Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

  As Alan continued to embellish upon this theme, the cops warmed up to the story. It had the ring of truth, they thought. They liked Alan. They liked his respectful, Boy Scout attitude, and his comical accent, which they mistook for Australian. Alan, in fact, reminded the cops a lot of this guy in a movie they'd just seen, this Crocodile Dundee fellow.

  From that point on, the cops were putty in the Yorkshireman's hand. Great movie, that Crocodile Dundee, the cops told him, Alan ought to check it out. The cops went on to say how genuinely sorry they were that Alan had been attacked in their usually peaceful city, and they hoped he didn't judge all Americans by the behavior of a few bad apples. And then they wished him a friendly good night.

  Of all the preposterous twists and turns in the Burgess saga, perhaps none is more preposterous than the pairing of Adrian and Lorna Rogers. Adrian, after all, is by his own admission a destitute, uncultured thirty-nine-year-old adolescent, while Lorna is as upper crust as they come. Her family has been at the summit of Denver society for four generations; theirs is a world of polo ponies and coming-out parties and very exclusive country clubs, a world where one's children are expected to go to the right schools and marry into the right families. Lorna-an intense, strong-willed, very attractive attorney-did the debutante routine in all its splendor, went to college at Williams, has a sitting congressman, Mo Udall, for an uncle, and likes to unwind by riding thoroughbreds in fox hunts. And in 1981, eleven months after meeting him in Kath- mandu's Yak and Yeti bar, she married Adrian Burgess, bad boy of the Himalaya.

  When I asked Lorna what she thought of having a husband who was absent four or five months of every year, she admitted she'd been "really miserable for the first couple of years, but now I kind of like it; I like the pattern of coming and going, the way it keeps the relationship from getting stale. I get to have a husband and share a life with him, but I also get to have a lot of freedom. Actually, Adrian being gone isn't nearly as bad as the way these goddamn expeditions monopolize the household when he's getting ready to go."

  Adrian has spruced up his act some under Lorna's considerable influence. The renQwned honky-tonker and street-fighter, for instance, has lately taken to riding in the family fox hunts, decked out in full regalia. Whillans is no doubt spinning in his grave, but according to Adrian, "It gets a bit exciting, if you want to know the truth. Riding those 'orses is like sitting on a fast motorbike that goes where it wants to, not where you steer it."

  There are not yet any fox hunts on the other twin's horizon. Alan remains the consummate lowballer, a grand master of the art of getting by, living proof of Eric Beck's oft-quoted dictum, "At either end of the socioeconomic spectrum there lies a leisure class." Alan, observes his ex-friend Gordon Smith, "has no visible means of support; he never seems to do any work, yet somehow he always scrapes by. It's a bit of a mystery how he manages it, really."

  One way he manages it is to spend most of his time, even between expeditions, living in Nepal with Sherpa friends. "I suppose I average about six or seven months a year over there," Alan says. "It's a lot cheaper to stay in Nepal between trips, living on three dollars a day, than to fly back to the West. Of course, to get by on that you 'ave to be willing to eat the same things the Sherpas eat, and eating potatoes and lentils and kurd three times a day can get a bit boring. And that kind of money won't allow you to drink beer, you 'ave to stick to chang and rakshi.

  "I don't mind dirt-bagging it, though. I've actually come to prefer the Third World lifestyle," Alan continues. "When I come back to the West now, I become confused by all the choices. You really feel the culture shock, the difference between a culture that 'as some depth and one that only thinks it 'as. My gut's grown accustomed to the Sherpa flora, right, so I never get sick over there anymore, but as soon as I come back 'ere-like to Vancouver or somewhere?-BANG! I get the shits, the congested chest, the 'ole bloody business."

  By living in high Sherpa villages, Alan is also able to sneak off and climb illicitly, without the hassle of permits, peak fees, or liaison officers. In the winter of 1986, for instance, he and a Sherpa friend ducked into Tibet with their Sherpani girlfriends and managed to come within a day of summiting on an 8,000-meter peak. "It was all 'ighly illegal, of course," Alan says, "but it was the biggest adventure I've 'ad in the last eight years; it was great. We went super light: just one tent, two mats, and two sleeping bags for the four of us. During the trek over to the mountains, we 'ad to listen carefully for yak bells, and lie low whenever Tibetan traders came up the trail, because they'll sell you out to the Nepalese check posts if they see you."

