Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

by Jon Krakauer

  If you're worried about the psychological makeup of prospective tentmates, you might want to invest in a shelter sewn from pink fabric. Behavioral psychologists speculate that there may be hormonal neurotransmitters in the eye that are stimulated by the discrete wavelengths of certain colors. These are thought to affect the hormonal output of the brain's hypothalamus, pineal, and pituitary glands, which in turn determine mood. In a series of highly publicized experiments, test subjects were placed in a small room painted a shade known as "Baker-Miller Pink." Within fifteen minutes of entering the pink chamber, say the researchers, the subjects' muscles were tranquilized to the point of weakness, and there was a dramatic reduction in "violent, aberrant, aggressive, and selfmutilative behavior" in criminals, paranoid schizophrenics, and "obstreperous youths."

  There is a good deal written about the pleasures of solitude in the great outdoors, but when you're caged in a tent, the world beyond the dank ripstop isn't doing much for you anyway. Hence the appeal of social, crowded campgrounds such as Lonesome Lake in the Wind River Range, or the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna on Mt. McKinley. The ever-present sight and smell of trash and human waste, the thundering tape decks, and the crowds might strike the effete or uninitiated as reason to avoid them, but to those with foresight, the value of having a neighboring tent to visit when a six-day storm bears down will be obvious enough.

  That it makes no sense to go into the wilderness to seek out a crowd should not be twisted into a case for heading into the wilderness in groups of one or two. By all accounts it is impossible for an extended two-person expedition to come off without inflicting permanent psychic scars on the participants if the weather turns grim. And as for going solo, Victor F. Nelson (a lifelong convict and an expert on the nuances of solitary confinement) cautioned in 1933 that "the human being, by and large, is a very bad companion for himself; where he has to face himself for any length of time, he acquires a deep disgust and a restless anxiety which makes him seek almost any escape." On a solo trip there won't be any altercations over whose turn it is to do the dishes, but when it comes right down to it, if the forecast looks bleak, most people prefer even bad company to no company at all. Quarreling at least passes the time.

  Selecting a companion from one of the less temperamental species is, of course, a fine compromise between the loneliness of going solo and the likelihood of human fellowship turning rancid after a few days in a tent. A dog's conversational skills leave something to be desired, and a wet dog smells even worse than a wet climber, but a good dog will listen with tireless cheer and sympathy, and is, it goes without saying, the archetypal vent for frustration.

  As the days of storm-enforced captivity mount and the dripping tent walls sag ever lower, lassitude overcomes the inmates. The eyes take on the unfocused glaze known as the "Aleutian stare," and energy for conversation becomes impossible to muster, except when it takes the form of argument. This is not a symptom peculiar to the contemporary generation of expeditionaries. In The Worst journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910-1913 race to the South Pole, Apsley Cherry-Garrard writes thus of weathering an antarctic winter:

  One great danger threatened all our meals in the hut, namely that of a Cag. A Cag is an argument, sometimes well informed and always heated, upon any subject under the sun . . . They began on the smallest of excuses, they continued through the widest field to be caught up again and twisted and tortured months after ... What caused the formation of ice crystals; ... the best kind of crampons in the Antarctic, and the best place in London for oysters; the ideal pony rug; would the wine steward at the Ritz look surprised if you asked him for a pint of bitter?

  Cherry-Garrard and company were able to resolve many of these debates by consulting the Times Atlas or Chambers Encyclopedia. Too lazy to haul along such reliable, if heavy, reference works, presentday backcountry aficionados most often rely on the wager ("put up or shut up") to bring discussions to a close. The wise record all bets in writing.

  When extemporaneous discussions become too volatile, games can provide a more structured channel for venting frustration and passing time in a civilized fashion. Botticelli is a good game, and if you bring a deck of cards, matches will substitute for poker chips, though care must be taken to keep enough of them out of tent-floor puddles to ensure hot meals. Money always seems like an exceedingly abstract commodity when you're deep in the wilds, so the game might be more exciting if stakes are limited to articles of immediate value on the trip itself-a day's rations, say if food is running short, any dry clothing that might exist, additional square inches of floor space, or meaningfully heavy portions of the load for the hike out.

