Seven Summits

by Dick Bass; Frank Wells; Rick Ridgeway

  The slope immediately below the summit of Vinson was mostly rock, so Miura downclimbed it before putting on his skis. With both Marts and Maeda filming, he then skied the several miles back to camp 2 over the ice-hard snow.

  Dick and I were out to greet Miura as he skied into camp 2. It took a couple more hours for Frank and the others to get down. Frank was slowed because his glacier glasses had fogged so badly he had to take them off. Worried about snow blindness, he had then descended the rest of the way to camp by opening his eyes, memorizing the terrain right in front of him, closing them again and making six steps, then doing the same thing over.

  With everyone in camp we again played musical sleeping bags because Frank wanted to rest a few hours before continuing nonstop down to the plane. Dick and I told them we would see them below, and left. After a short sleep, they got up, prepared a meal, and then again Miura stepped into his skis.

  Frank, accustomed as he was to the movie business, figured Miura's plan was to ski only part of the terrain between them and camp 1. After all, this section contained the crevassed icefall with its towering seracs. Frank guessed Miura, like a trueblood filmmaker, would find a few photogenic positions and ski them several times to get all his angles. But he was wrong.

  “Miura skied from the tents at camp two to the doorstep at camp one,” Frank later told us. “Jumping crevasses, weaving around the seracs, leaping off blocks. It was the most incredible skiing I’ve ever seen.”

  Just as important for Miura, the good weather held and Maeda and Marts got the entire performance on film. Now we were a complete success. All the climbing team had reached the summit, and we had the film in the can.

  Bonington was up at camp 1 to help us freight everything down, and the plane's crew was out to help us pull the sleds the final distance from our base camp to the aircraft.

  As soon as we arrived Kershaw said, “I’m in touch with Rothera (where we had to go to refuel), and they report building clouds. I’ve also talked to Siple, and we have an invite to stop there. Now I’d like to get the hell out here if there's a storm brewing because I’m still apprehensive about gusting winds coming off these slopes. So I suggest flying to Siple, getting an update from Rothera, then continuing if things look right.”

  Siple was that American station a little less than 200 miles from us, and Frank and Dick were also anxious to get messages out that we were down and safe. We were a week overdue, and Frank knew Luanne—who by original plan was in Australia waiting to meet them for the Kosciusko climb—would no doubt be pacing the floor.

  “So let's get out of here right now,” Kershaw said, “while the weather's right.”

  We loaded our gear, closed the fuselage door, then crossed our fingers. Would the turboprops kick over? Kershaw flicked switches, and the low rpm whine started. Number one kicked in, then two and three. Now, as long as we didn't catch the ski tips on the sastrugi…

  With the engines warmed, Kershaw throttled the turbos to near full power to break the skis out of their settled positions. Then he spun the plane, and we started to gain speed. We bounced once, then delicately lifted off. Out the window we watched the shadow of the plane grow smaller on the sculpted snow.

  Kershaw made a wide bank left and then we gathered on the starboard windows as he dipped the wing in a farewell salute to Vinson. With the radio headset over his ears, he turned aft and yelled, “I’ve got Siple on now. They say they've got the beer iced down.”

  14

  KOSCIUSKO: A WALK IN THE PARK

  Luanne Wells sat in her room on the twenty-sixth floor of Sydney's exclusive Regency Hotel. It was one of the best rooms, overlooking the scenic harbor, on what was called the “butler's floor,” meaning there was a butler stationed at the door of every room; all she had to do was push a button and a well-groomed strapping Australian appeared and said, “Ma'am, what can I do for you?”

  But she wasn't enjoying it. This was her eighth day in Australia waiting for Frank and Dick. They were a week overdue. She had no idea where they were—on the mountain, back at base camp, en route home. Or somewhere between, crashed in that airplane? She tried to push the thought from her mind.

