The Climb

by Anatoli Boukreev

  A Taiwanese expedition headed by Makalu Gau was the source of endless jokes, which thinly veiled serious concerns about his team’s qualifications and their ability to get off the mountain alive. One climber said, “I’d as soon have been on the mountain with the Jamaican bobsled team.” And then there was the Johannesburg Sunday Times Expedition, which had publicly been embraced by Nelson Mandela. Stories about the relative inexperience of many of their climbers and questions about the veracity of their wiry and short-tempered leader, Ian Woodall, were roundly exchanged over Henry Todd’s Scotch.

  American climber and Everest veteran Ed Viesturs was heard to say, “A lot of people are up here who shouldn’t be.” Viesturs, thirty-seven, was working as a guide and doubling as an on-camera talent for the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX/IWERKS Expedition, headed by the American climber and filmmaker David Breashears. The film production, with one of the largest budgets ever committed to a documentary about Everest, was to result in a large-format film to be released in 1998. Designed to be projected in theaters outfitted with wraparound screens and state-of-the-art sound systems, the film would offer virtual, armchair Everest.

  Breashears, in his early forties, was something of a legend in the Himalaya. More than any other climber, except for perhaps Sir Edmund Hillary, who with Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest for the first time in 1953, Breashears had been successful in making Everest a cash cow, deriving over the years a substantial portion of his income from his activities on the mountain. In 1985, he had the distinction of having guided Texas businessman and millionaire Dick Bass to the summit. Bass, at fifty-five, became the oldest climber to date to make the top. This accomplishment is seen by many as the pivotal point in the history of attempts to climb Everest. The adventuresome and the well-to-do took notice. If a fifty-five-year-old with motivation and discretionary income could do it, anybody could! Commercial expedition companies were spawned to address the demand that was stimulated and to service customers who could pay big dollars for big mountains.*

  As Breashears and his IMAX/IWERKS expeditionary force trekked toward the Everest Base Camp, they made an impression. Not far from Kami Nora Sherpa’s house in Pangboche, several members of the expedition had stopped at a teahouse and occupied some of its tables. They ordered tea, but refused the offer of local food, preferring instead home-bought goodies pulled from expedition bags. One veteran at the Everest Base Camp who found the team a little too coiffed and cool referred to them as the “Gucci guys.”

  Tenting nearby the IMAX/IWERKS Expedition at the Everest Base Camp were Henry Todd’s Himalayan Guides expedition and several other commercial expeditions that, like Todd’s, had brought paying clients to the mountain. Among the “dollar dogs,” as one Everest chronicler has privately labeled commercial expedition members, was the Adventure Consultants Guided Expedition, headed by New Zealander Rob Hall.

  Hall, black bearded and imposing with a “Lincolnesque” appearance, had an intensity and quiet reserve that made many think he was much older than his thirty-five years. Since 1990, when his company began taking expeditions to Everest, Hall had taken a record thirty-nine climbers (clients and expedition personnel combined) to the top of Everest. His company’s “adverts” that ran in international climbing magazines were large, alluring, and not immodest. One that appeared in early 1995 read: “100% Success! Send for Our Free Color Brochure.” One hundred percent that is until May 1995, when he turned all of his clients back from their bid to the summit as deep snows at higher elevations had slowed their progress. No clients had made the summit.

  In 1996, Rob Hall was back, ready to go again, determined, if he could, to get back into the win column. The pressure was on. Success, not turnarounds, brought in new business, and there was an additional challenge in 1996: a new competitor in the game.

  Scott Fischer from West Seattle, Washington, was coming to the mountain. Six foot four with a chiseled, symmetrical face and long, flowing blond hair, he ran his West Seattle, Washington-based adventure company, Mountain Madness, as an extension of his personal ambition: to climb mountains around the world and to have a hell of a time doing it.*

  With his talent, good looks, and charm, he was a prime candidate for mountaineering’s poster boy. He had a charismatic personality with the drawing power of an industrial magnet. He could attract clients, motivate them, get them to commit, to write their checks and pack their rucksacks. He was a contender, but new to the business of guiding a commercial expedition to Mount Everest.

