Outside Online spoke with Ed Viesturs Tuesday, June 11, shortly after he arrived at his Seattle home. Viesturs successfully summitted Everest May 23 along with David Breashears, who was shooting an IMAX film of the climb.

Tell us about summit day. How did it go?

(442K .wav file)
Our summit day was May 23rd--and well, it actually started on the 22nd at 11 p.m. and then went into May 23rd. I left at 11 p.m. because I was climbing without oxygen and everybody else on the team left at about midnight, assuming that they would eventually catch up to me. I reached the summit then at 11 a.m. in the morning and the rest of the team around noon. So it was a relatively good day. I mean, the weather was good at that point, with only very light winds, but we had some deep snow to break trail through on the way to the summit. Other than that, we did shoot film on the ascent. We took the IMAX camera all the way to the summit and got some footage with the camera on the summit itself. I (went) back to Camp IV; I was back by 2:30 in the afternoon and the rest of the team, everyone, was back by 4:00.

Can you tell us about what sort of logistics the filming posed?

(385K .wav file)
It did add quite a bit of time. There was a group of Sherpas. They were assigned to carry the camera and then we had film magazines and the battery and some other things. So there were, I believe, five Sherpas who were film Sherpas. Then we also had four other Sherpas. Their role was to be in support of the Sherpas carrying the camera gear. They carried all of the oxygen necessary for the Sherpas who were carrying the camera gear because they couldn't carry a lot of their own oxygen. It must have been a real difficult day for them. They had a hard time keeping up with the rest of the group and so at a lot of places David Brashears had to wait an hour or two hours just for the camera to catch up so that he could do the shot that he wanted. And unfortunately, since I started an hour earlier, they didn't really ever catch up to me, so they didn't get any decent footage of me climbing the mountain which was, you know, going to be a big part of the film. But, unfortunately, they never caught up. And even though I waited in several places for probably a total of two or three hours, they never caught up. David finally caught up to me at the south summit and then I went to the summit and he went shortly thereafter. But he never caught me with the camera. So, he did get some of the footage he wanted, but unfortunately not all of the footage that he wanted. So it was a lot of logistical work just to get the camera and all the film and stuff to the summit to shoot the footage. So it was that extra added burden, you might say.

So each time the camera stopped to film, did the camera have to be assembled? Was there a long routine with that?

Right, you break the camera down by taking the lens off and there's a monopod that you have to set the camera on to give it stability when you're shooting. And then there's also the film magazines, which weigh about ten pounds. So we tried to take all of that off after each shot to make the camera as light as possible and it still weighed about 30 or 35 pounds just on its own. So we had to then, every time we set up for a shot, take the camera out, put it on the monopod, put the lens on that you want, and put the film magazine on. So it's not just like pulling a video camera out of your pack and shooting some footage. It's quite a process. So David selected places and selected shots that he'd already pre-planned for the summit day.

Was David the only one on the crew who was trained with the camera?

No, there was also another climber who was his assistant, Robert Shauer, so he was basically David's assistant. So if David couldn't function as cameraperson, Robert would take over. They worked very closely together. David did the majority of the filming and Robert assisted him by loading the film or loading the magazine or putting the lenses on. And he did a little bit of the shooting, but David did the majority. But Robert was the backup person.

You mentioned you had to wait in several places while the camera crew tried to catch up, but that you had to leave before it arrived each time. Why weren't you able to wait longer?

(420K .wav file)
I was totally comfortable with climbing that day and I reached the summit at 11 in the morning, which was plenty early and very safe. And at that point I'd only been going for 12 hours. But when I waited at certain places, it was more or less dictated by how cold I was getting. I waited at the first place, right where we get onto the southeast ridge, I got there at 3 in the morning and waited until 4 in the morning for the people to catch up. But even after an hour of waiting, they hadn't caught up yet. So I was really getting cold, so then I had to then climb higher and keep moving just to stay warm. Once the sun came up, of course, we were a lot higher, so you still get cold. So I would wait at another spot for the camera to catch up and it didn't, then I waited at the south summit for a half an hour and that was at nine in the morning. So it was more dictated by how cold I was getting rather than just lack of oxygen or anything. I did want to get to the summit and I did want to get down in a certain amount of time, so all of that put together basically dictated how long I could wait for the camera.

