Above the Clouds Read online

  Translated from the original Russian

  by Natalia Lagovskaya and Barbara Poston

  Collected and edited by Linda Wylie

  Foreword by Galen Rowell

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  All religions, all teachings, are synthesized in the Himalayas.

  —NICHOLAS ROERICH, SHAMBHALA

  For Anatoli

  FOREWORD

  Many doubts rushed through my mind when Anatoli Boukreev asked me to join him on a winter ascent of the South Face of Annapurna in December 1997. That it would be his last climb was not among my fears. He seemed to possess that rare balance of boldness tempered by self-restraint that keeps so many great climbers alive. If he failed on Annapurna, I expected it to be the result of his own wise decision not to continue.

  My doubts were mostly about my own abilities. Nearing sixty, I would be no match for his Olympian level of fitness. I didn’t want to prevent his making the summit. Attempting the huge wall in winter without fixed ropes or camps was radically more difficult than the siege-style first ascent done by Britain’s best climbers in the prime season.

  Anatoli would need unusually good winter conditions plus an unusually strong partner, or he would have to leave a weaker partner behind, hopefully by mutual agreement. Was I prepared to wait it out up high or possibly descend alone in winter?

  After he listened to my concerns about the extreme nature of his goal, my ability compared to his, and my previous commitment to guide a photography trek in Patagonia, he told me not to come with him if it didn’t feel right to me. Then he suddenly switched topics. What was I doing next July? Would I join him in Pakistan to climb two 8,000-meter peaks by standard routes in summer conditions? I instantly accepted and set aside two months on my 1998 calendar.

  Had we done those climbs together, I would have come to know Anatoli well enough to write about him in the third person with a literary facade of objectivity, as if I really could assess the meaning of his life apart from my own experience. I was taught that to promote oneself or one’s own philosophy is the cardinal sin of writing reviews or biographical essays. Yet I feel the need to present much of my own philosophy and related experience to evoke what Anatoli’s spirit meant to me and should mean to mountaineers of the future. I believe that I come up short in the obvious parallels between Anatoli’s bold decisions and those by which I remain alive today. Anatoli lived his short life to the fullest and packed more into thirty-nine years than almost anyone who lives to be one hundred.

  If this book were to be distributed only among fellow mountaineers, a review of Anatoli’s achievements combined with a few anecdotes would suffice as a foreword. But why should armchair mountaineers, who might only know Anatoli as the inarticulate Russian villain depicted in a bestseller about the 1996 Everest tragedy, care to know more about his life and letters? It is that perspective that I want to convey here.

  Though the latent greatness that Anatoli possessed cannot be compared to the unquestionable genius of a Mozart, Anatoli’s fine mind was far more in tune with its body, which it rightly recognized as part of, rather than separate from, the natural world. For Anatoli, mountains were altars where “I strive to perfect myself physically and spiritually. In their presence I attempt to understand my life, to exorcise vanity, greed, and fear.… I view my past, dream of the future, and with unusual acuteness I experience the present moment.… On each journey I am reborn.”

  Based on his Himalayan record alone, Anatoli was indisputably a great man, but few Americans outside his circle of friends know about the breadth of his humanity or how deeply he suffered during the last year and a half of his life because of negative publicity about his role as a guide on the infamous 1996 tragedy on Mount Everest. Unlike genius, which is a personal quality that often comes to naught, greatness implies a recognition of unusual human endeavor by the minds of others. It always comes after the fact, and all too often posthumously. Besides involving a continuum of accomplishments, greatness seems to require humility and a willingness to wait for the world to make its judgments.

  I dwell at length on greatness because I believe Anatoli was robbed of it during his lifetime. As I wrote in a Wall Street Journal review of climber/journalist Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, readers of the number-one bestseller are drawn “toward conclusions that erase heroism from the Himalaya as surely as modern journalism erases greatness from the American presidency.” Though I praised the book as having “rare eloquence and power that could remain relevant for centuries,” I strongly objected to the author’s unfair treatment of Anatoli. Though Krakauer grants Anatoli certain strengths, “he never paints the big picture of one of the most amazing rescues in mountaineering history performed single-handedly a few hours after climbing Everest without oxygen by a man some describe as the Tiger Woods of Himalayan climbing.”

  After going from tent to tent, pleading for help, Anatoli headed out alone at night in a blizzard from the South Col to rescue three lost climbers. After descending from Everest, no other guide, Sherpa, or client (including Krakauer) could muster the necessary strength or courage to accompany Anatoli. That this amazing man who saved lives high on the mountain came to be characterized as an arrogant Russian villain in the subsequent made-for-TV movie based on the book is as woeful a modern outcome as any fictional tragedy of the past conjured up by Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. Sadly, the New York Times report on Anatoli’s death a year and a half later included the dark cloud of unresolved Everest controversy: “Krakauer accuses Boukreev … of compromising his clients’ safety to achieve his own ambitions … and endangered them by making the exhausting climb without the aid of bottled oxygen.… However, Krakauer credits Boukreev with bravely saving the lives of two [sic] climbers.”

