When Will Cockrell told me he was writing a book about Mount Everest, he couldnā€™t see the roll of my eyes. But heā€™s perceptive enough to have picked up on my lukewarm commitment to being interviewed, and so I felt a need to explain that there are already quite a few Everest books out there. My coffee table is in danger of imminent collapse under their weight; my shelves sag with Everest encyclopedias and memoirs. Itā€™s been done, I told him.

Listen carefully, he said: This will be different. It will be the story of the entire guiding industry that was created on and around the worldā€™s highest mountain. He planned to call it .

That got my interest, because I put about a quarter century of blood, sweat, and tears into this ā€œindustry.ā€ I first went to the Big E in the early 1990s, which turned out to be the dawn of the commercial era on the Goddess Mother of the Earth. Following years of adventure in the Himalayas, I quit guiding 8,000-meter peaks after the twin disaster years of 2014ā€”when an avalanche on Everest killed 16 Nepali workers in the Khumbu Icefallā€”and 2015, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed 19 people at Everest Base Camp and a total of 9,000 people in Nepal.

I had to admit to that a history of Everest as a business hadnā€™t been done, but Iā€™m pretty cynical, and I wasnā€™t sure that he was the right person to do it. Iā€™ve long enjoyed his magazine articles in venues like Menā€™s Journal, ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų, and GQ, and I know he put in some good years climbing rock and crags. I even guided him on Denali a while back. But he isnā€™t an Everest climber, much less an Everest guide. How was he going to understand the business? And, failing that, was he just going to take the usual potshots about how we exploited Sherpas and destroyed the environment and clogged up a sacred mountain with privileged neophytes who hadnā€™t ā€œearnedā€ the right to be there?

But Cockrell seemed to value my input, and as someone who’s been captivated by Everest for so long, I wanted to avoid the foolish mistake of thinking that everyone already knows this story as well as I do. They donā€™t, and one of the virtues ofĢż Everest, Inc. is that it sneaks up on you and becomes a history of the whole damn thing. In the 1920s, there was George Mallory; then came Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who achieved the first summit in 1953; and then there were the heroic hardasses of the 1970s and 1980s, climbers like Reinhold Messner and Jerzy Kukuczka, who got to the top using new routes, or by climbing without oxygen, or in winter, or during the summer monsoon. In 1985, Dick Bass came along and popularized the idea of climbing the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on each continent. In the 1990s, guides like Todd Burleson, Eric Simonson, and Russell Brice turned Everest into a gold mine and made climbing it start to look easy. But the deaths of 1996 put an end to that.

There were also obvious tensions, exemplified in 2013 by a confrontation that involved climbers Simone Moro, Ueli Steck, and a number of Sherpas. It was spurred by a specific encounter on the Lhotse Face, but it also came to symbolize long standing friction between Western climbers and guides and home-grown mountaineers from Nepal. The year 2019 saw another potent symbol of how crowded the mountain had become: the famous and startling Conga Line photo, which showed a long queue of climbers en route to the Hillary Step and the summit.

As for Cockrell, his overall focus is on how two great transformations came about. The firstā€”in the late 1980s and early 1990sā€”happened when expeditions backed by nations gave way to client-funded trips, and how those, in turn, developed into guided climbs. Something that was once unimaginable became routine. This shift was marked and shaped by particular tragedies, by the thirst for money and publicity and power, but also by heroism and the absolute thrill of climbingā€”and workingā€”in extreme environments.

The second great transformationā€”which is ongoingā€”is the power transfer away from the foreign men and women who invented the Everest industry to the Nepalis and Sherpas who are determined to shape its future.

Cockrell has done a masterful job of putting the now-sprawling industry into an understandable and vastly entertaining context: his book isnā€™t just another catalog of expeditions and statistics. Improbably, Everest, Inc. is a story with narrative drive, as Cockrell makes it clear how one thing led to another. It succeeds precisely because heā€™s a real journalist and storyteller, rather than just another antagonist with scores to settle. This project required a professional, someone with the energy and interest to track down and interrogate a thousand quirky and often egotistical characters. Cockrell talked to the movers and shakers who built the industry, and to those who carried its weight on their backs. He sifted through mountains of published material and documentaries to understand changes in the game.

As I said, I thought I knew it all about the main players, but reading Everest, Inc. reminded me that I only knew them superficially. Just because we shared a climbing route, a poker table, and endless hours waiting for weather and coughs to go away didnā€™t necessarily give us full insight into each other. Cockrell asked the right questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning who my mentors and cohorts actually were and what motivated them.

Weā€™re losing some of them, of course. In the week I spent reading the book, David Breashears and Lou Whittaker died. Both are key figures in the evolution that Cockrell maps out in Everest, Inc., and their loss makes me thankful that their reflections were preserved. And yes, a number of us talked smack about each other to Cockrell, but his reporting of these remarks doesnā€™t devolve into gossip. Even in the cases where important peopleā€”like Jon Krakauer and Nirmal ā€œNimsā€ Purjaā€”wouldnā€™t speak to him, he goes to considerable effort to give balanced assessments of their contributions to Everest history.

As for my worry that Everest, Inc. would take the standard and easy shots, Iā€™ll admit I was relieved. Cockrell doesnā€™t shy away from controversies, but he doesnā€™t sensationalize them, either. The ethnic and economic tensions that have driven change in commercial climbing become a central theme. The persistent worry that modern climbers routinely and blithely walk past the dead and dying is addressed. (My belief is that rescues should be attempted when theyā€™re feasible, but that itā€™s always possible for climbers to get themselves so deeply into trouble that no one can save them.) He shines a light on the tangled relationship between guided climbing and the media covering it.

This is tricky stuff, and I think Cockrell makes it clear that newspapers, magazines, books, and films are big parts of the enterprise, too. Their tendency to hype the deaths and disasters have served as fuel on the commercial fire. Time after time, business increased in the wake of well-publicized accidents and mishaps.

Between the lines of Cockrellā€™s book, one can easily discern that more than a few Everest climbers attempted the mountain so they could set themselves apart from mere mortals. Nothing aided them more than the perception that taking Everest on was death-defying and extreme. Those of us guiding and leading expeditions hated the coverage and railed against the mediaā€”unless of course we were the ones being interviewed in a given year, since there arenā€™t a lot of shy folks in this industry, and we all liked the spotlight. (Some of us still do, and as I read, I got mildly irritated that a few relentless self-promoters get even more coverage in Everest, Inc., at the expense of some of the hardest-working Sherpas and guides on the mountain.) Invariably, the story strays from the actual craft of climbing and guiding that drew me to this world to begin with, but thatā€™s Cockrellā€™s point. This isnā€™t a book about the mythical and virtuous climber toiling toward some noble and deeply personal goal. Itā€™s about the Inc.

Everest, Inc. puts the big events and obvious disasters in clear focus. But Cockrell also does a credible job of explaining that it doesnā€™t necessarily take an act of god to kill people on the mountain. The transformations that heā€™s highlighting mean, in essence, that the mountain is becoming more accessibleā€”which many would view as an inherently good thing. But more people on the mountain will mean more people dying. Plain and simple. And shifting the business to those eager to take on more clients for less moneyā€”and in the process hiring less-experienced mountain workersā€”will have that same act-of-god effect from time to time. There will be deathsā€”and headlines all over the worldā€”even when a major storm or avalanche isnā€™t the cause. Face it, the daily squall is bad enough at 28,000 feet. The sun simply going down at the end of the day is a disaster when youā€™re cold and strung out. Calamities will hit the new operators a little harder, but Everest, Inc. points out that the old-guard operators put their share of clients and guides way out there beyond their abilities.

