The Lost Explorer

by Anker, Conrad

  Like all serious mountaineers, Conrad has had his share of close calls. The closest came in 1991, on Middle Triple Peak in the Kichatna Spires of Alaska. Conrad and longtime pal Seth Shaw had made the second ascent of the mountain’s splendid east buttress and were completing the descent. With only eighty vertical feet remaining between them and the glacier, Shaw reached the bottom of his rappel and prepared to clip in to the anchor Conrad had set up two feet away. Just as he reached out a carabiner to clip, the snow platform on which he had come to rest broke loose. Shaw was still on rappel, at the end a 300-foot rope doubled through the anchor on the pitch above. Climbers customarily tie knots in both ends of the rappel rope, so they don’t slide off the end by accident; normally the snow ledge breaking would have been inconsequential.

  “We were just exhausted,” remembers Conrad. “We’d been on the route five days. We’d gone into the Kichatnas super-light, with only fourteen days’ food, and this was our twenty-first day. Somehow I tied a knot in one end of the rope and not in the other.”

  Thus as Shaw’s weight came on the single knot, it pulled the rope through the anchor above, like a line whipping unchecked through a pulley. Shaw fell eighty feet and landed hard on the glacier.

  “I thought he was dead. So here I am in the Alaska Range, with no radio, the nearest other human being sixty miles away, eighty feet up, with no rope. I thought, Oh, my God, how do I get out of this?”

  All Conrad had to extricate himself from a hopeless predicament was a small “rack” of climbing gear, a few cams and nuts and five or six pitons. He began to place what gear he could in marginal cracks in the vertical wall and aid-climb his way gingerly down. He had to put his weight on one insecure piece, transfer it to the piece below, then remove the upper cam or nut to reuse as he got lower. At all times he tried to keep three interconnected pieces affixed to the rock. “It was like trying to cross a desert,” he says, “with twenty feet of railroad track that I had to keep pulling up from behind and resetting in front.

  “I started hearing voices. Human voices, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying. It’s the eeriest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. Eventually, Seth came to and got up. Amazingly, he wasn’t even badly hurt. We talked to each other. He was wallowing around in the snow. There was still nothing he could do for me. He didn’t have enough gear to lead back up to me with the rope, and besides, he was utterly exhausted.

  “I just kept shuffling gear, cleaning ice out of the crack, trying to keep three pieces in at all times. Then suddenly I slipped and the whole thing blew—all three pieces came out at once.”

  Conrad fell most of the eighty feet, his back slamming against the rock, then his head. Yet the glacial snow on which he landed saved him, as it had Shaw, from death. Conrad’s back rang with excruciating pain (the injury still occasionally bothers him, eight years later), but the two men now faced a thirty-mile ski out to Rainy Pass with no food. The desperate jaunt took them thirty-six hours. Along the way, they found a hunting cabin; inside, they gorged on a jar of peanut butter and bags of salt and pepper (laid in to season the slabs of fresh moose meat hunters might lug there the next October). Glad to be alive, they crossed the Happy River and reached a roadhouse hunting lodge at Rainy Pass, where their bush pilot picked them up.

  The professional turning point in Conrad’s life came in 1993, when North Face signed him on as a sponsored climber. His first contract earned him a relative pittance, but by living frugally and supplementing his take with the odd carpentry job, he made ends meet. By 1999, Conrad was making a decent income from his North Face gig, although going to Everest entailed so many missed obligations that—just like Mallory in 1924—he agreed to take a cut to half pay.

  As a North Face representative, Conrad travels around the country, giving slide shows, taking potential clients out for a day of easy skiing or climbing, or giving a climbing demonstration on an artificial wall. He can be sardonic about the work, which he sometimes alludes to as “the petting zoo.” Yet, in his habitually earnest way, he waxes enthusiastic about his encounters with a public avid to taste adventure, even if vicariously.