Were David and the camera crew able to catch up to you at the summit and get footage there?

No, David caught up to me at the south summit. I went on to the summit and he was 20 minutes behind me on the summit, but still I couldn't wait that long at the summit, so I left. And then probably another half an hour later or an hour later the camera and the Sherpas finally did get to the summit. But by then I was gone. So David did then get footage of Jamling and Araceli (Jamling Norgay, son of Tenzing Norgay, who summitted with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, and Araceli Segarra, the first Spanish woman to summit Everest). So he did part of our team, anyway, reaching the summit.

How was the descent?

The descent went perfectly. I went down in three hours. I was back by 2:30 and they stayed longer obviously on the summit and did some filming, and then they were all down by 4 o' clock. So it went very well, we had a good day and the weather stayed good after our ascent also. So we had a great few days up there.

And you did more filming after you returned from the summit?

We spent the next morning after summiting filming at the South Col--probably until noon we stayed there. It was perfectly windless. It was a great day to be slowly, very slowly, moving around at 26,000 feet, but we did some filming. We set up a weather station, which records wind speed, direction, temperature, and transmits that down to a receiver and hopefully somewhere into Kathmandu so they can tell at any time what the weather is doing at the South Col. So we set that up and we filmed that process and we also set up a GPS receiver so we got our science project done and did the filming of that. And then we went all the way down to Camp II on that same day.

Can you elaborate a little more on the science project?

It's something done in tandem. It was part of the film and we had Roger Billem who joined us for the early part of the expedition who's ... I guess you call him a geologist, geophysicist. The science project was definitely a big part of the movie, so we did get to the South Col and the gist of that was to set up these two scientific data collectors, one being a weather station and one being the GPS. So that was a big part of the movie.

You summitted after the storm that killed members of three climbing parties. Did the events of that weekend affect your summit experience or the film in any way?

(401K .wav file)
In actuality, not too much. If anything, we just became more conservative and tried to do things a lot safer than we had previously thought. I think in general we were a real experienced and conservative group to begin with, but after these events we were even more so. We had a definite turnaround time: if we weren't on or near the summit, we would turn around by 12 o' clock or 1 o' clock to make sure we could get down. We were looking for the ultimate day to summit as far as weather was concerned. We had weather reports coming in from England from a very reputable weather forecaster, and his forecasts were right on as far as wind was concerned. So if anything, it made us safer and more conservative. And also you know we felt we should continue and finish our climb and achieve our goal of filming and reach the summit. We thought we could, by doing that safely, break a barrier we might have had in our psyche because of what had happened. And also we could, you know, show the people in general in the world that, yes, you can climb Mount Everest safely and we wouldn't leave with the morbid fear of Mount Everest. So I think we kind of turned things around and showed that it could be done safely.

Will the events of that weekend be a part of the film?

(423K .wav file)
It'll be part of the film. We didn't get any footage of that weekend, simply because we were, number one, very busy helping the people that were there get off the mountain. And also we didn't feel it was appropriate, and it was just such a burden to set a camera up. But for the most part we were just too busy and we didn't even think about doing any filming of the rescues and whatever. But we will somehow present the events of the weekend with some photos and that type of thing. More as a memorial or in honor of the people that died and the people that survived, and so it'll be very well done if anything.

Can you talk about what your role was and what kind of things you were doing during the storm?

(470K .wav file)
Well, initially, we'd seen and listened to people as they summitted the day before and that evening we got word--this was at like 10 or 11 o' clock that night--that people were still missing. And we could tell that the weather was very bad up high and windy. And the next morning when we heard from Rob at about five in the morning or so, we were still at Camp II, and so we tried to as much as we could to start coordinating the rescue efforts and to see you know if we could set up a mini-hospital at Camp II, which we did and also try to get some communication going between us and the South Col and base camp. A lot of people's radios weren't working up there--they were out of batteries--so we got a message up to them that, hey, we had extra batteries up there if they could find them and dig them out of our tent they could use them. And then let's get a radio that everybody can communicate on.

