Base Camp CONFIDENTIAL (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine April 2001

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True EVEREST
Base Camp CONFIDENTIAL (Cont.)


	Lydia Bradey, right, does the Base Camp boogie, 1988 (Geoff Tabin)

In 1987 Nepal opened Everest up even more, allowing multiple permits on routes. The number of climbers swelled from about 100 annually to 500, and Base Camp faced a new problem: urban sprawl. The 1988 season also saw a series of other firsts: the fastest summit, in 22 hours, by Frenchman Marc Batard; the first person to parapente from the summit, Frenchman Jean-Marc Boivin; the first American woman on top, Stacy Allison; and the first woman to summit without oxygen, New Zealander Lydia Bradey.

STACY ALLISON: The size of Base Camp kind of hit me smack in the face. It's like, "My God, Everest is a big mountain, but can it accommodate so many people at the same time?" But back then people weren't taking their computers, their cell phones, their weather stations. We were there to climb. There weren't all these other agendas going on. When the girls and I had free time, we went over to the other side of the glacier and did our toenails. And gossiped. Very simple pleasures.

GEOFF TABIN, zany American climber and ophthalmologist who has completed the Seven Summits: It was a small Base Camp and virtually everyone was a character [in 1988]. There was Marc Batard, who was this Napoleonic figure, about five-foot-six, very skinny. This was in the days before titanium became well known. He was going to do this speed ascent and he had titanium crampons and a titanium ice ax, and a one-piece suit with this bladder which held, like, two and a half liters of black coffee. And then Jean-Marc Boivin, who [was going to] jump from the summit with a parapente. He was your basic French cool personified. Everything he had had the logo "Jean-Marc Boivin Extreme Dream Team." He jumped and landed down at Camp II in 11 minutes. Unfortunately, he died two years later BASE jumping Angel Falls.

We had a guy on our team named Johnny Petroske [who] took a big blue-and-white barrel and painted red stars on it, and lined the inside with toilet paper. He brought it over to the French television crew and started telling them about how he started out barrel-rolling on Mount Rainier, and then Niagara Falls and Mount McKinley, and now he was going to barrel-roll from the summit of Everest. Whenever they asked him why he was doing this, he would go, "IT IS MY DESTINY!"

Lydia Bradey was an incredible person...kinda laid back, hard climbing. She had the most unbelievably killer body. She wore this skin-tight Lycra suit around Base Camp. She had absolutely flash white teeth, really sparkling eyes, and blond dreadlocks. A lively, wisecracking, good spirit. She was a little bit of a wild woman. Lydia had this summit suit designed to make it easier for women to pee out of, but we joked that it also gave easy access for other activities. She ended up climbing solo up the mountain after a feud with her teammates. Lydia came down a heroine. [She] came down and said, "I made it to the summit of Everest." Everyone said, "Hey, congratulations!"

KAREN FELLERHOFF, American expedition organizer in the late eighties: ShoSho was my dog that followed the yak trains up to Everest Base Camp in the spring of 1989. I think he survived on a diet of yak manure. He appeared under the flap of my team's dining tent our first night at Base Camp. He was covered in the little yellow and brown dags he acquired sleeping in the rock latrines. I fed him Vienna sausages and disinfected him with surgical soap purloined from the hospital tent. ShoSho is Sherpa for "come here." He had a stash of bones he hoarded near my tent. He enjoyed the sunny part of the day gnawing on a good rib. I was curious. Barbecue spareribs were not on the menu at Base Camp. One morning I followed him on his daily trek through the pinnacles and discovered the source of his bones. It was a mummified, shrunken climber wrapped in a sun-bleached tent. The poor fellow had probably been laid to rest in a crevasse 20 years earlier and spit out by the glacier that spring. I gathered the bones from ShoSho's cache and folded the rest of the remains in a cloth and cast them in a crevasse.

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