The Last Step

by Rick Ridgeway

  At that time, Everest had been climbed only twice; first by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953, then by the Swiss in 1956. The American expedition was planned as a paramilitary operation on the grandest scale: 19 climbers, 37 Sherpas, and 909 porters to carry 29 tons of gear 180 miles from Kathmandu to the base of Everest. Originally, Dyhrenfurth planned a mountaineering grand slam: to climb not just Everest, but also its two satellite peaks, Nuptse and Lhotse, on the same expedition. Gradually that plan was scuttled and replaced by an even more ambitious goal: to climb two sides of Everest simultaneously. One team would ascend the southeast ridge (South Col) route used by Hillary and by the Swiss, and another would attempt the unclimbed west ridge; the two parties would meet on the summit and together descend the southeast ridge, thus completing a traverse of the summit. If successful, it would rival the greatest ascents in mountaineering history.

  Dyhrenfurth was unwilling, however, to gamble all on one bold plan. Dividing the expedition into two groups would divide the strength of the team. It was decided first to concentrate their unified strength on the goal of getting one team to the top via the southeast ridge. Having accomplished that, they would try the simultaneous ascent, with the assurance that the expedition was already a “success”—something necessary to pay their expedition debt of nearly half a million dollars.

  For the first attempt, Dyhrenfurth chose two of his strongest climbers: Sherpa Nawang Gombu and Big Jim Whittaker. They were a Mutt and Jeff team—Gombu five foot four, Big Jim six foot five—but together they reached the summit on May 1, 1963. Three weeks later, the other team completed its objective—a traverse of Everest by the west ridge. The traverse was an astounding and outstanding achievement, but the man who came away with the most recognition was the one who stood on the summit first. May 1 was a day that forever changed the life of Jim Whittaker. From then on, his name was affixed with the cognomen, “The First American to Climb Everest.”

  Jim came home a hero. The National Geographic Society, which had in part sponsored the expedition, awarded to each member its Hubbard Medal; a few weeks after returning from the Himalaya, Big Jim stood in the Rose Garden, next to Nawang Gombu, relating their experiences to an attentive John Kennedy. Five months later Kennedy was shot—an event that was to have an indirect but marked influence on Whittaker’s life. The Canadian government decided to name the highest unclimbed mountain in their territory after their neighbor’s slain president, and the National Geographic Society contacted Jim to ask if he would be interested in making the first climb of the mountain.

  Jim accepted the offer and, in 1965, made preparations for the ascent. He called a few friends, signed them up, and thought he had a complete team. Then came a telegram from Washington, from Senator Bobby Kennedy’s office: the senator, and possibly his brother Teddy, wanted to know if they could join the climb.

  At first Jim was hesitant. The Kennedys had little experience mountaineering. But he greatly admired the family, and it would be a once-ina-lifetime chance to climb with them. Teddy Kennedy had to withdraw his application because of a back injury suffered in a small plane crash, but it was agreed that Bobby could come along. Jim picked him up at the airport, outfitted him, and they left for Canada. Kennedy picked up climbing technique rapidly. He was in good shape, and he made the first steps onto the summit. There is a photograph in Jim’s living room of the two of them, leaning on each other on the summit, with a hand-scrawled inscription: “I am the one helping him. RFK.”

  After the climb, Jim had to go back to Washington to write the story for the Geographic, and Bobby insisted he stay with the family at Hickory Hill, their home in McLean, Virginia. It was a pleasant two weeks and the beginning of a close friendship. They made plans for future adventures. Each summer, they floated a wild river and, each winter, they skied at Sun Valley. Jim had joined the jet set and found himself sitting in rubber rafts with Andy Williams, George Plimpton, Claudine Longet, skiing with Jackie Kennedy, sailing with Aristotle Onassis. It was on one of the float trips that Jim had a conversation with Bobby Kennedy he will never forget:

  “We were floating along having a great time,” Jim recalls, “when Bobby suddenly asked me the strangest question. He said, ‘Jim, have you ever thought who you would have as pallbearers for your funeral?’ ”

  “No, I haven’t,” Jim told him. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . I was just wondering.”

  “Why? Have you thought about it?”