The book explains where the industry is headed and whoā€™s taking it there. Cockrell gives an important and articulate voice to the Sherpas and Nepalis driving the current phase of commercial climbing, not just on Everest, but on each of the worldā€™s highest mountains. There is a fitting balance to the story. Yes, there was a fascinating period when the great western Everest guides roamed the planet, brought the clients, hired the help, called the shots, and made the movies. But Everest, Inc. makes it clear that this era has passed, which isnā€™t really a bad thing. This future is fascinating, too, and the charactersā€”this time from more diverse backgroundsā€”are still larger than life.

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The Nepalese village of Pangboche sits at the foot of Ama Dablam, about halfway along the modern ten-day approach to Everest Base Camp. It is one of the last continually inhabited villages that one encounters on the journey. There are trees, teahouses, and terraced potato fields. A good number of the inhabitantsā€”farmers and yak herdersā€”are also phenomenal high-altitude climbers. In recent decades, Pangboche had become well known to visiting climbers, because it was also the home of Lama Geshe, a worldly, unassuming man in red and gold robes with a shaved head and a ready smile. As the highest-ranking lama in the area, his blessing was sought by thousands of foreigners heading up to try risky things in the mountains and by thousands more who simply valued an audience with a learned, devout, and humble Buddhist.

Lama Geshe died on February 12 at age 87. I had plenty of visits with him over the years, as I made 21 attempts on Everest, but Iā€™m not under the illusion that he knew who I was. Still, I considered him a good friend, despite the fact that he didnā€™t speak English and I didnā€™t speak Tibetan, Nepali, or Sherpa (pathetic, considering how much time I spent in the Himalaya).

Usually, when we ducked through the doorways of his house and came into his living room with the hot stove and butter lamps, our Sherpa Sirdar would take a crack at explaining to him why we thought we were special and how he might recognize some of us as repeat offenders in the mountain climbing game. I was always a little relieved that none of that seemed to faze him. Lama Geshe would be sitting cross-legged in one corner of the room, with a bunch of Tibetan prayer books open on the table in front of him. Far too often, in recent years, it was clear that he wasnā€™t in great health, but he was always in great spirits. During the busy climbing seasons, one team after another would crowd into his room with cameras and microphones and abundant hubris. I never once saw him scold a visitor for spilling tea or bowing at the wrong time. He was just genuinely and obviously happy to see you, to bless your endeavor, to pray together, tie a special string around your neck, and give you a head butt. Heā€™d often laugh a little while he did it. Lama Geshe would then give you a card, on which heā€™d handwritten a prayer, and would ask that you take it to the top of the Goddess Mother of the Earth, Chomolungma (the Tibetan name for Everest).

One of his living room walls was filled with pictures of climbersā€”some famous, many not so famousā€”whoā€™d posed on the summit with the cards and had taken the trouble to get the pictures back down to Pangboche and to Lama Geshe. For a trip leader, heā€™d sometimes give a pouch of specially blessed rice grains to be carried through the Khumbu Icefall for protecting the team. Lama Geshe, while placing silk khata scarves around our necks, reminded us not to kill anything on this sacred mountain and to be kind to one another. Iā€™d then follow his instructions exactly, despite or maybe even because of my lack of spiritualism. Typically, six weeks later, while trying to shave every ounce from my summit pack, Iā€™d look at that prayer card that needed a ride to the summit and Iā€™d think for a moment about my beliefs and consider leaving it behind. But I never did, because Lama Geshe believed, and the Sherpas risking their lives to help me believed. And because perhaps that wise, kind, and humble man down in Pangboche knew more than I did about the top of the world.

I was always a little scared at the start of a two-month Everest expedition, and I liked going to the Himalayas with folks who were similarly apprehensive. I wanted climbers who knew what they could lose and who appreciated that Sherpas would be doing a whole lot more than just ā€œworking for themā€ on such a trip. So, going for a blessing on the way in and conducting a puja at Base Camp werenā€™t ceremonies done just for believers or Buddhistsā€”they were done out of respect for the mountain and its people.

The pilgrimage to Lama Gesheā€™s home could be a little confusing for first-timers, because across the river and down valley from Pangboche was a grand and shining temple at Thyangboche. Wouldnā€™t that be where the good juju was? Why were we going for our blessing to some guyā€™s living room in a house that looked like all the other Pangboche houses? But the Sherpas I climbed with absolutely revered Lama Geshe, and I think I came to know why. He really seemed to care about people.

My last time up there in the Khumbu was the earthquake year of 2015. That was a hard time, with death and disaster all around. Iā€™m asked all the time now whether I miss the mountain. And I do. But mostly I miss the people. Like many, I was only just coming to terms with the news that Elizabeth Hawley had passed in Kathmandu. Coupling that with Lama Gesheā€™s death, I canā€™t help thinking that it is the end of an era. It isnā€™t a tragic end. They both lived admirably long and full lives. And God knows the Hillary Step sat up there patiently at 29,000 feet for long enough before it disappeared. But rocks come down, mountains change, and people finish their lives.

That doesnā€™t mean the game is finished. There isnā€™t any shortage of Everest left to climb at the head of the valley. There will still be great folks to send you off to your mountain with a blessing and perhaps even a knock on the head to settle your stomach butterflies and stiffen your vertebrae. And afterward, in Kathmandu, good folks will still document your achievements and endeavors. But that is all for a new era.

I intend to live in the past and hang on to Hillary, to Hawley, and to Lama Geshe a bit longer.

Dave Hahn is a mountain guide and ski patroller. He has reached Everestā€™s summit 15 times.

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THE DESCENT OF Tenaya Canyon has trap written all over it. Some whoā€™ve through-hiked it refer to the place as the , and apparently rangers rescue and recover folks from it all too often.

Ronald Hahn

Ronald Hahn near Tenaya Lake.

Ģż

When you arrive at , which sits at 8,150 feet, nothing looks difficult or desperate about the routeā€™s start, but a short distance in the granite steepens and the plot thickens. The descent covers ten rugged miles and drops 4,200 feet. Thereā€™s no trail, and during the scramble down there are plenty of places to break legs, crack skulls, and get swept away in high water. It takesĢżcapable teams a full day to complete, with time allotted for the odd picnic and a short nap in the California sunshine.

Not surprisingly, those who survive the journey recall the incredible views of Half Dome, Mount Watkins, and Cloudā€™s Rest. They tell of strolling through the wondrously vast and polished granite bowls that once hosted Yosemiteā€™s hardworking and long-gone glaciers. Where those bowls funnel into a vertically walled rock gorge, climbers speak of frolicking in Tenaya Creekā€™s emerald pools and only casually mention the route-finding and rappelling skills they employed to get there. Once theyā€™ve hopped down the creeksā€™ boulders and emerged into the wide-openĢżvalley below Half Dome, they seem barely fazed by the finale, an exit through several miles of thick forest that transitions to campgrounds, lodges, and shuttle buses.

Of course, such breezy descriptions donā€™t say anything about going down there with your 78-year-old dad. Our proposed mission had been percolating for a few years. Iā€™m not sure I ever did embrace it as a good idea, but eventually I told Dad, ā€œIā€™m fully committed.ā€ Commitment is unavoidable with this particular Yosemite rite of passage. As far as I could tell, thereā€™s no bail-out option that doesnā€™t involve a helicopter flight plan and a great deal of explaining shortcomings and overreachings.Ģż

Over the past 60 years, at least 17 people have died and many more have been rescued in , most of them because of high water or falls. In 1872, received no outside aid whatsoever when he solo-climbed out of Tenaya. Having barely begun, he slipped, smacked his head on a rock, was knocked unconscious, and tumbled downhill. A shrub stopped him just before a steep drop-off. He came to, dusted himself off, and climbed his way out with a concussion. If Muir could do it, why couldnā€™t we?

