In August 2000, a year before the September 11 attacks, American climbers Tommy Caldwell, Beth Rodden, Jason Singer, and John Dickey were kidnapped at gunpoint by Islamic militants while climbing Kyrgyzstan’s famous Yellow Wall. Greg Child told their story in the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř article “Fear of Falling” and in the book . In a new edition published this month by Mountaineers Books, Child looks back on what, in retrospect, was the beginning of a dangerous new era in adventure.

It took me a few years to figure out that the story I had really told when I wrote Over the Edge was a story about the loss of innocence. The incident 14 years ago in which four young Americans stumbled into a terrifying world of violent extremism, and later survived a tumultuous escape, was a pivotal episode in their lives from which they emerged intact—yet changed. Thirteen months later, the United States suffered its own collective loss of innocence with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Prior to 9/11 we lived in a comparatively blissful state. I recall optimism, tolerance, and a sense of prosperity in the United States and Europe. American travelers, and most everyone else, hopped on international flights (with our shoes on our feet) and crossed most borders with ease. There was a sense that we were welcome (nearly) everywhere. When the hijacked jets destroyed the World Trade Center, we were stunned not only by the loss of life but also by our failure to have seen it coming. The vast majority of us didn’t realize the breadth and depth of the gulf that had grown between two world cultures.

The violent incursion into Kyrgyzstan by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and the way it swept the young climbers into its suicidal procession, somewhat presaged the post-9/11 era of seemingly nonstop wars. While the United States began scaling back its involvement in 2011, in September 2014 a new campaign began, in Syria and Iraq, against the Islamic State (also called ISIL and ISIS).

These wars, old and new, are being fought against people not unlike those members of the IMU whom I wrote about in Over the Edge. We understand such people no better than in 2001, nor do they understand us. The gap between our two worlds is the story of our times.

[quote]It took longer than I expected for terrorists to again target climbers, but when they did, the brutality was shocking.[/quote]

Reexamining the issues I wrote about back then has been daunting because the backstory to the settings in Over the Edge concerns a labyrinth of struggles embroiling the Islamic world.

The IMU itself is a perfect example. As the U.S.-led coalition booted the Taliban from power after the 9/11 attacks, it was reported that the IMU—battle-hardened troops training and sheltering in Afghanistan, whose leadership was beholden to bin Laden—were bombed out of existence by U.S. air raids. That’s what I reported in Over the Edge. It turns out, however, that while plenty of IMU, Taliban, and other bin Laden loyalists died or were captured, many others escaped as well, fleeing by truck, foot, and plane across the Afghan border into Pakistan.

Just last June, ten allegedly Uzbek militants in Karachi, Pakistan, and killed 29 Pakistani soldiers and civilians. All the militants were killed. On a website, the IMU claimed responsibility for the attack and posted photos of their “martyrs” wearing black turbans and holding AK-47s. The IMU’s resurgence shows that these armies of darkness are like the Hydra, sprouting two new heads whenever one is chopped off.

I always believed that what happened to the four climbers in Over the Edge would be repeated in some way, in some other mountain outpost where climbers, in their base camps below the mountains, are sitting ducks. It took longer than I expected for terrorists to again target climbers, but when they did, the brutality was shocking.

It happened during the night of June 22, 2013, at the base camp of a multinational team attempting to climb Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain in the world, located in northern Pakistan. This particular base camp, under the west side of the mountain, is at the end of the Diamir Valley, reached by 15 miles of trail accessible only by foot or packhorse. The base camp, at an altitude of 13,000 feet, is a spectacular place, the destination of many Western mountaineers and trekkers; approximately 50 foreign climbers were up on Nanga Parbat on various routes at the time of this incident.

On that night, 16 young men armed with automatic rifles and knives—allegedly wearing uniforms of the local police, the Gilgit Scouts—suddenly appeared at the international camp. Yelling that they were Taliban and Al Qaeda and that everyone should surrender, they swarmed through the campsite, ordered the occupants out of their tents, and tied their hands. Other militants collected passports and money from the tents. Whenever they found satellite phones, radios, or laptops, they smashed them with rocks.

Only one foreigner would survive: a Chinese mountaineer and former policeman named Zhang Jingchuan, who freed his wrists and ran into the night amid a hail of gunfire. The several other survivors were Pakistani staff members of the expedition who persuaded the militants they were of the Ismaili sect, with whom the militants—Sunnis—had no blood quarrel. Among the Pakistanis was a climber named Sher Khan, who provided most of the information later reported by the media.

According to his account, after everyone in camp had been rounded up, the militants separated the foreigners from the Pakistanis, forced everyone to kneel, and shot the foreigners from behind. Ten climbers were murdered, including a Chinese national with U.S. citizenship, Honglu Chen, and others from China, Ukraine, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Nepal. The 11th murder was of Pakistani cook Ali Hussain; although a Muslim, he apparently was killed for being Shiite.

[quote]Climbers always believe the worst will happen to someone else. That’s how they mentally survive.[/quote]

Sher Khan told the media that the killers left shouting, “God is great,” “Long live Islam,” and “Long live Osama bin Laden,” and that one said, “This is revenge for Sheikh bin Laden.” When Zhang Jingchuan sensed that the attackers had left, he crept back to camp, found a working satellite phone, and raised the alarm. Approximately nine hours later, a Pakistani military helicopter and soldiers arrived. By then, the militants had disappeared.

After the attack, two related extremist groups—Jundallah and Tehriki-Taliban (TTP, or Pakistani Taliban)—jointly claimed responsibility. Numerous suspects were arrested in a police dragnet, but most have been cleared and released. To date, it’s unclear if anyone connected with the murders has been caught.

Who are these people who would slaughter unarmed, defenseless foreign visitors at a base camp in the mountains? Where did they come from? In the published by Sher Khan on National Geographic’s website, he said the militants variously spoke three languages: Urdu, the Pakistani national tongue; Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan; and Shina, the local dialect. This might hint of a Taliban leadership with local recruits.

The mountains and valleys between Pakistan and Afghanistan are wild country, and the Taliban have been there ever since the United States pushed them out of Afghanistan in 2001. More extremists flocked to the area after the Pakistan army started cracking down on them in the Swat area, in 2009; millions of refugees have fled the fighting during these campaigns.

The factions involved in the conflict make for a confusing hall of mirrors in which extremists can be allies of the Pakistan government one day (when they are fighting the Indian army in Kashmir) and enemies on another day (when they jeopardize Pakistani interests). At this point in history, the so-called War on Terror has shifted from Afghan soil to Pakistani soil, and instead of U.S. and NATO boots on the ground, U.S. special ops and drones prowl the valleys searching for terrorists on kill lists, while Pakistani troops launch major offensives.

How does this affect those who are drawn to the mountains to climb, to explore, and to soak in their beauty?

Climbers always believe the worst will happen to someone else. That’s how they mentally survive.

“That avalanche?” they wonder. “No, it’s not for me.”

“That storm on the horizon? I’ll get down the mountain before it hits,” they reason.

Climbers were back at Nanga Parbat in the season of 2014, albeit with promises of added security from Pakistan. The overall numbers of climbers and trekkers were, however, lower. Local people in the Diamir area, who spoke against the attacks soon after they occurred, were feeling the loss of the usually dependable, well-paid work that tourism provides. Eventually foreigners will start returning en masse, but who can say where or when there will be another strike like the one at Nanga Parbat? Recent history suggests that it is just a matter of time.

Greg Child is the author of , from which this article is excerpted (Mountaineers Books, $16.95.) A longtime contributor to şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, he lives in Castle Valley, Utah.

The post When Rock Climbing and Terrorism Collide appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

The first of two partially intact corpses showed up early that day, when Pakistani guides and Spanish climbers on the 12-square-mile glacier came across a broken, desiccated body. The leg bones were wrapped in brightly colored wind pants; on one skeletal foot was a sun-bleached Koflach plastic boot. Judging by the clothing’s vintage, the guides guessed the body was that of a Korean expeditioner lost in 1993.

Later, three Pakistani guides from the nearby village of Bunar Das made another grim find: a headless corpse, consisting of a rib cage, a strip of spine, shoulder bones, tufts of hair, and scraps of clothing. The remains were scattered amid gray glacial rubble, near the foot of a dirt-streaked ice cliff running with meltwater. At first the guides—Abdul Mateen, Faz al-Haq, and Abdul Manan—thought the body could have belonged to any number of men lost on the western flank in recent years. But when the talus yielded a leather boot entombing a wool-socked foot, they knew they’d probably stumbled across an older tragedy, since plastic footwear had replaced leather after 1980.

This, they realized, could be the body of GĂĽnther Messner.

GĂĽnther, the younger brother of Reinhold Messner—the 61-year-old Tyrolean climber widely considered history’s greatest mountaineer—was by far the most famous MIA on Nanga Parbat, and, a few years back, Reinhold had specifically asked the Pakistani guides to search for him. GĂĽnther, 24, had gone missing in June 1970, when he and Reinhold—then 25—made a daring first ascent on the south flank of the peak via the 14,763-foot Rupal Face, one of the tallest alpine walls on earth.

The feat was a stunning success for two young climbers on their first Himalayan expedition, but only Reinhold lived to tell about it. As he described the tragedy later, GĂĽnther was stricken with altitude sickness soon after they summited, on June 27, and was too debilitated to backtrack down the sheer ascent route, particularly since they had no rope. After a sub-zero bivouac, followed the next day by a much debated episode in which Reinhold shouted to other climbers at a distance but somehow didn’t or couldn’t convey GĂĽnther’s plight, the brothers apparently decided that their only chance of survival was to pick their way down the unfamiliar but less steep Diamir Face. If they succeeded, they would score another coup in the process: the first complete traverse of Nanga Parbat.

According to Reinhold, near the end of the descent he’d pushed an hour or so ahead of his brother, believing the worst was behind them. Then, out of view—in an area toward the bottom of the Diamir Face—GĂĽnther disappeared in what Reinhold assumed was an avalanche. He could find no trace of GĂĽnther. Grief-stricken, Reinhold staggered on for the next two days before finally making it to safety in the Diamir Valley.

In the aftermath, the damage to Reinhold’s body and soul was immense. He lost seven toes and several fingertips to frostbite. Worse, he’d lost his beloved brother and the climbing partner he once called his life’s “accomplice.”

“GĂĽnther!” he’d shouted endlessly as he searched for him on Nanga Parbat. “It was the anguished cry of a lost animal,” he wrote later. “I had suffered. I was badly frostbitten. I had died.”

IF THE TALE HAD ENDED THERE, the potential discovery of GĂĽnther’s body might not have attracted attention outside Messner’s immediate circle. But the Messner saga on Nanga Parbat has always been much more than a survival story. It’s also an enduring mystery, and the seed of a bitter conflict between Messner and several of his teammates on the 18-person German/Austrian expedition that had traveled to Pakistan to scale the mountain.

