Into Thin Air (20 page)

A number of very accomplished Himalayan mountaineers were in attendance on the Nepalese side of Everest in 1996—veterans such as Hall, Fischer, Breashears, Pete Schoening, Ang Dorje, Mike Groom, and Robert Schauer, an Austrian on the IMAX team. But four luminaries stood out even in this distinguished company—climbers who demonstrated such astonishing prowess above 26,000 feet that they were in a league of their own: Ed Viesturs, the American who was starring in the IMAX film; Anatoli Boukreev, a guide from Kazakhstan working for Fischer; Ang Babu Sherpa, who was employed by the South African expedition; and Lopsang.

Gregarious and good-looking, kind to a fault, Lopsang was extremely cocky yet hugely appealing. He was raised in the Rolwaling region, his parents’ only child, and he neither smoked nor drank, which was unusual among Sherpas. He sported a gold incisor and had an easy laugh. Though he was small-boned and slight in stature, his flashy manner, appetite for hard work, and extraordinary athletic gifts earned him renown as the Deion Sanders of the Khumbu. Fischer told me that he thought Lopsang had the potential to be “the second coming of Reinhold Messner”—the famous Tyrolean alpinist who is far and away the greatest Himalayan climber of all time.

Lopsang first made a splash in 1993, at the age of twenty, when he was hired to carry loads for a joint Indian-Nepalese Everest team led by an Indian woman, Bachendri Pal, and largely composed of female climbers. Being the youngest member of the expedition, Lopsang was initially relegated to a supporting role, but his strength was so impressive that at the last minute he was assigned to a summit party, and on May 16 he reached the top without supplemental oxygen.

Five months after his Everest climb Lopsang summitted Cho Oyu with a Japanese team. In the spring of 1994 he worked for Fischer on the Sagarmatha Environmental Expedition and reached the top of Everest a second time, again without bottled oxygen. The following September he was attempting the West Ridge of Everest with a Norwegian team when he was hit by an avalanche; after tumbling 200 feet down the mountain he somehow managed to arrest his fall with an ice ax, thereby saving the lives of himself and two ropemates, but an uncle who wasn’t tied to the others, Mingma Norbu Sherpa, was swept to his death. Although the loss rocked Lopsang hard, it didn’t diminish his ardor for climbing.

In May 1995, he summitted Everest a third time without using gas, on this occasion as an employee of Hall’s expedition, and three months later he climbed 26,400-foot Broad Peak, in Pakistan, while working for Fischer. By the time Lopsang went to Everest with Fischer in 1996, he’d only been climbing for three years, but in that span he’d participated in no fewer than ten Himalayan expeditions and had established a reputation as a high-altitude mountaineer of the highest caliber.

Climbing together on Everest in 1994, Fischer and Lopsang grew to admire each other immensely. Both men had boundless energy, irresistible charm, and a knack for making women swoon. Regarding Fischer as a mentor and a role model, Lopsang even started wearing his hair in a ponytail, as Fischer did. “Scott is very strong guy, I am very strong guy,” Lopsang explained to me with characteristic immodesty. “We make good team. Scott does not pay me as well as Rob or Japanese, but I no need money; I am looking to future, and Scott is my future. He tell to me, ‘Lopsang, my strong Sherpa! I making you famous!’ … I think Scott has many big plans for me with Mountain Madness.”

* A jumar (also known as a mechanical ascender) is a wallet-sized device that grips the rope by means of a metal cam. The cam allows the jumar to slide upward without hindrance, but it pinches the rope securely when the device is weighted. Essentially ratcheting himself upward, a climber thereby ascends the rope.

* Prayer flags are printed with holy Buddhist invocations—most commonly
Om mani padme hum
—which are dispatched to God with each flap of the pennant. Often prayer flags bear the image of a winged horse in addition to written prayers; horses are sacred creatures in the Sherpa cosmology and are believed to carry the prayers heavenward with special speed. The Sherpa term for prayer flag is
lung ta
, which translates literally as “wind horse.”

APRIL 29, 1996 • 23,400 FEET

[T]he American public had no inherent national sympathy for mountain climbing, unlike the Alpine countries of Europe, or the British, who had invented the sport. In those countries there was something akin to understanding, and though the man in the street might on the whole consider it a reckless risk to life, he acknowledged that it was something that had to be done. There was no such acceptance in America
.

Walt Unsworth

A day after our first attempt to reach Camp Three was thwarted by wind and barbarous cold, everybody on Hall’s team except Doug (who stayed at Camp Two to let his injured larynx heal) made another try. A thousand feet up the immense slant of the Lhotse Face, I ascended a faded nylon rope that seemed to go on forever, and the higher I got, the more laggardly I moved. I slid my jumar up the fixed line with a gloved hand, rested my weight on the device to draw two burning, labored breaths; then I moved my left foot up and stamped the crampon into the ice, desperately sucked in another two lungfuls of air; planted my right foot next to my left, inhaled and exhaled from the bottom of my chest, inhaled and exhaled again; and slid the jumar up the rope one more time. I’d been exerting myself at full bore for the past three hours, and I expected to be at it for at least an hour more before taking a rest. In this agonizing fashion I climbed toward a cluster of tents reputed to be perched somewhere on the sheer face above, progressing in increments calibrated in inches.