  Over the eight years Alan has intermittently lived and climbed in the Khumbu district of Nepal, he has developed a remarkable rapport with the Sherpa people. Because few Western climbers can come close to matching the performance of Sherpas in the Himalaya, most Sherpas privately condescend to sahibs. "They tend to regard Westerners as chumps," Alan states flatly. Because Alan is unusually strong at altitude for a white boy, and has learned, like a Sherpa, to carry monstrous loads with a tump-line around his forehead, he has earned a rare degree of Sherpa respect. "In some ways," Alan brags, "they consider me a local."

  That consideration is at least partly due to the fact that in June, 1987, a twenty-one-year-old Sherpani named Nima Diki gave birth to Alan's son in a bed of leaves at thirteen thousand feet in the village of Phortse. Alan allows, "When I got the letter from a Sherpa friend warning me, `Nima Diki's looking a little big,' I thought, `Oh fuck, what am I going to do?' But when I got over there and saw the little guy, I stopped worrying."

  It remains to be seen whether the arrival of the child, named Dawa, will finally bring Alan's protracted adolescence to a closeas he prepares to enter his fifth decade-and actually usher him into the world of adult responsibility. He has, however, been overheard mulling over such adult-sounding dilemmas as whether or not Dawa should go to school in Kathmandu or in the Khumbu.

  Meanwhile, Chris Bonington-apparently no longer concerned about the twins' reputation-recently invited Adrian and Alan on a major expedition, scheduled for the spring of 1989, to attempt the only significant unclimbed line remaining on Mt. Everest: the notorious northeast ridge, where Britain's two finest Himalayan climbers, Joe Tasker and Peter Boardman, disappeared back in 1982. Because the 1989 expedition will be a typical Bonington extravaganza-involving sixteen western climbers, thirty Sherpas, live television broadcasts, siege tactics, bottled oxygen-and both Adrian and Alan have had unpleasant experiences on big-budget, big-team Himalayan efforts, the twins respectfully declined the invitation.

  After participating in Alan Rouse's large and ill-fated expedition to K2 in 1986, says Adrian, "We decided, absolutely, that from then on we would climb only with each other, and never again with a huge team." Owing to the expedition's complex logistics, the Burgesses were almost never ropemates on K2, and were profoundly unhappy because of it.

  Sherpas believe that identical twins-zongly, they call themare imbued with exceptional luck. Lucky or not, the power of the bond between twins cannot be overestimated. Their relationship has a built-in intimacy that at times seems almost clairvoyant. "With your twin," Adrian says, "you always know just what'e's thinking, just what 'e's going to do. There's this tremendous trust: you couldn't lie to your twin, even if you wanted to; 'e'd see right through it straight away. On a big trip, on the other 'and, because of all the expedition politics you're never in total control of your own climbing. Somebody at base camp decides who you should climb with, when you should go up, when you should go down. And that's dangerous."

  Adrian speculates that Bonington's upcoming Everest expedition is likely to be particularly hazardous in that regard. "Because of all the money being spent," he explains, "and the direct involvement of the media, the climb is going to be hyped-up like crazy. And the climbers will start believing all that hype, of course, and develop a `go-for-it' mentality. Personally, I think somebody's going to get killed."

  That somebody, notes Adrian, could all too e
asily be a Burgess were they to go along. "I've learned to accept death as a part of life in the mountains," Adrian reflects. "I've even learned to accept it when close friends die. But I don't think I could handle it if Al died; Icouldn't accept that."

  It's likely that pride, as well as caution, played a part in the twins' decision not to join Bonington. On the huge 1982 Everest expedition, by all accounts, Alan Burgess did more to make the climb a success-in terms of route preparation, leadership, and load carrying-than any other member of the team, yet poor timing and a malfunctioning oxygen mask denied him the opportunity to stand on the summit. That, in itself, might not have bothered Alan unduly had he not seen the post-expedition glory-and financial spoils-go almost exclusively to those who summited.