Within months of the trip’s end, tensions between Messner and expedition leader Karl Maria Herrligkoffer, fed by their conflicting versions of what had really happened to GĂĽnther, erupted into a series of lawsuits. Messner accused Herrligkoffer of manslaughter and “neglected aid” in his brother’s death, and Herrligkoffer accused Messner of libel. The suits’ outcomes didn’t resolve the underlying acrimony, and, after a period of surface calm, the fracas restarted in 2001 when Messner harshly criticized his former teammates in public, saying they hadn’t bothered to search for the missing brothers and, in effect, had failed to render assistance during an emergency. For a mountaineer, whose loyalty to his comrades is supposed to be paramount, it was the worst insult imaginable.

In subsequent months, Messner advanced his attack both in the German media and in The Naked Mountain, his 2002 book about Nanga Parbat, in which he employs a dreamy, semi-hallucinatory style to describe his bewilderment and anguish when his teammates did not come to the rescue.

Angered by the affronts, four Nanga Parbat expedition mates came forward individually with tales of their own. Ending more than 30 years of silence, Hans Saler, Gerhard Baur, JĂĽrgen Winkler, and Max von Kienlin pointed out what they called major discrepancies in Messner’s story. Von Kienlin and Saler theorized that Reinhold had split up with GĂĽnther near the summit in order to pursue an ambitious, premeditated solo traverse. Messner had even discussed the plan beforehand at base camp, Baur told reporters. The Naked Mountain, the teammates said, was Messner’s revisionist attempt to deflect his own guilt.

It got worse. In 2003, Saler’s explosive book Between Light and Shadow: The Messner Tragedy on Nanga Parbat offered several alternative theories about how GĂĽnther could have died—none of them compatible with Messner’s story. That same year, von Kienlin published his own broadside, The Traverse: GĂĽnther Messner’s Death on Nanga Parbat—Expedition Members Break Their Silence.

Saler, now a 58-year-old mountain guide in PucĂłe;n, Chile, and von Kienlin, a 71-year-old baron based in Munich, both speculate that Messner’s historic traverse was no emergency bid to save his brother, and that GĂĽnther never accompanied Reinhold down the Diamir Glacier. Instead, they posit that Reinhold parted ways with his brother near the summit and set off down the Diamir Face solo, while GĂĽnther headed toward the ascent route. GĂĽnther might have died in a high bivouac, or in a fall, they conjecture. Perhaps he wasn’t even suffering from altitude sickness, and chose to climb back down the Rupal Face—alone.

“Behind Reinhold’s story is a big lie,” Saler told me in 2003. The team members had spoken up, von Kienlin added, “to defend the honor of comrades who can no longer defend themselves,” since at least six of the original 18 were dead.

Over time, the controversy has become the most extraordinary fight in modern-day climbing history—a blood feud that has spawned more than a dozen lawsuits, countless attacks and counterattacks, a revenge theory (stemming from a post-expedition love affair between Messner and von Kienlin’s wife), and numerous efforts by Messner to find GĂĽnther and vindicate himself.

“It may take ten years, it may take 30 years, but I must find GĂĽnther’s body,” Messner told me in 2003, by which time he’d already made several trips to Nanga Parbat to scour the terrain. “There is no other chance for me to save my reputation.”

IN JULY 2005, WITH THE HELP of the three Pakistani guides, Messner’s redemptive moment seemed at hand: The men said they had located the skeleton at about 14,110 feet, an hour’s climb above the Diamir base camp, near where Messner had believed GĂĽnther might be.

Quickly, the guides photographed the bones, boot, and clothing and relayed their news to Messner. Within days, the information reached him at Schloss Juval, his 13th-century castle home in the mountains of South Tyrol, in far northern Italy. After seeing a photo, Messner said he had little doubt: The boot and jacket appeared to be GĂĽnther’s.

As it happened, Messner had already arranged to return to Nanga Parbat in August, when he was to lead a group of trekkers around the massif and check in at a village school he was helping build. A German freelance reporter and a photographer had been invited to follow along.

By August 26, with his 14 trekkers and two journalists in tow, Messner was on the south side of Nanga Parbat, a three-day walk from the spot where the bones lay. His mood was both stoic and combative.

“After 35 years of waiting, I can wait a little bit longer,” he told şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř contributing editor Rob Buchanan, who happened to be on assignment nearby and tracked down Messner at Tap Meadow, a grassy spot below the Rupal Face. It was tea time, and Messner was holding court in a mess tent, his fellow trekkers seated around him. He was trim and fit, sporting his trademark wild helmet of hair. “Who could possibly think that I would have abandoned my brother up there?” he scoffed. “No one would do that—that isn’t human behavior!”

On August 29, when he reached the remains, Messner was jubilant. “Es ist mein bruder!” he declared emotionally. The footwear, he said, was the clincher. A brown leather Lowa Triple Boot (named for the twin felt liners placed inside a hefty shell), it was standard equipment for the 1970 team. Moreover, a custom detail—a cord loop near the toe, used to secure crampon straps—matched the way the Messners had rigged their boots.

The next day, the trekking group’s doctor, Munich-based anesthesiologist Rudolf Hipp, harvested tissue samples for the DNA testing Messner would seek in Europe. The boot and foot bones were set aside; Messner would take them home. And then, drawing on the bravado that helped make him the first person to scale all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks—a feat he accomplished without supplemental oxygen—Messner took executive action: He cremated the rest of the remains at the group’s base camp. Whether the body was indeed GĂĽnther’s, or someone else’s, most of it was now gone forever.

Borrowing from Tibetan tradition, Messner and his team built a chorten, a square-shaped stack of stones, as a monument to GĂĽnther. He threw GĂĽnther’s ashes toward the mountain. A few days later, he took the boot and bones onto his flight home.

“When I held in my hands the remains of GĂĽnther, I had a strong feeling, like a phantom pain of an amputee,” Messner told me by phone in September, after he’d returned to Schloss Juval. Already, the bone find was taking on a life of its own, defying simple things like happy endings or peace or even logic, and his voice was urgent and angry.

“Now I have proof. It is over for me,” he said. “The story is clear and finished!”

BUT, INCREDIBLY, THE STORY IS NOT FINISHED, and it probably never will be, since its mysteries seem to defy resolution by any single piece of evidence. Though Messner’s proclamations of victory were reported all over the world—CLIMBER IS CLEARED OF ABANDONING HIS BROTHER, read the August 19 headline in The Times of London—his detractors still have plenty of questions.

“Finding GĂĽnther’s body proves nothing except that he died somewhere on the Diamir Face,” Saler said when I phoned him in Chile. “We still know nothing of how GĂĽnther died.”

Critics were outraged that Messner had assumed the right to burn an unidentified body before conducting conclusive DNA tests. The bones, they argued, could have belonged to any one of the 12 or more climbers lost on Nanga Parbat’s western face.

The DNA test results, it turned out, went Messner’s way. On October 21, Messner held a press conference at the Institute of Legal Medicine, in Innsbruck, Austria. There, molecular biologist Walther Parson and other lab officials told journalists that they’d compared DNA in a recovered toe bone with DNA from Messner and his younger brother Hubert. The bone was “beyond a reasonable doubt” from a Messner brother, he announced. The lab concluded that the bone was 17.8 million times more likely to be from GĂĽnther than not.

Still, that didn’t put an end to the wrangling. The teammates did not question the genetic tests—a wing of Innsbruck Medical University, the Innsbruck lab performs DNA analyses in civil and criminal cases, and is seemingly beyond reproach. But finding GĂĽnther’s body, they reiterated, did not by itself solve anything. GĂĽnther might have perished in a fall near the summit, or in the upper or middle part of the Diamir Face, not toward the bottom, where Messner said he’d last seen his brother. In fact, Saler asserted, if GĂĽnther had died in the lower third of the face, roughly between 14,765 feet and 16,400 feet—as Messner has described the location—Saler believes the remains would have been found much lower than 14,110 feet (where they were reportedly recovered), since glacial movement typically carries bodies a mile or more down a mountain over a period of 35 years.

On one thing, Saler and von Kienlin had to concede defeat: Their theories about GĂĽnther’s death on the Rupal Face hadn’t proved true. But their Rupal conjecture, they maintained, was only one of several possibilities they’d offered, and, in their view, Messner had seized on it in a vast oversimplification that suited his needs.

In a statement last summer, von Kienlin wrote that Messner has “unjustly declared again and again” that “the discovery of the body on the Diamir side is proof that he is right” and that his critics “lied.” “This is an untruth intended to cause confusion and to trick the public.” Or, as he told me by phone: “Reinhold won’t give journalists straight answers.”

In crime novels, straight answers usually surface when someone is confronted with a “gotcha” piece of evidence. But no amount of sleuthing was or is likely to secure proof in this case. There were no witnesses to GĂĽnther’s death, and the last person to see him alive—an exhausted, oxygen-deprived man without food, water, sleeping bag, or shelter on a 26,660-foot Himalayan mountain—was Reinhold Messner himself.

Until the 2005 discovery of GĂĽnther’s body, the only evidence that seemed as if it might be a smoking gun was an alleged—and very controversial—handwritten note described in the 2003 book by von Kienlin, The Traverse. The one-page, penciled “confession,” recorded by von Kienlin and dated July 4, 1970, purports to document a conversation between Messner and von Kienlin in a dusty motel room in Gilgit, Pakistan, just before the anguished Messner returned home. During their talk, Messner supposedly says he was not with GĂĽnther at all after summiting.

“I lost GĂĽnther,” the note allegedly says. “For hours I was up there yelling for him. I don’t know why, but he couldn’t hear me. He was doing very badly. He didn’t make it. Maybe he fell.”

In his book, von Kienlin says he warned Messner that Herrligkoffer, the expedition leader, “won’t take very kindly to [your] decision to go down the other side. Von Kienlin tells Messner that he’ll need a “clear account” about the traverse to protect his parents and his reputation.

Immediately after the May 2003 release of von Kienlin’s and Saler’s books, Messner’s Hamburg-based law firm marched into court. Von Kienlin’s note, Messner claimed, was a fake that was created after the expedition, while Saler’s book was a “fairy story.” By July 2003, Messner won a temporary injunction against Saler’s and von Kienlin’s publishers. The two companies were ordered to make some minor revisions to the tomes: For example, reprints of von Kienlin’s book could not include a reproduction of the disputed note on its back cover. As part of the dispute, von Kienlin was also ordered to hire an independent handwriting expert to assess the note’s legitimacy and age. One expert hired by von Kienlin had concluded in 2004 that there was a 75 percent probability that the document was legitimate, but the court last summer ordered a second analysis. Those results have not yet been announced.