  “I can use my slide shows and ski outings as a chance to share my outlook on life, which is fundamentally Buddhist,” he says. “People come to see slides of me climbing, to share my adventures, but I can use the opportunity to talk about being a good person, about how anger and hatred disrupt an expedition, about how sometimes it takes a little more effort to be positive than negative, but that it’s ultimately life-enriching. I’d like to take what notoriety or fame comes my way and turn it into something good, as for instance Sir Edmund Hillary has, building schools and hospitals in Nepal. I’d like to share what mountains have done to change my life, and become a spokesperson for goodness.”

  Anker’s partner on many extreme climbs during the last seven years, Alex Lowe, says, “More than anyone I’ve traveled and climbed with, Conrad reaches out to the people around him, giving of himself, his time, and his illimitable energy. No one who comes in contact with him walks away unaffected.”

  At thirty-six, Conrad stands six feet two and weighs 175 pounds, though he lost a few pounds on Everest. His sandy hair is usually unkempt and tousled, as if the wind had rioted in it, and a day’s growth of beard often furs his cheeks and chin. His manner is soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, though his blue-green eyes hold his interlocutor with an unblinking gaze. Even at rest in his own apartment, his body seems to have the catlike grace, coiled ready to spring, of a great athlete in great shape.

  During the last eighteen years of vagabondage, Anker felt that the intensity of his climbing precluded marriage and family. Two years ago, however, he met Becky Hall, a lawyer for the Nature Conservancy. Just before Conrad left for Everest, the two became affianced.

  In the wake of Mugs Stump’s death, mired in a year-long depression, Conrad taught himself to paint with watercolors. This sedentary occupation has become his one serious hobby, which he pursues even in the midst of expeditions. His deft landscapes have a kind of Japanese simplicity. He gives away every painting he executes, and never signs them.

  On Everest, with his fascination for all things Buddhist, Conrad became intensely curious about the lives of the yak herders who carted the expedition’s 16,000 pounds of food and gear from Base Camp to ABC, about the lives of the Sherpas who would make such invaluable colleagues up high. “Because the United States is so recently settled, despite the Native Americans,” he says, “in our country we don’t really have a mountain culture. In places like Tibet, I’m completely fascinated with the mountain cultures that have been at home in the great ranges for centuries.”

  Good climbers, on the whole, are not often deeply empathic men or women. Their own agendas of triumph and vindication loom too large. Conrad Anker is an exception. And just as his sympathetic openness led him to spend hours lounging with the yak herders, without being able to exchange an intelligible word, it was not surprising that, when the Ukrainian Volod Gorbach lay near death in the middle of the night on the North Col, Conrad should unhesitatingly take charge of the difficult and dangerous evacuation that might save his life.

  DR

  WE PUT VOLOD INTO A SKED—a sled litter that looks something like a big plastic burrito—with foam pads underneath him. We put his harness on, tied the harness to the top of the sled, put him inside a sleeping bag, and wrapped him up so he wouldn’t fall out of the sled. There were the four of us Americans—Tap Richards, Jake Norton, Andy Politz, and me—along with Silvio, a very strong Italian climber.

  We knew there were fixed ropes in place all the way down the steep section below the North Col, and thus fixed anchors about every 150 feet. We had a 600-foot rope of our own, so we could make a good long lower, then rappel down the fixed ropes ourselves.

  Tap and I stayed at the top, lowering Volod. We used a Munter hitch, a simple knot that would cinch down on the rope even if we lost control of it altogether. The rope came up from Volod’s sled, through a belay
device attached directly to the anchor, then to Tap and me. It’s as if we were lowering him through a pulley, with an emergency brake backing us up.

  Andy and Silvio were rappelling the fixed lines, but tending the sled, one on either side of it. They had short leashes to the top and bottom of the sled, to make sure it didn’t flip upside down, which can easily happen in a lower if the foot of the sled fetches up on a ledge or a bulge. Jake went first, to set up each station for the next maneuver.

  As soon as we’d lowered him the full 600 feet, Andy and Silvio would tie Volod off. Tap and I would cut loose the ropes and rappel quickly down; by the time we got to the next station, Volod was rigged for the next lower. We were doing all this in the dark, with headlamps, communicating with each other by radio.