  Countless board games can be devised with a pen, a sleeping pad, and camp flotsam and jetsam. Recreating Monopoly is always a hit (trying to remember the correct layout of the board and the contents of the Community Chest cards can kill a lot of time in themselves), but the favorite among climbers is "Peak Experience," a long, involved game that is perversely realistic in that it can be impossible to reach the "summit." Wristwatch or hand-held electronic games are amusing, but their incessant beeping seems to have something to do with the high rate of accidental breakage while a game's owner is out visiting the latrine.

  No matter how good the game, there comes a point in the latter stages of an extended incarceration when one possesses, if not outand-out loathing, a compelling desire to minimize contact with other persons-ruling out argument or even a silent game of cards-and some type of solitary diversion becomes essential.

  Though not light, books possess an ounce-of-weight to minuteof-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants. One school of thought holds that life in the tent so numbs the intellect that the only literature capable of sustaining interest is simple-minded, shallow stuff, heavy on the action: science fiction, pornography, thrillers. Others recommend bringing ponderous tomes that you've always thought you should read but never quite managed: When you're sufficiently bored, after all, you'll read whatever's available, probably more than once. Indeed, why not use the unparalleled tedium of the stormed-in camp to at least get started on Proust?

  The best tentbound reading of all, however, may be the literature of expeditioning itself, for it can be inspirational as well as entertaining. As you sink into a morass of self-pity simply because you've spent your entire once-a-year vacation trapped inside a soggy tent that smells like dirty socks, it might help you get a grip on yourself to read about the horrors endured by such early polar explorers as Nansen, Shackelton, and Scott. Your own difficulties will be put in perspective by accounts of expeditions that lasted three years, cold that actually shattered teeth (Cherry-Garrard wrote of being thankful for a day that "warmed up" to fifty below zero), blizzards that raged at hurricane force for six weeks without letup, scurvy, starvation, and sea-leopard attack.

  If interpersonal bile makes social pastimes impossible, and you've recklessly neglected to pack a book, there aren't many avenues left. Cooking and eating are of course limited by supplies of food and fuel, which are invariably meager. You can study the soup packages, memorizing the polysyllabic preservatives, or count the threads in the tent roof, but such fun cannot go on forever, and eventually you may find yourself slipping into a state described by Victor Nelson: "I would lie in bed, my face to the dark side of the cell, clinging tightly to old times and to future times ... The contiguous, encircling reality was too harsh to be borne."

  In such dire straits, even the most upstanding individuals have been known to raid the first-aid kit as a last resort. But mountain storms have a way of outlasting an emergency supply of Percodan or codeine, and a claustrophobic, smelly nylon envelope is not the best place to experience the hell of narcotic withdrawal.

  Sometimes fate will smile on the tentridden, or at least smirk, and break the tedium by upping the misery level until survival itself comes into question. Getting hit by an avalanche or zapped with lightning, vaporizing the tent with an exploding stove, coming
down with appendicitis two hundred miles from the nearest hospital, an attack by a grizzly-nothing cures existential ennui as quickly as an acute threat to one's existence.

  There is a thin line, however, between mere wretchedness and thrilling, action-packed agony. In 1967, the first party to climb in Alaska's Revelation Mountains, finding themselves stormed in for more than forty of their fifty-two days in the range, managed to stay on the right side of that line almost continuously. Matt Hale recalls coming back to their base camp near the end of the expedition soaked to the skin after a futile, multi-day sortie to collect butterfly specimens, only to encounter a week of horizontal rain and sleet. Driven by gale-force winds right through the walls of his tent, the rain showered the interior of the shelter with a fine, continuous, thirty-four-degree spray that chilled bodies to the bone and reduced sleeping bags to sodden wads of feather and nylon.

  Hale, on the verge of going hypothermic, figured out that the driest way to sleep was to remove all his wet clothing, wedge himself as best he could into his clammy but somewhat waterproof backpack (trying to ignore the fact that it was awash with the remnants of soggy Fig Newtons), pull a rain parka on over that, and only then slither into his wringing-wet sleeping bag. "Night after night," he remembers, "I'd have this delirious, half-conscious dream that I'd be hiking down the glacier and come upon a warm, dry cabin. Just as I'd start to open the door I would always wake up, shivering uncontrollably, wet and sticky with Fig Newton crumbs." Although the trials of that week in the tent covered a broad spectrum of miseries, Hale is quick to emphasize that "boredom was not a problem."

