Into Thin Air (11 page)

Fischer, forty, was a strapping, gregarious man with a blond ponytail and a surfeit of manic energy. As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, he had chanced upon a television program about mountaineering and was enthralled. The next summer he traveled to Wyoming and enrolled in an Outward Bound–style wilderness course run by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). As soon as he graduated from high school he moved west permanently, found seasonal employment as a NOLS instructor, placed climbing at the center of his cosmos, and never looked back.

When Fischer was eighteen and working at NOLS, he fell in love with a student in his course named Jean Price. They were married seven years later, settled in Seattle, and had two children, Andy and Katie Rose (who were nine and five, respectively, when Scott went to Everest in 1996). Price earned her commercial pilot’s license and became a captain for Alaska Airlines—a prestigious, well-paying career that allowed Fischer to climb full-time. Her income also permitted Fischer to launch Mountain Madness in 1984.

If the name of Hall’s business, Adventure Consultants, mirrored his methodical, fastidious approach to climbing, Mountain Madness was an even more accurate reflection of Scott’s personal style. By his early twenties, he had developed a reputation for a harrowing, damn-the-torpedoes approach to ascent. Throughout his climbing career, but especially during those early years, he survived a number of frightening mishaps that by all rights should have killed him.

On at least two occasions while rock climbing—once in Wyoming, another time in Yosemite—he crashed into the ground from more than 80 feet up. While working as a junior instructor on a NOLS course in the Wind River Range he plunged 70 feet, unroped, to the bottom of a crevasse on the Din-woody Glacier. Perhaps his most infamous tumble, though, occurred when he was a novice ice climber: despite his inexperience, Fischer had decided to attempt the coveted first ascent of a difficult frozen cascade called Bridal Veil Falls, in Utah’s Provo Canyon. Racing two expert climbers up the ice, Fischer lost his purchase 100 feet off the deck and plummeted to the ground.

To the amazement of those who witnessed the incident, he picked himself up and walked away with relatively minor injuries. During his long plunge to earth, however, the tubular pick of an ice tool impaled his calf and came out the other side. When the hollow pick was extracted, it removed a core sample of tissue, leaving a hole in his leg big enough to stick a pencil through. After being discharged from the emergency room at a local hospital, Fischer saw no reason to waste his limited supply of cash on additional medical treatment, so he climbed for the next six months with an open, suppurating wound. Fifteen years later he proudly showed me the permanent scar inflicted by that fall: a pair of shiny, dime-size marks bracketing his Achilles tendon.

“Scott would push himself beyond any physical limitation,” recalls Don Peterson, a renowned American climber who met Fischer soon after his slip from Bridal Veil Falls. Peterson became something of a mentor to Fischer and climbed with him intermittently over the next two decades. “His will was astonishing. It didn’t matter how much pain he was in—he would ignore it and keep going. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would turn around because he had a sore foot.

“Scott had this burning ambition to be a great climber, to be one of the best in the world. I remember at the NOLS headquarters there was a crude sort of gym. Scott would go into that room and regularly work out so hard that he threw up. Regularly. One doesn’t meet many people with that kind of drive.”

People were drawn to Fischer’s energy and generosity, his absence of guile, his almost childlike enthusiasm. Raw and emotional, disinclined toward introspection, he had the kind of gregarious, magnetic personality that instantly won him friends for life; hundreds of individuals—including some he’d met just once or twice—considered him a bosom buddy. He was also strikingly handsome with a bodybuilder’s physique and the chiseled features of a movie star. Among those attracted to him were not a few members of the opposite sex, and he wasn’t immune to the attention.

A man of rampant appetites, Fischer smoked a lot of cannabis (although not while working) and drank more than was healthy. A back room at the Mountain Madness office functioned as a sort of secret clubhouse for Scott: after putting his kids to bed he liked to retire there with his pals to pass around a pipe and look at slides of their brave deeds on the heights.

During the 1980s Fischer made a number of impressive ascents that earned him a modicum of local renown, but celebrity in the world climbing community eluded him. Despite his concerted efforts, he was unable to land a lucrative commercial sponsorship of the sort enjoyed by some of his more famous peers. He worried that some of these top climbers didn’t respect him.

“Recognition was important to Scott,” says Jane Bromet, his publicist, confidant, and occasional training partner, who accompanied the Mountain Madness expedition to Base Camp to file Internet reports for Outside Online. “He ached for it. He had a vulnerable side that most people didn’t see; it really bothered him that he wasn’t more widely respected as a butt-kicking climber. He felt slighted, and it hurt.”

By the time Fischer left for Nepal in the spring of 1996, he’d begun to garner more of the recognition that he thought was his due. Much of it came in the wake of his 1994 ascent of Everest, accomplished without supplemental oxygen. Christened the Sagarmatha Environmental Expedition, Fischer’s team removed 5,000 pounds of trash from the mountain—which was very good for the landscape and turned out to be even better public relations. In January 1996, Fischer led a high-profile fund-raising ascent of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, that netted half a million dollars for the charity CARE. Thanks largely to the 1994 Everest clean-up expedition and this latter charity climb, by the time Fischer left for Everest in 1996 he had been featured prominently and often in the Seattle news media, and his climbing career was soaring.

Journalists inevitably asked Fischer about the risks associated with the kind of climbing he did and wondered how he reconciled it with being a husband and father. Fischer answered that he now took far fewer chances than he had during his reckless youth—that he had become a much more careful, more conservative climber. Shortly before leaving for Everest in 1996, he told Seattle writer Bruce Barcott, “I believe 100 percent I’m coming back.… My wife believes 100 percent I’m coming back. She isn’t concerned about me at all when I’m guiding because I’m gonna make all the right choices. When accidents happen, I think it’s always human error. So that’s what I want to eliminate. I’ve had lots of climbing accidents in my youth. You come up with lots of reasons, but ultimately it’s human error.”

