Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

by Jon Krakauer

  The Burgess's string of ascents did not go unnoticed in the British climbing community. As early as 1975, in fact, Chris Bonington considered inviting them on his historic expedition to the southwest face of Everest-a route hyped as "the hardest way up the highest mountain in the world." The expedition eventually put Dougal Haston and Doug Scott on the summit, but the twins' names never made it onto the team, most likely, Alan speculates, "because we'd some'ow developed a reputation for occasionally getting a bit disorderly, and Bonington, very much a media man, didn't want anybody along who might blow 'is cool for 'im."

  When the twins realized that their "reputation for occasionally getting a bit disorderly" might preclude their ever being invited on an expedition to a major Himalayan peak, they decided to take matters into their own hands. In 1979 they joined forces with a friend named Paul Moores and went to Nepal to attempt an audacious alpine-style ascent of 26,041-foot Annapurna II. They were turned back by hurricane-force winds at 23,500 feet, but that taste of rarefied Himalayan air only whetted their appetites for more of it; the Burgesses have returned to the Himalaya or Karakoram every single year since.

  Last fall it was Lhotse-Mt. Everest's nearest neighbor, the fourth-highest mountain in the world-that received the twins' attention. Nineteen eighty-seven, as it turned out, was not a good year to climb in the Himalaya. Storms ripped through the range with such frequency and violence that not a single climber made it to the top of either K2 or Everest, the first time in sixteen years that the summit of the latter was not attained. The twins were understandably relieved, therefore, halfway up Lhotse, when September 27 dawned bright and promising over the Khumbu region of Nepal.

  Alan was breaking trail high on Lhotse's southeast buttress, followed on the rope by Adrian and an acquaintance from Colorado named Dick Jackson. The great amount of fresh snow on the peak made the party think twice about avalanche conditions, but the slope felt reassuringly solid beneath the knee-deep mantle of powder; with a dozen Himalayan expeditions under his belt, Alan figured he could tell when a hill was safe and when it wasn't. Furthermore, it seemed important to make the most of the fair weather in a season that had seen so little of it.

  At 23,000 feet, the route up Lhotse zigged and zagged through a series of ice cliffs. Alan was leading past one of these seracs over easy ground, casually belayed from below by his brother, when his hypoxic reveries were cut short by a deep, muffled WOOOMPF! Alan looked up to see the jagged gash of a fracture line rip across the slope and calve off an immense slab of wind-packed snow, five feet thick and one hundred fifty feet across, directly above his stance.

  For an instant, the slab seemed to move in slow motion, but as it tore free from the last of its fragile underpinnings and committed itself to the valley, a vertical mile below, the mass of snow began to accelerate with alarming speed. After traveling forty feet, the leading edge of the slab slammed squarely into Alan's chest. "I tried to scramble on top of it," he remembers, "but there was no bloody way. I went under, and then there was blackness, and all I could think was, `Shit, so this is what it feels like to die.'

  "But after maybe three seconds," Alan continues, "I suddenly popped back up to the surface, facing downslope, up to me waist in the avalanche, with all this 'eavy snow pulling at me legs. Instinctively, I threw me 'ead back, went into a full arch, and the whole thing slide underneath me."

  It was, however, a case of having jumped out of the frying pan into the fire: The avalanche had by that time engulfed his two ropemates, and was rapidly carrying them toward the lip of a twohundred-foot ice cliff. Alan had just enough time to plant his ice axe and dig in his heels before the rope to Adrian and Jackson jerked tight at his waist, threatening to yank him off the side of Lhotse once again.

  With the weight of his partners stretching the rope tight as piano wire, and Alan's tenuous attachment to terra firma about to fail, his impromptu belay pulled Jackson and Adrian up to the surface of the snow slide, allowing the avalanche to pass beneath them. When Alan finally arrested their tumble, Jackson and Adrian were only ten feet from the edge of the cliff.

  The following afternoon, recovering at base camp, they noticed a lammergeier-a species of Tibetan vulture with a nine-foot wingspan-circling in the updrafts overhead. This was puzzling, for lammergeiers were never seen unless there was a dead yak or other carrion in the vicinity, and there was no reason for any yaks to be near. The puzzle was solved a day later, when the twins accompanied the doctor from a Spanish expedition to the toe of the mountain to search for four overdue teammates, and came upon bits and pieces of climbing gear scattered across a large avalanche fan.