Meanwhile, muddying the waters even more, Messner offered this motive for von Kienlin’s attack: “He lost his wife to me.”

This last part is definitely true. Ursula Demeter and Messner had become enamored in the early seventies, when Messner, on the mend from his toe amputations, was a guest at Schloss Erolzheim, von Kienlin’s castle in southern Germany. After Demeter and von Kienlin divorced, she and Messner were married from 1972 until 1977.

But did von Kienlin still harbor a grudge? In 2004, when I asked him this question at his suburban Munich home, the baron—wearing a hand-painted silk tie and puffing a cigarillo—casually waved off Messner’s jealousy theories. “If I wanted revenge,” he said, “I would have acted on it long ago.”

When I called von Kienlin in September 2005 to ask about the recovery of GĂĽnther’s remains, he had new theories of his own, a clear indication that this battle will not end soon.

“Messner has friends in Pakistan; he’s invested in a school there; they may have helped transport the body,” von Kienlin said, rattling off a laundry list of gripes that became more arcane as he continued. “Why was only one boot recovered in Pakistan?” he asked. “Where is the other boot? Could the recovered boot actually have been Reinhold’s?

“Reinhold says that it’s a dangerous place, where he left his brother—so then why did he leave GĂĽnther there alone?” von Kienlin went on. I could almost see him shaking his head in wonderment. “Reinhold says he’s got his honor back,” he said. “But why, if he left GĂĽnther?”

THE STORY OF GĂśNTHER and Reinhold’s final climb together began with great promise in 1969, when the two Tyrolean brothers were thrilled to accept invitations to join a team tackling the first ascent of the Rupal Face on Nanga Parbat, a mountain known to be a killer.

Reinhold was a hotshot climber in the Alps, determined to make a career out of mountaineering. GĂĽnther—reticent, devoted, and deferential to his older brother—was a talent in his own right. He and Reinhold, part of a family of nine children, had grown up in the Villnöss Valley, in the Italian Dolomites, surrounded by formidable crags and walls that became their training ground—and their escape route from their authoritarian father. They’d bonded after an incident that occurred when Reinhold was 13.

“I found my younger brother GĂĽnther cowering in a dog kennel,” he writes in The Naked Mountain. “Our father, during one of his fits of rage, had thrashed GĂĽnther so badly with the dog whip that he could no longer walk.” From that day forward, the two became climbing partners and allies, united against “the injustices of this world.”

The other members of the expedition included some elite climbers: Saler, Gerhard Baur, Felix Kuen, Peter Scholz, and JĂĽrgen Winkler, a photographer. The suave von Kienlin had offered a cash contribution in return for being included.

Their leader was the taciturn 54-year-old Karl Maria Herrligkoffer, who’d already organized six expeditions to Nanga Parbat. (He’d become obsessed with the mountain after his half brother, climber Willy Merkl, along with eight others, died on the peak in 1934.) He’d also commanded the 1953 trip in which maverick climber Hermann Buhl—defying Herrligkoffer’s demands to return to base camp—made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat, a fast-and-light solo above the high camp on the Rakhiot Face. Herrligkoffer had not been pleased at Buhl’s rebel impulse. Messner, for his part, idolized Buhl’s breakaway spirit.

But on June 26, 1970, no defiance seemed evident. High on the mountain, the Messners and Baur sat at Camp 5, watching for a signal rocket from base camp. If Herrligkoffer fired a blue rocket, it meant good weather, and the team would try to summit on the 27th. If Herrligkoffer fired a red rocket, it meant bad weather, and Reinhold would attempt a Buhl-like solo dash.

Radio Peshawar reported good weather, so Herrligkoffer fired a rocket, but it exploded red, not blue—the first glitch. Seeing this, Messner started out shortly after 2 a.m., without gear, for a quick-and-light attack, to avoid the presumed bad weather. At sunrise, as GĂĽnther and Baur were installing rope to aid Reinhold’s return, GĂĽnther did something impulsive—the second crucial twist in the tragedy.

Baur, now a 58-year-old adventure filmmaker based in Bavaria, recalls how GĂĽnther impatiently dumped a rope and sprinted into the Merkl Couloir, a nearly 2,000-foot ice ribbon, to catch up with his brother. It was the last time anyone but Reinhold saw him.

As Messner describes it, he was at first irritated but eventually glad when a breathless Günther—he had pulled off the amazing feat of climbing the steep face, at altitude, in less than four hours—appeared for the final push. The brothers reached the summit at about dusk, shook hands, then started down. Immediately, Günther began lagging, addled from his fast climb. Günther worried that reversing down the sheer Rupal Face would be dangerous. He suggested a descent via the gentler Diamir Face.

Slowly, Messner came around to the idea, he writes in The Naked Mountain. The Diamir Face looked like the only way out of desperate straits—the brothers had no stove, tents, food, or sleeping bags. (“You think I was so crazy that I would plan to traverse Nanga Parbat without a cooker?” as Messner would ask me later. “I’m not stupid!”)

In Messner’s account, they descended for about 800 feet to the Merkl Gap, a notch in the southwest ridge named in honor of Herrligkoffer’s half brother. From there, Messner could peer down into the Merkl Couloir—the route they’d used that morning. The brothers bivouacked in the gap, in temperatures as low as 40 below zero.

The next morning, Messner recalls, GĂĽnther was delirious. The older brother says he started shouting for help at 6 a.m. About three hours later, he saw Kuen and Scholz in the Merkl Couloir, heading for the summit. Messner says he shouted to Kuen for help and a rope, but it was windy, he was yelling over a cliff, and Kuen was as far as 100 yards away. Kuen and Scholz climbed higher, then Kuen and Messner tried again. GĂĽnther was out of sight; Kuen did not know where he was.

“Are you both OK?” Kuen yelled.

“Yes! Everything’s OK,” Messner replied, in what would become one of the central puzzles in the dispute. Why, Messner’s teammates would challenge later, did he not signal their distress?

It’s impossible to get elaboration from Kuen or Scholz, because both have died, Kuen in 1974 and Scholz in 1972. But according to Messner, the brothers were OK, relatively speaking: They were alive, just badly in need of a rope.

Messner says he then tried to coax Kuen and Scholz to climb up to him, but Kuen judged the steep, corniced wall between them to be suicidal. So, thinking the brothers were indeed OK, Kuen and Scholz continued toward the summit, leaving Messner, by his own account, in utter despair.

WHATEVER HAPPENED, from a climber’s perspective it’s hard to grasp why the Messners, with GĂĽnther so ill, would leave the security of a known route, fixed ropes, camps, and the pending arrival of two teammates on the Rupal Face.

“It’s illogical,” argues Saler. “If you’ve climbed a tall building by the stairs, and you’re exhausted on the roof, you don’t climb down the outside of the building.”

But as Messner puts it, his teammates have been motivated to “invent” stories about him because they’re jealous of his success. They have no right to judge his decisions on Nanga Parbat, he adds, because they weren’t there with him and they have no idea what he was going through. “How can they know the truth?” he asked me in September.

In Messner’s version, he and GĂĽnther bivied on their second night at about 19,685 feet, in a section known as the Mummery Rib. By the next morning, June 29—their third day without shelter or water—GĂĽnther could only stumble slowly along. Messner walked ahead, through the seracs of an avalanche-prone flank. He was more than an hour ahead of GĂĽnther when he reached a spot where glacier water flowed. He sat down to drink and wait for his brother.

Messner says that when GĂĽnther failed to appear, he backtracked up the mountain. Despite a frantic day and night of searching and calling, he found only avalanche debris. Over the next few days, Messner would falter downward until he came across villagers, who helped carry him to a road. On July 3, six days after summiting, he encountered the vehicles of the departing team and was rescued.

GĂĽnther’s death was “where everything ended and everything begins,” Messner writes in The Naked Mountain. For many days after, “I still experienced that feeling of increasing remoteness as a feeling of having been abandoned; as a kind of dissociation. Perhaps this was because one can neither cope with, nor indeed survive, such loneliness without suffering lasting damage.”

THE FEUD STARTED almost at once. In July 1970, Messner was still in an Austrian hospital, with a jar of seven amputated toes on his bedside table, when he complained in a local newspaper article that Herrligkoffer, a doctor, had not properly treated his frostbite.

Herrligkoffer retaliated in an account in a German weekly, in which he described GĂĽnther as “too weak for a summit bid” and lionized Felix Kuen and Peter Scholz, who reached the top the day after the Messners.

As the argument intensified, Messner accused Herrligkoffer of abandoning the two brothers and leaving them for dead; Herrligkoffer said at a public lecture that Messner had “sacrificed his brother to his mountaineering ambition”; and Messner, in 1971, filed the manslaughter and “neglected aid” suit, the first of at least a dozen legal actions that he and his former leader would file against one another.

Messner lost the first case—and all the others. Herrligkoffer, meanwhile, won a libel and breach-of-contract suit against Messner, who’d violated a publishing rights agreement by writing a book about the 1970 expedition, The Red Rocket on Nanga Parbat. As to the libel matter, Messner was forbidden from making claims that Herrligkoffer had failed him and GĂĽnther.

After Herrligkoffer died, in 1991, the battle momentarily quieted, but it roared back to life again on October 4, 2001, when Messner was invited to speak at a gathering to honor the publication of a biography of his old nemesis, Herrligkoffer. In the middle of his remarks, he threw a grenade.

“I am saying today that not going into the Diamir Valley, back then, wasn’t Herrligkoffer’s mistake—it was more a mistake of the other expedition members,” he announced as TV cameras rolled. “Some of them, older than I, didn’t mind one bit that the two Messners never reappeared,” he said. “And that is the tragedy!”

Gerhard Baur and JĂĽrgen Winkler stood in the audience, flabbergasted. Was Reinhold suggesting that the team should have hotfooted it nearly 100 miles to search for the brothers, whose whereabouts were unknown?

“For years the enemy had been Herrligkoffer,” Winkler told me later. “But on that day Messner turned 180 degrees against the team.”

By now, Messner was a celebrity who had parlayed his feats into an empire, becoming a TV personality, corporate endorser, author of some 40 books, and Green Party member of the European Parliament. So when the first major retaliatory salvo came in May 2002—an open letter from Saler excoriating Messner for “truth distorting”—the scrap became big news, recounted everywhere from German newspapers to the Web. “Especially you, Reinhold, are indebted to this team,” for its “absolute loyalty over the last 32 years, but for which you do not have a single good word,” Saler wrote. “I am convinced that your brother would have reached base camp alive if you would have asked for help.”

