Everest a Year Later: False Summit (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 1997

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True Everest
Everest a Year Later: False Summit (Cont.)

By Mark Bryant


	(Photograph by Andrew Eccles)

MB: One of the most frequently asked questions to come our way these past months is how one justifies the pursuit of something that's arguably so supremely selfish. Rob Hall, Doug Hansen, Yasuko Namba, Scott Fischer, Andy Harris, and seven others were lost to their loved ones last May. Linda nearly lost you. And people ask, for what? Unlike dangerous but arguably selfless, even noble pursuits—like firefighting or relief work or space exploration—mountaineering, in the wake of the Everest deaths, strikes many as benefiting no one but the mountaineer himself. Especially when it comes across more like trophy hunting.

JK: I guess I don't try to justify climbing, or defend it, because I can't. I see climbing as a compulsion that at its best is no worse than many other compulsions—golf or stamp collecting or growing world-record pumpkins. And yet until Everest I probably never fully appreciated the emotional devastation it can wreak. Seeing the hurt it caused the families of good people—this has shaken me deeply, and I haven't fully come to terms with it yet. I started climbing when I was eight—that's 35 years ago—and it's been the driving force in my life for at least 24, 25 of those years. So when I got back from Everest, I couldn't help but think that maybe I'd devoted my life to something that isn't just selfish and vainglorious and pointless, but actually wrong.

There's no way to defend it, even to yourself, once you've been involved in something like this disaster. And yet I've continued to climb. I don't know what that says about me or the sport other than the potential power it has. What makes climbing great for me, strangely enough, is this life and death aspect. It sounds trite to say, I know, but climbing isn't just another game. It isn't just another sport. It's life itself. Which is what makes it so compelling and also what makes it so impossible to justify when things go bad.

MB: In his account of his successful 1963 ascent, Everest: The West Ridge, Tom Hornbein, who's been a friend and role model to you, wrote, "But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I left behind." You quote this line in your book, so the idea must resonate for you. What did you think climbing Everest was going to do for you, and what do you think other people want from it?

JK: It's certainly nothing that stands up to sober-minded scrutiny. Before going to Nepal, I wasn't thinking, "If I climb Everest, my life will improve in such and such specific ways." It's not like that. You simply think that if you can succeed at something that huge, that seemingly impossible, surely it won't merely alter your life, it will transform it. As naive as that sounds, saying it out loud, I think it's a pretty common expectation.

MB: There are certainly harder climbs, any number of routes on any number of peaks that serious alpinists consider more worthy. But Everest, when all's said and done, is still Everest. And for those whom that mountain gets in its grip...

JK: Right. And yet Everest deserves more credit than it gets in some quarters. I came away with infinitely more respect for it—and not simply because it killed several people last May and nearly killed me. It's an amazing peak, more beautiful than I'd imagined. And the South Col route, which I'd always demeaned as the "yak route" up a mountain I'd called the "slag heap," is in fact an aesthetic and worthy climb. But even before you get there, well—I just can't stress enough how Everest warps people. Even Linda, who casts a jaundiced eye toward climbing.

MB: Having been a climber herself, Linda knows all too well...

JK: She does know all too well; she sees the complete absurdity of climbing. Yet even she remains in the thrall of Everest—she read too many National Geographic articles as a kid, is how she puts it. She's somehow starstruck by Everest: "Wow, you've climbed Everest." Despite the fact that she's as cynical as anyone about climbing, she acknowledges that Everest is something special, that it can't be assessed like other mountains. And if you don't understand Everest and appreciate its mystique, you're never going to understand this tragedy and why it's quite likely to be repeated.

MB: There's a wonderful passage in the autobiography of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who made the first ascent of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, about the many arguments he used to try to convince himself not to attempt the peak with a Canadian romantic named Earl Denman in 1947: that Denman had precious little experience, no money, no permission to enter Tibet for a climb of the North Face, and so on. But then he writes, "Any man in his right mind would have said no. But I couldn't say no. For in my heart I needed to go, and the pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth."

JK: Yeah, I love that quote. Among the reasons I love it is because it illustrates that while climbers sometimes tend to think of Sherpas as mainly being in it for the money, here was someone who'd been trying to get on a successful Everest team since 1933 and was as deeply "in its grip," as you say, as I was 50 years later. I'd had this secret desire to climb Everest that never left me from the time I was nine and Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, a friend of my father's, made it in '63. They were my childhood heroes, and Everest was always a big deal to me, though I buried the desire until Outside called. And as critical as I've been of some of the guides and clients in the magazine piece and in the book, on one level I identify with them very deeply. I had summit fever as bad as anyone, and I was there for reasons that, professional duties aside, were no less suspect than anyone else's. I wanted to climb it—that's why I was there. Sure, I thought there was an interesting, even important story to be told about what was happening to Everest. But I wouldn't have taken the writing assignment if I wasn't utterly motivated to get to that summit.

MB: What about your fellow climbers? Who's going on these guided Everest expeditions—and on some of the nonguided, noncommercial trips as well? And just how much of the necessary skill and experience do these people have? I quote from your book: "When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formidable challenges of the world's highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as though half the population of Base Camp was clinically delusional."

JK: Some of my teammates and members of other groups have taken me to task for saying that more than a few were woefully unprepared and unskilled—in the clients' own view they were very experienced. One teammate, for example, was reduced to a helpless, infantile state by his infirmities and needed extensive help to make it down to the South Col. And yet he doesn't seem to remember this; his view is that he was just fine, that he didn't need any help. While he's a good guy and was actually one of the stronger members of our group, I guess what I'm trying to say is that people's perceptions of their own abilities are amazingly far off the mark. The unreliability of memory among Everest survivors, clients and guides alike, is something that I find strange and fascinating and quite disturbing. While comparing multiple interviews that various subjects gave to me and other journalists, I discovered that the recollections of some of us have changed dramatically with the passage of time. Consciously or unconsciously, a number of people have revised or embellished the details of their stories in significant and occasionally preposterous ways. And — big surprise—the revisions invariably put the subject in a better light. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the kind of person who goes to Everest—the big ego and big personality—isn't inclined to self-criticism or self-analysis.

Let's not mince words: Everest doesn't attract a whole lot of well-balanced folks. The self-selection process tends to weed out the cautious and the sensible in favor of those who are single-minded and incredibly driven. Which is a big reason the mountain is so dangerous. The psychological circuitry of most Everest climbers makes it hard as hell for us to quit, even when it's obvious that we should. If you're willful enough to make it all the way to 27,000, 28,000 feet—well, let just say that the less willful and less stubborn already bailed and headed down long ago.

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