  She stared at the phone. When would the call come? She had been afraid to leave her room for more than an hour at any one time in fear of missing it. She had a friend with her, Betty Borman (Marian Bass had been unable to come), and they had done a couple of things the last week—an afternoon at the horse races, a cricket match— but each time Luanne had left word at the desk how to reach her, and each time she had called back for messages.

  The phone rang.

  She stepped toward it, reached for it, hesitated, then picked it up.

  “Hello, Mom?”

  “Kevin, is that you?”

  It was her eldest son. Why would he be calling? Had he heard something? Was anything wrong…

  “Have you heard from Dad?”

  “Yeah. I just got a call from some ham radio operator in the Midwest. He said he had made contact with an American base in Antarctica called Siple Station, and that Dad, Dick, and the others are caught there in a storm and can't fly out. They're all okay, but they don't know when they'll be able to leave.”

  The news was good and bad. At least they were off the peak safely, but now they still had to fly in that god-awful airplane over a thousand miles to get out of Antarctica. For Luanne, that held as many potential hazards as the climb. She had been on board the plane once, at Van Nuys airport a few hours before Kershaw and the crew had left. She remembered climbing up the rickety aluminum ladder through the side fuselage door, past the gear strapped in piles, to the “stateroom” with its thrift-store couch, to the cockpit with its exposed wires and lines. For Luanne, with nothing to compare but commercial carriers, the DC-3 had to her looked held together with tape and baling wire, and left her quite literally sick to her stomach.

  Now she spent the next few days thinking about that plane flying over some white wasteland she could hardly imagine. She received another message from Frank (again passed on by a ham radio patch) that the storm was not letting up. Four days passed, five, then six. There was nothing to do but wait, and stare at the telephone.

  It had taken an hour and a half to fly from Vinson to Siple. Once we left the Ellsworth Mountains all we could see ahead was the flat and trackless ice cap. Siple appeared suddenly: an emergency James-way hut, three tall antennas, and a flag pole with the stars and stripes coloring the otherwise featureless landscape. Everything else, the living quarters and the research stations, was under ice, housed in a long single story building inside an under-ice cavern thirty feet high. The twenty-nine men and women who manned the base were out to greet us, and that evening we were treated to “Independence Cocktails” made with ice from the strata of a core sampling that the scientists on base said was laid down in the snowfall of 1776. Drinks were followed by a memorable steak and baked potato dinner with fresh salad and watermelon flown from New Zealand.

  We had hoped to leave shortly after dinner, but Giles radioed Rothera and they reported the weather conditions seemed to be worsening. “It's a bit risky going there in anything but perfect conditions,” Giles explained, “as we'll have no extra fuel to go elsewhere if we can't land.”

  A few hours later we exited topside to check on the plane and saw the storm had moved in on us. The plane had half-disappeared above the wind-driven spindrift that obscured the ice cap like a streaking ground fog. In the sky the scudding clouds had reduced visibility to a few hundred feet. It was obvious we had no choice but to wait.

  And we waited—four days. We marked time watching movies on the base's VCR. And we ate. Each of us had lost ten to twenty pounds on the climb, and we couldn't seem to eat enough. Each meal we swept the buffet table like vacuum cleaners sucking up every crumb. Then in the early morning hours, between classics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Deliverance, we raided the refrigerator. Even Frank learned how to heat leftovers in the microwave.

  “Bass, can you
believe this? Me in a kitchen, cooking.”

  “Cooking! Heck, Pancho, all you're doing is pushing buttons.”

  The base personnel at Siple had seemed as happy as we were when Rothera radioed improving weather conditions. We spent an hour digging the DC-3’s skis from the drifted snow, then took off with the entire base waving us good-bye, like townfolks in some Western.

  Much of the route toward Rothera was still clouded, although on occasion we would see through a breach in the cover the edge of a peak or a piece of coastline, and Kershaw would identify the landmarks from memory, saying things like, “There's the Ronne Entrance to the Bach Ice Shelf on the south side of Alexander Island.”

  Then it clouded in completely.

  “Rothera reports building clouds,” Kershaw reported. “They say visibility is now too low to land.”