But seriously, why did I think we had any right to try the darn thing? For one, I liked the focus that Tenaya Canyon gave Dad, who lives in Manhattan. Heā€™s a fit guy and finished a section hike of the Appalachian Trail two summers back. Having another strenuous goal motivated him to watch what he ate, take every opportunity to go for a hike, and practice rappelling at the climbing gym.Ģż

Plus, Dad has a long history in Yosemite. He grew up in San Francisco and spent big chunks of time during summer vacations living in the Valley. He climbed in Yosemite in the forties and fifties. In the sixties,Ģżfamily and career took precedence, and he let technical climbing go in favor of hiking and backpacking. In the mid-eighties, when his pesky children were out of the way, he got back into a different kind of climbing, with trips to the glaciers of and . When I saw his pictures of those places, I began to understand how mere mortals might break into the world of mountaineering. Around that time, he told me heā€™d go to McKinley with me if I first went to Rainier to learn the ropes. I went, discovered the guide service there, and knew immediately what I wanted to do with my life.

I climbed McKinley twice with Dad, two of 28 expeditions Iā€™ve now managed up that way. Twenty-five years as a have also resulted in a few hundred Rainier summits, 20 expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks, 15 seasons in Antarctica, and a decent reputation for common sense in uncommon places. My dad had given me the mountains. I believed I owed him Tenaya.

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, we drove out Yosemiteā€™s Tioga Road with Jon Martin, the son of one of Dadā€™s old Army buddies. ā€œMy wife was a little nervous about letting me go do this with a stranger, so she Googled you,ā€ Jon told me. ā€œShe says that you might be an OK partner to be with if the going gets tough.ā€ We both laughed.

My dad had suggested we get a predawn start, with an eye toward completing the voyage in a day, but my reasoning won out in the end. ā€œLetā€™s plan on it taking two days and do it in one if weā€™re progressing better than expected,ā€ Iā€™d said. ā€œNormal morning, normal breakfast, normal start, so that weā€™re well rested and can enjoy ourselves a little.ā€ We carried food and gear for a night out, and I registered with the Park Service for that eventuality. I even carried a bear-proof canister for our provisions.

We set out from Tenaya Lake at 9 A.M.,Ģżunder perfectly blue skies, and found our way past the sternly worded warning sign: THIS IS NOT A TRAIL. TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT IS DANGEROUS. Before long we came into the immense granite basins. At first these werenā€™t very difficult, and the scenery was incredible. I said ā€œwowā€ a lot, as did Jon and Dad. Dropping a couple thousand feet on bare and tilted granite can be tough on the quadriceps, and as we went along the angle and exposure increased. I had the huge advantage that I was coming off a guiding season on Rainier, so Iā€™d done plenty of 9,000-foot descents in a day with a heavy pack on, but my eyes and attention were focused on Dadā€™s steps. In awkward places, I got directly under him so that, if he fell, Iā€™d have a chance at stopping himā€”or at least of joining in and dying with him. That way I could avoid facing questions about what the heck we thought we wereĢżdoing taking on Tenaya Canyon.

We got down the slabs just fine, and we reached a kind of magical and isolated forest of big oak and pine trees, appropriately named the Lost Valley. But it was now 3:20 p.m., and we hadnā€™t encountered the technical sections yet.

From the Lost Valley the gorge begins and the commitment builds. We rappelled 40 feet down into the tight waterway. I watched Dad come down, worried about all that could go wrong. But he did great.

It was 4:50 when we made our way down the rough riverbed. We were burning daylight. At 6:15, we came to the LeConte Boulder, a 25-foot drop-off with a deep pool at its base.ĢżUnder different circumstances, I might have stood there transfixed by the beautiful waterfall cascading into the pool amid the clean granite, vertical walls, and deepening shadows, with the million-dollar view of Half Dome in the distance. But I was concerned about Dadā€™s tired legs and our chances of having an accident. I rigged a rappel and dropped over the edge to scout the descent. As I hauled myself back up, I devised a plan.

I would lower Dad first, and then Jon, down the cliff face. This would be easier than a rappel because the descent speed would be safelyĢżcontrolled by me, and the climber would only have to worry about finding the correct way to go from the base of the wall. Once in the pool, we could wade along on a few submerged boulders for 25 or 30 feet and then clamber up onto dry rocks to resume the down-gorge scramble. Dad seemed fine with this plan, so I asked Jon to stand where he could see my father a little better than Iā€™d be able to as I tended theĢżanchor and friction device. My dad went over the edge and out of view. I paid out rope. I paid out more rope and chatted with Jon about his mountain adventures with his own parents. Then I got a little worried, since it seemed like I was paying out more rope than there was cliff face to descend. I asked Jon if he could still see Dad. He stretched to a point where my father could be seen and said, ā€œHeā€™s struggling.ā€

Since I was belaying, I couldnā€™t unclip and jump down to see what needed to be done. It occurred to both of us then that Dad had taken a wrong turn at the bottom of the waterfall. Instead of wading from boulder to boulder, heā€™d tried to set off across the deepest part of the pool, in his climbing gear, with his pack weighing him down. Jon cupped his hands and yelled for Dad to head downstream instead, but the waterfall was loud. Miraculously, Dad heard him, and within a few minutes I could see him working across the underwater line of boulders. I lowered Jon and rigged myself up for a rappel, then quickly scrambled to theĢżboulders where Jon and Dad were waiting.

ā€œSo you decided to go for a swim back there?ā€ I joked, trying to break the tension.

ā€œThat is about as close as Iā€™ve come toĢżdying,ā€ he said softly. ā€œThe water was over my head, and I very nearly lost my glasses. It was all I could do to get back to the rocks.ā€

I was horrified. My father had almost drowned, and I was the one whoā€™d almost drowned him. I thought back to how Iā€™d continued to pay out rope and what might have happened. I imagined him swallowing water and going down, while I obliviously held on to the rope until he floated into view. In my 25 years guiding, caution, skill, and good luck have kept anyĢżclient of mine from serious harm. The thought that Iā€™d break that streak with my own father shook me to the core.Ģż

My dad was horrified, too. After all his years in the mountains, to realize that heā€™d been tired enough to make exactly the wrong decision at the bottom of that cliff was sobering.

DARKNESS CAME quickly, and we set up camp. We put on dry clothes, ate, and tried to rest, but I couldnā€™t sleep. What if Dad was just as tired in the morning? Weā€™d never be able to get out of the gorge without help. We hadnā€™t seen any other people in the canyon. Iā€™d brought a satellite phone and a cell phone, but I didnā€™t want to use them. That would be an admission that weā€™d done a poor job of planning, and it would endanger whoever had to helicopter in. My pride would take a severe beating, but pride couldnā€™t be a legitimate reason for not calling.

At first light, around 6:15, a thin covering of cloud crept in. As we got back into helmets and harnesses, I became impatient when Dad owned up to being a little stiff. ā€œIf you canā€™t walk, weā€™ll be calling for a helicopter,ā€ I said.Ģż

ā€œI know that, David,ā€ he said. ā€œBut I can only do my best.ā€

Which is, of course, what I knew heā€™d give, but I was scared and it showed. I asked Jon how the night had gone for him. ā€œNot soĢżbadly,ā€ he said. ā€œI got a little sleep here and there.ā€

When we resumed our boulder-hopping down the gorge, Dad seemed to get some of his balance and strength back. I scouted a way through a much anticipated spot called the keyholeā€”which, as the name implies, requires a wiggle through giant granite blocks. We each came through smiling and laughing, because it was just plain fun. It was 8:30. I rigged a belay down the moderately steep path beyond the keyhole.

