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Outside Magazine September 2003

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The Survivors (Cont.)

"IF CLIMBING WERE TOTALLY SAFE, it wouldn't have the same draw," says Royal Robbins, 68, one of the pioneers of big-wall climbing in America. "You know it's dangerous in the first place, and the ironic thing is that when there's a mountain on which people died, getting up that mountain alive has a greater value."

Nothing can prepare you for the phone call or the person at the door telling you there's been a storm, or an avalanche, and that your wife, husband, father, or daughter isn't coming home.

It's true: For many, risk is a necessary part of the game. Over the past decade, however, more climbers have begun to talk openly about the darker side of high-altitude mountaineering. "The defining thing about climbing is that it kills you," says British mountaineer and author Joe Simpson, whose 1988 classic, Touching the Void, recounts his own close call with death in the Peruvian Andes. "Not many people publicly question the fatality rate, because it opens up a very nasty Pandora's box. Your rather fragile rationale for why you are climbing might not stand up to a close examination, and so you'd rather not talk about it. People feel uncomfortable and think, No, no, it's not like that. But you only have to look at the facts."

According to figures collected by Kathmandu-based historian Elizabeth Hawley, the 79-year-old chronicler of decades of Himalayan expeditions, the death rate on climbing expeditions to Nepal between 1950 and 2001 was 1.9 percent. But, she points out, that includes all Nepalese mountains. Zero in on people doing new routes in the high Himalayas and the statistics change dramatically.

A 1988 survey by Charlie Clarke and Oxford pediatrician and High Altitude Medicine Handbook author Andrew Pollard examining 83 British expeditions to peaks over 7,000 meters between 1968 and 1987 found that 23 of 535 climbers were killed. Excluding the deaths of Sherpas and porters, for which it was difficult to find accurate information, this added up to a fatality rate of 4.3 percent—at least one death for every fifth expedition. "If that were Formula One and more than one out of every 25 drivers were killed over this time span, it would be crazy," says Clarke, now 59. "The level of risk would never be accepted."

Joe used to say he was as likely to get killed in a car crash as on a mountain, and many climbers still echo that sentiment. But according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, approximately 42,000 people in the United States are killed every year in motor vehicle accidents. Out of a population of 281 million, that's approximately one death in 6,700. When I ask Steph Davis, a 30-year-old climber from Moab, Utah, who has tackled some of the biggest walls in the world, how many of her friends have died in climbing accidents, she counts eight. American alpinist Mark Twight, 41, says that 43 people he's known have died climbing. Over the past 15 years, Joe Simpson has lost, on average, a friend a year to the sport. How many people have lost that many friends to car wrecks?

According to Ruth Seifert, risk is, for many people, a totally abstract concept. "Mountaineers know terrible things happen to other people, but they think those people have been unlucky or made some mistakes. They say, 'Oh, I'm a careful person. I've survived lots of other expeditions. I'm going to be all right.'"

But what if something does happen? What if they don't survive? This is a question that has long been taboo in mountaineering. Most climbers are happy to discuss the reasons they climb—the thrill, the joy, the sense of purpose—but ask about the people waiting at home and their tone changes. The ebullient Slovenian alpinist Tomaz Humar, a 34-year-old father of two, suddenly grows silent. "This is the hard question," he says.

Andy Kirkpatrick, a 32-year-old British alpinist who also has two young kids, becomes defensive: "If I were an armed first-response cop, would it be any different?"

Only Royal Robbins is unflinching in his reply. "We have to remember that if we're talking about true risk," he says, "occasionally there has to be a price paid."

"By whom?" I ask. "The people left behind?"

"Yes," he says. "That's part of the largeness of the price."

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