Keeper Of The Mountains (28 page)

One of the few climbers she placed in her “preferred” category – the pioneers – was the Slovenian Tomaž Humar. In the fall of 1997 Humar had made a brief appearance in Nepal with climbing partner Janez Jeglič to climb an impressive direct line up the previously unattempted West Face of 7855-metre Nuptse. The two completed the route, but only Humar survived the climb. They required three bivouacs on their ascent and climbed with no fixed lines and no fixed camps. Humar reported that the face was wracked with avalanches and falling séracs. Although they climbed together during the ascent, they became separated and sum­mited separately, Jeglič about 15 minutes before Humar. When Humar arrived on the summit, all he saw were his partner's footprints in the snow leading toward the south side of the mountain. He surmised that Jeglič had gone beyond the summit by mistake and been blown down the South Face by the strong gusting winds. Humar then had the long, complex and dangerous descent to do alone. He explained to Elizabeth: “If you are pushed and you want to survive, everything is possible.” She queried his ambitions to climb such dangerous routes and he explained that steep Himalayan faces roused his mountaineering passion – he couldn't explain why. As they looked at photographs of other unclimbed faces in the Himalaya, he
referred to Nuptse's West Face as “gorgeous” and talked at length about his dreams of other faces. This was the kind of conversation that Elizabeth loved – reminding her of the old days discussing new routes with Messner and other Himalayan pioneers.

In the second category – the peak baggers – Elizabeth's interest was primarily statistical. There were certainly a lot of them to keep track of in 1997. Basque climber Juanito Oiarzabal knocked off his 12th 8000er with Manaslu, and South Korean Park Young-Seok claimed an unprecedented five 8000-metre summits in six months. Two Spanish brothers, Jesús and José Antonio Martinez, set themselves the ambitious goal of climbing all the 8000ers within a year of their first success, all without oxygen or Sherpa support. They were now up to three. Elizabeth grilled them about their plan, asking whether they ever tired from such an ambitious schedule. Antonio replied, “Three days' stay here in Kathmandu … is enough to recover from a climb.” She asked if they ate anything special to help them succeed. “Aspirin,” he said.

Italians Sergio Martini and Fausto De Stefani made it to 12 successful 8000-metre summits, if you counted a confusing account of their ascent of Lhotse. At first they told Elizabeth they had summited, but when pressed for details, they clarified they had been so near the top they felt they could rightly claim it, though they weren't sure just how close they had been because they couldn't see a thing. Then Young-Seok, who summited three days later, followed the Italians' crusted footsteps in the snow and said they ended at least 150 vertical metres below the summit.

When Martini summited Everest in 1999, he called it his 14th. But that included his “almost” summit of Lhotse, which Elizabeth didn't count. However, he did tell her that he might return and climb Lhotse again.

Martini allegedly refused to talk to Elizabeth for two years because of her report on Lhotse, but she insisted she used their words in the report, verbatim:

“We think that we did.”

“How high did you get?”

“We think that we got very, very close.”

“How close?”

“Maybe 50 metres.”

S
o she reported what he had said, rather than stating they had definitely reached the summit. They were unhappy about that, but Martini subsequently went back to Lhotse and summited it, making sure to get pictures. He eventually spoke to her again.

Also in 1999, Oiarzabal summited Annapurna as his 14th. When Oiarzabal told Elizabeth that he would probably return and do some of the 8000ers again she wryly observed, “It seems to be extremely difficult for climbers to stop climbing.”

Another 8000-metre man, Alan Hinkes, had a plan of adding a few more 8000ers to his list in short succession, but his strategy was thwarted by a bizarre mishap. While at base camp for Nanga Parbat in 1998, he inhaled the flour coating on the chapati he was eating, causing a violent sneezing fit that injured his back so badly that he was unable to move because of the pain. He was rescued by helicopter and was eventually hospitalized in Britain. Elizabeth found this amusing, as did Hinkes, since he told the story in all of his lectures, to the delight of his audiences.