A year later, Saler and von Kienlin would publish their books and Messner would sue them. Meanwhile, Messner was preparing a retaliatory salvo of his own: In April 2004 he held a press conference in Innsbruck to announce that GĂĽnther’s fibula had been found during a 2000 journey he’d made to the Diamir Glacier. As Messner described it, Hans Peter Eisendle, a friend of his, had discovered the bone not far from where the three Pakistani men would find GĂĽnther’s remains five years later. Messner had taken the fibula home and squirreled it away.

Then, in the autumn of 2003, he suddenly brought it to the Austrian Central DNA Laboratory, in Innsbruck, for testing. “There is no reasonable doubt” that the bone belonged to a Messner brother, biologist Walther Parson told the 2004 press conference as Messner—the epitome of feral elegance—looked on.

“This shows everything I said to be the truth, and I consider the case closed,” Messner told me after the event.

But his critics had not been convinced. They didn’t believe the DNA test results were conclusive. The bone, they added, could have come from anywhere and been dropped on the mountain where Messner claimed to have found it.

Oddly enough, I’d heard the same wild accusation, in reverse, from Messner, who told me he feared that his teammates were combing the Diamir Glacier for bones and offering to pay locals to do the job, too. His detractors’ goal, he said, was to plant them on the Rupal Face.

Hearing this, I imagined an alpine version of Groundhog Day, in which GĂĽnther reemerges from the ice year in and year out, and the accusations of treachery and calumny go on and on.

IN GERMANY, the fight continues. Messner, enraged at the “character assassination campaign” against him, recently announced to German newspaper Der Spiegel that he is teaming up with award-winning Munich film director Joseph Vilsmaier to make a documentary about the “crime” committed against him.

What will his teammates do now?

“We will find this man who is making this film and say, ‘If you really want to make a documentary, you have to show both sides,’ ” says Saler. “And we will show him our side of the story.”

Von Kienlin, for his part, says he refuses to overreact the way he believes Messner has. “He puts himself in such a ridiculous position, he hurts himself,” he said. “Silence is better than to speak such idiocies. Everything is so totally overdone. He wants people to always be sad for him.”

Then von Kienlin paused for a moment. “Maybe I’ll write another book about the things that have happened since The Traverse was written,” he said. “But maybe not. To talk is silver, but silence is gold.”

Meanwhile, at press conferences in Islamabad, Pakistan, on September 4, and at his castle on September 8, Messner held the leather boot aloft, claimed vindication, and referred to his expedition mates as ˛őł¦łó˛ą´Ú˛ő°ěö±č´Ú±đ (literally, “sheep heads”) who were “miserable cheaters, liars, and criminals.”

“What they’ve done to me is just like what the Germans did to the Jews—no difference!” he told Austria’s News magazine this summer. When I called him later, he was still furious. “They took my reputation and spat on it!” he shouted.

Will the discovery of GĂĽnther’s body end your anguish? I asked. Will the feud be over?

“It will never be over,” he replied angrily. Then, in a fast-paced, 40-minute monologue, he railed against journalists for believing the “lies” of his teammates, against von Kienlin’s cunning, and against the German Alpine Club for letting von Kienlin and Saler hold a press conference in their “holy house.”

So why did he burn the remains?

“So nobody can go there and bring these bones over to the other side of the mountain!” he yelled. “That’s why we cremated everything! The crime energy is so strong in these people!”

Messner was midstream when I thought I heard a voice calling in the background. “Ah, I must go now,” he said abruptly. “Bye-bye.” He sounded suddenly convival, then hung up.

The post Es Ist Mein Bruder! appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

There is at least one good reason to go climbing in South Africa, and that’s the stone. The geologic forces that turn coal into diamonds have morphed primeval sands into glassy red quartzite reefs that erupt across the country, offering hundreds of world-class climbing areas—from the remote cliffs of Blouberg and bouldering routes in the Cederberg Mountains north of Cape Town to a massive upsurge that looms over the city itself.

climbing south africa

The new generation. 25-year-old climbing instructor Thulani Mazibuko on the cliffs at Waterval Boven

climbing south africa

Rock country: the author, in the foreground, and Ed February rope up on Touch and Go, a route on Cape Town’s Table Mountain

climbing south africa

Ed February at his home in Cape Town

climbing south africa

Ande de Klerk in Lost World Canyon

climbing south africa

This is Africa: local girls in the township of Waterval Boven

climbing south africa

Between worlds: rock jock Thulani Mazibuko left the Waterval Boven township for a teaching job with Afrikaner climbing instructor Gustav van Rensburg

climbing south africa

Peacekeeper: an armed policeman on the cliffs at Waterval Boven

climbing south africa

Tangerine dream: Gustav van Rensburg climbing at Waterval Boven

Just north of the Cape of Good Hope, a stiff southeaster rips over the summit of Table Mountain, blowing tendrils of fog toward Cape Town’s sunbather-dotted beaches, 3,000 feet below. I’m halfway up a 5.10 route called Triple Indirect, perched on a ledge in the lee of the wind, as my friend Ed February leads the last pitch. Ed is a local and, as one of the country’s most famous climbers, a regular on this crag. Even at 48, his physique is as honed as a featherweight boxer’s. When he shouts that he’s off belay, I clamp my fingers over edges of white stone as solid as kiln-hardened porcelain. The exposure below my toeholds is dizzying. I can see Table Bay, where Dutch ships anchored in 1652 to found Cape Town. Six miles out to sea lies Robben Island, the prison compound where Nelson Mandela was jailed for 27 years. White suburbs hug the coastline, while the black townships of Guguletu and Khayelitsha are a fringe of smoke over the flats.

I pull up and find Ed near the cable-car station at the summit. Though he’s climbed this cliff—a 400-foot quartzite sheet—a score of times, he beams as we coil our ropes. Table Mountain is where South African climbing began, and Ed points along its fortresslike ridge to a distant headwall. “First climbed in 1895,” he says. I try to picture the Victorians who scaled this monolith with hemp ropes back when the motto was “The leader never falls.” And then I try to imagine how Ed could identify with them.

Only a decade ago, Ed wasn’t allowed on many routes in his home country. Under apartheid—the system of racial separation codified by the white Afrikaner minority in 1948—even the outdoors was segregated. And Edmund C. February, doctor of botany, university lecturer, and recipient of the Gold Badge, the highest honor of the elite Mountain Club of South Africa, is black.

UNTIL 1994, WHEN APARTHEID was dismantled, the politically correct way to respond to an invitation to climb in South Africa was to politely decline. Throughout the years of the struggle—from the first state of emergency, in 1960, to Mandela’s release, in 1990, and election as president, in 1994—South Africa was coming apart at the seams. The whole world could see it on the nightly news: an endless video loop of burning townships, white cops in riot gear shooting tear gas and bullets, black protesters returning fire with stones and the occasional AK-47.

Paradoxically, the violence masked a vibrant period of discovery in the South African backcountry. Denied permits to climb in Nepal, Pakistan, India, and most anywhere else because of their government’s racist policies, rock hounds explored their own backyard, extracting first ascents from its unexplored cliffs. Climbers filled the guidebooks with new routes, creating a tightly knit fraternity as fond of beer and practical jokes as any clan of crag rats, except that they happened to be pushing the levels of difficulty into the ether of 5.13. Most were white: There were Dave Cheesemond and Greg Lacey, Cape Town pioneers who both died in mountaineering accidents—in the Yukon and Chamonix, respectively—in the eighties. Martin “Tinie” Versfeld, now 45, the son of famed Afrikaner philosopher and poet Martinus Versfeld, and a climber with a hawk’s eye for new routes. And finally Andy de Klerk, 37, for two decades the country’s top climber, thanks to stiff 5.13 ascents at home and solo climbs of the Alps’ north faces. In 2000, after hearing about these guys for years, I decided to see what I’d been missing.

Here’s what I found on that first trip: Yosemite may rule for big walls, Pakistan for vertical faces, and Thailand for beach cliffs, but South African climbing is singular. It has something to do with the tangerine stone, the big-sky sunsets, the way the rock has settled into a dawn-of-time landscape. By the end of my stay, I’d sampled the best climbing on earth—in one of its most troubling settings. My hosts lived in walled compounds surrounded by razor wire. Carjackings and rape were at anarchic levels in the cities, and in the countryside, attacks on Afrikaner farms were escalating.

There were still two South Africas, it seemed, and I wanted to understand the divide. So when I went back last November with a rope, a rack, and a rental car, my first call was to Ed.

I GOT MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Ed February in 1991. He was clinging to an overhang on Cape Town’s Muizenberg Peak, on the cover of the British climbing magazine Mountain. Already the world’s best-known black climber, he was famed for his bold traditional routes on cliffs near Cape Town and an ungodly number of first ascents with his protĂ©gĂ©, Andy de Klerk. He sported a tight Afro, like a muscular Jimi Hendrix. When I finally met him in the flesh, on a vulture-infested rock tower in Cameroon in 1998, his hair and beard were flecked with gray, as befits a professor.

Ed is voluble, softhearted, irascible, loyal to friends, and drinkative when it comes to single-malts. He’s also the most optimistic South African I know, with little patience for those who’ve given up on the country’s teething problems. He prefers to point to the rural villages getting electricity and piped water for the first time, courtesy of President Thabo Mbeki’s black-led African National Congress government. At the Mountain Club of South Africa (MCSA), he has been the “intergenerational go-between,” as Andy puts it. The bar in the Cape Town club room was Ed’s brainchild, as were the monthly Tuesday-night socials. Yet until recently, his fellow members, nearly all of them white, had no inkling of the depth of the anger inside their friend.

To understand where Ed February’s head is, you have to know that for most of his life, climbing has been a series of humiliations. Take the time in the Cederberg Mountains, in 1978, when Ed and Dave Cheesemond were denied a hiking permit. The ranger told them they couldn’t hike separately—there had to be two people in a party—or together, because mixed-race hiking was also not allowed. Or again in the Cederbergs, in 1983, when Tinie Versfeld fell and cracked his head. Standing at the whites-only entrance at the Clanwilliam Hospital, trying to help his Afrikaner friend stay upright, Ed was ordered to take Tinie to the black entrance. There, another white nurse refused them entry. Like a scene out of Kafka, the two men bounced back and forth for painful minutes until Ed pleaded that the patient just needed a few stitches.

“The system couldn’t conceive that two guys of different color could be hanging around together,” he remembers. “They didn’t know how to handle it.”

Under apartheid, which means “apartness” in Afrikaans, almost all interactions between races were prohibited. Laws classified people as “white,” “black,” or “colored”—for the many South Africans descended from Malays, Indians, and other Asian slaves and Ă©migrĂ©s. “Nonwhites,” the term still used for anyone who is not Caucasian, were forcibly relocated, their homes sometimes bulldozed to prevent their return. Blacks couldn’t vote; the Immorality Act banned interracial marriage.

