Above the Clouds

by Anatoli Boukreev

  On October 20, about one hundred people came out to compete in the Basic Boulder Marathon. The trail conditions were bad, icy slush and mud. Just before the start of the race the route was changed. I ran in fifth place for most of the distance. After the steep uphill section, Kevin, Patrick Healey, and Neal Beidleman passed me. I was disgusted with myself for being in such pitiful shape. At a rest stop, I paused and ate a little. When the food kicked in, my strength came back. Toward the end of the race I sped up, but lost time negotiating the unfamiliar trail. I finished in eighth place; if I had not gotten lost, my place would have been sixth. Some would say that was not so bad for my first marathon, but those results weren’t anything that impressed a sponsor or me. Kevin felt sick before the race and finished ten minutes behind me in thirteenth place. After it was over, I could see from looking at him that he was satisfied with his performance.

  The thing that struck me most after the race was the attitude of the participants. No matter what place they took, everyone seemed satisfied with his time. Each person finished the race beating his main rival, himself. You could see that the motivation for these people was a love of running, the mountains, and nature; the race was a way to celebrate life. The run through the beautiful spurs of the Rocky Mountains was a kind of holiday. Now I believe that everywhere there are humans who cannot live without regular athletic pursuit.

  I am starting to understand a lot more about the way things work here. Visiting in America, you must be ready to live according to local standards. One must respect the customs and lifestyle. I have a good impression of the people that I met during my first trip, especially Bob Palais and Elliott Robinson. My relationships with Beth Wald, Kevin, and Patrick Healey have become more complex. They are interesting people. During this time, the biggest problem for me has been my poor command of the English language. Even Kevin, whom I lived with, sometimes seems like a complete stranger. From our training sessions, I know that like me he has a deep love for running and will make a good climbing partner on Everest. We have that in common, but really very little else. Often during this visit a Russian saying has come to mind: “An uninvited guest is worse than a Tartar.” A month has passed since the race and my soul is feeling empty. I guess that I am homesick.

  Though it was expensive for me, and I wish that some things had gone differently, coming here was not a waste of time. Now I understand that I need to work harder on bringing climbers and travelers to the Union. Though strong people are respected in America, to obtain sponsorship as a sportsman, one must have a famous name. By Russian standards I earned good money working at a laborer’s job, but if I hope to coach or interest sponsors in my climbing ambitions, I will have to produce some concrete results. Now I must focus on preparing for the one-day Everest climb. Without attention to my health and constant training, I won’t last too long. Other goals I set for myself are mastering the marathon distance, the ski marathon distance, and ice-climbing techniques. I want to start a company called Extreme Sport. Also, I must be able to climb a 5.11 pitch comfortably; otherwise around here I look pretty funny.

  Boulder, Colorado, November 21, 1990.

  3

  THE YEARS BETWEEN, 1991–93

  Anatoli climbed Everest in 1991. He was not the only Soviet mountaineer to stretch his legs in the Himalayas. On various expeditions in 1990 and 1991, Anatoli’s Kanchenjunga teammates summited the hardest 8,000-meter peaks by new or difficult routes: the South Face of Lhotse, the South Face of Annapurna, the South Face of Manaslu, the East Ridge of Cho Oyu, and the West Wall of Dhaulagiri. Their accomplishments were so impressive that in Kathmandu 1991 was called the “Russian Year in the Himalayas.” As her alpinists left their marks in climbing history, the Soviet Union collapsed. The shock waves from that event changed the rules that governed every facet of their existence at once and forever.

  In a mountaineering life, tragedy is no stranger. When friends are lost or you watch their painful adjustments to life after frostbite has taken its toll, it is difficult. In the winter of 1990, our team was forced to turn back just below the summit of Pobeda Peak. Six of our expedition members had sustained such severe frostbite that they required helicopter evacuation for medical attention. For many of them, the road to the mountains closed forever that day. Out of the twenty-nine members on the international team of the former Soviet Union who climbed Kanchenjunga, five have died. Nineteen eighty-nine was not so long ago. Nine of my Almaty teammates were on that roster, and three of the best of them remain in the mountains forever. Valeri Khrichtchatyi was buried in an avalanche guiding clients on Khan-Tengri in August of this year. In the autumn of 1990, Grigori Luniakov and Zinur Halitov died attempting a futuristic route up Manaslu.