  Indeed, twenty-some years after the expedition, Hale speaks of the ordeal with great affection; the guy would return to the Revelations-heinous weather and all-in an instant were the opportunity to arise. As the eminent nineteenth-century alpinist, Sir Francis Younghusband, observed, "It is because they have so much to give and give it so lavishly . . . that men love the mountains and go back to them again and again."

  IT'S AN ORDINARY JUNE MORNING IN DOWNTOWN TALKEETNA, CULtural hub of Alaska's upper Susitna Valley, population maybe 250 on a good day. The dawn breeze carries the scent of spruce and wet earth; a moose wanders across the hamlet's deserted main drag and pauses to rub her head against the fence of the local ballpark. Abruptly, out on the airfield at the edge of town, the peace of the young day is shattered as the engine of a small red airplane coughs two or three times and then catches with a roar.

  The fellow in the pilot's seat is a big shaggy bear of a man named Doug Geeting. As he taxis his craft to the end of the runway, Geeting gets on the radio and files a flight plan in the terse, cryptic argot that's the lingua franca of aviators everywhere: "Talkeetna, four-seven-fox. We've got four souls to the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna. Three hours fuel. Hour-and-thirty on the route."

  "Four-seven-fox, roger. Wind three-five-zero at six, favoring three-six. Altimeter two-niner-eight-niner."

  "Two-niner-eight-niner, roger. Away we go." With that, the thirty-five-year-old pilot pulls back on the throttle, the din of the engine rises to an unholy wail, and the little airplane leaps off the tarmac into the huge Alaskan sky.

  Beyond Talkeetna's two airstrips, half-dozen dirt streets, and ramshackle assemblage of log cabins, trailers, quonset huts, and souvenir shops lies a vast plain of black spruce, impenetrable alder and waterlogged muskeg-a mosquito's idea of paradise that's flat as a griddle and barely 350 feet above sea level. Just fifty miles away, however, the immense ramparts of Mt. McKinley-the high est point in North America-erupt out of these lowlands without preamble. No sooner is Geeting in the air than he banks sharply to the left, buzzes west over the broad, silty braids of the Susitna River, and points the airplane squarely toward that hulking silhouette.

  Geeting's craft is a Cessna 185, a six-seater with about as much room inside as a small Japanese station wagon. On this particular flight he is carrying three passengers, who are jammed into the cabin like sardines beneath a heap of backpacks, sleeping bags, skis, and mountaineering paraphernalia that fills the airplane from floor to ceiling. The three men are climbers, and they have each paid Geeting two hundred dollars to be flown to a glacier at the 7,500- foot elevation on Mt. McKinley, where they will spend the better part of a month trying to reach the 20,320-foot summit.

  Approximately one thousand climbers venture onto the slopes of McKinley and its satellite peaks each year, and landing them on the high glaciers of the Alaska Range is Doug Geeting's bread and butter. "Glacier flying"-as this demanding, dangerous, littleknown facet of commercial aviation is generally termed-is practiced by only a handful of pilots the world over, eight or nine of whom are based in Talkeetna. As jobs go, the pay isn't great and the hours are horrible, but the view from the office is tough to beat.

  Twenty-five minutes out of Talkeetna, the first snaggle-toothed defenses of the McKinley massif rise sharply from the Susitna valley, filling the windshield of Geeting's Cessna. Ever since takeoff the airplane has been laboring steadily upward. It has now reached an altitude of 8,000 feet, but the pickets of snow-plastered rock looming dead ahead stand a good 1,500 feet higher still. Geeting-who has logged some fifteen thousand hours in light planes, and has been flying this particular route for more than fifteen years now-appears supremely unconcerned as the plane bears down on the fast-approaching mountain wall.