  As smoothly as we managed the lowering, the sled was still bouncing off corners and shelves in the ice, causing Volod a lot of pain, though your body will kick in with endorphins that act as natural painkillers. We could see that his nose was frostbitten—black and shriveled up, with bits of flesh coming off. We knew his feet and hands were frostbitten, but we didn’t want to take off his gloves or boots.

  I’m proud to say that we were really efficient. We did five 600-foot lowers in only an hour and a half. Some of them were tricky: the second went over an open crevasse, the fourth down a really steep ice chute.

  By midnight, we’d gotten Volod to the foot of the North Col. It was as dark and cold as it was going to get. There was still a considerable horizontal carry to ABC, at 21,000 feet. Russell Brice had organized a team to take over from us there, comprised of Dave Hahn and Thom Pollard from our party, several climbers from other expeditions, and a whole bunch of cook boys and Sherpas, about twenty people in all. They took Volod’s sled and carried him across the relatively flat part of the glacier incredibly fast. They just flew. Part of the way, they could slide him on another rescue sled, which Simo had arranged to get to the foot of the lower.

  In his sled, Volod kept trying to sit up. The guys who were carrying him said, “Just twenty minutes. Twenty more minutes!” Volod could barely whisper in response. They finally got him to ABC at 2:30 A.M.

  There, Russell Brice had converted his dining tent into a medical ward. They had a heater going to keep Volod warm. The Ukrainian team doctor put some oxygen on Volod and got some fluids into him. He could barely manage to drink through a straw. Finally they took off his gloves and boots. The hands and feet weren’t completely black, but they looked bad. What nonplussed me was to see that on the lower part of his body, Volod had only long underwear on, then fleece pants, then Gore-Tex pants. No down suit on his lower body.

  That serves as a reminder of just how important mountaineering is in certain impoverished Eastern European countries. Not only Ukraine, but Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia—all those countries have produced superb Himalayan climbers, who’ve succeeded without even being able to afford proper equipment, let alone having the luxury of being sponsored. There’s a tremendous amount of national pride involved in their efforts. It emerges from the Ukrainian expedition brochure, written in fractured English, but eloquent all the same:

  The Ukraine needs herous to entering to the XXI Centure, and they are forged there, where the maximum concetration of phusical, mental and intellectual forces is necessary for achievement the purpose. There is no better place, than climbing to the highest summits of the world.

  On the morning of the eleventh, I built a carrying basket out of two metal pack frames, some duct tape, and some parachute cord, and five Tibetans carried Volod the thirteen miles down to Base Camp. He wasn’t in great shape, but he was lucky to be alive.

  We had never worked better as a team than during this rescue. Dave Hahn put up a nice acknowledgment of our achievement in his MountainZone dispatch:

  As I recall from normal life, heroes are seldom seen up close and personal. In fact, where I work at Mount Rainier, I have to drive all the way down to the big city, buy a ticket and a $6 beer, and sit way up in the stands in the hopes that Ken Griffey Jr. will smack one over the wall and give me a long-distance look at greatness. Here, I just look over my tea cup and see heroes every day.

  Two months after the expedition, I got word from a Ukrainian team member, Roman Coval, in Kiev. Volod had had the last joints of two fingers on his left hand amputated, as well as several toes on both feet. It could have been a lot worse.

  He hoped to climb again. As Roman rather mordantly put it, “In Ukraine, we have enough climbers without fingers or toes—the only problem is to change boot size.”

  The team had received special honors from the president of the Ukraine. The expedition, Roman said, had been “highly approved by the government.”

  No one ever found any trace of Vasil Copitko. His teammates think that as he tried to descend in the dark late on May 8, he must have fallen off the eastern face of the ridge, above the Kangshung Glacier. If he’d fallen down the north face, above the Rongbuk, somebody later in May would probably have found something. It’s entirely possible that Vasil’s body will never be discovered.

  Despite our success, the rescue had a sobering effect on our team. The Ukrainians weren’t novices; they were good, strong climbers who knew what they were doing. Only some minor miscalculations, and the bad luck of weather, put them on the edge of survival. We all knew the same thing could happen to us.