  Anyone who has lost friends while climbing understands how difficult it is to live through their deaths. Confronted with the impact it makes on their loved ones, you are forced to reexamine your passion. Each loss makes it harder to return, once again to take up the paths that lead to the summits. Yet there are those of us who must return. The mountains speak to something deep inside, and the inner longing that answers cannot be ignored.

  From the moment we heard that Zinur and Grigori were lost, our team at the Sports Club vowed that our future climbing experiences would keep their spirits and courage alive in our hearts. Our success on Dhaulagiri in the spring of 1991 is a tribute to the influence they had on each of us. The West Wall of Dhaulagiri (8,172 meters) is one of the most technically difficult routes in the Himalayas. There was no fighting or competing for first place during our expedition, and every man on the team climbed to the summit without the assistance of bottled oxygen.

  We endured a harrowing descent from the summit, making it back to the shelter of the tents at Camp IV in darkness while a fierce storm rolled up the mountain slopes. Back in our flapping shelters, it was as if a freight train were rushing by two steps beyond the thin walls. Suddenly there was an incredible ringing sound, followed by crackling and hissing. For two hours in what should have been pitch-darkness, the walls of the tent glowed with blue light. In dropping temperatures, chased by a violent wind, the next day we retreated down the mountain. The memory of our friends helped the ten of us work together like a well-oiled machine while we secured that difficult route. It helped us survive the harrowing descent without trauma or tragedy.

  In October of 1991, I returned to Nepal as a member of a Russian-American expedition. We were there to challenge the Everest speed-ascent record of twenty-two hours and thirty minutes set by French climber Marc Batard. Vladimir Balyberdin of St. Petersburg was our expedition leader. My American friend Kevin Cooney was my climbing partner. After seventeen days of work, only two Spanish climbers had succeeded in reaching the summit. High winds prevented most people from climbing above Camp III. Though the gales blew strongly, on October 6 our team managed to lash our tents down onto the rocks of the South Col.

  As preparation for a later speed ascent, Kevin and I decided to make an easy acclimatization climb on the seventh. He pulled on his old Koflach boots. We left our tent at 8:30 A.M., not taking our ice axes, just our Leki ski poles. Balyberdin climbed with us for a time; he had his movie camera. I did not pay any attention to him, thinking that he intended to do some filming on the Col. Kevin climbed ahead of me for a while. It was easy going and not particularly a struggle. Somewhere around two o’clock in the afternoon, rather unexpectedly, we found ourselves on the South Summit. I went ahead across the ridge below the Hillary Step. At one point I looked back; Kevin was still standing on the South Summit. He waved me to go on.

  The wind blew with strong force across the ridge-top, but without enough momentum to push me off the slope. I crawled up the Hillary Step using the remnants of old rope that survived from previous expeditions. Above on a steep incline were the vestiges of steps that the Spanish climbers had cut into the ice the week before. I kept going. Almost by accident, I arrived on the summit at 3 P.M. Was it a coincidence that I stood on top of Everest for the first time one year f
rom the day Zinur Halitov and Grigori Luniakov died on Manaslu? I do not think so. That moment remains clear in my memory and I will never forget it. Their spirits were close, and strangely I sensed that we were together again, there on top of the world.

  Those feelings passed. I became aware that Kevin was not visible on the slope below. I hurried down. Around 6 P.M. I climbed into our tent and was relieved to find him waiting for me. Too tight, his old boots had caused numbness in his toes. Sensibly avoiding frostbite, he had turned back at the South Summit. All night I argued with Balyberdin because as leader he had not given me permission to attempt the summit. Kevin and I were just climbing, but my independence caused a rift between “Bal” and I that permanently affected my opportunities to join his expeditions.

