Everest a Year Later: False Summit (Cont.)

Outside Magazine May 1997

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True Everest
Everest a Year Later: False Summit (Cont.)

By Mark Bryant


	(Photograph by Andrew Eccles)

MB: You and others have certainly been critical of how Anatoli Boukreev, one of Scott Fischer's guides, performed some of his duties, though in your book you quote a great insight of his: "If client cannot climb Everest without big help from guide, this client should not be on Everest. Otherwise there can be big problems up high."

JK: I'm in total agreement with Anatoli when he warns that if you coddle clients down low, you're asking for trouble up high, and yes, I've been critical of what Anatoli did after he tagged the summit, and that he climbed without oxygen while working as a guide. His mistake, as I see it, is that after having coddled clients and gotten them high, as the current job description of an Everest guide demands, you then owe it to them to keep coddling them rather than just blasting down on your own. Nevertheless, Anatoli's warning here is right on the money, and people should listen to him.

MB: Shouldn't people also be rethinking the way other aspects of these commercial trips are conducted? Here we often have some people with little experience or skill, a guide-client relationship that can discourage that all-important sense of "team," and a rather sizable financial transaction that puts real pressure on the guides to see that those signing the checks get a crack at the summit.

JK: There's something about the recent commercialization of Everest that's shocking and very troubling. But maybe it shouldn't be. The sport of mountaineering, after all, was invented by wealthy Englishmen who hired burly local hill people to guide them up the Alps, do the grunt work, and keep them from harm. There's a long tradition of guided climbing, so who am I to say that it's bad or wrong, even on the world's tallest mountain? All I can say is that the commercial experience on Everest leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm reminded of something Alex Lowe said not long ago. Alex is arguably the best all-around climber in the world, has summited Everest twice, and has guided it three times. Alex remarked that he gets far more satisfaction from guiding the Grand Teton in the summers than he ever did guiding Everest. In the Tetons, he said, his clients came away both grateful for his help and jazzed about the mountains and climbing, whereas his Everest clients tended to come down pretending they weren't guided and putting on weird airs.

The way Everest is guided is very different from the way other mountains are guided, and it flies in the face of values I hold dear: self-reliance, taking responsibility for what you do, making your own decisions, trusting your judgment—the kind of judgment that comes only through paying your dues, through experience.

MB: And when such values are in short supply? What then?

JK: In our case, and I think this is true for many commercial ventures, we never became a team. Instead we were a bunch of individuals who liked each other to a certain degree and got along well enough, but we never had this feeling that we were all in it together. Part of it was that we didn't do enough of the actual work: Sherpas set up camp, Sherpas did the cooking. We didn't have to cooperate and work out who was going to haul this load or who was going to cook or do the dishes or chop the ice for water. Which contributed to the fact that we never coalesced as a team, which in turn contributed to the tragedy: We were all in it for ourselves when we should have been in it for each other. When I should have been there for others, I wasn't. I was a client and my teammates were clients, and we all counted on the guides to take care of anyone who got into trouble. But the guides couldn't, because they were dead or dying, and there weren't enough of them.

MB: People who read your Outside piece continue to say—constantly, it seems—that you've been altogether too hard on yourself about your own role in the events of May 10. And as readers of the book will discover, that intense self-reproach hasn't gone away. Where's the guilt coming from, and has it begun to subside at all?

JK: I can tell you this: I'm doing better than I have a right to. I mean, look at my role in the death of Andy Harris, the young New Zealand guide on our team. There is no way I should have ever headed down to camp and left him high on the mountain. I should have recognized that he was hypoxic and in trouble.

MB: You honestly think you abandoned him up there at the South Summit? That it wasn't a safe assumption that he was there doing a job? He was the guide and you were the client, a distinction that was drummed into everyone from the outset of the expedition. Plus there was the altitude: He wasn't thinking clearly, but you should have been? In a Himalayan storm?