  “Yes. I would want my best friends.”

  Not long after, Jim listened to Ethel Kennedy tell him, “You’ve got to do it. There’s no choice. That’s the way Bobby wanted it.” Jim was a pallbearer at Bobby Kennedy’s funeral.

  “Even then,” Jim now says, “I think Bobby realized he was living on the edge, and it was one of those things he had to think about. So I guess he had told Ethel who he wanted for pallbearers. He was the most incredible man I’ve ever known. I think what I admired about him most—and maybe what I’ve tried to pattern myself after—was his ability to always grow, to assess each situation, absorb each experience, and in some way learn something new. He was always pushing himself, always moving forward, always testing. I remember on the climb up Mount Kennedy he was constantly asking me questions about this or that, always quizzing me about what it was like on Everest. And on that climb, he was in fantastic shape. Some of the experienced climbers were holding him back. I really grew to love the guy.”

  After the assassination, Jim’s life centered mostly around his three sons and running the outdoor equipment store. He was having trouble at home. In 1972, he was divorced from his wife, and at age forty-three almost had to start over again. But, a year later, he was married to a talented, pretty, twenty-five-year-old Canadian, Dianne Roberts. For Jim, life blossomed again. It was the beginning of the better years. He was again interested in climbing, too, and the following year agreed to lead the 1975 K2 expedition. After that expedition failed, it was not long before Jim knew he had to go back. He saw Ethel Kennedy a short time after the ’75 defeat, and she asked, as if there could be only one answer, “You are going back, aren’t you?”

  Jim also knew that, if the 1978 K2 expedition were successful, it would be the capstone of a successful career and an interesting, exciting life. If it failed, though, it would be a lackluster finish to his career as a climber; he felt he wouldn’t have it in him for another attempt on a major peak, and he knew he would be left with the feeling he should have quit while he was ahead. But there was not really a choice. Jim is a person who likes to quote famous people and, of his repertoire, his favorite is from Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

  Hiking in crisp morning air was an invigorating contrast to the usual midday heat. The mile out of Askole was the most pleasant of the approach march. Willows lined the trail that followed irrigation canals gurgling with crystal water from a nearby artesian well. There were sounds of footsteps and low-voiced chitchatting from porters both behind and in front, and the song of finches in the apricot trees. Overhead, a lone vulture—a big one, perhaps the lammergeier—wheeled in widening gyres, carried aloft on a rising air cell heated by morning light now glowing on the upper rim of the valley.

  We left the shaded lanes and wheatfields and once again entered the desert. Soon the morning sun changed to noon sun, and we climbed a switchbacking trail up a rocky promontory to avoid a narrow in the river gorge. On top of the promontory, the trail traversed the cliff before again descending to the river bank. In places it was hair-raising. Poles of eucalyptus braced against the cliff, supporting a frame of other poles on which was laid a ramp of heavy flagstones. The exposure was dizzying; below the scaffolding, the cliff dropped away to the whirlpools, sinks, and standing waves in the ice-cold Braldu.

  Alpinist Reinhold Messner, generally agreed to be the foremost climber in the world today, has described this approach to the Baltoro Glacier as more dangerous than the climb
s at the end of the march. On his approach to Hidden Peak in 1975, he had a close call on a particularly treacherous section of trail between Chakpo and Chango (an area we had traversed four days earlier) when a landslide broke loose above him, sending him perilously close to the edge of the rushing Braldu.

  Later in the summer, while we were climbing, we learned that the leader of a British Latok expedition had been swept to his death in this same section when part of the trail sloughed away, throwing him in the freezing water. A few weeks after that incident, an American trekking party on their way to visit our Base Camp suffered a near-fatality on the same section. The trail broke away, throwing a fifty-seven-year-old woman into the water. Shelby Scates, a newspaper correspondent coming in to cover the last part of our climb, jumped down to the river’s edge. As the woman swept by, he swung his ice ax and stabbed her pack. Just as the ax began to slip from his grasp, another man in the party scrambled down and helped drag the woman to shore, saving her from icy death.

