target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">CHAPTER 11
This is a work of creative nonfiction, based on hundreds of hours of interviews and research. The details contained within are true to the best of the author’s knowledge. All scenes with dialogue have been re-created based on the accounts of living participants in those conversations. In the few cases where all parties are deceased, the author relied on the accounts of persons still alive to whom those conversations were described shortly thereafter, as well as on selected books, newspaper and magazine articles, photos, and audio/video recordings.
8000-METER SPECIALIST
—Bruce Barcott, writing for Outside magazine in 2001
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO become one of the world’s premier high-altitude mountaineers? If Christine Boskoff is any example (and she certainly is), the answer is speed, stamina, brains, experience, and the ability to persevere with a smile. “Christine takes pain very well,” says Peter Habeler, the legendary Austrian climber who guided with Boskoff on Everest in 1999. “She can suffer without moaning, which few Westerners can or want to do anymore.” Her ability to endure in the Death Zone has led the 34-year-old Wisconsin native to the top of the world’s highest mountains. In the past six years she’s ticked off six of the fourteen peaks above 8,000 meters (Everest, Cho Oyu, Gasherbrum II, Lhotse, Shishapangma, and Broad Peak), in addition to becoming the only female expedition leader among the elite guide services operating on Everest. “She’s got great inner confidence and experience,” says American climber Charlie Fowler, who scaled Tibet’s 26,291-foot Shishapangma with Boskoff last fall. “I haven’t seen anybody stronger.”
Five years ago Boskoff was stuck in an Atlanta cubicle, engineering flight simulators for Lockheed Martin. Off-hours she built her endurance engine by working the crags near town, whipping off ten-mile runs, and scrambling up frozen waterfalls during the Southeast’s brief ice-climbing window. A spring 1993 mountaineering trip to the Bolivian Andes whetted her appetite for more substantial peaks, including the Himalayan massifs. “I’d quit my job every time a big expedition came up—Broad Peak in ’95, then Cho Oyu in ’96,” she says. Eventually, she abandoned her office post altogether for a less tethered career; she moved to Seattle to help take over the Mountain Madness guide service in 1997, a year after the company’s founder, Scott Fischer, died on Everest.
This spring, Boskoff will be back on Everest as a guide for Mountain Madness, which may yield her second summit on that peak. She’ll then attempt K2’s dangerous SSE Spur with Fowler. A view from the 28,250-foot pinnacle would put her halfway to becoming the first woman to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. Thing is, she’s so modest about her ability, male climbers who approach her at climbing crags have no idea who they’re flirting with. One day last year at Skaha Bluffs, in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, she was besieged by a crew of twentysomething lads trying out their best lines on the attractive alpinist.
“What do you do for a living?” one asked her as she limbered up a 5.10 line. “Oh,” said Boskoff, who had recently topped out on Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, “I run a travel business.”
CHAPTER 1
MISSING
LIGHT MIXED WITH DUST POURED through a grimy window in the police station conference room. As more officers crammed inside, standing room became scarce. God, this is too much, thought Ted Callahan. What the hell do they think they’re going to see here?
It had taken more than twenty-four hours for the police to grant Callahan’s request to open the bags, and suddenly it was time. The Chinese Public Security Bureau (PSB) here in far western China initially acted as though his request to unlock Chris’s and Charlie’s duffels had been overstepping bounds. Now, it seemed every desk clerk and janitor in the building had packed into the small space, all waiting to see the bags reveal their secrets.
The buzz from the Chinese police officers collided with the tranquil scene just outside the station. The streets of Litang were home to Tibetan Buddhists, most of them dressed in traditional clothing of richly woven fabrics made from yak hair. Oblivious to the drama inside the station, the locals were focused instead on impending weather systems and the impact to their barley crops.
Two oversize duffels lay in the middle of the room, each secured with a lock. Callahan fiddled with each one, tugging to see if he could jimmy them open. No luck. He’d been operating on wisps of sleep and too much coffee since heading up the search-and-rescue operation a week ago. Or was it a search-and-recovery? The differences muddied his exhausted mind. Setting them aside felt like the only way to move forward.
Callahan had left his academic fellowship in Kyrgyzstan as soon as he’d been alerted to the disappearance of Chris Boskoff and Charlie Fowler by Mountain Madness, Chris’s Seattle-based guiding company. Having solid experience dealing with the Chinese and a grasp of the language, he was a good match to head the on-the-ground operation. Chris was a friend and Charlie was a climber he’d known and admired for years. The couple loved climbing more than anyone he knew.
At age thirty-two, Callahan was an accomplished mountaineer himself who’d led trips for Mountain Madness and understood the draw of remote peaks in this part of the world. Both the terrain and the people in the area near the Tibetan border had captivated Charlie for decades, and now Chris shared his fascination. It was an area they’d returned to again and again.
This time, no plan had been left to track their whereabouts. No permits had been requested to help aid the