  His motivation for becoming an Everest “dollar dog,” one of his business associates has said, was fairly simple: “I think that he looked at Rob Hall’s success and thought … ‘If he can do it, I can do it.’ And not in a competitive macho way, but just saying, ‘Hey, I’m a really great climber. Why can’t I do it, too? … I’ll get clients and I’ll go, too.’ ” Go, too, and make the money, too.

  Mountain Madness’s former general manager, Karen Dickinson, described the company’s decision to package expeditions to Everest as “kind of the ultimate in high-altitude mountaineering. There was a demand from our clients that we wanted to service or else lose them to the competition. If it goes well, it could be very lucrative, so there was a financial motivation. Of course, I can’t stress enough that you’re equally as likely to lose your shirt… . It’s just a high-stakes game financially.”

  Fischer was focused on the potential of the big rewards that could come from running a successful expedition. He had been thinking about changing his life. Karen Dickinson said, “He had turned forty the year before; his business had finally gotten to where he wanted… . He’d climbed K2 [8,611 m]; he’d climbed Everest; he was established as a successful guide… . He was talking about maybe he wouldn’t go back to the summit of Everest again, that he would hire people to do that.”

  The plan had been loosely sketched, little more than casual conversations between Fischer and Dickinson, but those who knew him best said Fischer was giving more consideration to shaking things up. His personal life, his role in the company, his public persona, everything was up for midlife review.

  Fischer had worked at developing the Mountain Madness business since the early 1980s, but it had never consistently provided him a good, steady income. Climbing had been his thing; the business had enabled that, but he’d never been a headliner, had never played in the big tent. A commercial success on Everest, he knew, could considerably alter the picture. If he could draw enough clients at $65,000 apiece (Hall’s asking price), and if he could build a successful big-mountain expedition schedule, he could solve a lot of problems, finance a lot of change.

  Part of the challenge in his birthing a new direction was his lack of international visibility. He didn’t have the reputation of many of the other players in high-altitude mountaineering who graced the covers and pages of climbing magazines and equipment catalogs. As his efforts as an expedition leader had progressed, his personal climbing career had taken a back seat. He had come to feel, as one friend put it, “that he wasn’t getting his due in the media … the press didn’t treat him fairly, that he wasn’t respected; his name wasn’t really brought up much; he wanted to be recognized.”

  His difficulty, as some of those around him saw it, was his image: accomplished climber, instructor, guide, and photographer, yes, but also swashbuckling, devil-may-care, good-time guy. These characterizations made for a certain kind of notoriety, but it wasn’t the kind of image that made the big-dollar clients comfortable or drew the lucrative Fortune 500 sponsorships. He was, for that league, perhaps too “dicey.” A successful Everest expedition, one with a lot of visibility, could “skew the do.”

  Working the phones from their West Seattle office, Dickinson, Fischer, and their staff massaged the client list to promote their expedition, and they mailed out hundreds of promotional brochures, two-color productions that had the graphic allure of a lawn-mower operator’s manual. They didn’t have the luster or panache of Rob Hall’s advertising, but they were on the str
eet with the word: “Climbers on the 1996 team will get a crack at the highest mountain in the world… . We’ll build a pyramid of camps, each stocked from the one below. The guides and high-altitude Sherpa staff will fix rope, establish and stock camps, and provide leadership for all summit attempts. Climbers will carry light loads, saving their strength for the summit.”

  For Fischer’s competitors in the Everest game, it was not good news to hear that he’d decided to move into the market. Fischer’s easygoing style and his efforts in packaging expeditions to the remotest destinations in Africa, South America, and Asia had attracted a lot of customers from around the world, and his success, if it came, would be especially problematic for Rob Hall, who had been incredibly successful in recruiting American clients for his Everest expeditions.

  In an effort to generate more press for both Mountain Madness and himself, Fischer and his staff trolled for media attention as aggressively as they did for client climbers, and early on in their efforts they had a bite, one that promised a serious opportunity.