  The missing Spaniards had been attempting to climb Lhotse by a route adjacent to the one taken by the Burgesses and Jackson and had been caught in a similar avalanche on the very same morning. The Spanish climbers, though, hadn't been so lucky: All four of them were swept six thousand feet to their deaths. A thorough search of the run-out zone turned up the mangled remains of two of the bodies, which Alan and Adrian helped the doctor bury. "Man," Adrian recalls with a shudder, "that was a 'orrible job." It was not, however, a job the twins were unaccustomed to.

  Any alpinist who sets his sights on the higher reaches of the Himalaya stands a fair chance of being party to someone's premature demise; for those who attempt 8,000-meter peaks with the frequency of the Burgess brothers, it is a statistical inevitability. They had both been present in 1982-Alan as a member of a massive Canadian Everest expedition; Adrian with a small New Zealand team attempting Lhotse from the west-when first an avalanche in the notorious Khumbu Icefall, and then a collapsing serac, killed five of their cohorts. The twins had also been on K2 that ugly summer in 1986 when the mountain took the lives of no less than thirteen men and women, including the leader of their expedition, the acclaimed English climber Alan Rouse, whose companions (not the twins) had been forced to abandon him, comatose but still alive, in a tent at 26,000 feet to save their own skins.

  By Adrian's reckoning, more than half of the twins' climbing colleagues have, as he put it, "gotten the chop," the majority of them in the Himalaya. But if the implications of this gruesome tally bothers the Burgess boys, it doesn't show. Dealing with risk, walking the fine line, playing a game of ever-escalating brinkmanship-this is what the cutting edge of climbing has always been about. Those who elect to participate in this hazardous pastime do so not in spite of the unforgiving stakes, but precisely because of them.

  Even after the unpleasant business with the dead Spaniards underscored the closeness of their shave with the avalanche last September, the twins gave no thought to abandoning their original plan to climb the southeast buttress of Lhotse, traverse its long, spectacularly serrated summit ridge, descend the distant west side of the peak, and then, for a finale, run the gauntlet of the Khumbu Icefall to reach the base of the mountain. Alan actually managed to convince himself that their brush with death had bettered their odds-from then on, they'd be more cautious.

  A week after the avalanches, the twins, Dick Jackson, and another Coloradan, Joe Frank, went back up on the peak, only to be stopped at 21,700 feet by even worse avalanche conditions than before. The twins still weren't ready to give up on the mountain, however. They decided that the route that had killed the Spaniards looked safer than their own, so Alan departed for the village of Namche Bazar to get their climbing permit changed to the Spanish line.

  "While Al was down in Namche," says Adrian, "this mega storm 'it the 'imalaya, the biggest of the 'ole bloody year. Dumped more than four feet of snow in thirty-six hours." During the second night of the storm, Adrian was lying in his tent at base camp when the back side of the sturdy dome suddenly collapsed, smashed flat under a mass of snow. Unable to get to the door, he cut his way out to discover that a small avalanche-just a slough, really-had slid noiselessly off the hillside above camp, crushed half his shelter, and stopped a foot short of burying him. His brother's tent, a few yards away, was completely buried beneath six feet of cement-like avalanche debris.
"If Al 'ad been in it that night," Adrian gravely postulates, "there's no question what the outcome would've been."

  The next morning, Adrian set out for Namche to find Alan. The walk out required breaking trail through chest-deep snow; it took two hours to make the first mile, a distance he'd normally cover in fifteen minutes. After another mile, beneath Island Peak, Adrian came upon the base camp of a Royal Air Force expedition. "It looked like it'd been 'it by a fuckin' bomb," he says: "'alf the tents were flat, two bodies were lying nearby, all that showed of another body was this frozen 'and sticking out of the snow. The survivors said a fourth body was still buried somewhere, they didn't know where, and that a Tamang porter'ad gone crazy after the avalanche, thrown off all 'is clothes, and run off into the night. All I could think was, 'Oh man, is this shit really 'appening?'

