—JOHN BUCHAN
Curious children along the trek (Photo by Lute Jerstad)
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You’ve climbed the highest mountain in the world. What’s left? it’s all downhill from there. You’ve got to set your sights on something higher than Everest. |
—WILLI UNSOELD
PREFACES PAST
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
The events recounted in this book took place half a lifetime ago. Sometimes, feeling like a surrogate for a former self, I wonder if I was really there. In this present moment of Everest mania, reminders of the reality of having been there come unrelentingly, daily. In the original preface, I wrote with prescience, “Everest was not a private affair. It belongs to many men.”
Much has changed since 1963. The mountain has changed. Not in any noticeable geological way, yet the lammergeiers circling overhead cannot help but note increased numbers of tiny, multicolored creatures clinging to its flanks. Notoriety has altered Everest’s interface with man in ways that are the fate for all attractive mountains. The discovery of a high mountain leads to explorations to it from which a route to the summit can be contemplated. Initial attempts ultimately result in the first ascent. The next phase is the testing of limits: more difficult routes, hostile seasons, an aesthetically purer style, such as the fast, light-weight, do-it-yourself Alpine-style ascents without Sherpa support and without the use of supplemental oxygen. The seminal event of this phase was Reinhold Messner’s 1980 solo ascent of Everest’s North Face without the use of supplemental oxygen. Dick Emerson would have explained that these evolutions keep the outcome uncertain and motivation, therefore, at a maximum. Each pushes the envelope of possibility and thereby increases accessibility for future wanderers as well as the stakes for those with a creative flair.
Because Everest is the highest, it has become a magnet for climbers of many nationalities, of a widening range of abilities, who can test themselves and come home (if they are fortunate) wearing a small mantle of notoriety. With Dick Bass’s ascent in 1985, guided climbing came to Everest, as it has to all other major mountains of the world. The easier ways up the highest mountain on earth could be traveled, with appropriate support, by those less experienced if physically fit, motivated, and sufficiently affluent. In recent years the base camp beside the Khumbu Glacier has become a small city of tents filled with hundreds of would-be Everest summiters from all over the world, supported by a large number of Sherpas.
The goal now is to get not just a few, but rather all members of a group to the top. By this year’s end, ascents of Everest should have passed one thousand. The numbers, especially of climbers with lesser experience, add a new, complex dimension to the sociology of climbing on Everest and to the risk. When Willi and I headed toward the summit on May 22, 1963, we were alone. We had only ourselves to depend on and worry about. Our disconnection from loved ones and support added an uneasy seasoning to our effort. Now, with crowds common near the top of Everest on a fine spring day, too many perceive that help is at hand. This feeling of security lures driven but less-experienced individuals into situations where they lack the ability and judgment to manage by themselves. Others’ lives (and aspirations) are put at risk when a humanitarian need to assist arises. In addition, numbers bring queues with delays sometimes of an hour or more at bottlenecks like the Hillary Step as one waits one’s turn to go up or down. Getting up and getting down expeditiously is a time-honored precept of safe mountaineering; standing immobilized invites disaster. Everest has caught the attention of the general public. The tragic events that unfolded in the spring of 1996, as told in accounts such as Jon Krakauer’s powerful, introspective bestseller Into Thin Air, are part of the reason. Another contributor to what one anthropologist has referred to as the “new Everest boom” is the immediacy that modern satellite communication brings to what once was one of the most isolated places on earth, a near real-time window on the game being played out.
My feelings about this new Everest are mixed. My mind acknowledges the inevitability of what has come about, but my soul sorrows at the evolution, and regrets that a precious spiritual element of adventure is largely gone from this highest place on earth. I am thankful for having been born when I was, and having been in the right place at the right time.
We survivors of this adventure are thirty-five years older, no bolder, a little slower. Of our team of twenty, eight are dead. When I wrote the preface for the second edition in 1980, I ached from Willi Unsoeld’s death on Mount Rainier a year earlier. Willi and Dick Emerson, who died three years later of cancer, remain a vital part of my life, even though I cannot argue with them anymore. Jake Breitenbach was killed in the Icefall. Jim Ullman and Dan Doody died soon after the expedition. More recent subtractions were Barry Prather, Barry Bishop, and Jimmy Roberts. Barry Bishop’s camera caught the special moment that is the cover of this book. We who remain climb on—at least metaphorically. Everest has changed our destiny.
Only in the last couple of decades have I appreciated, or at least acknowledged to myself, that mountains formed my life. Early on I discovered that tree- and house-climbing in Saint Louis paled in comparison to the peaks and cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. My love of rock translated into a geology major at the University of Colorado, where climbing led to mountain rescue, rescue to first aid. After my junior year, I decided to apply to medical school. I imagined being a general practitioner in a mountain town in Colorado or Wyoming, but a medical school dedicated to training specialists soon disabused me of this goal. In spare moments I began to read about humans at high altitude and wondered why people responded physiologically as they did. My professor of surgery suggested specializing in anesthesiology as a way to combine my interest in caring for people with an academic career in physiologic research.
I returned from Everest in 1963 to my first real job, as a member of the faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine. I confronted the future full of uncertainty. Would I succeed in my academic aspirations as a clinician, teacher, and scientist, or would I forever be tagged as just the “doc who climbed Everest”? For many years I tried to separate my medical and mountain worlds.
Aging has allowed me to accept my accomplishments as well as my limitations. Now I understand that mountains and medicine are warp and weft of the same cloth. From mountains I learned many lessons that defined me and my relationship with those around me: my medical and scientific colleagues, my students, my climbing companions and other friends, my wife and children, and others whose lives this book touched in unexpected ways.
Climbing mountains, especially the risky Himalayan variety, is a selfish proposition. Yet I believe that something of value comes from this seemingly useless pursuit. As I worked and learned and taught as a physician practicing a high-risk critical care specialty, I found that risk is an essential ingredient to life. The ability to accept uncertainty enables one to stay cool during crisis. The willingness to risk also underpins discovery: creativity in science or art or other ventures into the unknown. Finally, accepting that outcomes are commonly uncertain and failure often possible (for that is inherent in the definition of risk) allows us as a society to better cope with the challenges that confront us in what we do to our planet and each other.
Sherpani porters resting (Photo by Tom Hornbein)
The climbing of mountains also gives us heroes who we might look up to and strive to emulate. My boyhood was replete with heroes. A little uncomfortably, I find myself cast in this role by others as this event acquires its niche in the history of mountaineering. I also discover that heroes are as important to me now as they were in my youth. Heroes are for all ages.
I now realize that this book is about accepting risk, and pursuing dreams. Perhaps its greatest value is not so much as a historical description of a Himalayan