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Outside Magazine September 2003

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The Survivors
"He died doing what he loved best," they always say. But when climbers meet their end on the high peaks, the ordeal is just beginning for their wives, husbands, children, parents, and friends.
An exclusive excerpt from Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow

By Maria Coffey


	(Gail Albert-Halaban)

THEY WOULDN'T TELL ME JOE WAS DEAD—not at first. "Disappeared" is what they said. Lost without a trace on a knife edge of ice and snow at 27,000 feet. Last seen on the evening of May 17, 1982. I was 30 then. Joe Tasker, my boyfriend of two and a half years, was on a British expedition attempting Everest's then-unclimbed Northeast Ridge. Thirty-four years old, he was one of Britain's climbing stars, with a number of new Himalayan routes to his credit, including the north ridge of 28,169-foot Kanchenjunga, on the border of India and Nepal, and the west face of India's 22,520-foot Changabang. With him on the ridge that day was his frequent partner, 31-year-old Pete Boardman, who, in 1975, had become the youngest man, and one of the first Brits, to summit Everest.

Joe and Pete set off from advance base camp, at 21,000 feet, on the morning of May 15. Monitored via telescope by expedition leader Chris Bonington and base camp manager Adrian Gordon, they climbed higher for two days, without supplemental oxygen. As the light faded on May 17, they moved out of sight, behind a pinnacle on the ridge. They never reappeared.

The news blew my life to pieces. For months I staggered from day to day, unable to fully accept the fact of Joe's death, unwilling to believe he wasn't coming home. That September, Pete Boardman's widow, Hilary, and I set off on our own journey to Everest. We stayed in the same hotels they had; we crossed the high, dusty plains of Tibet in the back of a truck, as they had. We trekked for ten days across the passes of the Kharta and Karma valleys, on the eastern side of Everest, and up the rough 12-mile trail to the site of their advance base camp. We sat in flattened-out areas where their tents had stood, and we collected relics: an empty whiskey bottle, film cartridges, the tattered remains of a copy of Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, which I had given Joe to read on the trip. On our way back down, through the Rongbuk Valley, we left mementos among the stones of Joe and Pete's memorial cairn. We planted a garden around it, scrabbling in the dirt with our fingers, transplanting patches of moss, burying poppy seeds, trying to beautify the closest thing we had to a grave.

No one can teach you how to mourn. As with climbing a mountain, you can try to prepare, but it's impossible to know what will happen once you are on its steep slopes. Before my trip to Everest, I'd gone from my home in Manchester, England, to the Lake District to visit the Boningtons—Chris and his wife, Wendy. Chris and I walked with his dogs, and he listened with kind patience as I talked endlessly, repetitively, about Joe. Standing on the top of a hill, watching cloud shadows slide over the rolling green fells beneath us, Chris suddenly said to me, "I know you can't imagine it now, but one day you will fall in love again—and be happy."

I remember feeling angry with him, as if he underestimated my pain. Eventually, however, he was proved right. In 1986, on a teaching exchange to British Columbia, I met Dag Goering, a Canadian veterinarian who, like Joe, loved adventure but, unlike Joe, was prepared to compromise so I could come along. We got married and began to explore the world by kayak.

A decade later, we were in Austria, paddling down the Danube. One windy afternoon, as the sky filled with roiling storm clouds, we pulled ashore in Vienna. While Dag studied a menu at the marble-topped table of a coffeehouse, I went outside to a phone booth to call my mother, in England. She answered not with her usual delight and relief but in a voice choked with tears. "They found a body on Everest," she blurted out. Time slowed, images sharpened. I leaned against the glass door of the telephone booth, staring at fat, perfect raindrops bouncing off the shining flagstones of the square. "It was on the news," my mother continued haltingly. "They say it has to be either Joe or Pete."

I called my friend Ruth Seifert, a psychiatrist who has been married to London neurologist and expedition doctor Charlie Clarke for 32 years. She told me that a Kazakh climber had come across the body on the Northeast Ridge. He had taken photographs and, when he returned from the Himalayas, would send them to Chris Bonington. It would be several weeks before they arrived.

A photograph, I told Dag. If it were of Joe, how would he look after lying for a decade near the summit of Everest? Surely he would be perfectly preserved, forever youthful as I'd grown older? Gently, Dag warned me about the ravages of UV radiation, dry winds, extreme cold; the remains might not be pretty, he said—might not even be recognizable.

A month after I stood in that phone booth in Vienna, Chris received the pictures. From the clothing, Hilary and her mother-in-law identified the remains as Pete's. For Hilary, it was an affirmation of her belief that Pete hadn't fallen. If he'd died violently, she had always claimed, she would have sensed it. I was relieved, too. During the weeks of waiting, I'd begun to dread what the discovery of Joe's body might unearth in me. But I felt compelled to see what death on the mountain looked like.

The next time I saw Hilary, she handed me a large brown envelope containing a copy of the black-and-white photograph, then quietly withdrew. I thought I was prepared. But when I saw the picture, I cried out loud: desiccated skin drawn tight over bones, hair bleached white, the head uncovered, the hand gloveless in the snow. As shocking as the ravaged body, however, was the supreme bleakness of the place where it lay. That image of Pete Boardman's shell, leaning against a bank of snow on the Northeast Ridge, is fixed in my memory as one of profound loneliness and desolation. When I cried over it, I cried for Joe, too, for the fact that he had perished so far from warmth, and from life.

"This is a desperate place," he'd written to me from base camp a few weeks before he died, describing the high winds, the cold, and the unforgiving landscape. And now I saw, truly, what he meant.

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