Into Thin Air (43 page)

Becoming dangerously chilled, courting frostbite and hypothermia, Boukreev was compelled to descend not by fatigue, but by the profound cold.

For perspective on how the deadly windchill at high altitude is exacerbated when a climber isn’t using supplemental oxygen, consider what happened to Ed Viesturs thirteen days after the 1996 disaster, when Viesturs summitted with the IMAX team. Viesturs departed from Camp Four for the summit early on May 23, some twenty or thirty minutes ahead of his teammates. He left camp ahead of everyone else because like Boukreev he was not using gas (Viesturs was starring in the IMAX film that year instead of guiding), and he was concerned this would prevent him from keeping up with the film crew—all of whom were using bottled oxygen.

Viesturs was so strong, however, that nobody could come close to matching his pace, even though he was breaking trail through thigh-deep snow. Because he knew that it was crucial for David Breashears to get footage of him during the summit push, every so often Viesturs stopped and waited as long as possible for the film crew to catch up to him. But whenever he stopped moving he immediately felt the effects of the debilitating cold—even though May 23 was a much warmer day than May 10 had been. Afraid of getting frostbite or worse, on each occasion he was forced to resume his ascent before his teammates were able to get close enough to film him. “Ed is at least as strong as Anatoli,” explains Breashears, “yet without gas, whenever he stopped to wait for us he got cold.” As a result, Breashears ended up with no IMAX footage of Viesturs above Camp Four (the “summit day” footage of Viesturs that appears in the movie was actually shot at a later date). The point I’m trying to make here is that Boukreev had to keep moving for the same reason Viesturs did: to keep from freezing. Without supplemental oxygen, nobody—not even the strongest climbers in the world—can loiter on the frigid upper reaches of Everest.

“I’m sorry,” Breashears insists, “but it was incredibly irresponsible for Anatoli to climb without gas. No matter how strong you are, you are right at your limit when you climb Everest without oxygen. You aren’t in a position to help your clients. Anatoli is dissembling when he says the reason he went down is that Scott sent him down to make tea. There were Sherpas waiting at the South Col to make tea. The only place an Everest guide should be is either with his clients or right behind them, breathing bottled oxygen, ready to provide assistance.”

Make no mistake: there is a strong consensus among the most respected high-altitude guides, as well as the pre-eminent experts in the esoteric field of high-altitude medicine/physiology, that it is exceedingly risky for a guide to lead clients on Everest without using bottled oxygen. As it happens, while researching his book DeWalt instructed an assistant to call Peter Hackett, M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on the debilitating effects of extreme altitude, in order to solicit the doctor’s professional opinion about the oxygen issue. Dr. Hackett—who reached the summit of Everest with a medical research expedition in 1981—replied unequivocally that in his view it was dangerous and ill-advised to guide Everest without using oxygen, even for someone as strong as Boukreev. Significantly, after seeking and receiving Hackett’s opinion, DeWalt deliberately made no mention of it in
The Climb
, and has continued to insist that not using bottled oxygen somehow made Boukreev a more capable guide in 1996.

On numerous occasions while promoting their book, Boukreev and DeWalt asserted that Reinhold Messner—the most accomplished and respected mountaineer of the modern era—endorsed Boukreev’s actions on Everest, including his decision not to use bottled oxygen. In a conversation with Anatoli in November 1997, he told me face-to-face, “Messner says I did right thing on Everest.” In
The Climb
, referring to my criticisms of his behavior on Everest, DeWalt quotes Boukreev as saying,

I felt fairly well maligned by the few voices that had captured the imagination of the American press. Had it not been for the support of European colleagues like … Reinhold Messner, I would have been depressed by the American perspective of what I had to offer my profession.

Lamentably, like other assertions in
The Climb
, the Boukreev/DeWalt claim about Messner’s endorsement has turned out to be untrue.

In February 1998, during a meeting with me in New York, Messner stated into a tape recorder, without equivocation, that he thought Anatoli was wrong to descend ahead of his clients. Messner speculated on the record that had Anatoli remained with his clients the outcome of the tragedy might have been quite different. Messner declared that “No one should guide Everest without using bottled oxygen,” and that Anatoli was mistaken if he thought Messner endorsed Anatoli’s actions on Everest.

Messner isn’t the only respected mountaineer whose views have been misrepresented by DeWalt in his efforts to discredit me. He has also quoted David Breashears, who, in an interview published in 1997 in
The Improper Bostonian
, took issue with my portrayal of Sandy Hill Pittman, a close friend of his. I admire Breashears’s loyalty to Pittman. Breashears is known for speaking his mind in a sometimes brutally honest fashion, and I admire that quality too, even when his criticisms are directed at me. It turns out that Breashears has also been very frank in his assessments of DeWalt and
The Climb
. The following is an excerpt from an e-mail Breashears sent me, unsolicited, in July 1998:

In my opinion [DeWalt] has no real credibility having been 10,000 miles away from the event. I’m sure you agree that you could never have accurately written about high altitude without having been there, despite all your years of climbing experience. Contrary to what DeWalt states regarding climbing without oxygen, most experienced high-altitude climbers disagree with his conclusion … ALL evidence and all logic (oxygen = fuel = energy = warmth, strength, etc.) firmly dispute DeWalt’s claims.… Anatoli descended allegedly to be in position to provide assistance. But he never did find his clients, they were freezing to death across the Col. It was up to them to stagger into camp with the information so vital to their rescue.… Anatoli was sitting in his tent unable to assist anyone, until informed of the lost climbers’ position. Enough! It’s a pity Anatoli isn’t here to continue the dialogue. I stand by my conviction that he descended because he was cold and weary and couldn’t possibly remain (relatively motionless) on the summit waiting for clients.… Finally, why the continued debate about your book? Where’s the outrage about the real issues? … You just had the guts to put it all in writing.