  “My God, what are we going to do?” Frank said, voicing for all our immediate reaction.

  “Oh, not to worry. I have contingencies for this sort of thing. You know, alternative landing spots.”

  Arriving over Rothera our fears materialized when all we could see was solid cloud over the landing zone.

  “There's another crevasse-free area on the other side of the island,” Kershaw said. “When it's cloudy here it's almost always clear there. So don't worry, we'll fly over there and land, then when they tell us by radio it's clear, we'll come back.”

  Kershaw changed course while the rest of us kept vigil out the plane's windows. The clouds remained unbroken.

  “How much further to this other place?” Frank yelled forward to Kershaw.

  “We're over it.”

  “But it's socked in!”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Well what are you going to do?”

  “Fly around until I find someplace clear.”

  We knew that was a tall order. We also knew there were jagged peaks on all sides—we could see many of their summits sticking above the clouds. And we knew there was less than an hour's fuel remaining.

  “There's one more place I know of not far from here,” Kershaw said. “I flew over it several years ago, and filed it away as a possibility for some circumstance like this.”

  Kershaw spotted a hole in the clouds and we dipped below the cloud layer, flying about a hundred feet above ice-free water. We skirted a long calving ice cliff edging the sea, then passed a spit of land that was home to several hundred penguins that waddled around hurriedly as we buzzed over. The clouds above started to break, and in a moment we were in a small clearing.

  “I hope and pray Kershaw's spot is up there where it's clear,” Frank said.

  A moment later Kershaw turned aft and yelled, “There's the landing. It's good and clear.”

  “Thank God,” Frank said.

  In a few minutes we were safely landed on the crevasse-free glacier.

  “Now we simply wait for Rothera to open,” Kershaw said with British nonchalance.

  Six hours later it did. Kershaw fired up the turbos and in a few minutes we were at Rothera and welcomed by the several dozen British and Chileans. It took a few hours to refuel the plane, and when we received a favorable weather report for the Drake Passage, we climbed aboard and bid farewell to the frozen continent.

  It was a six-hour flight back to Punta Arenas. The rest of the Antarctic Peninsula was clouded, so for the second time we missed the spectacular view of the sharp ice-encrusted mountains that rise from the ocean the length of the peninsula. But it was clear over the Drake, and we were spared the threat of icing that had added such an element of anxiety and excitement on our trip over.

  “I guess we've earned an easy one,” Dick said. “I’m looking forward to Punta Arenas and soaking in a big bathtub of hot water.”

  “Yeah, and I’m anxious to get to a phone,” Frank added. “I know Luanne must be worried sick.”

  In her Sydney hotel room, the phone finally rang.

  “We're in Punta Arenas, at the tip of Chile, darling,” Frank said, his voice raised to make the long-distance connection. “Tomorrow we catch a flight back to Santiago, and then in the quickest way we can, we're going to Sydney. See you in two days or so.”

  That night, for the first time in over a year, Luanne went to bed without feeling the emptiness next to her, without considering if possibly that emptiness was something she was going to have to get used to for the rest of her life. It was the first night in over a year she slept all the way through without waking and wondering.

  In Santiago, Frank and Dick hoped to catch a flight to Easter Island and on to Tahiti, where they could connect to Sydney, but the once-a-week Lan Chile flight had just left so their best alternative was to return to Los Angeles, then connect to Sydney. In three days they went from Antarctica to Patagonia to Los Angeles to Australia, and it was a very jet-lagged pair of mountaineers that Luanne picked up at the Sydney airport.

  Jet-lagged, perhaps, but phlegmatic, never. Frank was like a little kid telling Luanne his Antarctic adventures.

  “… and then we took off from Vinson and got to Siple, and you wouldn't believe how the people there live under the ice. But they did have a cassette machine for movies, and even better a kitchen stocked with goodies. You would have been proud of me, darling, cooking my own meals. Well, not really cooking them, but they had this microwave thing that was incredible. Just push a button and presto! Darling, we've got to get one.”