ā€œWhat the hell is all that for?ā€ Dad asked.

ā€œSeeing as how Iā€™m carrying this rope, we might as well use it every chance we get,ā€ I joked, trying to take the edge off my concern about the consequences of a misstep on nontechnical terrain.

By noon, the walls opened and the forest began. Weā€™d reached Yosemite Valley, though we still had a few miles of bushwhacking to do before hitting the part with trails and tourists and lodges. Dad gained strength as the afternoon went on. It became a hike, and his legs were still strong from the Appalachian Trail. I stopped keeping time.

OUR ESCAPE FROM Tenaya took usĢżunder the giant Northwest Face of Half Dome, where our chief difficulty was walking one way while looking back at the dramatic scenery the other way. It was mesmerizing. We also had a good view of the Devilā€™s Diving Board, a prominence halfway up the mountain, which had reached to take iconic shots of the face. My dadā€™s bucket list includes a run up to this vantage point. We were hoping to do Devilā€™s Diving Board next.

But despite getting out safely, Dad was still shaken by Tenaya. ā€œMaybe I should just give up on the Diving Board,ā€ he said. ā€œItā€™s probably too much, and I donā€™t want to be a burden to you. What should I go for instead?ā€

I registered his serious and thoughtful tone, but I was beginning to feel upbeat and optimistic about our next adventureĢżtogether. Iā€™d seen just how tough it could get, but here he was with his pack still on and a couple of miles until the finish, and he was already trying to figure out the next journey. I was proud of him. As I understand it, a bucket list is a bunch of things to do before dying rather than things to do that cause dying. And despite knowing that such trips will get more difficult for both of us as the years pile up, neither of us want them to end.

The post How I Nearly Killed My Father appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

ĢżĢż ĢżĢż

El Capitan

The author, day four

El Capitan

Anker jugs up as Hahn and Ninov hang out on their portaledges.

I’m not much of a rock climber… and certainly not a big-wall climber. This is not modesty. Sixteen expeditions to 8,000-meter peaksā€”nine of those to the top of Mount Everestā€”and 22 years spent guiding cold, remote glaciers don’t make one modest. But it can make for a less-than-all-around climber, which is me, because big-wall climbing and high-altitude mountaineering require surprisingly different skill sets. Sure, when I started going up mountains I dreamed of climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan. But let’s face it: I also wanted to be a fighter pilot, the president, and a porn star. I became an Everest guide instead.

Ģż

Eleven years ago, in Antarctica, Alex Lowe, the quintessential all-around climber, watched me tiptoe across steep, blue ice on crampons and noted that I seemed overly concerned with the 5,000-foot drop below me. Right then, he and Conrad Anker, his best friend and longtime climbing partner, offered to take me up El Cap. “Climb El Cap and you’ll get comfortable with exposure once and for all,” Alex said.

I shouldn’t have waited. Alex died tragically in an avalanche two years later, in 1999. Conrad and I had climbed together again earlier that year, when he found George Mallory’s remains at 27,000 feet on Everest. We summited together on that trip, and I had a rough time at 29,000 feet. I was badly anemic, I ran out of oxygen, it started to snow, and it was late in the day. Conrad stuck with me. He gave me his own oxygen, and we made it down. He probably saved my life.

Although the El Cap subject came up over the next few years, I didn’t figure it was ever going to happen. Then I guided a trip on Everest last year with photographer and climber Jimmy Chin, and while we were wedged in a tent at 20,000 feet, I got to talking about my life’s dreams. Jimmy stopped me when I got to the El Cap part. “Rad will guide you, and I’ll shoot pictures,” he said.

So the sandbagging began… Conrad picked the Pacific Ocean Wall, a line up the right flank of El Cap. In person, on a sunny day, El Capitan is a bright, massive, 3,000-foot-tall sheet of granite, completely dominating, as its name implies. One can have a difficult time getting used to the scale of it, but I had total trust in Conrad, 45, and Jimmy, 34, when it came to Big Wallery, where both of them had earned their reputations. I also had total trust in Ivo Ninov, whom Jimmy brought into the game. Ivo, 32, came to Yosemite from Bulgaria nine years ago, has been up El Cap more than 50 times, and is one of the best climbers in the area. He learned to speak English in Yosemite and says things like “The moon is sick” and “Life is bitching.” Our plan was to go in October and climb the wall over the course of seven days.

Ģż

“Just so we’re clear, I’m not secretly good at rock climbing,” I told them all when we met in August at the Outdoor Retailer show, in Salt Lake City. “I will be a novice. Will that be OK?” They smirked and nodded. Ivo then mentioned a film idea he and his stone-monkey buddies had been tossing around, something about dragging a corpse up an El Cap route to fulfill the last wishes of a guy who’d wanted to do the climb alive. I was encouraged.

On October 2, we drove into the valley and met up with Ivo, who’d been preparing for “launch.” We pressed our noses against the car windows to see the flashes of rock soaring all around us. Ivo had stockpiled 20 gallons of water and a fair amount of hardware and rope at the base of the route. We spent some time with the climbers hanging out in El Cap Meadow, where I basked in Conrad’s reflected celebrity glow. We looked at the tiny climbers on various routes on the wall, and I reminisced about my family history in the valley. My dad, Ron Hahn, was a Yosemite rock climber in the 1940s and ’50s. These walls were the scene of some of my earliest childhood memories.

Launch, 7:30 a.m…. I wasn’t really all that scared, yet. Rad motored up the first pitch, and Jimmy said, “OK, Dave, why don’t you jug on up next,” as he turned to help Ivo hitch the huge amounts of gear to be hauled up the cliff. Jimmy was telling me to climb the rope using mechanical ascendersā€”a reasonable suggestion, and certainly easier than climbing the rock itself. But I was hoping for something more along the lines of “Now, Dave, there are many ways to climb a rope, and this is a way that I think might work well for you in this particular application.” I promptly got caught in a tree a few feet off the ground. Jimmy untangled me, clipped a few of my carabiners and slings into different places, and pointed me upward again.

Second pitch (of 27), 10 a.m.:I got scared… At the first belay station, there were some nice distractions, like a black bear that lumbered past beneath me. Then Ivo accidentally dropped his tobacco and lighter, which bounced off my helmet. I was overworking like crazy, hanging on with my arms at the belay station instead of leaning back to trust the gear the way the pros do. I belayed Jimmy as he led the next two pitches (done as one), marveling that, even though he hadn’t aid-climbed in years (he’d been spending a lot of time on big, cold mountains recently), he was jumping boldly into the Pacific Ocean.

The wall’s overhanging nature became apparent as I struggled to get out of belay stations when it was my turn to jug. From the ground, the wall’s outward push was just a neck-straining curiosity, but now it meant I had no contact with the rock and total dependence on a rope as I climbed. I knew the consequences of falling had not increasedā€”a fall from 75 feet (partway up the first pitch) would have killed me just as surely as a fall from 200 feet (somewhere in the second pitch). But I was starting to think about such things as I’d swing out into space and flail at jugging the ropes.

My technique sucked. My arms were getting workedā€”my left one eventually went numbā€”and my movements were slow and jerky. I was perplexed and thought my skills from mountaineering should’ve helped more here. Hadn’t I used ascenders successfully to get myself and others out of crevasses? Hadn’t I pushed them up thousands upon thousands of feet of fixed line on all those Himalayan trips? Sure, that had been mostly with my feet on the ground, and all the vertical bits had been short (if spectacularly placed), but it seemed like I should get some kind of break.