JK: I know, intellectually, that there were reasons for what I did or didn't do, but here's what it comes down to: If I had simply been on Everest with six or seven friends instead of climbing as a client on a guided trip, I never would have descended to my tent and gone off to sleep without accounting for each of my partners. It's shameful and inexcusable, no matter what. And it's not just Andy. Yasuko died and Beck lost his hands, and this stuff eats at me, it plays over and over again in my head, and will, and should. I come down hard on other people in both the article and the book, so why should I let myself off easy? I think I've got some things to answer for.

MB: I was talking to one of the other survivors recently and it was obvious that he, too, was struggling. I mumbled something about time hopefully healing all wounds, and he said, "I guess it heals some wounds, but others it seems to open wider. And suddenly you discover that even bones, bones you never knew you had, are broken." And I felt such an ache for what this person must be dealing with. Are the other climbers able to move on, or are many still deep in the throes?

JK: Some seem to be doing quite well, actually—at least that's what they say—and I'm happy for them. Most amazing is Beck Weathers, who by all accounts is doing great, despite everything that's happened to him—losing his right arm to frostbite from the middle of his forearm down, losing the fingers on his left hand, losing his nose. But Beck is an incredible guy: The same qualities that enabled him to rise from the dead out on the South Col and save his own life have allowed him to deal with this better than one could expect, and I'm in awe of that.

But honestly, except for the work that needed to be done for the book, I've been in surprisingly little touch with the others. I'm reluctant to speak for anyone other than myself, and I may well be projecting here, but an awkwardness seems to have developed between many of us. If the trip had turned out well, I think we would, ironically enough, be in much closer contact: Wasn't that cool—we all climbed Everest together. Instead it feels tainted, and again I may be projecting, but it's as if we've retreated in shame.

MB: I gather you have, however, been in frequent touch with Andy Harris's parents in New Zealand and with his brother in upstate New York?

JK: I have. It's probably the closest bond I've established since this all ended.

MB: Why do you think that is?

JK: Partly because they've made the effort, partly because I feel somewhat responsible for Andy's death. Ron and Mary, his parents, have of course been devastated and are struggling to come to terms with things. I've opened up my research to them, and Ron's read everything about Everest he can find, both historical and contemporary, and wants to know every detail of what happened to Andy, though there's not a lot of detail to be had. And so we have things to share. They don't hold me responsible, and yet they understand why I feel as I do. Ron says, and I concur, that we now have this unusual bond.

MB: Back to the Everest survivors for a moment: From the time I first read the manuscript of your magazine story, I was struck by the shared culpability that so many must feel, at least to some small degree. Yes, there were some huge mistakes made, some critical ones, but there were also so many little things that built, imperceptibly, chillingly, one upon another.

JK: Believe me, I've been through every permutation: If I'd just done this, if Doug or Beck had done that, if Rob had done this. And I have to admit that not only do I feel guilt, but I've also done a lot of silent finger-pointing and blaming of others—and I'm not talking about the relatively measured criticisms I've voiced in print. I'm talking now about much harsher, darker judgments that I've kept largely to myself. Ultimately, however, I've come to realize that obsessing over the unacknowledged guilt of others does nothing to erase my own culpability. Besides, I suspect I'm not the only one who isn't sleeping particularly well at night.

MB: Last summer when I asked if writing the article was cathartic in any way, you said that events were still too fresh, emotions too raw. And in your introduction to the book you write, "What happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. It hasn't, of course." It hasn't? Not in the least?

JK: I wrote that as I was finishing the book in late November, and now, a few months and a long climbing trip to Antarctica later, I do think that the writing was cathartic in some way. When I went off to Antarctica for the months of December and January, I thought about Everest only a couple of times, which was very liberating and surprising. Only twice did I get the kind of ache that I'd felt almost without letup for the preceding six months. One time was on this grim bivouac, up high in subzero temperatures, extreme windchill, no shelter, and I remember lying there thinking about Rob and Andy and Doug, about Yasuko and Scott. I thought about how this would be a horrible way to die, that this is how they died. What were they thinking, what was Rob thinking after a night at 28,700 feet with no oxygen?

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