Ed was born after the clampdown, in the northern Cape Town suburb of Wynberg, in 1955. He describes himself as “black,” though the apartheid government deemed him “colored.” He knows little of his family history, save that his grandmother was Javanese and that February is a slave name, the month of some ancestor’s emancipation. Nevertheless, his skin color meant he was in for hard times. Eighty percent of the country was effectively off-limits, including national parks and game reserves. But each summer, Ed’s father, Ronald February, a schoolteacher, and his mother, Helen, who worked at the University of Cape Town library, circumvented the ban by piling Ed and his two brothers into their Hillman sedan and driving over the borders to camp in Lesotho, Swaziland, and Mozambique. “They had the same viewpoints as everyone else,” Ed says. “The love of nature, the love of wildlife—primarily because that’s what middle-class South African people are into.”

Drumbeats of the struggle punctuated Ed’s youth: the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, in which white police shot and killed 69 black protesters; Mandela’s imprisonment for high treason, in 1962; the bloody Soweto student riots of 1976. In college, Ed vented his rage at sit-ins that often ended with the police pulling out their quirts—or whips. “The first couple of protests, you get caught and beaten up,” he says. “Then you learn to run away.”

In 1977, Ed led a class walkout at the University of the Western Cape, a school for nonwhites, over a white history teacher’s revisionist lesson, in which Afrikaners were the chosen people. “I turned to the class and said, ‘This is bullshit; you shouldn’t be condoning it,’ ” he recalls. Only a few students followed him out. For outbursts like these, Ed’s teachers eventually flunked him, so he hauled up to Johannesburg and trained as an industrial radiographer, testing welds in an oil refinery.

“I think I’m probably more bitter about it now than I was then,” he says of apartheid. “Then, it was the system, it was how things were. They had everything; I had nothing. It’s how it was. You didn’t go around feeling anything about it; you just dealt with it.”

Ed’s way of dealing was to turn to the mountains. “It was a pretty sick society,” he says. “Climbing was normal.”

GROWING UP IN THE SHADOW of Table Mountain, Ed started climbing early. At 14, he was pedaling his bike to nearby Elsies and Muizenberg peaks, on the Cape Peninsula. There were a number of black climbers then, men who’d grown up before apartheid marginalized Cape Town’s black middle class, including Charlie Hankey, a distant uncle of Ed’s, and George Ganget, both of whom put new routes up Table Mountain in the fifties. At 16, Ed joined the Cape Province Mountain Club, a climbing club for nonwhites that had been around since the thirties. Ganget and other members took his skills to 5.8 and 5.9 levels, but within a couple of years he was outclimbing his mentors.

At Table Mountain, Ed would run into top climbers from the all-white MCSA and make small talk, but no one would tie in with him. At first Ed dragged his little brother, Rodney, out to hold the rope. But slowly, he and two other young black climbers, Ed January and Maurice Wyngard, found colorblind white partners. Dave Cheesemond broke the ice, in 1974. Then came Greg Lacey, Tinie Versfeld, and a high school kid named Andy.

When Ed and Andy de Klerk met, in 1981, they were an unlikely match: Ed was 26, Andy 14. Andy already had a bit of buzz as a kid with potential, so Greg and Ed invited him to go climbing on Table Mountain. “It was clear he was awesome,” says Ed. “He was climbing quantum leaps ahead of his day.”

Their partnership was one most climbers would envy. “Ed took me under his wing,” says Andy, who today looks more surfer than climber, with unkempt blond hair and a ubiquitous cigarette. “Race was never an issue.” Ed would pick Andy up at his house—with his mother’s blessing, which Ed still finds remarkable—and they’d hit the rocks, picking areas where they wouldn’t get any racial flak. They stopped counting new routes around 500.

To this day, repeating a de Klerk climb is a serious undertaking. One sweltering day early in my trip, Ed, Andy, and Tinie take me to the 120-foot pitch Technicolor Darkness, in Lost World Canyon, 100 miles east of Cape Town, near the town of Montagu. With a rating of 5.12b, it isn’t hard by modern standards, but it’s local custom to add a couple of grades to any de Klerk route. When I’m handed the rack to lead, I know I’m in for a sandbagging.

The rock is as smooth as a windowpane and split by a single hairline fracture. I climb halfway up before my forearms fail, and I plummet 20 feet. It’s the first of many falls. When I finish the route, I’m thrashed—yet pleased with my inelegant ascent.

“Did I mention that this mad bugger soloed that thing when he was a schoolkid?” Ed says. He and Andy were camping at the route’s base. Ed slept in, but 17-year-old Andy got up early and scaled the face without a rope. “Solo climbing is the ultimate in mind control,” Andy’d said when Ed took him to task.

The two continued to break new ground through Andy’s years at the University of Cape Town. But in 1989, as he was about to be drafted to fight in South Africa’s border war with Angola, Andy lit out for Europe, then the United States. He landed in Seattle, married an American climber named Julie Brugger, and didn’t return until 1998, after their divorce. He now lives in the seaside town of Scarbrough, 30 miles south of Cape Town, where he makes custom furniture. He’s remarried, to a general-practice physician named Charlotte Noble; they have a two-year-old son, Sebastian, and another child on the way.

“Avoiding an unjustifiable war was part of why I left,” Andy tells me. “But I also didn’t want to lose two years of climbing.”

BUCKING THE SYSTEM—whether apartheid or the draft—was just one more ability that Ed and Andy shared. But it didn’t make living in South Africa any easier.

In 1981, Ed met Nicky Allsopp, a graduate student in botany who now works for the government’s Agricultural Research Council, helping communities rehabilitate rangeland. Because Nicky is white, “it was against the law for us to be going out together,” Ed says. “We couldn’t go to movies, restaurants, pubs, or the beach together, but we could go hiking.” In 1984, they moved to the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Bokaap, into the house where Ed’s father was born and where they still live. In Bokaap, people weren’t bothered by an interracial couple, and in 1996, they wed.

Ed threw himself back into academia, finishing a doctorate in botany at the University of Cape Town that same year. Still, as a climber, he felt like he’d been left behind. For years, he’d watched white friends set out on club-funded expeditions wherever their passports were welcome—mainly in the Andes. “I am pretty bitter about it now,” he says. “I can sit and listen to these guys talk about all the great expeditions all over the world they went on, and I think, Fuck, those were the days I was struggling to find a climbing partner. And I was probably climbing twice as hard as any of them at the time.”

In 1996, Andre Schoon, then president of the MCSA and still an active member at 65, knocked on the Februarys’ door. Ed was 42 by then, a grand figure in South African climbing, and Schoon wanted him to join. Ed was reluctant—he’d criticized the club in the press as a white-elitist institution even when, in 1986, his friend Richard Hess, a black entrepreneur from Cape Town, joined as the first nonwhite member since the club’s founding in 1891. (Hess no longer climbs.) But now Mandela was calling for racial unity despite having been locked up for half his life. “I joined,” Ed says, “primarily because I agree with Mandela—we all have to work together to form a united South Africa.”

Ed would be one of the few nonwhites in the 1,800-member Cape Town section, the largest of the 4,500-member club’s 13 chapters. (The club has 35 nonwhite members today, 20 of them in Cape Town.) “I received a lot of criticism from people in the nonwhite climbing clubs,” he says. In 1998, Andy Johnson, the father of black climber Trevor Johnson, went so far as to call him the MCSA’s “rent-a-black” in the Cape Times newspaper.

In 2002, the club gave Ed the Gold Badge, the first time they’d awarded it to a nonwhite. Though gratified to receive it, Ed was still adamant that the MCSA owed him, and the entire nonwhite outdoor community, a formal apology. The nation had just undergone a wrenching national catharsis—the process of historical reckoning that emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, in which apartheid’s worst oppressors had asked for forgiveness. Ed felt the club should, too.

“If the foremost people in this country have apologized, then what is it for the mountain club to say they’re sorry?” Ed asks. “They want to sweep this matter under the rug. That’s where my bitterness stems from.”

THE GEM OF SOUTH AFRICAN CLIMBING is the Milner Amphitheatre, east of Cape Town in the Hex River mountains. A double-tiered cliff the size of El Capitan, the face boasts a host of 5.11 and 5.12 free climbs that parallel a 2,000-foot waterfall plunging over flint-hard quartzite the color of a Florida orange.

I’m with Tinie, Andy, and Tony Dick, a fifty-something Cape Towner who still climbs 5.11. To the dismay of the other two, Andy’s brought along his parachute and a Birdman wing suit. His friends always worry when Andy brings along his BASE-jumping rig, especially at 2,900-foot Milner. He’s broken his knee on the landing here—twice.

We’re a noisy bunch, cackling and joking on the three-hour hike to the cliff. Andy has hidden a 15-pound rock in my backpack, which I carry uphill for two hours before discovering it. As I fish it out, Tony, who is something of a raconteur, tells a story.

It’s Angola, circa 1975, and his platoon is taking a break during patrol. They’ve lit a braai, or barbecue, and they’re brewing tea and frying boerewors, spicy Afrikaner sausage. Next second, teapots and sausages explode into the air, and the rat-a-tat of small-arms fire sends everyone diving for cover.

“We’d made our bloody fire over an ammo cache that some rebel lads had buried,” he quips.

That war comes up a lot among middle-aged climbers. It’s a generational tag: Young South Africans who are cranking hard routes talk about cranking hard routes; climbers over 35 talk about politics, apartheid, and Angola. Forged discharge papers, wildebeests stampeding patrols—these tales are told casually around campfires and on drives across the veldt.

After a long day on the rock, Andy scrambles to Milner’s highest point. He pulls out a cigarette, then calls his mother on his cell phone to wish her a happy 68th birthday.

“Where are you?” she asks.

“Milner.”

“Are you going to jump?”

“Right now.”

“Then be safe!”

He hangs up, steps off the edge, flies for 25 seconds, and deploys his chute. Tinie and Tony breathe a sigh of relief.

Andy is not alone in his cavalier attitude toward danger; in fact, most South Africans seem to share it. One afternoon, I arrive at his furniture workshop, in an industrial park in Kommetjie, a half-hour drive from the city. I’m fresh from reading newspaper reports of a survey by the national police. South Africa is one of the most murderous societies on earth, one story proclaims: 21,738 murders in 2002, compared with 16,204 murders in the U.S., a country with six times the population. To me, the statistics warrant a minor freak-out.

“Why are you so hung up on doom and gloom?” Andy asks.

I look around the shop. Andy was padlocked behind a steel door when I arrived. Electrified wire and Armed Response security signs ring the building. He locks his tools in a safe every night.

“Looks like you’re in prison to me,” I remark.

