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

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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

THE CALL FROM DHAULAGIRI came in spring 1999. Tomaz was hanging around Kamnik, enjoying his life, and then it hit him.

"I could not believe it at first, but the call grew stronger with every passing day," he recalls in No Impossible Ways. "It was at the same time the most terrifying and the most blissful moment of my mountaineering career, a moment I had been waiting for these last five years. Dhaula had finally called, and I knew I had to mount the expedition that same fall."

For Tomaz, it would be a one-way ticket: He'd either make it to the top and down an easier route, or perish. It would be impossible to downclimb over the face's ice seracs. Three doctors refused to join his support team; they didn't want to watch a suicide by climbing. Tomaz himself cried as he left his kids.

The trip seemed more farce than expedition. A feud with the Alpine Association of Slovenia had frozen Tomaz out of funding, so his main sponsor, the Slovenian cell-phone company Mobitel, picked up the tab. Most of his gear got stuck in the Vienna airport; when he got to Dhaulagiri to begin his acclimatization on September 26, he realized he had not brought enough food. The weather was atrocious; storm after storm hit the area, costing two of the world's best climbers their lives—Alex Lowe, on 26,291-foot Shishapangma on October 5, and Briton Ginette Harrison on Dhaulagiri itself on October 24.

Tomaz started climbing on October 25. He went to a shrine to pray, then walked to the bottom of the south face with his old friend Stipe Bozic, 51, Croatia's top climber, who would stay at base camp to film the ascent. As the two parted ways, an avalanche roared down the main couloir of the face.

His pack weighed more than 110 pounds—food, stove, fuel, pitons, carabiners, sleeping bag, slings, and a five-millimeter rope, just 148 feet long, which would be used not for self-belay but to move his gear. The only luxury he allowed himself was one of his son's sneakers, clipped with a carabiner to his pack.

Progress was slow the first 24 hours, despite a full moon. Icicles broke from seracs, pummeling him; cold water flowed down cracks, soaking him; avalanches forced him to squeeze against the face. He named the seracs that hung like daggers above him—Guillotine, Praying Mantis. On the second day he heard Guillotine crack and flattened himself on the wall as niagaras of ice, rock, and snow hurtled past.

"How are you? Are you OK?" Bozic yelled over the radio.

"You need some adrenaline?" Tomaz replied. "I've got a serious surplus here."

Tomaz's back and arms became covered in welts and bruises. An ice block crashed into his leg, and he thought it was broken. Blood soaked through his gloves, staining the snow.

On the fifth night, after covering two vertical miles, Tomaz got a toothache. He lay awake most of the night. In the morning, he went to work with his Swiss Army knife, prying a filling from the infected tooth—this, after some minutes spent laboring on the wrong one.

Things became, if possible, worse. A shelf at 23,000 feet forced him to traverse 3,200 feet to the Japanese Ridge (the southeast ridge); he spent a night there at 24,000 feet and in the morning left most of his gear behind and traversed back. At 25,400 feet he actually dry-tooled, unroped, up 600 feet of loose granite, using his ice-ax and crampons to climb the bare rock. He was now within a few hundred meters of the summit. He bivouacked in the open, exposed, at 25,600 feet, on a ledge cut from the ice. For the second night his stove didn't work; he had no water, little food. He had been on the face for eight days.

Try to imagine that bivouac. You are alone, breathing air so thin that it's slowly killing you; you're without tent or stove; your body is a frostbitten and dehydrated bruise; you're beyond rescue. How do you survive, not just physically, but mentally?

Tomaz's answer: "We can control our heartbeat, which in cold, drawn-out bivouacs is preferably as slow as possible," he writes in his book. "It is necessary to disconnect the arms and the legs and draw most of one's blood into the core of the body and the head. We switch to other dimensions. We become insensitive to pain, cold, wind, homesickness, thirst, hunger. Instead of having dinner we separate from the physical world. But the further you go into the world where there are no reasons or consequences, points of the compass, time points like yesterday or today, where you only are—the harder it is to return. The reentry into the body is usually accompanied by pain."

On the ninth day, November 2, waking up at 25,600 feet, he struggled toward the summit. He took off his pack and filled his pockets with essentials—radio, camera, energy bars, one ice screw, one sling, the map of his descent route, family photos, a picture of the Virgin Mary, and his son's little shoe.

The weather worsened. Over the radio, base camp read messages of encouragement that Slovenians were sending to his Web site, www.humar.com, which was getting nearly two million hits a day. But then Bozic, who knew that even Tomaz has limits, got on the radio. "No one has ever done that before," he said, referring to Tomaz's solo route. "It's time to start thinking about descending."

Tomaz looked up at the summit, where a gale was gathering force. He took out a photograph of his son and, in his exhausted, depleted state, clearly saw young Tomaz crooking his finger out of the picture, saying, "Come home, Daddy."

"At that moment," he writes, "I realize in a flash: You're going to die! If you go on, you're going to die." He turned around.

"For the first time in my life, I realize that if I'm pig-headed, the end is waiting for me at the top," Tomaz recalls in his book. "Dhaula had let me have the face but not the summit."

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