  Only by understanding how Anatoli suffered as he came to be demonized, in the same media feeding frenzy that brought Himalayan mountaineering into the forefront of American consciousness, can a reader begin to comprehend the forces that put Anatoli into the path of death two years in a row. I’ve previously published my strong opinion that the presence of a journalist on assignment from Outside magazine on the most fatal commercial Everest venture was no coincidence. The two competing guides who died high on the peak felt extreme pressure to get positive free ink in a big national magazine story that they believed would attract lots of clients to pay $65,000 fees to the most successful guide.

  I’m also haunted by a strong suspicion that the second tragedy, so soon after the first, was also not coincidental. Were it not for the untoward media criticism directed at Anatoli after Everest, I doubt he would have felt the need to prove himself yet again in a world in which he had already outperformed every other climber of his generation.

  In early December 1997, just after Anatoli left for Annapurna, he received a special award for heroism in absentia at the annual meeting of the American Alpine Club.

  At the time of the award, Jim Wickwire, a highly respected Himalayan climber,
clearly stated that the committee weighted “all of the information that was readily available to us” and that “Jon Krakauer’s book was just one source.” Wickwire explained that the committee carefully considered Anatoli’s “nonuse of oxygen as well as his quick descent ahead of the Mountain Madness clients.” In the end, “despite what some, but by no means all, would consider to be actions inconsistent with so-called ‘standard’ guiding practice, Boukreev’s actions met the committee’s award criteria, including the higher standard imposed when professional climbers are involved.”

  More than enough said, but the controversy continued to escalate. I was among the dozens of people who began receiving e-mail copies of accusations and rebuttals between Jon Krakauer and Anatoli’s coauthor, Weston DeWalt, who had helped Anatoli publish a strikingly different account of events on Everest than what had been written in Into Thin Air.

  Because the Alpine Club had previously asked me to review The Climb, I decided to enter the fray and pose a question directly to Krakauer about the astounding claim in one of his e-mails “that virtually every Sherpa on Everest in 1996 blames that entire tragedy on Boukreev.” I asked Krakauer how he reconciled that statement “with the fact that every one of Boukreev’s clients survived without major injuries, while all the clients who died or received major injuries were members of your party.”

  On December 20, Krakauer answered that the survival of Anatoli’s clients was primarily due to their greater strength, but he curiously added: “I think the Sherpas are absolutely wrong to blame Anatoli, which is why I didn’t mention their point of view in my book.… They blame him, I think, because they hate him so intensely.”

  Neither DeWalt nor I had ever heard this claim before. Since I was planning a trip to Nepal in March, I decided to do a fact-finding journey of my own to interview Sherpas in the Everest area. Though that journey didn’t happen until after Anatoli’s death, it seems best to report the results out of chronological sequence here. At Everest Base Camp, I talked to more than thirty Sherpas who had been on Everest in 1996 as well as three commercial expedition leaders who were also there at the time. No one expressed the belief that Anatoli was responsible for the tragedy, nor knew of any Sherpa who had ever expressed such a belief. Speculations that the late Lobsang Jangbu might have blamed Anatoli for not staying high enough long enough to help his close friend Scott Fischer were put to rest by a climber who had tented with Lobsang on a small expedition shortly before his death.

  When I boarded a flight for South America just before Christmas, I expected not to hear anything more about Anatoli until I returned a month later. On the morning after Christmas at a remote lodge in Patagonia, a barely legible fax was brought to my door. When I saw the names Anatoli and Annapurna, my first thought was that he had kindly asked someone to notify me about his successful climb. As I looked more closely at the rain-soaked paper, I saw that it said “missing and presumed dead in an avalanche on 25 December.” A wave of grief rushed through my entire body as I walked out to the shore of a glacial lake filled with icebergs. There beneath the wild peaks of Torres del Paine, I stood alone, trying to make sense of wildly conflicted emotions. I didn’t know Anatoli that well, and never would, yet I felt as deep a sense of loss as if a member of my own family had died. We would never climb an 8,000-meter peak together, or any other mountain.

  Looking out over the blue icebergs, motionless beneath an angry Patagonian sky, I thought about how their floating tips represented the intense physicality that was all that many people knew of Anatoli. Invisible beneath the surface was the unseen spirituality that I had come to know in my conversations with him. We shared a diffident sacredness about life, friends, and simple things that comes across in the pages of his journals. It’s something that permeates the being of many a mountaineer after decades of personal challenge in the natural world.

  A more selfish reason for my extreme sense of loss struck me as I walked back to my cabin. There but for the grace of God went I. Despite our cultural gulf, Anatoli and I had an uncanny amount in common. I, too, had been a geology whiz kid who had moved from collecting rocks to climbing them. I, too, had moved on to become a physics major, hoping to better understand how the world worked, but instead finding ever more questions to ask. I, too, suffered from asthma, found relief in the clean air of higher altitudes, and went on to make fast ascents in the mountains. Lungs stressed by childhood asthma sometimes become conditioned to process oxygen better than normal lungs in later life. A classic example is Jim Ryun, who held the world record for the mile run, yet also suffered from childhood asthma.