  By midafternoon we had reached the confluence with the Dumordo River, one of the biggest tributaries flowing into the Braldu. Normally, the river is either forded—when the water level is low during spring or fall—or crossed by a suspension bridge two miles upstream. We found the river swollen with early summer thaw, much too high to ford. We could hear, below the roar of the turbid water, the deeper sound of big boulders grinding beneath the torrent sweeping them downriver. The Burmatype suspension bridge, made of vines woven into thick hawsers suspended over a narrow in the river, was gone; sometime in the past year it had broken and been swept away, and the people of Askole, who usually maintain such bridges, had not bothered to replace it.

  As I turned up the Dumordo to hike the two miles to Jola, the place where the bridge usually spans the river, I was by myself. It is difficult, on big expeditions, to find solitary time; when it occurs, it is something to enjoy. Wild roses covered the hillside, and their small pink flowers added color to a backdrop of sharp, glacier-covered peaks rising above the canyon walls. I heard rocks falling from the steep hill above me. Looking up, I spotted Jim Wickwire and Jim Whittaker, following a small goat trail they apparently thought was the main hiking trail. I could see that their trail—what there was of it—soon ended in a cliff; I yelled to them they would have to descend. I watched as they carefully downclimbed the cliff—even one slip could mean a long fall. A half hour later, they joined me on the river bottom, a much better place to hike.

  “Another mile or so and we’ll be to Jola,” Jim said. “I hope John has the bridge rigged. If everything is set up, we should get across without losing too much time.”

  “Waste time or not,” Wick added, “I sure as hell prefer to go over on our own rope bridge than cross that woven weed contraption we had to go over in ’75.”

  Soon, we could see the narrow at Jola and, as we had hoped, a rope spanned the river where the bridge used to be; we could see a T-bar seat, hanging from a pulley rigged to pull people and loads across. On the far side, John Roskelley was securing a rope anchor.

  We had learned the bridge was out before we started the approach march. While in Askole, we had met the rest of Bonington’s team on their way home; they confirmed there was not even a temporary rope crossing. They had hiked up the Dumordo River to cross at the terminus of the Panmah Glacier, where the river originated, and then back down the other bank. The detour had taken two full days. Jim started thinking about rigging a Tyrolean rope traverse to ferry the loads. While we were busy ferrying loads, the porters could move up to the glacier and down the other side. Unladen, they should be able to make it in one long day and, consequently, we would lose only that much hiking time.

  While working out the details, Jim learned that John Roskelley had already considered the situation and devised a similar solution. The obvious problem was how to get a rope across to the other side. John suggested that, while the expedition laid over in Askole for the rest day, he would go in advance, equipped with several lengths of rope and carabiner snap links, and simply wait for someone to show up on the other side. He speculated that since there was considerable traffic in the area from other expeditions, it should not be long before someone passed on the opposite shore, detouring up to the glacier. He would hail them, toss a line weighted at the end with a rock, and have it hauled across with the span rope attached. Once the span rope was secured, he could cross the river and rig a proper bridge. Jim agreed to the plan. The evening of the first day we arrived in Askole, John set out for Jola.

  John Roskelley was twenty-nine years old, wore a neatly trimmed, brindle-colored beard, and at five foot ten inches was a handsome, trim, 145 pounds. He was raised in Spokane, Washington, east of the Cascades, and spoke with a barely perceptible midwestern accent. He loved puns and jokes, liked to laugh. His childhood was full of bird-hunting and trout-fishing with his father, who was outdoors editor for a local newspaper. Spokane is a conservative place; John grew up unaffected by the politics and drugs that changed the lives of so many other people his age. During his college years at Washington State he spent most of his free time hunting, drinking beer with the boys, chasing girls, and to an ever-increasing degree, climbing.

  The climbing started when he was fifteen; from the beginning, he sensed that was what he most wanted to do. While in college, he made a trip to California’s Yosemite Valley with the dream of climbing the North American Wall of the famous El Capitan. Three thousand feet high, it is absolutely plumb-bob vertical, and at that time, 1971, it was considered the hardest rock climb in the world. Normally, a climber attempting it would have had years of preparatory experience climbing “big walls,” but for John it was going to be his first try. Several hundred feet off the ground he watched his partner rip out a series of small pitons and fall eighty feet. Undaunted, John aided his unnerved companion down, hiked back to the climbers’ camp, found another partner, and finished the climb. John wanted to be one of the best.