  “Frank, we've had one for twelve years.”

  Luanne could hardly believe how haggard Frank looked. His frostbitten nose was now covered with a black scab in places cracked and bleeding. On the one hand she had a hard time looking at him, but on the other had never been so glad to see him.

  She had originally planned a big party in Australia. Dick's earlier idea to end the film with a tuxedo and champagne banquet on top of Kosciusko had evaporated when they failed to get to the summit of Everest (we'll have it at Snowbird instead, Dick had said, after I make Everest on the next expedition), but Luanne still wanted to celebrate with champagne on top of Kosciusko followed by a gala dinner at a nearby inn. She had bought a case of the best champagne she could find, and made the dinner reservations. The Emmetts had flown down, and Morgan and Jennings were going to come in from Indonesia. With the delay, however, everything was cancelled.

  “But we still have the champagne,” Luanne said. “And Betty and I are taking a bottle to the top to help you guys celebrate.”

  They took a ski lift from a parking area near the base of Kosciusko to the beginning of the trail. There were already several dozen tourists in front of them, out for a weekend walk to the top of the mountain.

  “Maybe we should hike up off to the side,” Marts suggested. “Over by those boulders. We could do some rock scrambling that way. Look a lot better on film.”

  Frank and Dick started to argue the merits of Marts’ suggestion.

  “I think the trail will look just fine,” Dick said in a pleading and frustrated voice. “It'll be terrific humor, the juxtaposition of the incongruous—all these months of misery and privation living and climbing on rock, snow, and ice, and here we end it like a stroll in the park.”

  “Too boring,” Frank said. “Marts is right, we need more action.”

  “Wells, I swear, you might be a Hollywood hotshot and all that, but you don't have any sensitivity for the nuances of this moviemaking stuff. Now close your eyes and let me tell you what it will look like …”

  Meanwhile Marts had started hiking up his proposed alternate route.

  “Marts, get back here,” Dick yelled.

  But Marts kept going.

  “Guess we have no choice,” Frank said with a sly grin.

  “See you mountain climbers on top,” Luanne said as she started up the tourist trail.

  Dick reluctantly followed Frank, who followed Marts. An hour later Marts stopped to film a scene of Frank and Dick scrambling up some big boulders. Dick was in the lead, trying to get up a ten-foot rock, scraping his boot as he searched for
a toehold. Frank reached up and gave him a boost.

  “Damnit, Wells, Marts has got the camera going. What are you trying to do, make me look like I can't get up this on my own?”

  “I’m just trying to help you.”

  “Well, I don't need it. Besides, we're supposed to look proficient. I mean, otherwise how are we going to be folk heroes?”

  It had started as such a beautiful day they wore only T-shirts, and Frank was in shorts, but now a cold south wind started to fill and Dick took off his pack and pulled out his parka. Frank stood by with goose bumps growing on his bare arms and legs. He had no pack at all, and of course no extra clothing.

  “Dick, you wouldn't happen to have an extra windbreaker or anything?”

  “Wellsie, seven climbs later and you're still not able to take care of yourself. What are you going to do when you don't have me anymore?”

  “Fortunately I have another indulging roommate to take over—my wife.”

  Dick handed Frank an extra wind suit he had thought might be needed under just such a circumstance. They continued up the boulder-studded slope. The country was open and barren save for a tough tussock grass sprouting between boulders. Below them the treeless brown and green Kosciusko Plateau, reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands, spread to the horizon. To their right they could see the wide trail with a long line of tourists on their weekend stroll. Frank and Dick estimated they had about a half hour to the top.

  “Dick, did you bring any sunscreen?”

  Despite the chilly breeze, the sky was still clear and Frank was concerned about sunburn.

  “Frank, I just don't understand you. Why can't you remember to bring your own stuff?”

  “You let me borrow your toothbrush in Punta Arenas, so what's wrong with letting me borrow your sunscreen on Kosciusko?”