  A few moments before collision seems imminent-by which time the climbers' mouths have gone dry and their knuckles turned white-Geeting dips a wing hard, throws the plane into a dizzying right turn, and swoops through a narrow gap that appears behind the shoulder of one of the loftier spires. The walls of the mountainside flash by at such close range that individual snow crystals can be distinguished glinting in the sunlight. "Yeah," Geeting casually remarks on the other side, "that notch there was what we call `One-Shot Pass.'

  "The first rule of mountain flying," the pilot goes on to explain in the laid-back tones of his native California, "is that you never want to approach a pass straight-on, because if you get into some unexpected down draft and aren't able to clear the thing, you're going to find yourself buying the farm in a big hurry. Instead of attacking a high pass directly, I'll approach it by flying parallel to the ridge line until I'm almost alongside the pass, and then turn sharply into it so that I move through the notch at a forty-fivedegree angle. That way, if I lose my lift and see that I'm not going to be high enough to make it over, I'm in position to turn away at the last instant and escape. If you want to stick around very long in this business, the idea is to leave your back door open and your stairway down and clear at all times."

  On the far side of the pass is a scene straight from the Pleistocene, an alien world of black rock, blue ice, and blinding-white snow stretching from horizon to horizon. Beneath the Cessna's wings lies the Kahiltna Glacier, a tongue of ice two miles across and forty miles long, corrugated by a nubbly rash of seracs and crevasses. The scale of the setting outside the plane's windows beggars the imagination: The peaks lining the Kahiltna rise a vertical mile and more in a single sweep from glacier to summit; the avalanches that periodically rumble down these faces at a hundred-plus miles per hour have so far to travel that they appear to be falling in slow motion. Against this immense landscape, Geeting's airplane is but a miniscule red mote, an all-but-invisible mechanical gnat droning its way through the firmament toward McKinley.

  Ten minutes later the gnat makes a ninety-degree turn onto a tributary of the main Kahiltna called the Southeast Fork and settles into its descent. A crude snow-landing strip, delineated by a series of plastic garbage bags tied to bamboo tomato stakes, materializes in the middle of the glacier ahead amid a maze of gargantuan crevasses. As the plane gets closer, it becomes apparent that the glacier here is far from flat, as it had appeared from a distance; the strip, in fact, lies on a slope steep enough to give a novice skier pause.

  The thin air at this altitude has severely cut into the Cessna's power, and the plane will be landing uphill into a cul de sac of mile-high
granite walls. Hence, Geeting cheerfully allows, "when you land here, there's no such thing as a go-around. You've got to nail your approach perfectly the first time." To avoid any unpleasant surprises, he scans the surrounding ridges for wisps of blowing snow that might tip off the existence of hazardous wind conditions. Several miles away, up at the head of the main arm of the glacier, he spies a blanket of wispy cotton-like clouds creeping over a 10, 300foot saddle called Kahiltna Pass. "Those are foehn clouds," he says. "They indicate extremely turbulent downslope winds-rotors we call 'em. You can't see it, but the air is churning down those slopes like breaking surf. You take an airplane anywhere near those clouds and I guarantee you'll get the crap kicked out of you."

  As if on cue, the Cessna is buffeted by a blast of severe turbulence, and the stall-warning shrieks as the airplane bucks wildly up, down, and sideways. Geeting, however, has anticipated the buffetting, and has already increased his airspeed to counter it. Serenely riding out the bumps, he guides the plane on down until the glacier rises to meet the craft's stubby aluminum skis with an easy kiss. Geeting taxis the Cessna to the uppermost end of the strip, spins the plane around with a burst of power so that it will be pointed downhill for take off, then shuts off the engine. "Well, here we are," he offers, "Kahiltna International Airport."

  Geeting's passengers crawl hastily out into the glacial chill, and three other alpinists, their faces purple and peeling from a month on the hill, eagerly climb on board for a lift back to the land of beer, flush toilets, and green growing things. After five minutes at Kahiltna International, Geeting snaps off a crisp Junior Birdman salute to the dazed-looking crew he's just unloaded, fires up his Cessna one more time, and roars down the strip in a blizzard of prop-driven snow to pick up the next load of climbers, who are already impatiently awaiting his arrival back in Talkeetna.