Into Thin Air (45 page)

  DeWalt, however, has omitted a crucial detail that renders this entire issue moot. He neglected to mention that my letter to Rowell included these two important sentences: “First of all, let me say that I think the Sherpas are absolutely wrong to blame Anatoli, which is why I didn’t mention their point of view in my book. It seemed unfair and inflammatory to even bring it up.” DeWalt’s decision to raise this issue in his book—when no mention of it had been made in mine—is therefore hard to fathom.

* Referring to this particular error in the 1999 edition of his book, DeWalt wrote, “In all paperback editions of
The Climb
, a photo caption was deleted to correct what had been an honest and regrettable mistake.” The spurious photo caption has indeed finally been removed. But, tellingly, neither DeWalt nor his publisher has yet bothered to correct the error where it appears in the main text of the 1999 edition, on page 228.

* DeWalt wrote in the 1999 edition of
The Climb
, “I was not concerned about specifying an exact date, because I felt that Fischer’s statement to Bromet would not have been any less significant or relevant if it had been made on March 25 in Kathmandu or on April 2 during the trek to the Everest Base Camp.” But DeWalt conveniently fails to consider that Fischer’s opinion of Boukreev underwent a profound and well-documented transformation over the latter weeks of the expedition.

  The notorious conversation between Bromet and Fischer occurred on or around April 15, barely a week after Fischer’s team arrived at Base Camp. At that time, Fischer still had nothing but praise for his chief guide. Three weeks later, however, by the time the Mountain Madness team launched their summit assault, Fischer had grown notably disenchanted with Boukreev’s guiding methods, and was frequently angry with him (see pp. 188–90 of
Into Thin Air
). The actual date of Fi scher’s conversation with Bromet—and DeWalt’s attempt in
The Climb
to fudge that date by three weeks—is therefore extremely relevant. For many days immediately preceding his team’s summit assault, Fischer had complained bitterly and often to his closest confidants that, despite his repeated admonishments to Boukreev, he couldn’t persuade Boukreev to stay close to the clients. It therefore strains belief to suggest that on May 10, upon reaching the summit ridge, Fischer decided that he wanted Boukreev to descend alone, ahead of everybody.

* A resident of Norwood, Colorado, Fran Distefano-Arsentiev met Boukreev through her husband, the noted Russian climber Serguei Arsentiev. In May 1998, Fran and Serguei reached the summit of Everest together via the Northeast Ridge, without supplemental oxygen. Fran thus became the first American woman to climb Everest without relying on gas. Prior to topping out, however, the couple had spent three nights above 27,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, and they were forced to spend a fourth night even higher on the peak during the descent—this time completely exposed to the elements, without gas, tent, or sleeping bags. Terribly, both climbers perished before they could reach the safety of the lower camps.

* Herrod was found upside down, suspended from the rope. He appeared to have flipped over while rappelling down the Hillary Step on the evening of May 25, 1996, and had been unable to right himself—perhaps because he was too exhausted, or perhaps because he had been knocked unconscious. In any case, Boukreev and the Indonesians left his body undisturbed. A month later, on May 23, 1997, Pete Athans removed Herrod from the rope while ascending to the summit as part of an expedition making a film for the PBS television program,
NOVA
. Before cutting him free, Athans recovered Herrod’s camera, which contained his final photograph: a self-portrait atop Everest.

* After meeting Boukreev in 1997, Moro became one of his closest friends. “I loved and love (like a friend, of course) Anatoli Boukreev so much,” Moro told me, “that after I met him I changed my life, my projects, my dreams. Probably only his mother and his girlfriend, Linda, loved him more.” Moro, as it happens, disagrees strongly with my portrayal of Boukreev in this book. “You didn’t understand who Anatoli really was,” Moro explained. “You are American; he was Russian. You were new to 8,000-meter peaks; he was the best of all time at these altitudes (nobody else had climbed 21 times to a summit over 8,000 meters). You are a normal alpinist; he was a fantastic athlete and survival’s animal. You are economically sure; he knew hunger.… In my opinion you are like a man who, after reading a book about medicine, pretends to teach one of the world’s most famous and capable surgeons how to be a doctor.… When judging the decisions made by Anatoli in 1996 you must remember this: no clients on his team died.”

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

BÂTON WICKS PUBLICATIONS: Excerpts from
Upon That Mountain
by Eric Shipton (Hodder, London, 1943). This title is now collected in the omnibus
Eric Shipton—The Six Mountain Travel Books
(Diadem, London, and the Mountaineers, Seattle, 1995). Reprinted by permission of Nick Shipton and Bâton Wicks Publications, Macclesfield, Cheshire, England.

HAYNES PUBLISHING: Excerpts from
Everest
by Walt Unsworth. Published by Oxford Illustrated Press, an imprint of Haynes Publishing, Sparkford, Nr Yeovil, Somerset, BA22 7JJ. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.

SIMON AND SCHUSTER AND A. P. WATT LTD: Six lines from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, from
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems
, revised and edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster and A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.