through, And when it did, only on November 22, 1979, Zawada had to scramble frantically to put a team together and raise funds for the venture. In Nepal, the “official” winter climbing season ends on February 15. In order to try to meet that rather arbitrary deadline, the Polish team had hoped to be at base camp by December 1. That proved impossible now, and in the end, the Poles established their camp below the Khumbu Icefall only on January 5. This meant that they had considerably less time to work out a route up the mountain than a conventional spring expedition such as the ones I would be part of from 1991 through 1997, when we got to base camp by the end of March in order to go for the top in middle to late May.

  Among the thirteen members of the team, two of the strongest were Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy. Twenty-nine years old at the time of the expedition, Wielicki had trained as an electrical engineer. He had a reputation as something of a climbing daredevil, and he had already survived two bad accidents, one in a fall on a Polish cliff where he broke three vertebrae, the other in the Dolomites when he was hit on the head by a falling rock. The stone crushed his helmet and knocked Wielicki unsconscious, but after he woke up, he finished the route and bivouacked just below the summit. According to McDonald, “The next day a local doctor stitched up his head and warned him not to climb—good advice that Krzysztof promptly ignored.”

  Wielicki would go on to become the driving force in a whole series of Polish winter expeditions to the high Himalaya. He deserves, in fact, to be regarded as the all-time pioneer of winter climbing in the great ranges. And in 1996, Wielicki became only the fifth person to reach the top of all fourteen 8,000ers. The year before, in 1995, I had the privilege of pairing up with Krzysztof on Gasherbrum I, as he closed in on his lifelong goal. Although he was forty-five years old that summer, he performed spectacularly. I was thirty-six at the time, and I was truly impressed with Krzysztof’s strength, patience, and confidence. (Little did I know that I, too would be forty-five when I finally climbed Annapurna, my fourteenth 8,000er, in 2005.) There’s something to be said for being older and wiser when climbing in the Himalaya. Experience plays a key role in knowing how to temper your pace for an endurance event, and how to climb with maximum efficiency and minimum waste of energy. Patience is also crucial, and with age we get better at waiting.

  Getting up both Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II that summer, Krzysztof notched his eleventh and twelfth 8,000ers. The next summer he would finish his own equivalent of Endeavor 8000 by succeeding on two of the hardest, K2 and Nanga Parbat.

  Amazingly, in the winter of 2012–2013, at the age of sixty-two, Krzysztof led a team to Pakistan to attempt the first winter ascent of Broad Peak, one of only five 8,000ers (all in the Karakoram) that had still not seen a winter ascent. Four members of the team reached the summit, but two died on the descent. Even so, Krzysztof told me recently that he feels a mandate for the Poles to climb all of the 8,000-meter peaks in winter, and that he will be the spearhead leading this charge. His duty, he feels, is not necessarily to reach the summit himself, but to organize and lead the expeditions.

  Leszek Cichy, twenty-eight years old in the fall of 1979, was a rising star in Polish alpinism, but had far less experience than Wielicki. He was not expected to be a member of the summit team, but his performance on Everest that winter dazzled his teammates.

  In only ten days after reaching base camp on January 5, 1980, the Poles got three camps established above the Khumbu Icefall. But now conditions turned brutal. In the brief note in the American Alpine Journal covering the expedition, Marek Brniak evoked the nightmare of those days in late January:

  In the Western Cwm the temperature averaged –25° C. and on the higher reaches –45° C was recorded. Wind speeds reached well over 100 mph. As the days went by the color of the surrounding mountains changed. The peaks grew dark. Wind stripped the snow cover off the slopes, exposing rock and bare ice. Moving on the ice-covered stretches required double attention, extra belaying and fixed ropes on otherwise easy sections. Deep breathing with the mouth wide open to get enough oxygen caused throats, chilled by the icy, thin air, to become swollen and inflamed.

  Andrzej Zawada pulled off several tricks to keep the team’s morale from plu
mmeting. Among them was a big aluminum basin the team bought in Kathmandu and lugged into base camp, where it served as a bathtub, filled with kettles of water heated on the kitchen stove, so that the members could take turns escaping the cold in their portable hot spring.

  Even so, by the end of January, only four of the thirteen members were still fit and eager enough to contemplate the final assault. They were Zawada himself, Walenty Fiut, Cichy, and Wielicki. The latter two also happened to be the youngest members of the team, both along on their first Himalayan expedition. On February 11, Fiut, Cichy, and Wielicki finally got to the South Col, but the wind was so fierce there that they pitched their Camp IV just below its crest on the west side. The American-made tent had a pole arrangement too complex to assemble in the gale, so the climbers spent a sleepless night holding the roof up with a single pole. Over the radio, Zawada and others exhorted them to hang on and survive.

  The next morning, all three stumbled back down to Camp III. Wielicki had frostbitten feet, so he kept going all the way down to Camp II. Fiut, spooked by the night at the South Col, retreated all the way to base camp. The expedition was on the verge of collapse, so Zawada tried to rally its members. “How powerless is any leader at moments like these?” he later reflected. “If I wanted to save the expedition, there was only one thing to do, and that was to attempt the climb myself.”

  On February 13, Zawada and Ryszard Szafirski reoccupied Camp IV on the South Col. The next day they set out at dawn for the summit, but the bitter cold and the ceaseless wind turned them back only 750 feet above camp. They limped back down to Camp III. Still, it had been a gutsy effort by the fifty-one-year-old leader.

  As if the mountain itself were not a formidable enough obstacle, a bureaucratic snafu now raised its ugly head. According to McDonald, the Nepalese permit explicitly forbade any movement upward on Everest after February 15. The AAJ report, however, claims that only now did the team learn by radio at base camp of the February 15 deadline, and that it came as a shock to all the Poles. In desperation, on the fifteenth Zawada sent a porter out to the lowlands to contact the Ministry of Tourism and plead for an extension. Again according to McDonald (who got her story in 2009 from the surviving expedition members), “What [Zawada] didn’t know was that the porter was fed up with the whole expedition: the cold, the wind and the endless effort. Unbeknownst to Andrzey, the porter’s request was for just two more days. . . . Two days is all they got.”