Tom Hornbein Seattle, Washington April 13, 1998
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Afew days ago a news report carried a story that jolted my fondest fantasies. A Chinese mountaineer, Wang Hung Pao, who had been a member of that country’s successful ascent of Everest from the north side in 1975, was killed recently in an avalanche while reconnoitering for a joint Sino-Japanese attempt by the direct North Face. Prior to his death he had communicated to a Japanese teammate, Ryoten Hasegawa, that in 1975, high on the limestone slabs near Everest’s Northeast Ridge, he had found the body of a man, garbed in tattered, decaying clothing of the English mountaineering style of half a century ago. Might this be the body of George Leigh Mallory or his companion, Andrew Irvine, who were last seen by Noel Odell heading toward the summit on the morning of June 8, 1924? That they might be preserved in substance more than myth was at once disappointing and exciting. Were a camera to be found, would it provide an answer to the tantalizing question whether they reached the summit before coming to grief?
This event lends counterpoint to my mood as I write in the early dawn of the first anniversary of Willi Unsoeld’s death in an avalanche on Mount Rainier. Willi has been as much in my thoughts this last year as before he died. I suspect it may ever be so, for like Mallory, there is a permanence to what he left us that lingers fadeproof as a fine photo. Yet, writing these words for a new edition seventeen years after our climb, I find myself almost dispassionate (but not quite; the tears still come at unexpected moments) as I look back at the toll that seems part of the price of a love affair with mountains. Willi would say you have to look death in the eyeball to really live. Sometimes it stares you down. Jake Breitenbach died in the Icefall on Everest; Dan Doody in a fall ice climbing Mount Washington soon after; Marc Emerson, Dick and Pat’s sixteen-year-old son, in a fall while rock climbing almost a decade ago; Nanda Devi Unsoeld in Willi’s arms high on the mountain for which she was named, two-and-a-half years before her father’s death. There is more, but to what end? I look back across sorrow seeking the rationalization to justify the loss. It is simple. There is no choice. The addiction is one we all shared, the risks more or less appreciated, the joys and depth of togetherness transcendent. We, who remain and remember, go on, our inspiration and vitality mellowed but intact, enriched by moments intensely shared and now an element of our living memory.
Willi was fifty-two at the time of his death. The Old Guide was attempting to extract himself and a group of Evergreen College students from a taste of winter mountaineering high on Mount Rainier. He had wobbled up there on a couple of artificial hip joints that had recently replaced the originals, which he had pounded to the point where they spoke their pain too loudly back at him. Descending in blowing snow, the first rope of four was caught by an avalanche that lacked the blustering benignity of one that Willi and I shared on Masherbrum in 1960. Willi and Janie Diepenbrock were too deeply buried.
Willi lived life and preached it close to the edge. He used his years to the hilt and his impact on the world around him was a potent one. Over the years, he touched many lives, especially young ones. I have tried on several occasions lately to encapsulate on paper my view of the essence of Unsoeld. The ambition proved ill-conceived. There were too many essences, and their total turned out to be too crazily vast. That may be part of Willi’s plan, for he had an uncannily slippery way of provoking questions in others without blowing his own cover. Dick Emerson described it thusly in last year’s American Alpine Journal:
So I am left as perplexed as always. Is there some central principle which held the many parts of Willi Unsoeld together? A principle that will help me comprehend him as a single, mortal man? I have been trying for years to find it, to “figure Willi out”; and every time I thought I was getting close he changed before my very eyes.
It was a game we played between us. Willi, always searching for the key to his own character, knew that I was looking for it too; so he made the search into a game we played together. (“Willi,” I once said, “if you’ll just hold that pose a minute more, I’ll have you figured out; then I’ll tell you all about you.” My grin met his roaring guffaw, the one we can still all hear. “Di-i-ck! Do you really think I would let that happen? I’ll change before I let you figure me out!” I thought I had him then. “There’s the answer, Willi. You just did it again. You always compete, whether on a climbing rope or in this ‘search for self’! You’re more interested in beating me to the answer than you are in the answer itself! You would rather compete with me, than acquire all those virtues you like to call ‘self-knowledge’!” Willi returned my grin, and he spoke softly for maximum effect: “Perhaps, … Just maybe. But competition takes two. So, now, Dick, let’s talk about you!” Zap! Try again tomorrow.)
Willi Unsoeld taking shelter from the midday heat at Camp 2 (Photo by Tom Hornbein)
The Unsoeld that I find in The West Ridge still feels real seventeen years later, just incomplete. For most of us this adventure occurred at the beginning of our efforts to identify and realize our aspirations. For Willi, I believe, Everest was not high on the list. Another good climb, an essential seasoning to life, but not an ultimate challenge. Willi extracted a lot of mileage from the accomplishment and the notoriety, but it was mostly as a means to an end. He used Everest as a magnificent metaphor, actually multiple metaphors. “Outward Bound” on Everest was one, the theme to reach beyond one’s known limits, only he expressed his philosophy more powerfully and flamboyantly. The mountain became a medium for messages about such things as human striving, closeness and interrelationships, and the ecological assault on fragile environments. Everest provided Willi a visibility that he used to help accomplish the goals he set for himself, which amounted to provoking the rest of us to reexamine our philosophies of life to broaden our view of the world, and to learn to live in it with minimal trauma to the substrate or to each other.
I would guess none of us who were part of that 1963 expedition were left unaltered by it, for better or (and?) worse. Not so much by the climb itself, for that must have been a sense of incompleteness, of what might have been, of dreams unfulfilled. For a few the notoriety could be parlayed into recognition, either as an end in itself, or as a means to other ends, as Willi was quick to recognize. For me, this visibility seemed a liability as I returned from climbing Everest to begin my academic career as an anesthesiologist and physiologist. I feared being ever “the doc who climbed Everest,” and this concern added to the many doubts associated with the transition from the isolated simplicity of the mountain world to the more nebulous one of real life.
Perhaps I am haunted still by those searchings with which that adventure ended, for I have willfully and pleasurably traded off one sort of challenge for another. The current one, directing an academic anesthesia program, asks the same commitment and caring as climbing a mountain. There are occasions totally analogous to climbing out of a warm sleeping bag before dawn and into frozen boots. The pace must of necessity be a bit slower, for the task is measured in years rather than days or weeks or months. Moments of sorrow and joy related to the rise and fall of the tide of lives and friendships are similar, as are the risks, uncertainty, and resulting motivations. A difference is the lack of a clear simple endpoint, both literally and figuratively. Success is ill-defined, rarely absolute, and therefore, even more than with the climbing of a mountain, the pleasure is perhaps more in the playing than in the view from the top. And that is what makes tomorrow so enticing.
I shall not explore these intervening years further. They are after-Everest parts of our individual lives and while influenced by the event, sometimes profoundly, are not relevant to the story being resurrected here. This new edition, though, deserves some comment, for it too bears the stamp of time and change. Both rising costs and the loss of plates makes replication of the original Exhibit Format version an impossibility. We have salvaged a few of the more cherished (by me) quotes and started from scratch on the photographs. The pictorial orientation is now more toward the climb than the beauty of the approach march, and here Willi’s camera was particularly busy. The Emersons, Jolene Unsoeld, and Hornbeins combed our collections, added a few favorites from Jim Lester, and borrowed from the original “lecture” set. Unfortunately