Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar (Cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar (Cont.)

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine June 2002

Page:

Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar (Cont.)


	(Photograph by Antonin Kratochvil)

TOMAZ'S CLIMBS are so stunning that it's hard to find a logical explanation for them. He says it's simple—his spirituality makes the difference. "Every rock face breathes life with its lungs and emanates an energy that is proper only to itself," he writes in No Impossible Ways. "You feel this energy in particular when you climb the face." On Dhaulagiri, he says, he talked to the mountain and the mountain talked to him. When he put his hand on its flank he felt a pulse, and he knew, even before a serac fell, that it was going to fall. The mountain warned him.

Tomaz's first true spiritual test came on the Nepalese peak Nuptse. After Ama Dablam, Tomaz soloed the northwest face of Nepal's 22,336-foot Bobaye and then climbed two more Nepalese peaks: 20,075-foot Lobuche East with Carlos Carsolio, by now his favorite partner, and 23,494-foot Pumori, with Carsolio and Slovenians Marjan Kovac and Janez Jeglic. Jeglic was considered the country's best climber, and he and Tomaz cooked up an ambitious plan to establish a new route up 25,770-foot Nuptse, straight up the 8,200-foot west face.

They left base camp on October 27, 1997, and after two days were within 3,200 feet of the summit. They hacked out a tiny ledge and pitched their tent in a storm. That night, Tomaz woke up with a headache that felt like an anvil had landed on his forehead, which was strange. He never got altitude headaches. He turned on his headlamp and discovered that the tent had collapsed under avalanched snow; his head was being crushed.

Tomaz and Jeglic also made the unfortunate discovery that their stove had a gas leak. With that vital piece of equipment falling apart, they decided to make a lunge for the summit—3,200 feet up the wall, 3,200 feet down, in one quick push. They began their assault at four in the morning, climbing unroped on separate paths—simultaneous solos. By mid-morning, at 24,600 feet, they were together again. Base camp radioed that storm clouds were approaching from Everest in the west; a strong gale was already flailing the ridge.

"Let's climb until two," Tomaz told Jeglic. "If we make it to the top, we take pictures and then step on it and get down."

Jeglic reached the summit first and waved his ice ax. Thirty minutes later, Tomaz arrived. The winds were huge, and Jeglic (whom Humar often referred to by his nickname, Johan) was nowhere in sight.

"I'm met by the gale and footprints leading toward the south side of the ridge," Tomaz recalled, "but no Johan. Maybe he's gone to have a look around. I follow his tracks, cursing and grumbling: Where does he think he's going in this weather? The gale is blowing in gusts when I reach the last footprints. I collapse on the ground. No trace of him anywhere. He just disappeared. I start bellowing into the hurricane force wind: Johan! Johan!"

There was no answer: Jeglic had been blown off the top.



	(Photograph by Antonin Kratochvil)

Tomaz was distraught and disoriented. His mates in base camp pleaded with him to get off the summit. But he'd lost his goggles. The cold had destroyed the batteries in his headlamp. He was alone, in the dark, without his partner, lost in a maze of ice and rocks. His throat filled with phlegm and blood.

Base camp blared music over the radio—anything to keep Tomaz awake as he hacked blindly down the 3,000 vertical feet with ice ax and crampons, craning into the void for the tiny spot that might be his tent. Eleven hours later, he found it and collapsed. He tried to light the stove, but couldn't. He dozed off, and woke surrounded by flames—the stove had worked after all. His tent and sleeping bag were half gone.

Two days later, Tomaz struggled off the face. But the ordeal wasn't over. In Slovenia, he was seen as a villain in the eyes of many climbers, who blamed him for Jeglic's death. The beloved hero had died; the dangerous upstart had lived.

Tomaz is still controversial among many of Slovenia's climbing elite, who regard him as too interested in publicity and not as skilled as he would have people believe. He does not attend meetings at the Kamnik Alpine Club, nor does he sit on its governing board.

"Tomaz presents himself like a kind of god, or a person who has personal contact with some spirits who are preserving him," says Marko Prezelj, 36, a top Slovenian climber who heads the club. "If you think like that and climb like that, either you really have contact with ghosts or you have a lot of luck."

Beyond a curt hello, Tomaz is not on speaking terms with Prezelj. He thinks the falling-out he's had with other Slovenian climbers began the moment Jeglic was swept off Nuptse.

"His death was like cutting off my arm," Tomaz told me. "We talked a lot about our climb. We knew how dangerous it was. I said, 'Janez, if I die on Nuptse don't think about being guilty for me, and I will do the same.'"

Tomaz pauses.

"Janez was the god of climbing."

Another pause.

"They think the wrong man came back from Nuptse."

Page: