Into Thin Air (42 page)

Regarding the first of these complaints, this is what I know to be true about the conversation between Fischer and Boukreev atop the Hillary Step: Boukreev, Martin Adams, Andy Harris, and I were waiting together above the Step when an obviously ailing Fischer arrived on his way to the summit. Fischer first exchanged a few words with Adams, then had an even shorter conversation with Boukreev. As Adams remembers this latter conversation, Boukreev told Fischer, “I am going down with Martin,” and said nothing more. These six words comprised the full extent of their discussion, after which Fischer spoke briefly with me, then turned his back on all of us and resumed his plod toward the summit. Boukreev later insisted that after Harris, Adams, and I had left the scene, he and Fischer had a second conversation in which Fischer gave him permission to descend ahead of his clients in order to make tea for them and provide “support below.”

In the weeks and months immediately following the Everest disaster, Adams—Boukreev’s close friend and one of his fiercest defenders—told me, Neal Beidleman, and others that he doubted that this second conversation actually occurred. Since then he has revised his position somewhat: Adams’s latest stance is that he has no idea whether or not there was a second conversation between Fischer and Boukreev, because he wasn’t present when it was alleged to have taken place.

Obviously, I wasn’t present, either. So why do I doubt Anatoli’s memory of a second conversation? Partly because the first time Boukreev told me about having a long discussion in which Fischer encouraged him to descend ahead of his clients, Boukreev clearly stated that it occurred when Fischer first arrived atop the Hillary Step—when Adams, Harris, and I were present. Later, after I pointed out that Adams remembered this conversation very differently, Anatoli changed his story: now he said he’d had a second conversation with Fischer after Adams, Harris, and I had descended.

My main reason for doubting the second conversation, however, comes from what I saw as I began heading down the Hillary Step: as I looked up one last time to check the rappel anchors before descending, I noticed that Fischer had already moved well above the small staging area where Harris, Adams, Boukreev, and I had congregated to clip into the rappel ropes. Am I certain that Boukreev didn’t climb back up to Fischer and have a second conversation with him? No. But Anatoli, like the rest of us, was very cold and tired, and exceedingly anxious to get down. As I rappelled over the lip of the Step, Anatoli was shivering impatiently on the narrow ridge crest immediately above me; it’s hard for me to conceive of what would have prompted him to climb back up and have another discussion with Fischer.

Thus I have reason to be skeptical that a second conversation between Fischer and Boukreev occurred. Nevertheless, in retrospect, to be fair to Boukreev I should have reported his recollection of a second conversation and then explained why I doubted it, rather than make no mention of it at all in my book. I regret the hard feelings and sharp words that have resulted.

I am puzzled, however, as to why DeWalt has expressed such outrage over my decision not to report this disputed second conversation, while at the same time he saw no reason, in
The Climb
, to report the first conversation between Fischer and Boukreev—a conversation about which there is absolutely no argument: Boukreev told Fischer he was “going down with Martin.” Although Adams has expressed the view that I wasn’t in a position to overhear these words when they were spoken, he has never disputed that this brief declaration is precisely what Anatoli said. But in the version of events presented by DeWalt in
The Climb
, this conversation simply didn’t occur. It should be noted, moreover, that Boukreev’s failure to stay with Adams during the descent, as he told Fischer he would, nearly cost Adams his life.

In his book,
Sheer Will
, Michael Groom described the moment when he, Yasuko Namba, and I encountered Adams as we made our way down toward the Balcony at 27,600 feet. Adams, according to Groom, “was in an uncontrolled tumble off to our left. From where I stood he looked out of control and in no hurry to regain it.” Groom met up with Adams again lower down, after his tumble had somehow ended. Adams was

only just getting to his feet … veering dangerously close to the wrong side of the mountain in a series of drunken flops into the snow, one of which could end up over the edge in Tibet. I detoured off my path to get close enough to speak with him. I could see that his oxygen mask had slipped off beneath his chin and clumps of ice hung from his eyebrows and chin. Lying half-buried in the snow, he was giggling—the result of oxygen debt to the brain. I told him to pull his oxygen mask over his mouth. In a fatherly sort of manner I then coaxed him closer and closer to the ridge crest.… “Now, see those two climbers down there in red? Just follow them,” I said, pointing to Jon and Yasuko still visible in the gully below. He stepped off the ridge in such a haphazard manner, I wondered whether he cared if he lived or died. Concerned about his judgment, I decided to stick with him.

If Groom hadn’t happened upon Adams—who was completely disoriented after being left behind by Boukreev—it seems likely that Adams would have continued down the wrong side of the mountain and died. Yet none of this is reported in
The Climb
.

Perhaps the most disturbing misrepresentation in
The Climb
concerns a conversation between Scott Fischer and Jane Bromet (Fischer’s publicist and confidant, who accompanied him to Base Camp). Bromet, offering her memory of this conversation, is quoted by DeWalt in a manner intended to convince readers that Fischer had a predetermined plan in place for Boukreev to descend quickly after reaching the summit, ahead of his clients. This edited quote forms the basis of DeWalt’s second major allegation: that my failure to mention the purported plan in
Into Thin Air
was a nefarious “assassination of character for which, after the fact, I do not believe there is a justifiable defense.”

Actually, I didn’t mention this so-called plan because I found compelling evidence that no such plan existed. Beidleman—who is widely respected for his quiet humility, his honesty, and his strength and experience as a mountaineer—told me that if such a plan were in place, he definitely wasn’t aware of it when the Mountain Madness team went to the summit on May 10, and he is certain that Boukreev wasn’t aware of it either. During the year immediately following the tragedy, Boukreev explained his decision to descend ahead of his clients numerous times—on television, on the Internet, in magazine and newspaper interviews. Yet never during any of those opportunities did he ever indicate that he had followed a pre-determined plan. Indeed, in the summer of 1996, Boukreev himself stated during a videotaped interview for ABC News that there was no plan. As he explained to correspondent Forrest Sawyer, until arriving on the summit, Boukreev “didn’t know how, what is my plan. I need to see the situation and then make.… Because we didn’t make this plan.”