“Ah, it’s the Wild West out here,” he says, shrugging it off.

Andy reluctantly accepts crime as a function of township poverty, which has persisted in the post-apartheid years. “My neighbor was burgled last winter,” he tells me. “You know what they took? Food. And warm coats. They left the television.”

He takes a thoughtful drag of his smoke, then says, “You should visit a township.”

THERE’S SOMETHING CREEPY about gawking at poverty from an air-conditioned bus, so I sign on with şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Without Limits, a township-tour outfit that lets you gawk from a bicycle. For $46, I get transport to the Cape Peninsula’s Masiphumelele township, a rattly bike, and the guiding expertise of a 23-year-old Xhosa woman named Noluthandu.

We pedal down potholed roads past shacks that are more like collages of tin, brick, wood, plastic, and cardboard. Families share communal taps and toilets. Residents run jury-rigged wires along the ground to poach electricity from power lines. A woman sweeping her stoop waves us over. She’s watching Days of Our Lives.

Noluthandu shows me a spaza shop, a penny arcade where a single cigarette or a slice of bread can be bought. Then we stop at a shebeen, or bush pub, but one of the men inside yells something rude in Xhosa. “Let’s go,” she says. It’s afternoon, and the boys are well lubricated.

Masiphumelele sprouted up in the early eighties as an unnamed squatter camp for unemployed Africans and those working for whites in Cape Town. Concerned with slum conditions and rising crime, whites petitioned to relocate the squatters. Police ran them off, but after the laws preventing blacks from moving freely were abolished, in 1986, people slowly returned and built an “informal settlement” whose population has grown to 26,000. In the end, Masiphumelele—Xhosa for “We Will Succeed”—prevailed.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř the township are shacks built on a swamp—a case of squatters squatting on squatters—and we push our bikes to a small hutch. Inside are three sangomas, or healers, all women. A drum starts up and the broad-hipped matriarch leads the trio in a foot-stomping dance. At the end, they stand before us, panting.

“Ask them questions. They are fortune-tellers,” my guide says.

“Do you have a question?” I ask her.

“Me? No, I don’t believe in this. I am a Christian.”

We ask the matriarch what she sees in Masiphumelele’s future.

“This township is doomed. AIDS will destroy the people. We have nothing. The men have no work. There is no medicine.”

I pedal away, wondering how to digest a tour in which misfortune is the main attraction. On the way out, an eight-year-old boy hops on the back of my bike and cadges a ride. When it comes time to jump off, he high-fives me and smiles. Like any kid anyplace.

IN A COUNTRY BLESSED with rock, it seemed odd that I met so few black kids climbing. Though soccer, cricket, and rugby are hugely popular among black South Africans, there are few incentives to get township youth on a rope. As in America, climbing is still a white middle-class hobby. Ed blames apartheid for killing the love of the outdoors in black culture—that and the fact that a pair of rock shoes costs more than some people earn in a month. But in an unlikely place, I meet an exception.

East of Johannesburg is Waterval Boven, South Africa’s premier sport-climbing area, where the rust-red cliffs along the Elands River draw an international crowd. With 13 churches, three pubs, and 12,000 people, Boven is two towns—one white, one black. No barrier divides them, but the transition between gardened avenues and ramshackle Swazi township is stark. I rent a room at the Roc ‘n Rope hostel, which the owner, a 30-year-old Afrikaner named Gustav van Rensburg, and his French wife, Alex, 33, run as a climbing school. When we head to Boven’s crashing waterfall the next day, Gustav brings a police guard.

Crime became an issue for South African climbers three years ago, after a spate of holdups at the Wave Cave, a popular crag in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Boven is 500 miles from Natal, but Gustav was worried about photographer Jimmy Chin’s cameras. Recently, a township tough wielding a machete had threatened to cut a rappelling climber’s rope unless he handed over money. The climber slid down; the would-be thief ran off.

Several days later, on a climb called Rude Bushman, my partner is a dreadlocked 25-year-old Swazi named Thulani Mazibuko. Thulani’s name means “silence,” but once we start climbing, he opens up. He tells me he was just another township kid looking at a bleak future until he took a climbing class from Gustav. Seeing his talent—he’s climbed 5.12—Gustav gave him a teaching job. Thulani now rents a room at Gustav and Alex’s place.

Thulani moves easily between the township and the van Rensburgs’ house, aloof but not above the loiterers outside the Like Father Like Son liquor store. His ambitions are straightforward: move from Boven someday, go to school, find higher-paying work. But he’s in no hurry to leave.

“Township guys think it’s strange that I live with white people; they call me a white man,” he says. “But I don’t care.”

FROM BOVEN, I DRIVE east to Kruger National Park, then south through the lush foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains and back to Cape Town. I arrive in time to attend a slide show at the MCSA’s Tuesday-night social. There’s a friendly buzz in the air, and the bar is doing a brisk trade in Windhoek Lager. Ed works the crowd, dispensing hugs, shouting high-decibel greetings.

When the crowd is called to take their seats, Tinie strides to the front, holding a single sheet of paper.

“I feel we need to address issues from the past,” he begins.

A hush falls over the room. Calling the club’s history “a disgrace,” Tinie condemns it for having embraced apartheid in exchange for government grants and access to land. “We must apologize to all those who have been hurt,” he concludes. Everyone seems glad for the lights to fade.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř on the street, the talk is lively.

“Well done, my man,” Andy tells Tinie. But others disagree.

“Why should I apologize?” one twenty-something white climber demands. “I was a kid during apartheid.”

Though Ed appears to be the only nonwhite climber present, few address him on the subject. It’s too awkward. After the crowd drifts off, Ed and I go back to his place with a 27-year-old white climber named Tristan Furman. Tristan is sympathetic to Ed’s position, but, like other young climbers, he seems to feel that the need for an organizational apology has passed in the new South Africa. Around 1 a.m., after a few drinks, the discussion heats up.

“Ed, how many nonwhites have you introduced to climbing?” Tristan asks.

“That isn’t my responsibility,” Ed answers, irritated, adding that he’s done enough to inspire others by being the country’s preeminent nonwhite climber.

Tristan then describes how his family’s farming community was attacked by black hoodlums, with murderous results. “No one has apologized for that,” he says.

“We don’t have to,” Ed tells him. “We won.”

Moments later, the tension ebbs. “Well, we’ve all suffered in this,” Ed says calmly. “We should all apologize.”

That seems to be the nub of the argument: Who are “we” in South Africa? With so many cultures—more than a dozen black ethnic groups, Afrikaners, British-bred whites, Indians, Asians, and those containing a bit of everybody—perhaps there are too many South Africas, each a separate island waiting to be bridged.

Ed and Tristan part as friends, but a few months later, back home in Utah, I get an e-mail from Ed. It’s an open letter to Greg Moseley, the 63-year-old Cape Town MCSA chairman, sent to climbers across South Africa. The letter is long and, at times, seething with anger. Ed enumerates a list of grievances—from the club’s failure to apologize to its tardiness in recruiting a more diverse membership—before concluding, “As a nonwhite South African, I can no longer compromise my integrity by being an active member of this organization.”

I phone Moseley. He’s responded to Ed’s letter with one of his own, he says. Tinie’s remarks led to the formation of a working group that included, among others, Tinie, Tristan, Andre Schoon, and Jonathan Levy, a Jewish climber. A “draft apology that would also include the Jewish community” is being formulated; Ed just isn’t aware of it yet. Moseley is optimistic that the club and Ed are “now on the same wavelength.”

Ed sounds less hopeful when we talk: “They’ve been putting the apology off for years. Why not just do it?”

Most of those close to Ed support him. “Ed had to stir the club out of its comfort zone,” says his wife, Nicky. “Whites think they’ve moved on from apartheid, but blacks are still angry.”

“It’s been a long time coming, and Ed has no regrets, but I think the MCSA will come around,” Andy says. “Don’t be surprised if Ed is president of the club someday. Look at Mandela: He went from prison to president.”

STRANGE, THE MENTAL snapshots South Africa leaves with you. A donkey cart overtaken by a BMW. A Boer farmer spraying spittle and beer in a Karoo pub, shouting, “We used to live like kings! Now we live like princes!” The cloud-capped Drakensberg Mountains rising above the tin roofs of a township. And in the middle of it all, Ed February, a man standing at the center of the new South Africa, balanced between two worlds. Time will tell whether Ed returns to the MCSA. In the meantime, the rock remains unchanged.

My last climb is with one of Ed’s oldest friends, an orthopedic surgeon named Charles Edelstein—or Snort, as friends call him, because of his sinus problem. Snort has known Ed since 1978, when he was a dirt-poor med student renting a flat in Jo’burg. He took Ed in, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, except Snort is white, and it was illegal. We drive to Blouberg Massif, a 1,200-foot quartzite mesa near the borders with Botswana and Zimbabwe.

As we get closer to the mesa, the vegetation disappears, picked bare by goats and bony cattle. At the village of Blouberg, a Tswana boy leads us to a kraal, a village compound, and into a parking spot seemingly reserved for us. A woman leans in the doorway of a mud hut, a cell phone dangling incongruously from her waist.

“You are Charles,” she says languidly.

Snort has been climbing here for 25 years. He pays her to baby-sit the car, then, with the sun sinking, we saddle our packs and head uphill, hiking in the relative cool of the evening until, around midnight, we make camp in a cave.

At dawn, the rock is already griddle warm. Whenever I poke a cam into a crack, lizards scrabble up the wall. We climb all day, the hot air silent but for the jangle of cowbells.

The sun is sinking, throwing long shadows across the savannah, when Snort finally pulls himself over the top. I hear him shout, and I look up. He’s standing on the cliff edge, yelling, arms raised and fists clenched:

“This is Africa!”

The post Technicolor Darkness appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř 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 şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍřStats.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. » 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. » 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. » Once it’s loaded, an anti- wobble arm keeps up to four bikes from clanging around on rough roads. » 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. » 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. » The contact section of the shoulder strap is slip-proof injection-molded rubber. » 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.

The post Majesty or Travesty appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

IN THE 1990’s, AFTER THE FALL OF COMMUNISM and the opening of Central Asia, the Karavshin region of Kyrgyzstan’s Pamir Alai range—an area full of El Capitan-size big walls and untouched new routes—was fast becoming an international climbing destination.


That all fell apart three years ago, thanks to one of the most infamous incidents in recent mountaineering history. During 1999 and 2000, fighting between Kyrgyz troops and Taliban- and Al Qaeda-associated guerrillas of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) began to make the area unacceptably risky. In August of 2000, this was dramatically brought home with the kidnapping of four American climbers by IMU forces. The capture and subsequent escape of Tommy Caldwell, Beth Rodden, John Dickey, and Jason Smith, which I wrote about in şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř (see “Fear of Falling,” November 2000) and in my 2002 book Over the Edge, quickly dried up the tourism business.