  It was May 11, and no one except the three Ukrainians had yet summitted on Everest from the north. We had been planning to use these days to rest up for our second search and our summit attempt. Instead of gathering strength and fattening up, here we were, exhausting ourselves performing a rescue in the middle of the night.

  I tried to recuperate on May 11, but it wasn’t a very restful day. On the twelfth, we went back up to the North Col. I figured I was as ready as I’d ever be. My mind had fixated on an image of the Second Step, which I’d seen only in pictures. If I could climb it free, I could judge how hard it would have been for Mallory to have climbed it on June 8, 1924.

  6 Teeth in the Wind

  DR

  MALLORY’S GRIM PREMONITION came true: in the end, the 1924 expedition was more like war than mountaineering.

  Yet as he sailed from England to India, then as he rode and hiked toward Everest, Britain’s finest climber was filled not with foreboding, but with optimism. “I can’t see myself coming down defeated,” he wrote Ruth from the remote Tibetan village of Shekar Dzong. To his former teammate Tom Longstaff, he predicted, “We’re going to sail to the top this time, and God with us—or stamp to the top with our teeth in the wind.”

  As he had in both 1921 and ’22, once more Mallory underestimated Everest. His bravura performance two years before, along with Finch’s, had made the summit seem well within his grasp. At times, his certainty about success could approach cocksure arrogance, as during his lecture tour of America, where, envisioning a third expedition, he boasted, “Mount Everest is asking for trouble.” Yet at other times, his confidence was laced with threads of doubt, as in a sentence he wrote his sister Mary from shipboard, “Anyway, we’ve got to get up this time; and if we wait for it and make full preparations, instead of dashing up at the first moment, some of us will reach the summit, I believe.”

  The 1924 party was even stronger than the 1922 team had been. General Charles Bruce was back as leader, now fifty-eight and in poor health even before the expedition started. But Howard Somervell and Teddy Norton were returning, seasoned by their previous Everest foray. The cool-headed Norton was appointed climbing leader, despite Mallory’s greater experience and technical ability. Somervell brought along Bentley Beetham, a young climber of whom much was expected, for in the summer of 1923, the pair had had a season in the Alps few other Englishmen could match, climbing some thirty-five peaks in six weeks.

  Noel Odell imported vast funds of exploratory wisdom and alpine expertise, and though he was slow to acclimatize, once he was in shape, he would outperform all his teammates except Norton and Mallory.
Odell’s Spitsbergen protégé, Sandy Irvine, was an unproven quantity, but quickly showed that his solid athleticism and buoyant spirit could make up for lack of mountaineering experience. Rounding out the party were Geoffrey Bruce, now a mountaineer, thanks to his 1922 campaign; John de Vere Hazard, a fast and experienced climber in the Alps; and photographer-cinematographer John Noel, who would prove staunch in a supporting role.

  Mallory thought the team “a really strong lot,” and Norton went even further: “I doubt if so strong a party will ever again be got together to climb Mount Everest.”

  During the journey to the mountain, Mallory badly missed his wife, to whom he wrote often and at great length. The sense of having done her harm, during whatever “difficult time” the couple had gone through the previous autumn, afflicted him. “I fear I don’t make you very happy,” he wrote from the ship. “Life has too often been a burden to you lately, and it is horrid when we don’t get more time and talk together.” For Ruth, her husband’s absence was a constant ache: “Dearest one, I do hope you are happy and having a good voyage. I am keeping quite cheerful and happy, but I do miss you a lot.”

  On the approach, General Bruce recurringly felt “seedy” and weak. Unable to keep up with his teammates, he chose a low-altitude detour to get himself to the village of Kampa Dzong two days after the main party. Before he could reach that town, however, he collapsed in a full-blown malarial fever, apparently the flaring up of a long-dormant infection. Bitterly disappointed, he resigned from the expedition and returned to India.

  Teddy Norton was made leader of the party, and Mallory climbing leader (which he would have been de facto in any case). Fortunately, the two men got along splendidly, even during the expedition’s lowest moments, and made no important decisions without consulting each other.