So there I was on a portaledge in the dark… It was 9 p.m., 13-plus hours after we’d started climbing. If I’d had the courage to look down, my headlight would not have reached the 400 feet to the bottom. Let’s get something straight: There was no actual ledge. The portaledge is a cotlike platform of aluminum and fabric that hangs against the wall, suspended from a single anchoring point. Jimmy and I shared one. I ate cold food from a sharp can, still harnessed up, desperately careful that everything I took out or opened was clipped in and couldn’t fall. Listening to Jimmy, Conrad, and Ivo laughing and talking, I was aware that I was a dark pool of doubt. I was getting a glimpse of how world-class climbersā€”who know all too well the consequences of mistakes and bad luckā€”deal with nerves and channel anxiety into energy.

Meanwhile, I was clutching the edge of the portaledge, thinking of things that could go wrong. I didn’t trust the bolts we were clipped to. Ivo said, “Dave, the protection is bomber; you’ve got to trust the pro. Each of those bolts could hold 5,000 pounds.” After which I did a quick calculation to reassure myself that 190 pounds was less than 5,000. I looked at a label sewn onto the bed of the ledge, which said the fabric was not fireproof, so I did another quick calculation and realized how screwed I’d be if the ledge caught on fire. That is, if we had a stove, which we didn’t. Shouldn’t we have a stove?

And what if it started storming? It did… Not that night, but the second. I woke up when the first drop hit my lip at 1 a.m. We put up the rain covers on the ledges in the dark. When I say “we,” I don’t mean I was good for anything more than ballast. I was scared, exhausted (my ascender technique had not improved), cold (the temperatures were in the low thirties), and thinking about how I was holding the guys back. Almost every time I opened my mouth I was apologizing, and they had to be getting sick of that.

Snow squalls funneled through the valley for much of the following day. The clouds were low and gray, and most of the other climbers stayed in their ledges, but we got after it. Conrad was always up before daylight. He also called home each morning and night. (Conrad married Alex Lowe’s widow, Jenni, in 2001, becoming a father to their three boys.) The eighth anniversary of Alex’s death happened while we were on the wall, and we talked about it. The avalanche that took Alex’s life had nearly killed Conrad, too, and was about as life-changing an event as one could possibly sustain. I marveled at the way Conrad could still get himself up for some difficult and dicey leadsā€”the way he did on that stormy morningā€”and exude calm competence. Jimmy thought it was a perfectly normal way to start a day. “Adrenaline, the breakfast of champions,” he shrugged.

I was also impressed as hell by Ivo. He led the Central Latitudes pitch on that day, a very challenging traverse, and he did it smoothly, quickly, and with great skill. “You need to get it done, because no one can get you out of there,” he said, always the philosopher. Ivo turned out to be great at working with my limitations, too, which makes senseā€”as he casually revealed one day, he’s a fully certified mountain guide, trained in Chamonix and Bulgaria. I was in need of guidance. Not only was I a client; I was a bad client.

I had a small breakthrough on day three… To follow Ivo’s Latitudes pitch, I needed to go sideways on the wall, something I’d come to dread. The preferred method was for me to rappel from the belay station, descending to a V on the rope, well below the station I’d left and the one I wanted to get to. As usual, I was worried that my Grigri (the lowering device) would fail, if the rope didn’t break first or pull out the anchors it was attached to. I was doing the best I could to climb out of the V when I learned to jugā€”finally. I got it.

I was encouraged when I clambered onto a rock ledge to join Ivo, whom Conrad had begun calling the Bulgarian Wheelbarrow Artist, in reference to how he might consider carting his truly massive balls from one place to another.

After a largely sleepless, shivering night on the portaledge, better weather arrived on day four, and it was a little easier to watch the peregrine falcons flying about the face and to peer from side to side to see how the other humans on the wall were doing.

There were more breakthrough moments, like that sunny morning on day four when I finally decided to trust the rope, stepped off the ledge, swung 20 feet straight out from the cliff, and enjoyed it. I twirled out there in space, took pictures of my partners, and let out a big stone-monkey yell (as everybody else had been doing for days).

The loads became lighter eventually, too, and I reached a point where I was able to help with the hauling. I began laughing moreā€”at Ivo’s stories of learning to skydive and BASE-jump, both of which, he said, are “better than sex.” I rolled my eyes at Jimmy’s romantic quandaries. (People once ranked him as one of the most eligible bachelors, and he’s done slightly more stuff than Indiana Jones, yet he still worries he might get shut down asking someone out for a coffee.) I laughed at Conrad’s talent for devising novel climbing strategies and inventing phrases. Team Wheelbarrow was getting the job done.

There was no shortage of drama playing out around us. Some distance east of us, Ivo’s friend Ammon McNeely had taken a big whipper on the route he was rope-soloing. “He must have botched the sequence,” Ivo said. For a few moments, Ammon seemed to be unconscious and was hanging from his ropes. A rescue operation got going, and a helicopter flew into the meadow to stand by. Ammon managed, through yells and arm signals, to indicate that he didn’t need a rescue. Meanwhile, climbers Alex and Thomas Huber busted the speed record on the classic and well-traveled Nose routeā€”twiceā€”while we were on the wall, watching. They climbed it in two hours, 45 minutes, 45 seconds.

“You’ll love this next partā€”it’s super-sick!”… The boys were taking good care of me. I’d make it to a belay station with my teeth clenched and muscles quivering and get a big slap on the back from Conrad. He’d ask, in all seriousness, “Dave, do you want to lead the next pitch?” Jimmy would see me nervously looking around, lock eyes with mine, and say, “Dude, you’re doing it!” Ivo made sure I knew how to back up my systems, and each small success was greeted with “Man, that’s super-sweet!”

The final day was mostly just fun and hard as hell at the same time. By then we had big views of Half Dome and the rest of the world. I spent hours gazing at the bulk of Cathedral and Sentinel rocks, across the way. I was still apologizing all the time, but I was also enjoying the heck out of the place.

We phoned legendary climber Jim Bridwell on our sixth and final night and enjoyed hearing what it had been like for him to put up the Pacific Ocean route in 1975. Bridwell said he’d never repeated the climb, preferring to hold on to his original impressions of its challenges. The four of us crowded in to hear his exact recollections.

When I topped out on day seven, I didn’t spend a lot of time at the edge peering back down, nor did I do anything stupid like kiss the flat ground or curse the wall. I was happy to put things down without clipping them in, to take off my climbing harness and my grubby shirt and feel the sun on my rippling and huge muscles. Well, they weren’t huge, but they felt like they were.

I slowly and carefully rappelled down the East Ledges descent route, carrying a big load. Conrad waited to make sure I was OK, just like in 1999, when he and I came down the Northeast Ridge from Everest’s summit together in a snow cloud. Some things never change.

Now I’m home… And doing the reading I should’ve done before the climb. In the guidebook Yosemite Big Walls, I found a quote from Royal Robbins, perhaps the greatest of all big-wall pioneers. In reference to climbing a rope in 1961 on an overhanging El Cap pitch a few thousand feet in the air, Robbins said he was so scared that “I could barely suppress a shout of terror!” He went up anyway. In my own awkward fashion, so did I, and I’ll treasure that barely suppressed shout forever.

Dave’s Climbing Glossary

EL CAPITAN or EL CAP or THE CAPTAIN (n): a hulking 3,000-foot granite cliff in Yosemite National Park, California. Most people consider it “pretty” and find it challenging to fit the whole darn thing in a photograph. Big-wall climbing was, in large part, invented on this mountain. There are more than 50 established routes to the top.

PROTECTION or PRO or PIECE (n): nuts, bolts, cams, pitons, and any other metal bits that attached us to the wall. Some pro is “time-bomb pro” and fine for years, until, as Ivo says, “the day Jesus says this bolt is going to go off and you’re going for a sick ride.” Ivo says Buddha and Allah are just as good at dishing out sick rides.