  The naked porter was eventually found, frostbitten and hypothermic, but alive. Adrian hoisted him onto his back with a tumpline and lit out for Chhukun, the nearest settlement, seven miles distant. Halfway there, Alan appeared, coming up the trail. "Eh up, youth," Adrian greeted him, "good to see you. Give this fucker a ride, will you?" The brothers ran the rest of the way down to Chhukun together, taking turns carrying the porter, and managed to reach the village in time to save his life.

  The Burgesses were finally forced to give up their Lhotse expedition. But before they'd even arrived back in Kathmandu, they were hatching schemes to raise funds for a K2 expedition the following summer; one of these schemes involved convincing The National Enquirer that Alan Rouse might still be alive after spending two years in a tent at 26,000 feet (nobody had been back to the upper reaches of K2 since Rouse had been abandoned in August, 1986). The twins would return with the story of how he had survived by cannibalizing his fallen comrades, and in return ask the Enquirer for a modest honorarium-say, ten or twenty thousand dollars.

  As it happened, the Enquirer deal never got off the ground, but the twins managed to get to the Karakoram regardless. At the end of May they set up a base camp at the foot of K2; as this is being written-if all has gone according to plan-the Burgess boys should be arriving at the summit.

  Then again, they might not be. In scanning their climbing record, one is struck by how often success in the Himalaya has eluded the Burgesses: The twins have tried and failed to climb Annapurna II, Nanga Parbat, Ama Dablam, Everest (twice for Alan, once for Adrian), Lhotse (three times for Adrian, twice for Alan), Cho Oyu (twice for Alan), and K2; the only major Himalayan peaks they've actually seen the summits of, in fact, are 24,688-foot Annapurna IV and 26,795-foot Dhaulagiri. If climbers kept track of batting averages, Adrian would be hitting about .200 in the Himalayan Leagues, Alan a lowly .167.

  These unimpressive numbers can be attributed at least in part to the twins' habit of going after very tough routes with very small teams, and on many occasions intentionally making those routes tougher still by attempting the climbs in the screaming winds and unimaginable cold of the Himalayan winter. Paradoxically, the twins chalk up the scarcity of big summits in their lives to a "cautious nature." Alan insists that "among our peer group in England, we've always 'ad a reputation for being careful climbers, for not sticking our necks out that much. Why is why we're still alive, I suppose, and most of them are not."

  While both twins concede that dumb luck has a lot to do with who survives and who doesn't in the Himalaya, they also argue that the great majority of mountaineering accidents are preventable. "We look at it," says Adrian, "that most tragedies 'appen because climbers make mistakes. Sure, we're capable of making mistakes, too, but if you keep your eyes open, and don't climb for the wrong reasons, you won't make as many of them."

  Alan says the deaths of two of their closest friends, Al Rouse and Roger Marshall (who, in 1985, fell while trying to solo the North Face of Everest) are perfect examples of what can happen when people climb for the wrong reasons. "Both Roger and Rouse," Alan explains, "died because they were pushing to meet outside pressure. Rouse's situation back in England was such a mess-the woman 'e loved 'ad left him, and a woman 'e didn't love was about to 'ave 'is baby-that going back 'ome without 'aving summited was something 'e just couldn't face. In Roger's case, 'e was under incredible financial pressure to get up Everest; 'e needed to summit so 'e could write a successful book and pay off some loans that were 'anging over 'is 'ead and keeping 'im tied to the wife and family 'e was trying to get free of. It's 'ard enough making the right decisions at 'igh altitude without having that kind of pressure clouding your judgment."

  If caution and mountain sense have contributed to the twins' failures, their critics-of whom there are many-are quick to cite other, less charitable, reasons for the frequency of their washouts. Even the Burgess boys' most vocal detractors grudgingly admit that the twins are exceptionally strong at high altitude-that they seem, in fact, to perform as well as any climber alive in the cold, meager air found at those extreme heights known as the "Death Zone." But Gordon Smith-an erstwhile Burgess pal from Calgary who accompanied the twins to Annapurna IV, Everest, and Manaslu- maintains that the lads' freewheeling, "What, me worry?" modus operandi just doesn't cut it on 8,000-meter peaks. "There's a lot more to getting up a big mountain than being able to put one foot in front of the other," Smith states matter-of-factly, "and the twins haven't a clue how to organize an expedition. Somehow, something goes wrong on every one of their Himalayan trips."