  Outside, the leading outdoor-recreation magazine in the United States, wanted to sponsor a climber-writer, Jon Krakauer, a Seattle-based journalist and best-selling author whom they were commissioning to write a feature article on the boom in commercial expeditions to Mount Everest. They wanted to buy a slot on Fischer’s team for Krakauer, but they wanted a deal, a good deal.

  Keen to the opportunity that having such an accomplished journalist on their roster could bring, Mountain Madness aggressively worked the executives of Outside. They explored a variety of trades and exchanges that would work to each organization’s advantage and kept the heat turned up. A business associate of Fischer’s recalled, “Karen [Dickinson] was just lighting a fire right and left underneath Outside, saying, ‘Yeah!’ ”

  Negotiations went well, and Fischer was excited about the potential relationship. In exchange for a discounted price to Outside, Mountain Madness was lobbying for advertising space and a feature story, replete with color photos, that they hoped would contain precious promotional prose. Krakauer was enthusiastic, too, telling one of Fischer’s associates that he wanted to climb with Scott’s team because Scott’s team actually had better climbers and that Scott was a local guy and an interesting character.

  This, Fischer thought, could be the press he was looking for, coverage in a major, mass-market magazine whose demographics had the clusters of “Beemers” and backpackers who could afford big-mountain prices. Dickinson remembered, “There was a long period where we really thought that Jon was going to be on our trip… . And we sort of held open a slot for him, thinking that was his, and we were negotiating heavily with Outside about how the payment might look … a combination of advertising and just writing us a check.”

  But, a Mountain Madness associate recalled, “They were nickel-and-diming her [Dickinson] and basically wanted, I think, Mountain Madness to pick up the whole tab, not just have him go for cost, but less than cost, so Mountain Madness would be going out-of-pocket to have somebody on the climb. You know, come on, get real! … So, at a certain point, Outside went to Rob [Hall] and said, ‘Okay, what will you give it to us for?’ and Rob said, ‘Less than that.’ Bingo!” At the eleventh hour Outside bought Krakauer’s ticket from Adventure Consultants.

  A spokesperson for Outside, recalling the magazine’s decision to take Hall’s offer, said they did not select Adventure Consultants “solely for financial reasons” but had also taken into consideration that Rob Hall had “consistently more experience guiding on Everest, more of a track record in terms of safety, and according to Jon Krakauer, a better oxygen system.”

  Fischer was enraged by Outside’s decision, saying, “God, it’s typical of the media. Typical bullshit.” A friend of his remembered Fischer’s “paint-peeling” response: “He just thought it was really screwed of Outside to take this idea and run with it, and … getting all this information from Karen [Dickinson] and then just for a difference of maybe a thousand bucks—I don’t know what it was, but it probably wasn’t a huge amount—and going with Rob.”

  Exit one opportunity, enter another, perhaps a better one. Mountain Madness was able to sign on Sandy Hill Pittman, forty, a Contributing Editor to Allure and to Condé Nast Traveler. Already Pittman had climbed the highest mountain on six of seven continents, but Everest had eluded her. On two previous climbs, one of them with David Breashears of the IMAX/IWERKS team, she had turned back before the summit.

  Pittman was a prize. She had more high-altitude experience than Krakauer, and she had an agreement with NBC Interactive Media to do a daily feed to a World Wide Web site (www.nbc.com/everest),* and if Fischer could get her to the top, he would have publicity that a Pope in the pulpit couldn’t buy. But, he had to get her to the top, and Fischer knew that.

  “I think that first Scott saw her as somebody, kind of a plum,” said a friend of Fischer’s. “If he gets her to the top, whew! … She’ll write about him; she’ll talk about him; she’ll carry him on the wave of good fortune she’s had.” But, if he didn’t, he could have a publicity fiasco. An associate has said she could imagine Pittman saying, “It was Scott Fischer; it was Scott Fischer. He wouldn’t let me climb; I could have climbed.”