BELAY (v): to protect another climber by minding the rope that person is attached to. BELAY (n): the various stations between climbing pitches that are used to belay from, haul from, jug from, and sleep at. Keeping all the rigging at a belay organized is a neat and intricate cat’s cradle. I tended more to the cat-with-a-ball-of-yarn model, tangling every rope I touched.

HAUL BAG (n): a heavy bag that contains all your water, food, and clothing and is never all that easy to get into when you want those things.

AIRMAIL (v): to drop something down the wall accidentally. As in “Jimmy had a knee pad come loose one day and airmailed it down the cliff.” Ivo kindly airmailed Jimmy’s other one for him shortly afterwards so that somebody down below could have a pair.

SANDBAG (v): to entertain oneself by downplaying the difficulties of a particular challenge to a gullible friend or rival. See also: Dave Hahn on El Capitan.

The post Aces High appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

I left my clients on top of Mount Everest. They wanted it that way. Truth be told, Kit DesLauriers, her husband, Rob, and their great friend Jimmy Chin barely even noticed when I left. They were busy laughing, crying, taking pictures, hugging, and pointing out the far corners of the world visible at 11 a.m. on October 18, 2006, along with our crack team of nine climbing Sherpas, who'd heroically fixed every inch of the route up from our high camp at the South Col. I'd have preferred to stay and celebrate, too. Except these weren't just any clients. Each of the three was an elite athlete (Jimmy and Kit are both members of The North Face's professional team). And we had a deal: If they climbed to the top strong and responsibly, I'd let them find their own way down…on skis.

Mount Everest is not yet popular with skiers. Go figure. Perhaps it's because one must climb up first. Or the small matter that skiing Everest is life-threatening on the best day. It has been skied before. Among others, a few notable attempts include Japanese speed skier Yuichiro Miura, who in 1970 set his sights on the Lhotse Face, taking off from 26,000 feet at the South Col with a parachute, barely surviving a several-thousand-foot tumble and an Evel Knievel like disregard for fractures. More recently, Slovenian Davo Karnicar is the only person in history to have actually skied continuously from the summit to Base Camp, which he did in less than five hours in 2000. Frenchman Marco Siffredi snowboarded the Great Couloir, on the north side, in 2001, before returning to the mountain and disappearing in the effort to board the Hornbein Couloir in 2002; he was 23.

Kit, 37, the world freeskiing champion in 2004 and 2005, had her eyes on two prizes. No woman had skied Mount Everest, and no person of either gender had yet skied from each of the Seven Summits, the highest points on each continent. Everest was to be Kit's seventh. Rob, 41, was tagging along to film his wife's accomplishment, but with an illustrious career in ultra-steep skiing, he couldn't easily resist the temptation to make his own turns at 29,000 feet. Jimmy, 33, is well known for his mountain photography and had been to Everest's summit in May 2004, so, as a Jackson Hole neighbor of Rob and Kit, he was an obvious choice to get still shots. He meant to do that while skiing himself. Wally Berg, the leader of our expedition, was ably directing these efforts from Base Camp. I was the team's one-way climbing guide.

Fortuitously, my other job, when not guiding, happens to be ski patrolling, and as I climbed down from the summit toward the Hillary Step, at 28,800 feet, I rationalized that I'd simply switched hats up there on Everest. I would set up a belay anchor and position myself above the Step, then I would declare it “open” terrain for my skiers. We'd agreed that as I got my anchors set, they would ski down to me from the summit. I'd try to make sure they didn't go out of boundsā€”for instance, into Tibet, three inches to the left and 9,000 vertical feet down the Kangshung Face.

After ten minutes, Kit skidded to a stop just above me. Having descended the summit ridge on skis, she'd already accomplished the feat of skiing from the tops of the Seven Summits. I was impressed, but I was still worried as hell. I didn't know how she, Rob, or Jimmy would manage the next section, the Hillary Step, a 40-foot vertical rock face.

Rob showed up a moment later and very confidently tied into my belay line. His intention was to descend and traverse the Step while I safeguarded him from above. There were problems with this plan, aside from the obvious one, which involved the snow's reluctance to hang around on rock faces. Within just a few minutes, Rob was down and around a corner and I had no communication with him.This wasn't from lack of trying. We had belay signals, rope tugs, radios, and yelling at the top of our lungs as possibilities, but none seemed worth all that much when time dragged on and Rob's weight didn't come off the rope. Kit began to edge down toward the blind corner, and a few members of our Sherpa team made their way down to see what had happened to Rob. He'd made nearly all the very difficult moves needed, but then he'd run out of oxygen, meaning the last of those moves was nearly impossible with skis on. He was stuck.

Kit began to take off her skis in an awkward and steep spot. She got her crampons on and moved around the corner, putting her out of touch with me. Word got to me that Rob was out of oxygen. I wasn't terribly worried; I could see the big pile of full oxygen bottles our team had stashed about 250 feet away at the South Summit. But I was unaware of the strenuous and contorted position he was in on the Step. Eventually, the rope went slack and I pulled it back up. Jimmy was anxious to get tied in, and he immediately slid to the corner on his skis and disappeared.

Time stretched on, with only a tug here and a yell there. The rest of our climbing team clambered down past me, and I was relieved to see first Kit and later Rob making their way on foot to the South Summit oxygen depot. After I'd been in my cold belay seat for two hours, the rope finally came up free. As I deconstructed the anchors, I watched Jimmy ski across the wild traverse to the South Summit. (Jimmy had also run out of O's on the lower part of the Step and had nearly gotten flipped when his skis caught on old ropes.) I was last and now in danger of being left behind in the gathering snowstorm. I saw the gang holding skis up on top of the South Summit, and I reached for my radio. I asked them to consider that the window of opportunity for skiing was closing with the weather, the late hour, and the unexpected difficulties that the Hillary Step had presented. They accepted my cautious thinking, adding their own observations of avalanche potential. Their intention had been to ski every inch of the mountain from the summit, but life in the stratosphere requires flexibility, and their biggest goal still remainedā€”skiing the steep and slick Lhotse Face the next morning. Our team cramponed down to high camp, at the South Col, in snow and wind, carrying skis and “arm-rappelling” the steep fixed ropes. Rob and Jimmy couldn't resist strapping on the boards for the last few hundred vertical feet into camp. I had to admit that this was a beautiful and inspiring thing to see in a late-afternoon burst of sunshine at 26,000 feet.

The wind came back upĢżin the night, and at six in the morning on the 19th of October, it was tough to be enthusiastic about anything. But Kit woke up eager to ski and radioed over to the tent I was sharing with Jimmy to see how quickly he could be ready. Their goal for the day: to ski nearly 5,000 feet down the 50ā€“degree Lhotse Face. It didn't seem to bother them that the face was a bulletproof sheet of unforgiving white and blue ice any vaguely pleasant soft snow had been sandblasted off by wind and avalanches and that there would be no way to retreat once they'd made their commitment to it. One blown edge, one missed pole plant, and they'd tumble thousands of feet to their deaths.

At 27,940 feet, Lhotse is the world's fourthā€“highest mountain (one climbs a big chunk of it to get up Everest), and the face is a sick and mean aspect of it. Fifty degrees is about 15 degrees steeper than what can normally be found on doubleā€“blackā€“diamond ski runs in North America. Foreboding and sculpted clouds capped both Everest and Lhotse, but Rob, Kit, and Jimmy suited up, donned oxygen setups, and stepped directly from the tents into their skis. We shook hands and hugged, and they schussed away. I began my tedious descent, sans oxygen, along the ropes and tried to keep an eye on my friends. They quickly were several thousand feet below and to one side of me. From time to time I'd stop to breathe and turn my head to count the three dots on skis. At one point, my eyes played tricks on me and I thought I saw one of the dots disappear. My heart rate accelerated instantly to unworkable levels and I had to pause, taking another wrap of the rope around my arm in order to make sure all was still OK.