  At first everyone down in Base Camp insisted that it was impossible I had reached the top of Everest in such high winds and without using supplemental oxygen. Faced with their disbelief, I sheepishly revealed that I had taken a souvenir from the summit-marker poles. I produced the small silver cross that Spaniard Ralph Vidaurre had attached to them when he’d summited the week before. Ralph was delighted with my confession, and it changed the mood of everyone in camp.

  In the following days the jet stream dropped lower, producing winds that tore across the South Col at hurricane speeds. Kevin could not wait for conditions to change. His responsibilities at work demanded that he return to Colorado. For two weeks more, I tried to make a speed ascent. Once I climbed from Base Camp to the South Col in a little less than ten hours. My results made me think that breaking Batard’s record was a possibility, but the mountain had other plans. Approaching the South Col on a perfectly clear day, I was literally forced to crawl the final meters to the pass. Snow and tiny splinters of ice sand-papered my face. Not one of the tents that ten expeditions had pitched on the Col had escaped destruction. Taking shelter in the least damaged one, I spent a frigid night in a blast that made keeping a gas stove lit impossible. Unable to rehydrate myself with water, I felt my chest become tighter and tighter. For two hours the next morning I struggled to go up, managing to gain only two hundred meters. I gave up. As our team packed up to leave, I made a final attempt to ascend Everest by the West Ridge. Under a clear sky, faced with a medium breeze, I made it to about 8,000 meters. There conditions changed abruptly; the force of the wind became an invisible, impermeable wall. Again I was forced to turn back. I learned from those first experiences with Everest that she decides who gets up.

  Our Sports Club’s success on Dhaulagiri along with results from other Soviet expeditions was the reason 1991 was called the “Russian Year in the Himalayas.” No one would apply such a title of triumph to 1992 and 1993. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed in 1991. Before the year was out, former republics like Kazakhstan were independent countries and found themselves in difficult economic situations. This impacted everything in our lives. Especially affected were those areas and interests that had no previously developed commercial potential. For athletes this meant a loss of government support for training in sports that were not Olympics events or those that had not produced world championships.

  In all my years of mountaineering, I abandoned my goal before the end only three times—twice climbing Everest and once on Pobeda. Turning back is so difficult when a hundredth or even a thousandth part of the total labor is ahead of you. At the beginning of 1992, after twenty years of preparation, a fraction of what I had dreamed of accomplishing in mountaineering had been achieved, and everything in my life challenged me to quit. Though our success on Dhaulagiri proved our club had many men who were capable of climbing the hardest routes on 8,000-meter peaks without the use of bottled oxygen, all national sponsorship for our expeditions evaporated. My friends and teammates would not talk about climbing anymore; they struggled to earn money literally for bread.

  Dreams of the mountains did not leave me alone, and I focused my efforts on finding support for my ambitions in our new economic environment. With my level of experience, I knew I would be a welcome addition to any international team going to the Himalayas—if I could pay my way. All attempts to interest local sponsors failed. Independent businessmen had no understanding of patronage as it is practiced in the West and could not imagine that my efforts might be used in advertising to promote sales. In the summer of 1992, Balyberdin financed an expedition to K2 in Pakistan by charging the American and French climbers who were included on his permit. Because I had circumvented his authority while climbing Everest, I was not invited. I wrote to mountaineers I knew from other countries, and from time to time I received a response.

  On December 23, 1992, a letter arrived from German alpinist Reinmar Joswig. It was an invitation to join a summer expedition led by him and his climbing partner Peter Metzger. Success on three other 8,000-meter peaks in Pakistan had prepared Reinmar to take on the great ambition of his life—Chogori. Known to mountaineers as K2, she is the most alluring and seductively dangerous of all the world’s highest mountains. At that time, fewer than ninety individuals had been on the summit of K2, only one of them a German. For me as well, she sang a siren’s song. In 1992, seven men had climbed the three highest peaks in the world—Everest, Kanchenjunga, and K2. Success would make me the eighth.