  His big break came in 1973. An American expedition to Dhaulagiri—at 26,795 feet the sixth highest mountain in the world—was being formed, and the team would include the best high-altitude climbers in the country. John submitted an application but was turned down because of lack of Himalayan experience. Refusing to be caught by this catch-22, he continued to lobby for a position; just before the expedition was to leave, he was added on. At twenty-three he was the youngest member of the team, and he became one of the three climbers to reach the summit. (The others were Lou Reichardt and a Sherpa, Nawang Samden.) It was the start of an amazing career in the Himalaya.

  John had pushed to his limits on Dhaulagiri, suffering frostbite that cost him the ends of a few toes. But he was not intimidated. In 1974 he joined the American contingent of an international convention of climbers in the Pamir Mountains of Russia. Other expeditions followed in rapid succession: 1976—Nanda Devi, India; 1977—Makalu, Nepal; 1977—Trango Towers, Karakoram, Pakistan; 1978—Jannu, Nepal. John had just returned from the Jannu expedition a month before he left for K2. His future schedule would be equally formidable: he would return from K2 to spend the winter climbing frozen waterfalls in Canada; in early March 1979, he would attempt Gauri Shankar, a beautiful unclimbed peak in Nepal; from there, in June 1979, he would head to the Uli Biaho Tower in the Karakoram. And he was already making plans for other peaks after that: Makalu, Masherbrum, Everest. John was realizing his dream. He had the best record of any Himalayan climber in the United States. But it wasn’t without cost.

  He was married to an attractive schoolteacher from a Mormon family. John, when he was home, did what he could to make money writing and lecturing. But it wasn’t paying all the bills, and it wasn’t covering the costs of his expeditions—now averaging two a year. Not to mention the fact that he was hardly home. He felt pressure, but he also had to keep climbing: “It’s not something I want to go out and do every day,” he said. “But it sits in the back of my mind, and I have to go. I don’t think many athletes can tell you why they do what they do. They know th
ey are drawn, but not why.” If he stuck it out, he thought, he would eventually make enough on his lecture tours to give his wife a decent living. But it became obvious as the expedition progressed, as I got to know him better, that it was not easy. Every time the mail came, he first arranged his wife’s letters in chronological sequence, then before opening them said: “Well, let’s see if I’m still married.”

  John was showing his determination to work hard, and everyone had the feeling he was a likely candidate for the summit. The first day of the approach march, when after dinner everyone relaxed after the hard day’s work hiring porters, and the hard day’s hike, John had stayed up several hours documenting the names and villages of each porter we had hired—paperwork required by the government. When we learned the bridge at Jola was down, he was the first to volunteer to go ahead and jury-rig a new one.

  John had had help in building the bridge from Sadiq Ali, one of our sirdars, or porter chiefs; now we would have a chance to inspect their handiwork. I saw John on the other side of the river. He yelled for me to cross. Sadiq lashed me to an upside-down T-bar, with my legs over the crosspiece, and with a retrieval line, John hauled me to the other bank.

  “I think we can get all the loads across tonight if we work late,” he said, optimistically.

  “Good job on the bridge,” I replied. “Kind of fun swinging over that torrent.”

  Our voices were raised above the roar of the river. The others arrived and were ferried across, then as the first porters appeared, we began the lengthy task of clipping each of the more than 300 fifty-five pound boxes to a pulley and man-hauling them across.

  Meanwhile, the porters were instructed to set out up the valley to the river’s origin—the snout of the glacier—cross it, and return by the far bank. They left in a big, cheering crowd, apparently not minding the extra day’s hike. That they were getting paid full salary for the extra day, without having to carry a full load, no doubt added to the merrymaking. As the porters disappeared up the river valley, we continued ferrying loads. In spite of the hundred-degree heat, it was fun working together, pulling on the rope in time to a heave-ho, heave-ho. We had managed about a quarter of the loads, in two hours’ work, when someone looked up and said, “I hate to say it, but I think our work is just starting.”