  To get his clients to the top, Fischer had secured the services of three guides and promoted their commitment to his potential clients. In his promotional literature he identified the expedition guides as Nazir Sabir of Pakistan, a veteran guide and expedition packager who had climbed several 8,000-meter peaks; Neal Beidleman, an aerospace engineer, a climber, and ultra-marathon runner from Aspen, Colorado; and Anatoli Boukreev.

  Boukreev, thirty-eight, a native of Russia and resident of Almaty, Kazakhstan, was considered one of the world’s foremost high-altitude mountain climbers. By spring 1996 he had climbed seven of the most challenging of the globe’s 8,000ers (some of them more than once), and all of those he had climbed without the use of supplementary oxygen.*

  *Everest expeditions changed. Expedition organizers who had previously focused on national and corporate sponsorship were increasingly looking toward individuals with decent climbing experience and money who could be pooled to “buy” an expedition. Out of this reality came the marriage of the extreme alpinist and the serious amateur, both looking for a way to the top of the world’s highest peaks.

  *Fischer had paid his dues. He came from a solid experiential background, having begun his climbing education at the age of fourteen. A student of the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming, he had developed a reputation as a teacher of rock climbing and mountaineering, and was known as a highly qualified mountain guide with many successful and safe expeditions to his credit.

  *As this book went to press, the archive for this site was consulted, and its files had been removed.

  *There are fourteen 8,000-meter peaks in the world. Eight of those are within Nepal or extend into its territory.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE EVEREST INVITATION

  Scott Fischer and Anatoli Boukreev had been on some of the same mountains in their careers, but their climbing routes had never crossed. Through a mutual friend, the highly respected Russian mountaineer Vladimir Balyberdin, they had heard about each other; Boukreev about the gregarious, intrepid American who in 1992 had climbed the “savage mountain” K2 as a member of a Russian-American expedition; Fischer about a maverick climber who had dodged the draft for the Afghan war to climb mountains and was quickly becoming legendary for his endurance and the speed of his high-altitude ascents. Finally, in May 1994, they met for the first time.

  We met at a party being thrown at a restaurant in Kathmandu where Rob Hall was celebrating the success of his most recent expedition to Mount Everest. There were about sixty of us: climbers, Sherpas, and friends, all of whom had been invited to celebrate the end of the spring 1994 climbing season in Nepal. It is a small world, that of high-altitude mountaineers, and many of us knew each other from previous expeditions, but it was the first time I was to meet bo
th Scott and Rob Hall.

  I had just come from the first commercial expedition to Makalu (8,463 m), led by my friend Thor Kieser of Colorado. Our results had not been very good. Only three of us, including Neal Beidleman from Aspen, Colorado, and myself, had made the summit. Scott, like Neal and me, was celebrating his own success. Finally, after three attempts, he had made the summit of Mount Everest. It was a great achievement for Scott, especially since he had successfully summited Everest without the use of supplementary oxygen.

  For me Scott was a Russian’s classical idea of an American. He looked like he was from the movies, tall and handsome. His benevolent, open smile just drew people to him.

  I thought Scott had great potential as a high-altitude climber. I have had the good fortune to climb with many of the world’s finest alpinists, and Scott could stand with the best of them. Although he was less well known, I had for him a respect like I had for the American Ed Viesturs, whom I had met in 1989. Ed, who has summited nine of the world’s fourteen 8,000ers without the use of oxygen, is in my estimation America’s finest high-altitude climber.

  Chance brought Boukreev and Fischer together a second time in October 1995; again they were both in Kathmandu, Boukreev struggling to keep his mountaineering career going, Fischer to negotiate with Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism for a permit to take an expedition onto Everest.

  Boukreev had earlier in the year been invited by a Kazakh team to go to Nepal and join their expedition to Manaslu (8,162 m) scheduled for fall 1995. The expedition was to be made in memory of several Kazakh climbers who had perished in a 1990 attempt on the mountain. Boukreev, who had an ambition to climb all of the world’s 8,000ers and had not climbed Manaslu, had readily accepted the offer and trained religiously.