  Reinmar and I had become acquainted in Kathmandu, Nepal, in May of 1991. Two months later, I was in the Pamirs with members of Balyberdin’s St. Petersburg team camped at 7,000 meters on Communism Peak. We were the first to make it to the highest camp that year, and the following day Balyberdin planned for us to break a new trail through deep snow to the summit. With recent success on 7,134-meter-high Lenin Peak behind us, everyone was in great shape and well acclimated. Below in the comfort of the International Mountaineering Camp Pamir, members of Japanese and South Korean expeditions were patiently waiting for us to make tracks. That afternoon, a lone mountaineer appeared at our campsite loaded down with a big backpack. Immediately I noticed that he moved as though not fatigued by this effort. Fresh from the summit of 7,105-meter-high Korzhenevskaya Peak, Reinmar Joswig was making a rapid solo ascent of Communism Peak. As I helped him set up his tent, a gust of wind blew the outer cover toward the drop-off over the southern wall. Reinmar hurried to recover the tent fly. Familiar with those dangerous slopes, I went after him, offering him my rope and a belay.

  He joined us as we set out for the summit the next morning. For us that was a training run for the fall speed ascent of Everest. Reinmar kept up with my fast pace, and we soon left everyone else behind. Clearly, I was in the presence of a strong and experienced mountaineer. In the following days I became just as impressed with his modesty and good character. The letter from him in December of 1992 opened a crack in the door that I had thought closed forever. Remembering Reinmar from the Pamirs, I knew it would be an honor to climb with him again. I immediately agreed to join his expedition. Only my financial situation could stop me.

  My job as a ski coach was eliminated early in 1992. Though it had produced national champions, the program did nothing for the collective farm’s profits. My basic survival depended on a $20-a-month Master of Sports stipend and a $30 paycheck from the Army Sports Club. Everyone else in my country found himself in the same situation. Salaries were frozen at the old levels. Inflation was rampant. Unemployment was high. There was no hope of earning enough to pay my way to K2. Government sponsorship for our sport had stopped, and all my efforts generated no interest in the private sector. Financial difficulties lay like a stone in my soul, which distracted me from my regular routine of training.

  If there is a mountaineer who can climb the highest peaks the way I do without preparation, I envy that man. For twenty years I have strictly adhered to a self-devised formula of exercise and rest, always seeking to proportion my level of readiness to the level of the approaching goal. More than once my program of conditioning had allowed me to perform in critical situations when temperatures were unbelievably cold and my body was deprived of liquids for as much as twenty hours. In those tim
es my survival depended on my endurance. On K2, I expected to face the most extreme conditions of my career.

  I live with the knowledge that because of my height and weight, my body requires more time to adjust to altitude than that of a smaller person. On expeditions, prolonged time above five thousand meters exhausts the human body. Physical conditioning actually deteriorates. Without preliminary acclimatization, you risk finding yourself in the stupid situation where your body has adjusted to the altitude, but you have no physical strength to make it to the top. To maintain a basic level of adjustment to altitude and to keep up endurance, my routine training includes rapid ascents on 3,000-to-4,000-meter-high peaks all year. Going at a speed that keeps my pulse high prepares my body for the oxygen fasting one encounters at high altitude.

  As well, before the sustained intense effort required to climb above eighty-five hundred meters, it is obligatory to allow the body to rest completely. If you come to a mountain with the body’s immune response weakened by the stress of overtraining, you are more susceptible to exacerbation of chronic problems or to sickness caused by bacteria or a virus. Illness can progress rapidly at high elevations, lowering the body’s work potential. Weakness can make climbing impossible. At very high altitude, the effects of illness can cause a sudden drop in energy and you can die.

  Twenty years of sports experience imprinted in every cell of my body exactly what I needed to be doing to be ready for K2. The obstacles to my preparation were aggravating day-to-day problems resulting from the turmoil in Kazakhstan. Shelves in the stores were empty. Whole days were wasted searching for food. Suddenly all basic services were privatized. Eight hours standing in line resolved one tiny problem only if you happened to have the appropriate documentation with endless stamps from endless bureaucrats in your hand. Otherwise the next day you started over. It was insanely frustrating. Living costs skyrocketed, inflation made money worthless, and wages did not change. My thoughts were always occupied with the training that would keep me alive on K2. Exercise had become as important to me as food and water; without it I had no psychological strength to deal with the pettiness of my situation. As the discipline on which I based my life was broken, I became depressed.