And in the third category, the guided clients were just too numerous to talk about, in Elizabeth's opinion. But one season, guided climbs in particular dominated Elizabeth's journalistic reports: 1996 and the much-written-about Everest disaster that killed a total of 11 people. She interviewed many of the climbers and came to her own conclusions of what happened and why. She was convinced that the real fault for the disaster lay with the rivalry between the leaders of two commercial expeditions – Rob Hall, a New Zealand guide and owner of Adventure Consultants, and American Scott Fischer, head of Mountain Madness. Fischer was just getting into the business and, in her opinion, was “elbowing his way in.” On the other hand, Hall was a well-established Everest guide who had succeeded in getting his clients to the summit every year except the previous year. He had firm rules for himself and his clients about turning back if they hadn't reached the South Summit by 1:30 p.m. He had followed his own rules in 1995, and as a result nobody reached the summit but everybody returned home alive. That was not the case in 1996, when four of his team, including Hall, and five more from other expeditions perished on their descent in a terrible storm.

Elizabeth believed the tension on the mountain was created by two very different styles of leader, each with a huge amount at stake.
They were on a collision course, with both teams scheduled to summit on the same day. She described Anatoli Boukreev, Fischer's talented Russian guide, as being sadly miscast as a guide. In his book
The Climb
, Boukreev explains that he didn't see himself as a hand-holding kind of guide but rather as a route-fixer who would go ahead and prepare the way for the clients to follow. Elizabeth thought this strategy might have worked, except that Fischer was sick that summit day and not in a position to do the hand-holding that clearly needed to be done to get all the clients down safely.

She thought that both Fischer and Hall also likely felt pressure to succeed from organizers of other, less-expensive commercial guide companies, who charged clients around $20,000 rather than their pricier $60,000 fee. Although the cheaper expeditions provided fewer Sherpa helpers, less bottled oxygen and virtually no professional guides, there were occasional success stories and this could have been perceived as a threat.

Elizabeth knew them both well and she wondered about the adage that familiarity breeds contempt, or at least that familiarity can foster a more blasé attitude about danger. Experienced climbers who later found their bodies on the mountain were surprised that both Hall and Fischer were clad in relatively lightweight clothing. She wondered if their strong track records had led them to be overly confident in their abilities at high altitude.

Two weeks later another tragedy occurred, with a team from South Africa that claimed Nelson Mandela as its patron. The expedition had been plagued with internal distress from the start. Led by expatriate Briton Ian Woodall, it initially included black South African climber Ed February, who resigned from the team along with two others. Woodall refused to comment when Elizabeth questioned him about the incident. Back home in South Africa, the press went wild and built a story around Woodall's authoritarian leadership style. The three remaining high-altitude climbers – Woodall, Cathy O'Dowd and Bruce Herrod – made it to the summit on May 25. But this is where the real trouble began, because Herrod was slower than the others, perhaps due to his role as a professional photographer. He radioed from the top at 5:00 p.m. but failed to make contact at the scheduled 6:00 p.m. call. His teammates below him in Camp
IV
did not mount a search for him that night or the next morning. O'Dowd
and three Sherpas continued descending, and Woodall waited till mid-afternoon, at which time his bottled oxygen ran out and he too descended. Woodall speculated that Herrod must have fallen somewhere above the South Summit.

In the wake of all the Everest activity that season, Elizabeth was sickened by the numbers: 11 deaths out of 87 summiteers. She tried to determine the major causes. Certainly high altitude and unpredictable storms were factors. But she wondered about the number of people on the mountain. In the past, the Nepalese authorities had controlled the number of permits on the Nepalese side, but this season, due to pressure from Nepalese citizens earning a living from expeditions, they opened it up: there were no limits. There was congestion at the Hillary Step as a result and delays were a serious problem. This reduced the time available to descend before the weather turned.

Elizabeth, like many others, also doubted the skills and strength of many of the climbers on the mountain. American guide Ed Viesturs said there were probably quite a few climbers who shouldn't have been there. As he put it, “They're competent mountaineers, but Everest is another ball game.”