Apparently failing to comprehend Boukreev, a minute later Sawyer asked, “So your plan, then, once you passed everybody, was, you were waiting on the summit for everybody to come up as a group.”

Boukreev scoffed, and reiterated that nothing had been determined ahead of time: “It, it wasn’t exactly a plan. We didn’t make plan. But I need to see the situation. Then I will make my plan.”

In the 1999 edition of
The Climb
even DeWalt admits, belatedly, “Boukreev has never said that he knew of Fischer’s plan in advance of summit day.” DeWalt further admits that the only evidence to support his conjecture about a predetermined plan was Bromet’s recollection of a single conversation with Fischer. Yet Bromet herself emphasized to both DeWalt and me before publication of our respective books that it would be wrong to assume that Fischer’s comments indicated that he had anything resembling an actual plan in place. In 1997, immediately before publication of
The Climb
, Bromet sent a letter to DeWalt and St. Martin’s Press complaining that DeWalt had edited her quote in a way that significantly changed its meaning. She pointed out that he doctored her words in order to make it appear as though the relevant conversation between Bromet and Fischer had occurred several days before the summit assault, when in fact it occurred more than three weeks before the summit assault. This is not a minor discrepancy.
^*

As Bromet stated in her letter to DeWalt and his editors, the edited version of her quote that appears in
The Climb
is

absolutely wrong! The distortion will mislead readers into a false conclusion concerning many of the most important factors that led to the accident. Because of the distortion … the reader may be misled into believing that Boukreev’s descent [ahead of his clients] was a firm plan.… As this quote is written, it runs the risk of coming across as (part of) a calculated and distorted analysis of the accident whose sole purpose is to absolve Anatoli Boukreev of fault by attempting to lay blame on others.… Too much credit was given to this quote in constructing the events of the accident.… Scott never once mentioned this plan again. Moreover, Scott was a very communicative person. If it were Scott’s “plan” he would have talked it over with Neal and Anatoli. (In subsequent conversations with Neal, he told me that Scott communicated no such plan.) I feel this quotation as stated is grossly misleading.

As the squabble between DeWalt and me hardened into something resembling trench warfare, he desperately tried to explain away the clear, unambiguous meaning of the letter cited above—primarily through prodigious feats of obfuscation, and by intricately parsing Bromet’s quotes. Throughout the ongoing dispute, however, Bromet has unflinchingly stood her ground. “It’s ridiculous for DeWalt to say that he knows my mind better than I do,” she explains. “The letter I sent to him in October 1997 accurately states how I feel, despite his attempts to twist my words and claim that it doesn’t.”

When Bromet steadfastly refused to back down about the accuracy of her letter, DeWalt attacked her credibility in the 1999 edition of his book. Which is a curious tactic, because he constructed his theory about Fischer’s so-called plan entirely from his interpretation of Bromet’s statements, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. If DeWalt doesn’t think Bromet is believable, I’m not sure what he is left with.

Boukreev’s extraordinary strength, courage, and experience were highly valued by Fischer—nobody disputes this. Nor does anybody dispute that, in the end, Fischer’s confidence in Boukreev’s abilities turned out to be warranted: Anatoli saved two lives that most certainly would have been lost otherwise. But for DeWalt to insist that Fischer planned all along for Boukreev to descend from the summit ahead of his clients is manifestly not supported by the facts. And it is outrageous for DeWalt to further insist that I sought to assassinate Anatoli’s character because I declined to mention a plan that did not exist.

The matter of whether or not Fischer gave Boukreev permission to descend ahead of his clients was obviously very important to Anatoli after the fact. But the debate raging over this tangential question has flared beyond all proportion, obscuring the larger issue: the prudence of guiding Everest without supplemental oxygen. And nobody—not even DeWalt—has ever disputed the crucial facts underlying this larger issue: Anatoli elected not to use supplemental oxygen on summit day, and after reaching the summit he went down alone many hours ahead of his clients, defying the standard practices of professional mountain guides the world over. What has largely been lost in the bickering over whether Boukreev acted with or without Fischer’s approval is that the moment Anatoli decided, early in the expedition, to guide without bottled oxygen, it probably preordained his subsequent decision to leave his clients on the summit ridge and descend quickly. Having elected to climb without gas, Anatoli had painted himself into a corner. Lacking bottled oxygen, his only reasonable choice was to get down fast on summit day—whatever Fischer did or didn’t give him permission to do.

The crux of the matter wasn’t fatigue, moreover: it was the cold. The importance of bottled oxygen in warding off exhaustion, altitude sickness, and murky thinking at extreme altitudes is generally understood. What is much less widely known is that oxygen plays an equally important, if not greater, role in staving off the crippling effects of cold at high altitude.

By the time Anatoli began his descent from the South Summit ahead of everybody else on May 10, he’d spent between three and four hours above 28,700 feet without breathing supplemental oxygen. For much of that time he was sitting and waiting in a bitter sub-zero wind, growing increasingly cold, as any climber would in his situation. As Anatoli himself explained to
Men’s Journal
, in a quote he approved before publication,

I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour.… It is very cold, naturally, it takes your strength.… My position was that I would not be good if I stood around freezing, waiting.… If you are immobile at that altitude you lose strength in the cold, and then you are unable to do anything.