People who don’t climb mountains—the great majority of humankind, that is to say—tend to assume that the sport is a reckless, Dionysian pursuit of ever escalating thrills. But the notion that climbers are merely adrenaline junkies chasing a righteous fix is a fallacy, at least in the case of Everest. What I was doing up there had almost nothing in common with bungee jumping or skydiving or riding a motorcycle at 120 miles per hour.

Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I’d been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace.

Of course for some Everesters myriad other, less virtuous motives came into play as well: minor celebrity, career advancement, ego massage, ordinary bragging rights, filthy lucre. But such ignoble enticements were less a factor than many critics might presume. Indeed, what I observed as the weeks went by forced me to substantially revise my presuppositions about some of my teammates.

Take Beck Weathers, for instance, who at that moment appeared as a tiny red speck on the ice 500 feet below, near the end of a long queue of climbers. My first impression of Beck had not been favorable: a backslapping Dallas pathologist with less-than-mediocre mountaineering skills, at first blush he came across as a rich Republican blowhard looking to buy the summit of Everest for his trophy case. Yet the better I got to know him, the more he earned my respect. Even though his inflexible new boots had chewed his feet into hamburger, Beck kept hobbling upward, day in and day out, scarcely mentioning what must have been horrific pain. He was tough, driven, stoic. And what I initially took to be arrogance was looking more and more like exuberance. The man seemed to bear no ill will toward anybody in the world (Hillary Clinton notwithstanding). Beck’s cheer and limitless optimism were so winning that, in spite of myself, I grew to like him a lot.

The son of a career Air Force officer, Beck had spent his childhood shuttling from one military base to another before landing in Wichita Falls to attend college. He graduated from medical school, got married and had two children, settled comfortably into a lucrative Dallas practice. Then, in 1986, pushing forty, he took a vacation in Colorado, felt the siren song of the heights, and enrolled in a rudimentary mountaineering course in Rocky Mountain National Park.

It is not uncommon for doctors to be chronic overachievers; Beck wasn’t the first physician to go overboard with a new hobby. But climbing was unlike golf or tennis or the various other pastimes that consumed his cronies. The demands of mountaineering—the physical and emotional struggles, the very real hazards—made it more than just a game. Climbing was like life itself, only it was cast in much sharper relief, and nothing had ever hooked Beck to such a degree. His wife, Peach, became increasingly concerned about his immersion and the way climbing robbed their family of his presence. She was less than pleased when, not long after taking up the sport, Beck announced that he’d decided to have a go at the Seven Summits.

Selfish and grandiose though Beck’s obsession may have been, it wasn’t frivolous. I began to recognize a similar seriousness of purpose in Lou Kasischke, the lawyer from Bloomfield Hills; in Yasuko Namba, the quiet Japanese woman who ate noodles every morning for breakfast; and in John Taske, the fifty-six-year-old anesthesiologist from Brisbane who took up climbing after retiring from the army.

“When I left the military, I sort of lost my way,” Taske bemoaned in a thick Aussie accent. He’d been a big deal in the army—a major in the Special Air Service, Australia’s equivalent of the Green Berets. Having served two tours in Vietnam at the height of the war, he found himself woefully unprepared for the flat pitch of life out of uniform. “I discovered that I couldn’t really speak to civilians,” he continued. “My marriage fell apart. All I could see was this long dark tunnel closing in, ending in infirmity, old age, and death. Then I started to climb, and the sport provided most of what had been missing for me in civvy street—the challenge, the camaraderie, the sense of mission.”

As my sympathy for Taske, Weathers, and some of my other teammates mounted, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in my role as a journalist. I had no qualms when it came to writing frankly about Hall, Fischer, or Sandy Pittman, each of whom had been aggressively seeking media attention for years. But my fellow clients were a different matter. When they signed up with Hall’s expedition, none of them had known that a reporter would be in their midst—scribbling constantly, quietly recording their words and deeds in order to share their foibles with a potentially unsympathetic public.

After the expedition was over, Weathers was interviewed for the television program
Turning Point
. In a segment of the interview that wasn’t included in the version edited for broadcast, ABC News anchor Forrest Sawyer asked Beck, “How’d you feel about a reporter being along?” Beck replied,

It added a lot of stress. I was always a little concerned with the idea—you know, this guy’s going to come back and write a story that’s going to be read by a couple of million people. And, I mean, it’s bad enough to go up there and make a fool of yourself if it’s just you and the climbing group. That somebody may have you written across the pages of some magazine as a buffoon and a clown has got to play upon your psyche as to how you perform, how hard you’ll push. And I was concerned that it might drive people further than they wanted to go. And it might even for the guides. I mean, they want to get people on top of the mountain because, once again, they’re going to be written about, and they’re going to be judged.

A moment later Sawyer asked, “Did you sense that having a reporter along put extra pressure on Rob Hall?” Beck answered,

I can’t imagine it didn’t. This is what [Rob] does for a living, and if one of his clients got injured, that’s the worst thing that can happen to a guide.… He certainly had a great season two years before this in which they got everybody on top of the summit, which is extraordinary. And I actually think that he thought that our group was strong enough that we could repeat that.… So I think there is a push so that when you wind up again in the news, in the magazine, it’s all reported favorably.