Her comprehensive reports on the Everest disasters elicited conflicting responses. Some said that by reporting excessively on the expeditions that drew the most public attention, especially disasters involving guided clients, she was distorting history. By reporting on these large-scale disasters that had no serious place in the history of mountaineering, was she missing more important climbs being done at the same time? Some felt that by focusing on these commercial disasters, she stooped to the level of journalistic sensationalism and fed public misconception about the majority of climbing exploits in the Nepal Himalaya.

Despite the great attention given to Everest, Elizabeth did report on other important mountaineering achievements that season. On Manaslu, the Mexican climber Carlos Carsolio became the fourth person to climb all 14 of the 8000-metre peaks. His summit day was May 12 and probably would have drawn much more attention had it not been overshadowed by the tragedies on Everest. At age 33, Carlos was the youngest to climb all 14 and the first to reach the top of four 8000ers in one year: Annapurna
I
, Dhaulagiri
I
and Gasherbrums
I
and
II
, all in 1995.

A
nother climber on the trail of the 8000ers was also on Manaslu. French climber Chantal Mauduit, having summited Pumori and Lhotse on April 28 and May 10, helicoptered to the foot of Manaslu with one Sherpa, Ang Tshering. There was already some doubt about her claim earlier that year to have summited Lhotse. Climbers on the mountain saw her disappear from sight while climbing slowly in the couloir just below the summit and later told Elizabeth that she reemerged from it on her descent rather quickly. They doubted that she could have reached the summit in such a short time. On Manaslu, however, she reported seeing prayer flags on the summit, so Elizabeth did not question her claim. But could Mauduit have obtained this information from other climbers? Was Elizabeth too ready to accept “facts” from climbers?

Mauduit had climbed six 8000-metre peaks by the time she died in the spring of 1998 on Dhaulagiri. When she was climbing up to what would be her fatal camp, other teams were coming down because of deteriorating conditions. But Mauduit stayed on. She had a flamboyance about her – in the colourful things she wore and in the naming of each of her expeditions after a flower. Her Dhaulagiri expedition was called “Sunflower,” with sunflowers painted all over her tent, the same tent in which she and Sherpa Ang Tshering were eventually found. After an initial assumption that they had both been asphyxiated or suffocated, the post-mortem revealed that Mauduit's neck was broken. As there had been a lot of avalanche debris piled on one side of the tent, it was unclear whether her neck was broken before or after death. Elizabeth thought that Mauduit may have been overly ambitious for her skills and remembered reports from others that she was a slow climber. But Elizabeth had enjoyed her company, appreciated her charm and genuinely admired her combination of ambition and determination. She was saddened it had to end so tragically.

In the fall of 1996, Dutch climber Bart Vos claimed to have reached the summit of Dhaulagiri
I
by the seldom climbed East Face, a route taken in 1982 by a strong team who then turned back because of extremely dangerous snow on the summit pyramid. Elizabeth doubted Vos; he had lost credibility in 1984 when he made a false claim on Everest. He produced a Dhaulagiri summit photograph, but Elizabeth laughed – it was a night shot with him standing in the snow. It could
easily have been taken in the Alps or lower on the mountain; it didn't prove anything about being on the summit of Dhaulagiri, she scoffed. In fact, in her opinion, it didn't even look like a summit shot, just a snow shot. Along with Elizabeth, Dutch reporter Milja de Zwart did some investigative interviewing of other teams on the mountain. De Zwart wrote a disparaging article about Vos's claim and was subsequently sued for libel. Vos lost the case. Elizabeth described him as “a complicated man, as so many climbers are, and I have the feeling that he really believes his claims. I really think he is a Walter Mitty type. He lives in a world of fantasy and he believes he was successful.”

In Vos's case, as with other doubtful claims, Elizabeth cross-checked with other expeditions who were on the mountain at the same time. As the inconsistencies grew, she dug deeper. Following the court ruling in favour of Zwart's article, Vos had three months to appeal the decision against him. He did not. In Elizabeth's seasonal mountaineering report and statistics, she revised her findings on Vos to state that the claim was almost surely not true. From a mountaineering “interest” point of view, she realized that Vos's claims were not that important, but from the perspective of accuracy, they were. Elizabeth wanted her records to be accurate.