I've always believed that one should approach climbing objectives with the utmost humility, and I've grown to fear people who have no fear. My time with Jimmy, Rob, and Kit had convinced me that they had rational and legitimate fears, but they were smart about not indulging them. And they were equal to the challenges they faced. They were also skiing as a team, making decisions for a group and not just an individual. Those kinds of decisions, I came to see, are made more carefully, especially when you're friends, especially when you're married. The trust between them was essential. An hour and a half after leaving the col, I could see them moving across the final obstacle at the base of the face: the bergschrund, or last crevasse. Then I could see them hugging.

I caught them a few hours later at Camp II, where our cook, Ang Pemba, had just treated them to heaping plates of fried rice. Their turns on the face had all been deadly serious, and they described surface conditions that an ice ax could barely penetrate. Now, at 21,000 feet and relative safety again, they were almost giddy about their accomplishmentā€”and that they'd lived through it. Kit told me of the mantra she'd developed for the day: “Like your life depends upon it.” She'd repeated this during each turn on the face. When I heard Jimmy relate that he hadn't gotten all the pictures he'd wanted because he'd been too scared to put both hands on his camera and bring it up to his eyes (try this at home on a pitched roof after an ice storm and you'll realize the difficulty), I was a bit startled. Jimmy doesn't scare easily, and he doesn't miss many photos. Rob told me that at one point halfway down the face, he'd skied up to Kit, who'd related matter-of-factly that she was scared and didn't want to die. Rob said that he'd replied, “That's good,” and then they both skied on down. Rob took Kit's revelation to have been just right: A sane and functional human on skis in the middle of the Lhotse Face should be both scared and not willing to die. And a husband, upon hearing that his wife is thinking correctly, should then concentrate on his own turns and his own unwillingness to die. That was, of course, the mindset required to survive.

Skiing from Camp II, they dropped 1,000 feet through the Western Cwm. They had planned to ski through and alongside the dangerous Khumbu Icefall to Base Camp. I worried again, not because I didn't think they could do it but because worrying is what I do best. But a snowstorm was making it impossible to see, so they took off their skis and hoofed it to Base Camp. There we all eventually met up and toasted with glasses of very cold champagne to unlikely success, safety, and the good things that can happen when you have the right mix of fear and confidence. They'd skied more than 6,000 technically challenging feet (about half the vertical from the summit to Base Camp).

Some will say that this wasn't a “complete” ski descent, but I'd advise those people to try it themselves, after climbing the mountain in the snowy post-monsoon season, when summits are rare. Others may ask why anyone would want to ski the mountain in the first place. Jimmy put it best when he said, “You're hanging it out there, but that's what we do. We're ski mountaineers. Sounds completely insane, I'm sure, but we're very calculated about it.”

With her goal accomplished, when she returns to Jackson Hole Kit has set her sights on starting a nonprofit called the Balance Institute, providing support to people “who follow their hearts to crazy places like skiing off the summit of Mount Everest.”

“But I won't ever hang up my skis,” she said. “I plan to ski till I'm 100.”

The post The No Fall Zone appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

(Nay)
I WAS IN A SEATTLE RESTAURANT a few years back when someone shouted, “Hands up, all who’ve climbed Everest!” Half the people at my table saluted, as did several patrons, the cook, and a busboy. With 1,922 ascents by the end of 2003, Everest is no longer an exclusive club. For the past six years, there’s been an average of 164 ascents per year; last spring, there were a record 264. On a single day last May, a whopping 118 people stood on the summit. Photos show a conga line of Gore-Tex’d, feather-suited Michelin men and women clipped to a rope, plodding in lockstep up the final ridge. That’s not climbing; it’s an aberration.


Everest climbing as it’s done today is so different from the rest of mountaineering that it’s become a subsport—call it Everesting. Everesting obviously isn’t about the solitude of the high peaks. Nor is it about breaking new ground: No routes have been established since 1996, when a Russian team blazed a trail up the northern side of the Northeast Ridge. The North Ridge and the Southeast Ridge are rope-strung highways, the perilous Khumbu Icefall tamed with ladders and ropes conveniently installed by Sherpas. The summit has become a stage for practically every special-interest group. It’s been said, lightheartedly, that the last summit achievement will involve that which is typically confined to the bedroom, between consenting adults.


I wouldn’t deny anyone their personal sense of fulfillment on the world’s highest point—it’s definitely a cool place to be—but I do think we’ve gone nuts over this peak. Everesting is overrated and overpriced, and it overuses the mountain.


Since I’m fool enough to thumb my nose at the Big E and incur the wrath of its fans, I should come clean on my prior relationship with the place. Herewith, I confess that I climbed Everest’s North Ridge, with oxygen, in 1995 to make the 736th ascent, and that I pulled on any old bit of rope or ladder rung to reach the summit. I also confess that I enjoyed the climb, and that I still cherish the sense of cosmic smallness that accompanied the view from the top. I admit that I dumped my oxygen bottle on the mountain and pilfered some tiny rocks near the summit.


But even Everest lovers have to question the media’s unrelenting fascination with the mountain, when its newsworthiness is completely played out. Everest isn’t the hardest, the most beautiful, or the only mountain, yet it gets all the attention, and the bloviated coverage lavished on it leads to a lopsided view of mountaineering. This creates a strange, unjust state of affairs for those talented black-belt alpinists who spend their lives making visionary ascents in the great ranges, on mountains other than Everest—K2, Lhotse, Annapurna, Gasherbrum IV, the Ogre, or the big walls of the Trango Towers. Those climbers get little recognition, while any Joe Blow who paid his way onto a guided ascent of Everest appears on talk shows, writes books, and becomes a motivational speaker.


EVEREST WASN’T ALWAYS OVERRATED. Not in 1924, when George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were pushing to the bitter end on the North Ridge in tweed jackets and hobnail boots, or in 1952, when the Swiss missed the summit by a maddening 825 feet, or in 1953, when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay finally, as Hillary put it, “knocked the bastard off.” Try telling the three Chinese and Tibetan climbers who made the first ascent of the North Ridge, in 1960, that Everest is overrated, and Qu Yinhua will show you his amputated toes and tell you how he whipped off his boots and thick socks, above 28,000 feet, to climb the rocky Second Step.


Everest really meant something back then. In this laboratory for high-altitude alpinism, climbers proved that they could survive an ascent without oxygen (Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler, in May 1978, via the Southeast Ridge), and that the peak could be climbed in winter (Poland’s Leszek Cichy and Krzysztof Wielicki, in February 1980, via the same route). But then, by the end of the eighties, Everest was climbed out. By 1992, when the first paying clients arrived and the mountain morphed from climbing challenge to $65,000-a-pop commercial enterprise, its mystique was lost. Examining the tables compiled by Himalayan chroniclers Xavier Eguskitza and Eberhard Jurgalski on the Web site ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶųStats.com, I calculated that about 1,000 ascents, roughly half of the total, have been made by clients and their guides. I’ve seen at least one client who’d never worn crampons make it up the North Ridge.