Now the Karavshin appears to be opening up again. A major factor was the November 2001 disappearance of IMU leader Juma Namangani, who is believed to have been killed by American forces during U.S. operations in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the IMU’s collapse, new evidence has emerged that sheds light on the persistent controversies surrounding the climbers’ account of their ordeal, which has been dogged by accusations and second-guessing from the start. Foremost among the critics have been writers John Bouchard and Nancy Prichard, a husband-and-wife team from Oregon who charge that the climbers fabricated significant details of their story, a theme Bouchard and Prichard say they’ll explore in a book they plan to publish in spring 2004. But recent developments in Kyrgyzstan have corroborated the climbers’ version of events so thoroughly that there’s really only one thing left to say: Case closed.


In August 2000, Caldwell, Rodden, Dickey, and Smith were in the middle of a first ascent of the 2,500-foot Yellow Wall, in the Karavshin’s Kara Su valley. On the morning of the 12th, the climbers woke to the sound of bullets peppering the rock around their portaledge camp, 1,000 feet up. The shooters, three IMU rebels, ordered the Americans to rappel to the ground. They were taken hostage and marched at gunpoint through the mountains for six days, surviving a firefight between their captors and Kyrgyz soldiers, during which the IMU contingent executed a fellow hostage, a sergeant in the Kyrgyz army named Turat Osmanov. The four eventually escaped when Caldwell pushed their guard, Ravshan Sharipov, off a cliff. They fled to a Kyrgyz army outpost. A few weeks later, just after my şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř story went to press, there was startling news from Kyrgyzstan: Sharipov survived the fall and was captured by Kyrgyz soldiers.


Two details in particular have been the source of controversy. First, critics charge that the guerrillas’ assault rifles lacked the range to reach the portaledges, so their shots couldn’t have “forced” the climbers to descend. Second, it has been claimed that Sharipov was drugged by the climbers rather than pushed, and that the climbers changed their story to sound more heroic.


The first argument took a beating last year when climbers began returning to the Karavshin after a two-year absence. Two teams—one Czech, one American-Slovenian—traveled to the Yellow Wall in the summer and fall of 2002. Among other missions, they wanted to look at the gear the Americans had left behind.


“That gear was a hot topic all over southern Kyrgyzstan,” says Pavel Kopacek, 28, a member of the 11-man Czech team that visited the wall in July. “The locals thought the haul bags would be stuffed with American dollars.” In fact, what the team found was a pair of portaledges in tatters after being used as target practice for two years. Bullet casings and shrapnel from grenades littered the ledges and ground, as did bullet-riddled chalk bags, sleeping bags, propane containers, and shattered CDs. A second team, which included Garth Willis, an American climber who has lived in Kyrgyzstan off and on for the past eight years, pulled down the rest of the gear and portaledges in October. So much for the argument that bullets couldn’t reach that high.

THE MORE SERIOUS CHARGE AGAINST the Americans—that they lied about their escape—grew out of the confusion surrounding Sharipov’s reappearance and his conflicting statements following his capture. Sharipov told journalists and FBI agents—who’d traveled to Kyrgyzstan to investigate—that the Americans had somehow drugged his water and escaped when he fell asleep. In spring 2001, Smith, Dickey, and I went to the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, to meet with Sharipov in his prison cell. At the meeting, Sharipov recognized his former captives and started to revise his version of events, speaking clearly about falling and being knocked unconscious.


Meanwhile, Dateline, the NBC news program, started its own investigation. In May and June 2001, Sharipov was tried and sentenced to death for terrorism and taking hostages. At the end of the trial, Irena Balakina, Dateline‘s Kyrgyzstan-based stringer, was permitted to tape a courtroom interview. When asked by Balakina if he’d been pushed or had fallen asleep, he answered, “They pushed me.” It was an unambiguous, independent confirmation that the climbers had told the truth, and it dealt a stunning blow to their critics.





Although Dateline secured this interview ten months before the publication of Over the Edge, Sharipov’s admission was kept secret until the show’s broadcast in April 2002, after the book came out. This preserved Dateline‘s news scoop, but it also prolonged the skepticism surrounding the Americans’ story.


Remarkably, despite the new evidence and the independent corroboration by Dateline, Bouchard, a retired climber turned writer with whom the former hostages have never agreed to an interview, and Prichard, a publicist and freelance writer, continue to question the climbers’ story. According to a recent article in Sports Illustrated, Bouchard and Prichard said that their forthcoming book, a project they’ve spent more than $30,000 of their own funds researching, will expose exaggerations and half-truths in the kidnapping saga. Bouchard conceded that “there is no question [the hostages] went through a horrible experience,” but maintained that their tale still contains “too many discrepancies.”


These days, the remaining members of the IMU are in hiding; Sharipov remains on death row; and the former captives have more or less put the ordeal behind them. But is it really safe for climbers and trekkers to return to Kyrgyzstan? The organizers of the Raid Gauloises think so—the 12th running of the adventure race will be held there starting June 10. (The exact location had not been disclosed at press time.) Still, geopolitical instability remains a serious concern. Though visitors to Kyrgyzstan may be emboldened by the 1,500 or so U.S. military personnel sent in 2002 to Bishkek, a four-day drive from the Karavshin, there are no guarantees that Islamic guerrillas, rumored to be regrouping in Afghanistan and attempting to infiltrate Tajikistan, won’t turn up in the Karavshin again.


“There is little protection if Tajiks and Uzbeks want to kidnap more tourists,” warns Willis. “As soon as people return in numbers, there will probably be more troubles.”

The post Back from the Edge appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

JUNE 27, 1970. Two Tyrolean brothers, Reinhold and GĂĽnther Messner, stand atop 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, in Pakistan’s western Himalayas. Having snatched the first ascent of one of the biggest alpine walls on earth, the 14,763-foot Rupal Face, they shed their frozen felt mittens to shake hands and embrace.

Porters descending from Camp 2

GĂĽnther Messner on Nanga Parbat, June 1970

But things turn bad when they start down. GĂĽnther, 24, has followed his brother to the top despite the 18-member team’s plan for Reinhold, 25, to summit alone. Exhausted, he develops altitude sickness and, because neither brother has a rope, cannot descend by the same steep route. They blunder down the west side of the peak, succeeding only in cutting themselves off from the Rupal side entirely. After a bivouac near 26,000 feet, GĂĽnther becomes delirious. Seeing two teammates, Felix Kuen and Peter Scholz, ascending the Rupal Face, Reinhold cries for help—but they are too far away to understand his pleas. So the brothers make a life-or-death decision: They will head down the opposite side of the mountain via the less steep, but unexplored, 13,300-foot Diamir Face.


The epic that ensued—GĂĽnther and Reinhold’s two-day descent down uncharted territory, GĂĽnther’s June 29 disappearance in a reported avalanche, and Reinhold’s frantic search of the debris field and grief-stricken escape through the Diamir Valley—is the defining experience of Reinhold Messner’s life, and it’s described in his 40th book, The Naked Mountain, to be published for the first time in English in November by The Mountaineers Books. What U.S. readers may not hear about is the firestorm that the German edition sparked in Europe. In books written as direct rebuttals to The Naked Mountain, two members of the expedition claim that Messner’s story is a whitewash of the truth—that he abandoned his brother on the peak.


“There is a big lie behind Reinhold’s story,” says Hans Saler, a 56-year-old mountain guide now based in Puc—n, Chile. In his June 2003 book Between Light and Shadow: The Messner Tragedy on Nanga Parbat, he claims Messner sacrificed GĂĽnther for his own ambition, an allegation echoed in The Traverse: GĂĽnther Messner’s Death on Nanga Parbat—Expedition Members Break Their Silence, by fellow team member Max von Kienlin, a 69-year-old baron who lives in Munich.


Both climbers say that Messner’s descent of the Diamir Face was not an emergency escape—that, though this was his first Himalayan expedition, he planned all along to traverse the entire mountain solo and score a first on an 8,000-meter peak. Most astonishingly, both claim that GĂĽnther never accompanied Reinhold down the face at all. Instead, von Kienlin and Saler maintain, Reinhold left his brother near the summit to find his own way down, and GĂĽnther died descending the Rupal side, alone and unseen. Messner, they say, has been changing his story ever since to deflect his guilt.


This bitter controversy began when The Naked Mountain hit German bookstores in February 2002. Angered by Messner’s portrayal of what happened on Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest peak, and by his claims on German radio and TV that the team didn’t bother to search for the missing brothers, Saler aired his long-simmering grievances in an open letter to Messner circulated on the Internet and published in German newspapers.


“In your book you play brilliantly on the keyboard of self-pity,” he wrote. “Everybody kept silent about what had actually happened on the wall. Our silence had to do with loyalty, a foreign word for you. You are an excellent climber, but a good comrade? NO!”

“For years we talked to nobody,” Saler told şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř. “I didn’t even tell my wife. I wrote my book so Reinhold’s untrue story doesn’t go into the annals of alpinism without criticism.”


Such charges have brought thunderous denials from Messner, now 59 and a Green Party member of the European Parliament. “Can you imagine I would leave my brother?” he says from his castle home in northern Italy. “This is crazy. It is a lie.”


Charging libel and defamation, Messner has hired Hamburg-based lawyer Matthias Prinz, whose clients have included Princess Caroline of Monaco and actor Don Johnson. On July 14, Prinz’s firm persuaded a Hamburg court to impose an interim injunction against Saler and von Kienlin’s German publishers, halting reprints or translations, though they can sell remaining stock.


The ban is based on 13 disputed statements in von Kienlin’s book and 11 in Saler’s, but the debate is likely to explode beyond those points as civil proceedings unfold in Hamburg this fall. Von Kienlin says that he himself helped Messner concoct the tale of the avalanche, and that he will produce a 1970 diary entry in which he recorded Messner’s emotional confession that he lost GĂĽnther high on the mountain. Messner insists that forensics will prove the diary is a fake. Portraying von Kienlin as a failed gambler looking to make back his lost family fortune with a bestseller, he cites a different reason for the attack: “Von Kienlin lost his wife to me in 1971.”


That part, nobody disputes. Ursula Demeter was married to von Kienlin when Messner moved in with them after the expedition to recover from the amputation of his frostbitten toes. She left von Kienlin and became Messner’s wife from 1972 until 1977. But von Kienlin says he got over that long ago and that his critique is a matter of honor, in defense of those “comrades of the expedition who can no longer defend themselves.” Seven of those team members are now dead, including Kuen and Scholz. According to Saler, who was fixing ropes nearby, Messner said nothing to the two about being in trouble, and after a brief shouted exchange, he waved and continued his traverse.