  According to Gordon Smith, who also did more than his share of the work on Everest but did not summit, "When we left base camp after the climb, all eight climbers still felt very friendly towards each other. Then we arrived in Kathmandu, and the media started separating us into winners and losers. The guys who got to the top, the winners, received all the recognition-and quite a bit of money as well, from endorsement contracts and the like. The rest of us went back home to find that we had no jobs, no money, no reward. You find yourself thinking, Jesus Christ, I did a lot more work on that mountain than the bloke who happened to summit; is there any fairness in that?"

  So, the question of whether the twins would be going to Everest in 1989 was an open-and-shut case, or at least seemed to be. A few days after Alan left for K2, however, I received a postcard from him. He'd experienced a change of heart, he said, and decided that he was going to accompany Bonington to Everest after all, even though Adrian remained adamant about not going. Since I'd recently listened to both brothers hold forth at a table in the Bustop about the evils of mega-expeditions in general, and this Everest expedition in particular, I phoned Adrian-who had not yet departed for K2-to get the lowdown.

  "Al's always been a good rationalizer," Adrian offered, "and now 'e's telling 'imself that the route's a lot more difficult than 'e first thought, and therefore warrants the use of oxygen and fixed rope and a massive team and all that other crap. I think the real reason 'e's all of a sudden decided to go is that, basically, going to Everest means three free meals a day and a place to call 'ome for three months." A long, uncharacteristic silence followed. Finally, Adrian said, "Well, that's me brother, isn't it?"

  IN THE NORTHERNMOST CORNER OF PAKISTAN, IN THE HEART OF THE Karakoram Range, is a forty-mile tongue of rubble-covered ice called the Baltoro Glacier, above which rise six of the seventeen highest mountains on the planet. In June, 1986, there were 150 tents pitched at the head of the Baltoro, sheltering expeditions from ten nations. Most of the men and women living in those tents, whose ranks included some of the world's most ambitious and highly regarded climbers, had their sights set on a single summit: K2.

  At 28,250 feet, the summit of K2 is some 800 feet lower than Mt. Everest, but its sharper, more graceful proportions make it a more striking mountain-and a much harder one to climb. Indeed, of the fourteen mountains in the world higher than eight thousand meters, K2 has the highest failure rate. By 1985 only nine of the twenty-six expeditions that had attempted the peak had succeeded, putting a total of thirty-nine people on the summit-at a cost of twelve lives. In 1986 the government of Pakistan granted an unprecedented number of climbing permits for K2, and by the end of the summer an additional twenty-seven climbers had made it to the top. But for every two people who summited, one would die-thirteen deaths in all, more than doubling the number of fatalities in the preceding eighty-four years. The toll would raise some thorny questions about the recent course of Himalayan climbing, a course some people believe has become unjustifiably reckless. The new modus operandi leaves so little margin for error that climbers now commonly begin their ascents with the understanding that if things go wrong, the bond between ropemates-a bond that was until recently held to be sacrosanct-may be discarded in favor of a policy of every man for himself.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE: The original version of this piece, published in Outside Magazine, was co-written with Greg Child.

  The present direction of high-altitude mountaineering was set, it is generally agreed, in the summer of 1975, when Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler pioneered a new route up a 26,470-foot neighbor of K2's called Hidden Peak without bottled oxygen, a support team, fixed ropes, a chain of preestablished camps, or any of the other siege tactics that had traditionally been de rigueur in the Himalaya. Messner pointedly termed this bold new approach "climbing by fair means," implying that it was cheating to get to the top of a mountain by any other way.

  In a single stroke, Messner and Habeler significantly upped the ante in a game that did not lack for high stakes and long odds to begin with. When Messner first announced that he would climb an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak in the same manner that climbers tackled routes in the Tetons and Alps, most of the world's foremost climbers labeled the plan impossible and suicidal. After Messner and Habeler succeeded, anyone with designs on usurping Messner's throne-and more than a few of the men and women camped beneath K2 in 1986 had such designs-was left with little choice but to attack the highest mountains in the world by equally "fair" and incautious means.