  I also felt quite conflicted by my good fortune not to have been with Anatoli on Annapurna. Was I just luckier than he, or would the two of us together have somehow sensed the avalanche danger and avoided it? I had quite a history of narrowly avoiding avalanches, as well as of extracting myself out of some minor ones before they swept me down. Did that make me more likely or less likely to die in one in the future? I had no clear answer, but I did ponder whether the circumstances that had led Anatoli to try such an extreme climb in winter might further have influenced his decisions on that fateful Christmas Day.

  I recalled my own attempt to solo a lower peak in the Annapurna region in winter conditions, and how I’d instinctually retreated from an open slope, gone to its very edge, climbed up a few feet, jumped hard into the snow, and set off a slab avalanche that had cracked a curving arc up and over my original route, releasing tons of ice and snow. I later contemplated whether I would have sensed the danger and tested the slope if I’d had an eager partner with me, or if something about being there alone had allowed me to be more in tune with the mountain. I had few outside influences spurring me on—no sponsors to satisfy nor an agenda of summits to climb that year.

  If I had been there with Anatoli on Christmas Day, would either of us have sensed the impending doom? Such a question is unanswerable, yet appropriate to contemplate privately as a phantom survivor who had dropped out before the adventure began.

  Years earlier, I had dropped out of guiding Himalayan peaks, partly because of an increased ability to make a living through photography, but more because of witnessing too many times the fine line between triumph and tragedy while climbing with people I would otherwise not have chosen as partners. In 1977, I led the first American-guided ascent of a 7,000-meter Himalayan peak. A fellow guide roped to two clients was descending from the summit far too slowly into the night when the weakest member stumbled and fell on an ice slope. The guide held both men in a two-hundred-foot fall. Luckily, no one was injured, but few people outside our party realized how close our triumph had come to tragedy.

  The reverse—triumph instead of tragedy—could have happened on Everest in 1996 with just minor differences, such as a slightly earlier start or turning around weaker clients sooner. A smaller, more experienced, or more tightly organized group of Everest climbers would have been back at the South Col well before the brunt of the afternoon storm. Indeed, a French woman ascended neighboring 27,923-foot Lhotse that same day in the same weather conditions without incident. Though some say that Anatoli could have saved more lives by remaining near the summit for several more hours, waiting around so high while climbing without oxygen did not seem like the best choice at the time for Anatoli.

  Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but impending avalanches often defy prediction. In 1989, I was leading two clients across a glacial bowl at twenty thousand feet on Gasherbrum II when a distant avalanche began to fall off a lower peak. Judging its path, I yelled, “Run for it now!” Thirty seconds later, the tracks where we had been walking, as well as the empty nearby high camp of a women’s expedition, were buried under tons of ice. We were coated in blowing snow, but unscathed.

  How close we came was driven home to me when another guide from our expedition arrived roped to a weaker, more argumentative client who, I realized then and there, might not have instantly obeyed my command. That tiny sort of life-or-death difference influenced my decisio
n not to participate in any more guided 8,000-meter expeditions. On the other hand, I immediately agreed to climb two 8,000ers with Anatoli in the summer of 1998. Had I been roped only to Anatoli that day on Gasherbrum, I like to think that we both would have run for it, roped together, without a spoken word.

  Since that 1989 trip, I haven’t been back to an 8,000-meter peak. For me, serious mountaineering is all about trust; trust in oneself and trust in one’s companions. Mountaineering has no formal code of conduct, as there is with law or medicine. Philosophies constantly evolve, especially for those who excel. The old proverb “Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment” is nowhere more true than in high-altitude mountaineering. With your life on the line, you must constantly reassess your values, your decisions, your future goals, as Anatoli does so eloquently within these pages.

  Another truism is that human beings tend to explain away their failures as due to circumstances beyond their control, usually by blaming someone else. Unusual success, however, whether their own or someone else’s touted in the media, must be the result of exceptional personal ability. Thus Einstein was a born genius to come up with the theory of relativity (though he did poorly in school), and Reinhold Messner was a born superman to be the first to climb Everest without oxygen and to summit all the world’s 8,000-meter peaks (though physiologists who tested him afterward concluded that he was well trained, but physically quite normal). Had I not known Anatoli personally, I might have bought into the media myth that he was just a genetically gifted and narrowly trained Russian speed climber.

  When I met Reinhold Messner in the Himalaya and again in Alaska well before his Everest climbs, I realized that, above all else, he possessed an unusually inquiring and decisive mind. He wanted to know whether there was a yeti and all about Tibetan Buddhism as much as he wanted to summit high peaks. Messner is a survivor who has moved on to become deeply involved in European politics and to write more than thirty books.