The feud isn’t the only legal wrangling Messner has had over Nanga Parbat. He and trip leader Karl Maria Herrligkoffer fought in court at least a dozen times after the expedition: Messner sued Herrligkoffer, alleging that his negligence in sending up a botched weather signal rushed the summit bid and caused GĂĽnther’s death; Herrligkoffer sued Messner for violating the expedition’s now-expired publishing embargo. Messner’s 1971 book about the climb, The Red Rocket on Nanga Parbat, was ultimately banned in Germany.


Messner has now vowed to return to Nanga Parbat to scour the base of the Diamir Face. If he can locate GĂĽnther’s remains, he believes, he can prove his story once and for all. “I must go back,” he says. “There is no other chance for me to save my reputation.”


Messner searched for GĂĽnther once before on the Diamir side, in 1971 with Demeter, who remains convinced that his tale is genuine. He was “obsessed with finding GĂĽnther,” probing the dangerous icefall for four sleepless days, she said.


Finding GĂĽnther’s remains in a churning, 12-square-mile glacier may be a long shot, but Messner is adamant that he’ll comb the valley as early as next summer. Having rejected the use of metal detectors to locate his brother’s crampons (the glacier bristles with expedition hardware), Messner plans to train local villagers to continue his search. “It may take ten years or 30 years, or it may happen after my death,” he says defiantly, “but I must find GĂĽnther’s body.”

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It was a startlingly clear day on the North Ridge of Mount Everest in the spring of 1995, just the way every climber sees it in his dreams. I was within sight of the summit, closing in on mountaineering’s most popularly celebrated feat. Needless to say, it was a moment I’d been anticipating for a good, long while, yet never did I expect that my summit bid would dissolve into theater of the absurd. Sure, I had seen a lot of recklessness on Everest, but nothing quite this blatant: Just 100 feet from the top, I came upon a guided team that included an American client who, while trudging along beside me, was tripped up by his own feet and started to slide down the cliffs of the 10,000-foot North Face.

I was certain he’d fallen to oblivion, but when I peered down after him, I saw that he was alive, lying on his back on a sloping shelf of rock just a few feet below. A shred of fabric on his windsuit had snagged on a tooth of stone. Still, he was groaning in pain, his oxygen mask had been ripped from his face — and the fabric was beginning to give way. It was a hell of a jam to be in at 29,000 feet; only simple human decency dictated that I become ensnared in his problem.

Thankfully, luck prevailed. I found an old rope nearby, and a Sherpa helped me haul him to safety. Soon thereafter he summited — an event he celebrated, bizarrely, by twirling a lariat he’d carried with him — but he was still disoriented, and getting him down took all day. A Sherpa finally got him moving on his own by shouting, “If you do not keep going, we will all die.”

The American had none of the climbing skills, self-awareness, or endurance that should be the minimum requirements for trying an 8,000-meter peak. His footwork was that of a raw novice, and he made no attempt to use his ice ax to arrest his fall — a basic survival tactic. Once he unclipped from the last of the ropes that lined the mountain, he was a time bomb waiting to detonate. And though I eventually grew to like him, I also regarded him as a fool for being where he was.

When I returned to the States after that 1995 trip, I brought a sense of foreboding. What I’d seen — hordes of novices mobbing the mountain and nearly killing themselves — troubled me deeply. Of approximately 180 climbers from 11 expeditions trying the Tibetan side, nearly half were guided clients from commercial expeditions who would have flunked Climbing 101. Most of these folks operated at the threshold of their endurance even at lower altitudes. They stumbled clumsily, with an unforgiving abyss yawning to either side. (One, it was clear, had never worn crampons before.) They had a sheeplike reliance on guides and Sherpas to carry up all provisions and to make all decisions for them. Yet the guides were often just as discombobulated by the altitude — they were, after all, merely human. As for the traditional, noncommercial expeditions, aside from a few experienced hands, most also consisted of Himalayan first-timers. Everest, I learned, had somehow become a classroom for the world’s highest introductory course in alpinism.

Then came the events of 1996, and this debacle seems to have become the only thing that titillates the general media about climbing. The now-famous Life cover photo of 22 climbers strung along the South Ridge just before the storm is, I believe, the most disturbing image in climbing history. Yet I fear it has come to be accepted by the general public as the mountaineering norm. In that photo I don’t see the glory of summiting Everest; I see a knot of people ready to create a deadly traffic jam should they need to escape a storm.

Sadly, if not yet tragically, the scene on Everest will be much the same when the spring season kicks off this month. Commercial operators report that inquiries about guided Everest ascents have risen by almost 20 percent, entirely due to the crush of publicity, yet most were from the utterly unqualified. “We noticed a definite increase in calls,” says Manomi Fernando, program coordinator for Mountain Madness, “but the majority were not legitimate.” The latest word from Nepal and Tibet indicates that there will be fewer climbers this spring — 24 teams, down from 30 in 1996 — but the problems of overcrowding will remain: All of the teams in Nepal will be on the same route, the South Col; in Tibet, all but two will climb the North Ridge.

Noncommercial contenders in Nepal will include Japanese, Canadian, Swedish, American, Bolivian, and Malaysian teams, as well as a group from Indonesia guided by Anatoli Boukreev, a survivor of last year’s saga. The latter two are large national expeditions, and like the Taiwanese who caused so much trouble on Everest in 1996, those teams are unskilled in high-altitude climbing. The Malaysians, to their credit, did at least train on 23,442-foot Pumori last year, but the Indonesians have not, to anyone’s knowledge, undertaken any sort of team trial run.

There will also be five commercial groups on the Nepalese side: three led by British companies, one by New Zealanders, one by an American. The Kiwi attempt, headed by Guy Cotter (now running the late Rob Hall’s former company, şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Consultants) with help from guide Ed Viesturs, has four clients. The American group, led by Todd Burleson of Washington-based Alpine Ascents International, will have just one, a California businessman in his thirties named Charles Corfield. Operating on Burleson’s permit, Eric Simonson will also guide a single client, 68-year-old Leslie Buckland. And like last year, three-time Everest summiter David Breashears will be present, making a documentary about high-altitude physiology in conjunction with Viesturs.

All told, it can be conservatively estimated that 170 people will be clogging the South Col route.

Needless to say, the Tibetan side, with its cheaper permit rates, will also be busy. Noncommercial teams from Kazakhstan, Japan, Belgium, Pakistan, Slovenia, and Croatia, among others, have been granted permission, as well as a commercial operation led by New Zealander Russell Brice. Climbers on the North Ridge will total about 150.

All the guides leading clients in 1997 speak of having been sobered by last year’s tragedy. Some point hopefully to a safety advance that will be in wider use this year: fax phones linked to a highly reliable British forecasting service, which provided Breashears and Viesturs several days’ notice of approaching storms on their IMAX filmmaking expedition last year. “It gives pretty darn accurate reports of weather and winds, which is crucial,” says Viesturs. Most guides also say that it will be easier to enforce critical turnaround times and to deny clients a summit bid if they falter — they can invoke last year’s deaths to make their point.

But for this we have little to go on beyond the guides’ word. And though I have no beef with those who pay to be escorted up a mountain, nor any problem with the guides who are paid for this service, I do take issue with the grand illusion, championed by the outfitters and swallowed by so many innocents, that mountains above 8,000 meters can be safely guided. As the old saw goes, you pay your money and you take your chances.

In the wake of last year, many trip leaders are speaking more candidly about the business. Cotter, for one, says that he will “pave the way, not baby-sit” his clients. Viesturs, who has guided three trips up Everest in the past six years, says he thinks the trip leaders “broke the rules” last year, failing to enforce turnaround times because they wanted their clients to have a shot at the summit. He and Cotter, Viesturs explains, “are going to be very strict with our people.” On the surface, this no-nonsense approach sounds prudent, but when speaking in private, many guides all too willingly reveal what lies at its roots. I recall a conversation with one longtime Everest guide, who told me of a certain group that planned to hire him. “Do they have any experience?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “but that doesn’t bother me. If they pay me, I’ll take them as far as they can go. This is about business, not climbing.” I found this attitude cynical, yet no worse than that of another guide who said, “Whenever I’m on the mountain with these idiots, I regard that they’re trying to kill me.”

An unsettling sentiment — but also one that’s hard to refute. Many of those around me in ’95 had seen fit to skip training climbs up lesser Himalayan peaks and had motored right onto the big one. Beyond the incredibly lucky lariat-wielding American, there was his elderly French teammate, who had to be pushed from behind and pulled from above simply to get up the mountain. Yet when a Sherpa tried to overtake him on the home stretch to the summit, the Frenchman sternly stopped his escort with a mittened backhand to the chest — he had paid a boodle of cash for this moment and wanted to get there first. Equally troublesome, to my mind, were the fellows who made the first Turkish and Romanian ascents of Everest — men who ultimately needed to be rescued but who nonetheless returned to considerable fanfare in their home countries. Neither of them thanked me or the others who helped them down and to this day still don’t believe they were ever in trouble.

The Turk, Ali Nasuh Mahruki, was accompanied by a very capable Russian guide; the Romanian, Constantin Lacatusu, was from another commercial group. They had moderate climbing experience and had been guided up other mountains, but none like Everest. Both hoped to make oxygenless ascents, yet they carried oxygen anyway. Struggling in the thin air and weighed down by the heavy equipment, they resorted to using it. And though most sensible parties were summiting around 10 a.m., Mahruki reached the top in midafternoon. Lacatusu summited at dusk.

High winds moved in that night. The alarm was sounded when the guide radioed to say that his charges were exhausted and might not make it through the night. In the morning I climbed toward them with two bottles of oxygen. When I reached Lacatusu, he refused it, under the misconception that he’d made an oxygenless ascent and would be spoiling the feat. Soon Mahruki appeared, staggering down an avalanche-prone slope, headed for a cliff. I told him to clip into the ropes, but he refused, muttering something about not needing them.

Since even Himalayan veterans find clear thinking nearly impossible above 8,000 meters, it’s understandable, given their desperate states, that these two don’t grasp that they nearly died. Indeed, novices on Everest never seem to remember, or at least choose not to admit, the real and humbling circumstances of their ascents. But there was something I saw while rescuing this pair that struck me, in an odd way, as indicative of the problems on Everest — the wanton disregard for preparation, the blatant me-firstism, the utter lack of respect for both the mountain and the sport. On the way down I noticed that the ice ax the Romanian was using was mine. A few days earlier, it had been stolen from outside my tent.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř correspondent Greg Child is the author of two books on high-altitude climbing. Neither guiding nor guided, he has made 13 expeditions in the Himalayas, summiting K2, Everest, Gasherbrum IV, and Trango Tower.

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