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.)

WE ARE A FEW HUNDRED YARDS from the base of Rzenik. Tomaz turns left, off the rockfall, and crutches up a small hill. The last 50 yards is steep and covered with loose grass, and the crutches are useless, so Tomaz throws them aside. He pulls himself forward, crawling now.

He is grunting like an angry bull. As clods of earth dislodge in his hands, he throws them away, wildly; one hits me in the face. I don't know what's fueling him, whether it's the pain in his legs or the frustration of being reduced to crawling up a little hill, but the mental switch has been flipped.

We reach the top, which offers a clear view of Rzenik. It is not a classically beautiful mountain, with a well-defined peak, but it has a multitude of cracks and crevasses and ledges, a lifetime of problems for a young climber.

Tomaz is quiet. The silence lasts ten minutes, an eternity.

"This is my starting point, my meditation place," he finally says. "Here I get all the answers. Here the Himalayan voices called me. Here I taught myself everything. And when I come back here after the Himalayas, I see nothing has changed. I am still like this"—he places his forefinger next to his thumb—"small. And this place is still huge. When you ask where I get my power, that's it." He points at the mountain.

He talks a bit more, but the day is ending and the wind is picking up. It is time to head down. Tomaz grimaces as he stands, and he is unsteady. Everyone wants to know if he will climb again. At the moment, he is learning to walk.

The lure of the Himalayas is still with Tomaz Humar. There are so many faces out there, and who knows which one will call out to him at night. Two months after our Rzenik climb, Tomaz headlined at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, North America's premiere showcase of adventure documentaries. He'd thrown away his crutches, defying doctor's orders, and was hobbling around with his old friend Carlos Carsolio. Ed Webster was there, too; it was the first time he'd met Tomaz, and so he showed him his Everest memoir, Snow in the Kingdom, which included pictures of the north face of Lhotse, a 10,000-foot vertical that's never been climbed, never even been attempted. Tomaz called Carsolio over. "Carlos, look at this," he said. "I told you this would go, I told you this could be climbed."

Webster was amazed. "Tomaz immediately began picking out the weaknesses of the route and the exact time of day that you'd need to go through each area," Webster says. "He was ecstatic that here was one of the great walls that hadn't been climbed and that he could do it. I was just shaking my head that here was a climber who had a scary combination of the vision and the technical ability to pull it off. That was when he looked over at me and gave me one of those piercing looks and said, 'This is a one-way-ticket climb.'"

For now, one-way-tickets are a long way off. This spring I caught up with Tomaz on the phone, and he was with his best childhood friend, Tomo Drolec. They had just finished a climb and were laughing about it, and Tomaz said that it was time for a beer or two. He had started ice climbing a few months earlier, he explained, and now he was rock climbing, too. He said that he would climb a 1,000-foot wall in a few days.

"It's great," he said. "Nobody expected that I would recover so quickly...and I am surprised, honestly I am. I was really scared, especially with ice, about what would happen. The first few times when I tried climbing it was quite painful for me, in the bones and tendons. But after a few times the progress was really quick. Now it's perfect."

So Tomaz is back. Not back where he was after Dhaulagiri, but back where he started—climbing outside Kamnik with his best friend, having fun, drinking beer, the future unknown. Will he become strong enough to climb in the Himalayas? Will he want to? Should he want to? Should we want him to?

"Actually," Tomaz says, "I am preparing for something, but even my wife, she doesn't know. Right now I am in very good shape. On ice I feel great, and once again on rock." Soon he and Bozic would be heading to Mexico to visit Carsolio.

"That will be a new beginning," he says. "We'll drink tequila and wear sombreros. We will take some shots for a movie and climb, and we will talk about the future. I'm alive again."

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