Just because I take the snide side in this argument doesn’t mean that I’m losing sleep because the door to a once rarefied adventure has opened to the masses. Nor do I begrudge the jobs that Everesting has created for Sherpas, guides, cooks, porters, and writers like me. What I am suggesting is that Everest could be saved from the insult of this whole debate if climbers would show some imagination and repeat something besides the Southeast and North ridges, the paths of all but a mere 133 Everest ascents. It wouldn’t be overrated to test your mettle on the 1979 Yugoslav Route, on the West Ridge, with its technical rock at 27,000 feet; or to try to match Swiss climbers Jean Troillet and Erhard Loretan’s 43-hour alpine-style speed ascent of the North Face’s Japanese Couloir, in 1986; or to make the second ascent of the terrifyingly steep 1982 Russian Route on the Southwest Pillar. Of course, it would mean embracing risk: The four Slovaks who repeated the 1975 British Route on the Southwest Face in 1988 were so exhausted that they couldn’t climb down. They’re still up there, somewhere.


That sort of brinkmanship isn’t for everyone, but the paucity of takers tells us what kind of Everesters we’ve become. Year in, year out, we retrace paths opened half a century ago, fixing ropes to the same anchors and camping on the same sites as Hillary et al. Long gone are the days when Everest was, well, Everest.

(Yea)

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT, in 1923, George Mallory was asked one too many times why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, and that his famous reply—”Because it is there”—was snapped back in irritation. So now, 81 years later, what part of “Because it is there” is so hard to understand?


I like Mount Everest. I like climbing it (I’ve tried to get up the thing eight times now and have succeeded four), and I like helping other people climb it. I like to talk about climbing Everest, I like to write about it. Catch my modest slide show and you, too, can relive every glorious moment of my expeditions there.


What bothers me is the tendency among climbers who get their own sorry asses up Mount Everest only to spend the rest of their days preaching why you shouldn’t. “It was harder back then,” they say (most things were); “Our motives were purer” (and for the proper fee I can expound on just how pure); and “I was curious about my own limits” (and you should not be).


Admittedly, a day on Everest now can be easier than in days of yore. But on the easiest possible day—clad in space-age fabrics, sucking more oxygen than Jacques Cousteau, with a fixed rope in place—Everest is still hard enough for me. It is no simple thing to climb to 29,035 feet, and it never will be. Even so, mere mortals do make it to the top on occasion, which has fueled a strange debate. Some of the loudest critics are those climbers who believe that only first ascents and extreme difficulty are worth chasing after. But I believe there are other legitimate reasons to step into crampons. For one, I enjoy legendary, old ascents, and I get immense satisfaction tackling the same obstacles my heroes faced.


Yes, there are crowds on Everest most years now, and no doubt there will be again in May. Would I like to be the only person on the sacred Everest playing field? Yes. Is that going to happen? No. You might be surprised to learn that many of the people in the crowds are darn good folks. We’ve heard about the idiots on Everest so many times that it can appear as if unpleasantness is somehow a requirement for getting a permit. But great acts of bravery, kindness, and strength still occur on the mountain. If you can no longer sift through the media production to appreciate that a blind man climbed 29,035 feet above sea level, that’s your loss. If you missed the significance of the first ascent this past spring by an African black man, then maybe your view of climbing has too much to do with rocks and too little to do with humanity.


Many climbers argue that there’s no challenge or mystery left on Everest. But I’d take my hat off to anybody who managed an alpine-style retracing of Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld’s 1963 West Ridge–to–Southeast Ridge traverse. Hell, I’d buy your book, watch your movie, and even purchase merchandise that you’d endorsed. If you then managed to climb a line directly up the North Face without relying on either of the prominent couloirs, I’d nominate you for a Nobel Prize. Put another line up the brutal Southwest Face and nobody will ever kick sand in your face again.


When potential Everest clients come my way, I don’t look down my nose at them. Climbing, to me, has always been about making good personal decisions. Choosing to be guided on Everest is not a violation of any sound climbing principle that I can think of. Even so, there’s widespread concern that people can now “buy their way” to the top. Yes, it takes a lot of money to make the climb, but that’s not new. Besides, in the old days, the money came from taxpayers and charity drives, while it now comes from the participants. Isn’t that an improvement?


I wouldn’t think of convincing you that climbers don’t have some negative impact on Everest’s fragile environment, but it’s important to keep things in perspective. All of us have a negative impact on fragile environments when we choose to visit them. In my experience, the commercial ventures have become caretakers of the mountain, watching out for Sherpas’ rights and hauling trash down. Continued interest in Everest has fueled a viable economy in the Khumbu region of Nepal. Certainly, the climbing Sherpas earn their living in a dangerous and difficult environment, but their compensation has been at the upper limits of what their countrymen could hope to receive.


Some spectators have the bizarre notion that Everest should be some sort of money-free zone, that a board made up of monks, old climbers, and historians should interview potential mountaineers to make sure they’re pure of heart. Although many wealthy people have come to Everest, it might be argued that those patrons who buy their way up may prove to be more effective advocates for preservation than climbers alone ever could. Ultimately, I wonder if the climbing world fully realizes that Everest is not our mountain. It belongs to the people of Nepal and Tibet, after all.

MY FIRST TIME ON EVEREST’S SUMMIT, in May 1994, didn’t feel either crowded or easy. I was alone in a snowstorm, destined to run out of oxygen and daylight before I could make progress downward. My next time up there, in 1999, wasn’t crowded, easy, or even pleasant, come to think of it. I was badly anemic and not enjoying having run out of oxygen. By the spring of 2000, I was back on top, alone in a snowstorm again.


In May 2003, my commercial team sat in tents at 26,000 feet on the 50th anniversary of Hillary and Norgay’s summit day. After two months of trying, we acknowledged that continued high winds would prevent a summit attempt. But late that evening, the winds stopped, and we began to climb. A spectacular sunrise gave a hint of warmth and a calm summit. By 7:45 a.m., my “crowd” of eight—four Sherpas, two guides, and two guided climbers—began gathering on top. I took great pride in showing my team this special place. Through tears of joy, we gazed out on a thousand beautiful peaks. Had Mallory seen such a view, “Because it is there” would surely have been modified to include profanity. When all is said and done, you can’t beat the view from the top of the world.

Gear of the Year

Sport Racks and Luggage

Sport Racks


Bauer Vehicle Gear Back Road II Pro $349

WHY IT RULES: Being on top isn’t always best. Here’s a rugged, functional, and—dare we say it?—elegant rack that totes gear behind your vehicle. Ā» Finally, a hitch-mounted rack that doesn’t ask you to correctly sequence a half-dozen knobs when you want to get inside your car. Forget a water bottle in back? Spin a single lock—I did it with my foot—and watch the slightly angled, gas-assisted bar politely swing out of your way. Ā» The two bike arms have soft rubber cradles and locking tabs on either side, making it easy to secure any top tube. They also accommodate funky frame shapes. Ā» Once it’s loaded, an anti- wobble arm keeps up to four bikes from clanging around on rough roads. Ā» The Back Road packs in loads of features—like an integrated cable-lock system—and the simple design works incredibly well. HMMM…The bike cradles are a bit narrow; be tender when loading steeds with dangling cables.


Luggage


Red Oxx PR5 Safari-Beano’s Bag $175
WHY IT RULES: The Red Oxx guys, former military parachute riggers, are as intolerant of weakness in their duffels as they were with their chutes. To wit, this 2,400-cubic-inch bag is built to extreme specs—the fabric is 1,000-denier Cordura, the titanium of the bag biz. The oversize webbed-nylon handles aren’t just double- box-stitched to the bag; they wrap around it. Overkill? Probably. But I’ll take it. Ā» The zippers are the industry’s biggest, hence strongest. And the swiveling shoulder-strap clips—plus the V-rings they snap into—are stainless-steel sailboat hardware. Ā» The contact section of the shoulder strap is slip-proof injection-molded rubber. Ā» Beano is the nickname of an Oxx owner’s neighbor in Billings, Montana, who loves pockets, so this bag has ’em on all four sides of the main hold. HMMM…Though I wouldn’t trade it for plastic, that boat hardware is pretty clanky.

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