And we finally did that and that took us three or four hours. And then we had to slowly figure out what had happened up there and who was still missing. A lot of people thought some people were in tents when in actuality they were still missing, so we had to get somebody up there that was there who could figure all that out. And also during that morning I spent a lot of time talking to Rob Hall, and he was on the radio, and we were basically just trying to coerce him to move and to get him to motivate and somehow get him moving and get him down the ridge. And that was really hard, hearing his voice. And when his wife would call occasionally, that was really difficult also to listen to that conversation.

But by noon on the 11th I had to sign off and start heading up the mountain because we were trying to get some people to Rob and trying to get some people to the South Col to help Beck Weathers down and to help whoever was there and injured who needed help. So we then went to Camp II on the day that Todd Burleson went to Camp IV, and then they did a lot of coordinating up there and they basically revived Beck, The next day as they were assisting him down, myself and Robert Shauer went to about 25,000 feet and helped them get Beck Weathers down. We brought him down to Camp II on the 12th. And by then we had a little hospital set up and there was a doctor there and then it was the following day that we helped get him down to the top of the icefall where the helicopter then picked him up.

And then it was how many days before things got back to normal again? How did that period go for you team?

Well, we came back down to base camp. We thought we'd have to regroup and just rest and collect ourselves a little bit. So we came down to base camp and we rested for three or four days and then we went back up to Camp II and we were still waiting for decent weather so we waited at Camp II for another, I don't know, three days or so. And finally we had a decent weather report. The winds were breaking and calming down, so then we went back up and summitted on the 23rd. So it was almost two weeks later after the events occurred that we actually reached the summit.

How was the trek out?

Yeah, the trek out was relatively uneventful. We got stuck in one village for four days simply because we couldn't get a helicopter in. We were waiting for the clouds to clear and we just sat in a village called Sengboche for four days and finally got a helicopter out and two days later we flew back home to the States.

What factors changed your plan to summit Manaslu?

I was hoping to do a quick trip to do Manaslu and do a rapid ascent of that peak, but we'd run out of time. By the time we were trekking out from base camp it was already May 29, and the permits--the spring climbing permits--only go until June 1st. I literally just ran out of time.

What have you got planned now?

No big plans for the summer. We're just going to hang out and lay in the grass.

And after that?

Probably go to Cho Oyu in the autumn to guide a group of people up Cho Oyu. It's the sixth highest peak in the world.

What about your plans to get all 14?

I don't have any right now. We just got home and I usually kind of mull things over and see what's out there and who's going where and kind of start planning my spring and summer of next year probably this autumn some time. Once I get this out of the way and start seeing what's out there ... there's usually so many trips that people are going on or other people that are doing stuff that they don't usually finalize their plans until the autumn or the winter. I'll figure that out in three or four months from now probably.

What's been the reaction since your return to the Seattle climbing community, in light of Scott Fischer's death. Have people turned to you?

A little bit from me, I mean, my friends obviously are curious, but they've read and seen all the news programs and magazines. And there's other people here in the Seattle area who were over there. Jon Krakauer is in Seattle, and he was actually up there on that day so people I know have gotten a lot of information from them. The media, the local media, hasn't really hit me up yet, but I don't think they know I'm home yet. But we've talked to ABC and have done an interview with them and stuff like that. And we actually spent all weekend at Scott Fischer's memorial services. One was Saturday and one was Sunday, so we saw a lot of people there and a lot of his friends. So yeah, I gave them what information I had or what I thought and there were also a lot of people who were on his trip from across the country that were at the services also. So it was good to see them, because we never really had a chance to say goodbye at base camp. They were leaving and we were still up on the mountain, so it was good to see them again. And you know, say hello again, and finalize and talk about what happened.

When's the movie coming out?

The movie should be out in February of 1998. It takes about a year and a half. They still have some footage to shoot and also the post production and the editing, color corrections, and all that, and then printing of I don't know how many copies of the movies that they make. It'll be a year and half from now.