  On the Manaslu expedition, according to Smith, the twins' stubbornness led to critical shortages of important gear, such as snow pickets. On the same expedition, a group of trekkers who'd paid hefty fees for the privilege of accompanying the climbers to the first camp were, upon reaching the mountain, arbitrarily denied the opportunity when Alan became impatient with the novices. Smith feels the twins' shortcomings as expedition leaders stem in part from their trying to do too much. "It's very difficult," he explains, "to be up at the front all day, pushing the route hard, and then have enough energy at night to properly oversee the expedition logistics."

  But Smith disapproves of more than the twins' managerial skills. "They know how to be charming when it suits them," he continues bitterly, "but basically they're just a couple of con artists. They don't seem to care how many enemies they make; when they get caught out they just change their friends and move on to a fresh set of marks." If Smith's disaffection with the twins seems rather pointed, it might have something to do with the fact that their last trip together-the unsuccessful attempt on Manaslu in 1983-concluded with a disagreement over Alan's handling of expedition finances that escalated into a no-holds-barred fistfight in the streets of Kathmandu.

  Spend any time in Chamonix, or Llanberis, or the chang houses of the Khumbu, and you'll come to appreciate that there is no shortage of stories about the Burgess boys, their quick fists, and their brazen scams. "Wherever you go in Nepal," says American climber/physician Geoffrey Tabin, "as soon as the local people see that you're a Westerner, they excitedly ask you `You know Burgess? You know Burgess?' The guys are living legends on four continents; Alan's sexual escapades alone could fill several volumes of `Penthouse Letters.' "

  One of the more recent additions to the wealth of Burgess lore originated amid the weirdness and bright lights of Las Vegas, at the annual outdoor trade show. The twins were in attendance, putting the touch on industry bigwigs for funding and free gear for their Lhotse expedition. After a hard day of hustling, the twins made the rounds of the usual parties, where Alan met a friendly native who invited him to have a nightcap in her hotel room.

  Alan, Adrian, and Alan's newfound friend were driving down the Strip in Adrian's beater truck, en route to Adrian's hotel, when a low-slung car, carrying several Vegas cowboys, pulled alongside at a red light. Adrian, to make small talk, held up the beverage he'd been sipping and yelled out the window, "This American beer tastes like piss!" in his best Yorkshire accent.

  At the next red light, the low-slung car again pulled alongside the twins' truck, and two of the cowboys jumped out. Adrian also jumped out and,
being a firm believer in the preemptive strike, immediately punched one of the cowboys. Because Adrian was so drunk, however, he lost his balance while completing the roundhouse and fell on his face before the cowboy could return the punch. Alan, seeing his brother on the pavement and assuming he'd been coldcocked, jumped out and bloodied the hapless cowboy's nose (the second cowboy had by this time scurried back to the security of the low-slung car). Alan then collected Adrian, got back in the truck, and roared off down the Strip.

  When they stopped for the next red light, the low-slung car pulled directly in front of the twins in a menacing fashion, but none of the cowboys got out. This so angered Adrian that he hopped out of the truck, ran up the back of the low-slung car, and leapt up and down on its roof until the light turned green and the car peeled away.

  Unfortunately for the cowboys, though, the traffic lights just weren't turning for them that evening: the next one in their path was also red. Alan pulled the truck up behind the low-slung car, paused for a moment, and then rammed it smartly. Then he put the truck in reverse, backed up a few feet, and rammed the car again.

  By now the cowboys realized that they'd made a grave error in judgment in tangling with the Burgesses. The cowboys decided To hell with the red light, punched the car's accelerator, and promptly slammed into an oncoming vehicle. Alan, disappointed that the fun with the cowboys had come to an end, steered around the twisted metal and broken glass, and motored slowly on down the Strip toward Adrian's hotel.

  Shortly thereafter, five police cars surrounded the truck with lights flashing and sirens wailing, and Alan was yanked out of the cab and spread-eagled across the hood. The cops said they wanted to ask Alan a few questions about an alleged assault on some local citizens, followed by a hit-and-run accident. Alan politely explained that the cops had it all wrong, that he and his equally innocent brother, who were in town on important international business, were the victims, not the perpetrators, of the assault. And as for the accident, Alan said, the thugs who attacked them had simply collided with another car while trying to flee the scene of the crime. - -- - - - ---- -- - -