  The most coveted prize on K2 was its striking South Pillar, huge and unclimbed, a "last great problem" that Messner had nicknamed "the Magic Line." Soaring two vertical miles from glacier to summit, it demanded more steep, technical climbing at extreme altitude than anything previously done in the Himalaya.

  There were four teams attempting the Magic Line in 1986, including an American party under the leadership of a thirty-fiveyear-old Oregonian named John Smolich. Early on June 21, a bright, cloudless morning, Smolich and partner Alan Pennington were climbing an easy approach gully at the base of the route when, far above them, the sun loosened a truck-size rock from the ice, sending it careering down the mountainside. As soon as the boulder struck the top of the gully, a fifteen-foot-deep fracture line shot across the low-angled snowfield, initiating a massive avalanche that engulfed Smolich and Pennington in a matter of seconds. Climbers who witnessed the slide quickly located and dug out Pennington, but not quickly enough to save his life. Smolich's body, buried under thousands of tons of frozen debris, was never found.

  The surviving members of the American team called off their climb and went home, but the other expeditions on the mountain regarded the tragedy as a freak accident-simply a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time-and continued their own effort s without pause.

  Indeed, on June 23, two Basques-Mari Abrego and Josema Casimaro-and four members of a French-Polish expeditionMaurice and Liliane Barrard, Wanda Rutkiewicz, and Michel Parmentier-reached the summit of K2 via the mountain's easiest route, the Abruzzi Spur. Liliane Barrard and Rutkiewicz thereby became the first women to stand on top of K2, and, more impressive still, they did so without using bottled oxygen.

  All six climbers, however, were forced by darkness to bivouac high on the exposed side of the summit pyramid, and by morning the clear, cold skies that had prevailed for the previous week had given way to an intense storm. During the ensuing descent, the Barrards-both very experienced Himalayan climbers with other 8,000-meter summits under their belts-dropped behind and never reappeared. Parmentier guessed they had fallen or been swept away by an avalanche, but he nonetheless stopped to wait for them in a high camp on the off chance that they might show up, while Rutkiewicz and the Basques, whose noses and fingertips had begun to turn black from frostbite, continued down.

  That night-June 24-the storm worsened. Waking to a com plete whiteout and horrible winds, Parmentier radioed base camp by walkie-talkie that he was descending; but with the fixed ropes and all traces of his companions' footprints buried by fresh snow, he soon became lost on the broad, featureless south shoulder of K2. He staggered around in the blizzard at 26,000 feet with no idea where to go, muttering "grande vide, grande vide" (huge emptiness), as climbers in base camp t
ried to guide him down over the radio by their recollections of the route.

  "I could hear the desperation and fatigue in his voice as he went back and forth in the storm, looking for some clue to the descent," says Alan Burgess, a member of a British expedition. "Finally Parmentier found a dome of ice with a urine stain on it, and we remembered it. By this insignificant landmark we could guide him down the rest of the route by voice. He was very lucky."

  On July 5, four Italians, a Czech, two Swiss, and a Frenchman, Benoit Chamoux, reached the summit via the Abruzzi route. Cha- moux's ascent was done in a single twenty-four-hour push from base camp, an extraordinary athletic feat, especially considering that just two weeks before, the Frenchman had sprinted up the neighboring slopes of 26,400-foot Broad Peak, top to bottom, in seventeen hours.

  Even more extraordinary, though, were the deeds underway on K2's south face: a two-mile-high expanse of steep, ice-plastered rock, avalanche gullies, and tenuously hanging glaciers delineated on one side by the Abruzzi Spur and on the other by the Magic Line. On July 4, the Poles, Jerzy Kukuczka, thirty-eight, and Tad- eusz Piotrowski, forty-six, started up the center of this unclimbed wall in light, impeccably pure style, bent on pushing the limits of Himalayan climbing to a whole new plane.