Fischer’s assurances notwithstanding, his peripatetic alpine career was rough on his family. He was crazy about his kids, and when he was in Seattle he was an unusually attentive father, but climbing regularly took him away from home for months at a time. He’d been absent for seven of his son’s nine birthdays. In fact, say some of his friends, by the time he departed for Everest in 1996, Fischer’s marriage had been badly strained.

But Jean Price doesn’t attribute the rough patch in their relationship to Scott’s climbing. She says, rather, that any stress in the Fischer–Price household owed more to problems she was having with her employer: the victim of alleged sexual harassment, throughout 1995 Price was embroiled in a disheartening legal claim against Alaska Airlines. Although the suit was eventually resolved, the legal wrangling had been nasty, and had deprived her of a paycheck for the better part of a year. Revenues from Fischer’s guiding business weren’t nearly enough to make up for the loss of Price’s substantial flying income. “For the first time since moving to Seattle, we had money problems,” she laments.

Like most of its rivals, Mountain Madness was a fiscally marginal enterprise and had been since its inception: in 1995 Fischer took home only about $12,000. But things were finally starting to look more promising, thanks to Fischer’s growing celebrity and to the efforts of his business partner–cum–office manager, Karen Dickinson, whose organizational skills and levelheadedness compensated for Fischer’s seat-of-the-pants, what-me-worry modus operandi. Taking note of Rob Hall’s success in guiding Everest—and the large fees he was able to command as a consequence—Fischer decided it was time for him to enter the Everest market. If he could emulate Hall, it would quickly catapult Mountain Madness to profitability.

The money itself didn’t seem terribly important to Fischer. He cared little for material things but he hungered for respect and he was acutely aware that in the culture in which he lived, money was the prevailing gauge of success.

A few weeks after Fischer returned victorious from Everest in 1994, I encountered him in Seattle. I didn’t know him well, but we had some friends in common and often ran into each other at the crags or at climbers’ parties. On this occasion he buttonholed me to talk about the guided Everest expedition he was planning: I should come along, he cajoled, and write an article about the climb for
Outside
. When I replied that it would be crazy for someone with my limited high-altitude experience to attempt Everest, he said, “Hey, experience is overrated. It’s not the altitude that’s important, it’s your attitude, bro. You’ll do fine. You’ve done some pretty sick climbs—stuff that’s way harder than Everest. We’ve got the big E figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days, I’m telling you, we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit.”

Scott had piqued my interest—more, even, than he probably realized—and he was relentless. He talked up Everest every time he saw me and repeatedly harangued Brad Wetzler, an editor at
Outside
, about the idea. By January 1996, thanks in no small part to Fischer’s concerted lobbying, the magazine made a firm commitment to send me to Everest—probably, Wetzler indicated, as a member of Fischer’s expedition. In Scott’s mind it was a done deal.

A month before my scheduled departure, however, I got a call from Wetzler saying there’d been a change in plans: Rob Hall had offered the magazine a significantly better deal, so Wetzler proposed that I join the Adventure Consultants expedition instead of Fischer’s. I knew and liked Fischer, and I didn’t know much about Hall at that point, so I was initially reluctant. But after a trusted climbing buddy confirmed Hall’s sterling reputation, I enthusiastically agreed to go to Everest with Adventure Consultants.

One afternoon in Base Camp I asked Hall why he’d been so eager to have me along. He candidly explained that it wasn’t me he was actually interested in, or even the publicity he hoped my article would generate, particularly. What was so enticing was the bounty of valuable advertising he would reap from the deal he struck with
Outside
.

Hall told me that according to the terms of this arrangement, he’d agreed to accept only $10,000 of his usual fee in cash; the balance would be bartered for expensive ad space in the magazine, which targeted an upscale, adventurous, physically active audience—the core of his client base. And most important, Hall said, “It’s an American audience. Probably eighty or ninety percent of the potential market for guided expeditions to Everest and the other Seven Summits is in the United States. After this season, when my mate Scott has established himself as an Everest guide, he’ll have a great advantage over Adventure Consultants simply because he’s based in America. To compete with him we’ll have to step up our advertising there significantly.”

In January, when Fischer found out that Hall had won me away from his team, he was apoplectic. He called me from Colorado, as upset as I’d ever heard him, to insist that he wasn’t about to concede victory to Hall. (Like Hall, Fischer didn’t bother trying to hide the fact that it wasn’t me he was interested in, but rather the collateral publicity and advertising.) In the end, however, he was unwilling to match Hall’s offer to the magazine.

When I arrived in Base Camp as a member of the Adventure Consultants group, not Fischer’s Mountain Madness expedition, Scott didn’t appear to hold a grudge. When I went down to his camp to visit he poured me a mug of coffee, put an arm around my shoulder, and seemed genuinely happy to see me.

Despite the many trappings of civilization at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. Walking to the mess tent at mealtime left me wheezing for several minutes. If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. The deep, rasping cough I’d developed in Lobuje worsened day by day. Sleep became elusive, a common symptom of minor altitude illness. Most nights I’d wake up three or four times gasping for breath, feeling like I was suffocating. Cuts and scrapes refused to heal. My appetite vanished and my digestive system, which required abundant oxygen to metabolize food, failed to make use of much of what I forced myself to eat; instead my body began consuming itself for sustenance. My arms and legs gradually began to wither to sticklike proportions.