Many of us who were on Everest that May made mistakes. As I indicated earlier in these pages, my own actions may have contributed to the deaths of two of my teammates. I have no doubt that Boukreev’s intentions were good on summit day. I am absolutely certain that he meant well. What disturbs me, though, was Anatoli’s refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision.

DeWalt has written that my criticisms of Boukreev in
Into Thin Air
were motivated by my “desire to keep the spotlight from settling on a question that began to loom in the weeks after the Everest tragedy of 1996: Did Krakauer’s presence on the Adventure Consultants expedition [as a writer for
Outside
magazine] contribute to the tragedy that unfolded?” In truth, I remain quite troubled by the possibility that my presence as a journalist, and Sandy Hill Pittman’s, may indeed have directly contributed to the disaster. Contrary to DeWalt’s cynical assertion, however, I have never tried to steer the debate away from this topic. Indeed, I’ve raised the subject myself in numerous interviews, to say nothing of this book. I suggest DeWalt go back and read this page, where I devote a long passage to this very subject. I have not shied away from admitting the errors I made on Everest, however painful it has been to do so. I only wish that others had presented their versions of the calamity with equal candor.

Even though I have written critically about some of Anatoli’s actions, I have always emphasized that he performed heroically when disaster struck in the predawn hours of May 11. There is no question that Anatoli saved the lives of Sandy Hill Pittman and Charlotte Fox, at considerable personal risk—I have said as much on many occasions, in many places. I admire Anatoli immensely for going out alone in the storm, when the rest of us were lying helpless in our tents, and bringing in the lost climbers. But some of the decisions he made earlier in the day and earlier in the expedition are nevertheless troubling, and simply could not be ignored by a journalist committed to writing a full and honest account of the disaster.

As it happens, much of what I witnessed on Everest was troubling, and would have been troubling even if there had been no calamity. I was sent to Nepal by
Outside
magazine specifically to write about guided expeditions on the world’s highest mountain. My assignment was to assess the qualifications of the guides and clients, and to provide the reading public with a discriminating, first hand look at the reality of how guided Everest climbs are conducted. I also believe quite strongly that I had a duty—to the other survivors, to the grieving families, to the historical record, and to my companions who did not come home—to provide a full report of what happened on Everest in 1996, regardless of how that report would be received. And that’s what I did, relying on my extensive experience as a journalist and a mountaineer to provide the most accurate, honest account possible.

The debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took a terrible turn on Christmas Day, 1997, six weeks after publication of
The Climb
, when Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna, the world’s tenth-highest mountain. His loss was mourned around the world. Thirty-nine at the time of his death, he was a magnificent athlete who possessed tremendous courage. By all accounts he was a remarkable, very complicated man.

Boukreev had been raised in a dirt-poor mining town in the southern Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. According to British journalist Peter Gillman, writing in the London
Mail on Sunday
, when Anatoli was a boy his father

had eked out a living making shoes and mending watches. There were five children, in a cramped wooden house with no plumbing.… Boukreev was dreaming of escaping. The mountains gave him his chance.

Boukreev learned to climb as a nine-year-old, and his uncommon physical gifts quickly came to the fore. At sixteen he earned a coveted slot at the Soviet mountaineering camp in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. At twenty-four he was selected to become a member of the elite national climbing team, which brought him a financial stipend, great prestige, and other benefits both tangible and intangible. In 1989 he climbed Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak, as part of a Soviet expedition, and upon returning to his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, was honored as a Soviet Master of Sport by President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Due to the upheavals that accompanied the New World Order, this rosy situation was not to last long, however. As Gillman explains,

The Soviet Union was breaking up. Two years later Gorbachev quit, and Boukreev—who had recently completed his own ascent of Everest—found his status and privileges vanishing. “There was nothing,” he told [Linda] Wylie [his American girlfriend]. “No money—you were in bread lines.” … Boukreev resolved not to succumb. If the communist order had disappeared, he must adapt to the new world of private enterprise, using his assets of a mountaineer’s skills and determination.

In a remembrance of Anatoli posted on the Internet in early 1997, his friend Fran Distefano-Arsentiev
^*
recalled,

Those were desperate times [for Boukreev], just to be able to pay for food was a luxury.… [T]he only chance a Soviet climber had to go to the Himalaya was to compete within the system and win that privilege. Having the freedom to just go to the Himalaya, whether or not you are competent enough as a climber, was never an option. It was a dream.… Before Buka became famous there was a time when nothing came easily for him. But he pursued his dreams tenaciously with a vigor unlike anyone I have ever known.

Boukreev became something of a global nomad in pursuit of both mountains and money to make ends meet. In order to scrape together a living, he hired on as a guide in the Himalaya, Alaska, and Kazakhstan; gave slide shows in American climbing shops; and occasionally resorted to common labor. But all the while he continued to tally an extraordinary record of high-altitude ascents.

Although he loved climbing, and loved being in the mountains, Boukreev never pretended to enjoy guiding. In
The Climb
he spoke very candidly about this:

I wish with all my power there were other opportunities for me to make a living.… It is too late for me to find another way to finance my personal objectives; yet it is with great reservation that I work to bring inexperienced men and women into this world [of dangerous high-altitude mountaineering].