Above the Clouds Read online

  Anatoli had a similar breadth and power of mind, but in a far more genetically gifted body. He rarely experienced the pain and suffering often described as an inherent part of climbing into the “death zone” above eight thousand meters. Thus the high Himalaya became Anatoli’s playground, a place where he experienced supreme joy from simply being there as well as occasional greatness when he seized the proper moment to launch his long-prepared body and mind into action. Though best known to the public for climbing Everest, his performance above eight thousand meters on many other Himalayan peaks, often alone and in extreme conditions, remains unparalleled. He climbed Gasherbrum II in ten hours, Dhaulagiri in seventeen hours, Makalu in forty-six hours, Manaslu in winter, and traversed all four summits of Kanchenjunga in a single push. After just two days’ rest from his 1996 Everest rescue, he soloed 27,923-foot Lhotse in the record time of twenty-one hours.

  Climbing Mount Everest was second nature for Anatoli, even the first time he reached its summit. In these pages from his private journals, he describes undertaking “an easy acclimatization climb” above the South Col in preparation for his first climb of the peak as a speed ascent from Base Camp in 1991. He and a friend set off casually without oxygen and with just their ski poles at 8:30 A.M., long after the typical midnight starts for summit bids. For him, the climbing was “easy going, not particularly a struggle.” By two o’clock, “rather unexpectedly, we found ourselves on the South Summit.” While his partner descended back to camp in high winds, Anatoli crawled up the infamous Hillary Step without an ice ax and “almost by accident. I arrived on the summit at 3 P.M.”

  Had Anatoli revealed these inner thoughts to a journalist in 1991, out of context they could have been made to sound highly arrogant. What kind of person would express such casual regard for an adversary so formidable that its very name—Everest—has become a global metaphor for supreme challenge? Between the lines of his journal is the answer to that question never asked. Everest was simply a different mountain for Anatoli.

  Everest is separated from other great peaks of the world not so much by its ascent height as by its thin air, in which Anatoli performed extremely well. Alaska’s Mount McKinley rises thousands of feet higher above its base to just 20,320 feet. Even 14,495-foot Mount Whitney rises almost as high above a valley in California as Mount Everest does above the Khumbu Valley in Nepal.

  What matters far more than a mountain’s height or vertical rise is an emergent quality related to each human being’s ability to ascend under his or her own power. It is this that gives Everest such charisma and mystique. To see it rising 10,800 feet above the trekkers’ viewpoint at Kala Pattar is ever so psychically different from seeing Mount Whitney rising 10,600 feet above the Owens Valley. Every human being assesses natural terrain, from the most humble hilltop to the highest mountain, by a subconscious measure of the time it would take to get to the top under one’s own power.

  I was in my thirties when I first looked up at Everest’s summit from below and naturally visualized it in the expanded geography of time. With the techniques of the day and my abilities, it would have taken me at least three weeks to get to the top.

  Back home in California, I looked up about the same distance to the top of Mount Whitney. I had recently run the tourist trail to the summit in three hours. What a comparison to my three-week estimate for Everest! I let my youthful urge to mathematically quantify the world run rampant and calculated my personal psychic height for Mount Everest by multiplying the 168 hours in a week by the 14,495-foot height of Mount Whitney. The result was a staggering 2,435,160-foot mountain. A more conservative estimate might compare the difference between a guided client’s 250-foot-per-hour pace above the South Col on Everest to a 1,000-foot-per-hour pace on Whitney. That would make Everest’s psychic altitude only four times its measured height, or 116,140 feet. For Anatoli, however, Everest’s psychic height was far lower, within the limits of a hard day’s outing in good conditions. But was the mountain truly diminished for him? In psychic height yes, but in psychic reward, absolutely not.

  When Hillary and Tenzing first climbed Everest in 1953, media pundits predicted that no one would ever climb it again, now that it had been conquered. While the mountain will never again be viewed as the world’s most pristine and immutable point, there are good reasons why many top climbers return to it again and again after first reaching the summit. Human experience over time with proper motivation can infuse a landscape with a spiritual quality that every enduring culture describes in a hauntingly similar way. It is the essence of the long history of Himalayan pilgrimage, where physical hardships are undertaken for spiritual reward, rather than material gain. It also helps clarify the Everest dichotomy that engulfed Anatoli. The public knew him as a guide climbing Everest for material gain, yet he did so to fund his private passion to do other climbs for spiritual reward.

  When I first met Anatoli more than a decade ago, I felt an instant kinship with him on my favorite morning trail run in the Berkeley Hills. Rather than push the pace, which he could so easily have done, he paused to contemplate the sun breaking through fog-draped Monterey pines, patterns in the windblown grass, and the tall buildings of San Francisco rising in the distance over the blanket of fog. We hardly spoke about these things as our heads turned together and our bodies slowed down while the particular visions remained in view.

  At the time, Anatoli’s English was so broken that I knew him better by gesture and body language than by the few words we had in common. Not until after he died did I fully realize how much this lack of fluency in English contributed to his being misunderstood in America. Our increasingly troubled journalism is ever less satisfied with basic reporting. Events must be validated by eyewitness regurgitations of emotions that supposedly occurred at the moment, but more likely came to mind when the press asked for an interview. The British Everest climber Doug Scott may have been the first to openly state that great thoughts rarely if ever occur to mountaineers on summits, but frequently surface afterward while celebrating over beers with one’s mates. The same principle applies to tragedies.

  The language problem is at least part of the reason why Anatoli’s “great thoughts” are wholly absent in Into Thin Air, and only weakly present in his own book, The Climb, which is based on interviews conducted in English. Anatoli’s personal philosophies—from simple truisms to profound insights about the human condition—come across clearly in the book you are now reading because he wrote them in his native language. As I read them, they evoke strong memories of the young Anatoli, fresh to America, who asked me all about my first one-day climb of Alaska’s Mount McKinley.

  Pushing my personal limits, I had done the climb in 1978 with the late Olympic cross-country skier Ned Gillette, from a pass at about ten thousand feet where the peak connects to Mount Foraker. Anatoli wanted to do it from where bush planes normally land climbers at seven thousand feet, not because it would better our record, but because to him this seemed to be a more natural starting point. Only after we had spent an hour talking all about the climb did he ask if I thought we could have done it faster.

  “Not much faster that day,” I answered, “but we weren’t trying to set a speed record. We’d come from sea level two days before and weren’t acclimatized. Our goal was to pace ourselves and experience the mountain as a day climb—unencumbered with all the extra stuff between us and the mountain that we otherwise would have brought to spend nights in the cold or wait out storms.”

  “It is same for me,” Anatoli said. “At home I do competitions, but when I climb for me, my experience is not about the record, even when I break it. It is how I am with the mountain in that special way. You understand?”

  I did then, and more than ever, I do now. What set Anatoli apart from most other Himalayan climbers was far more than the combination of fortuitous genes, intensive training, and raw experience that rendered him able to climb 8,000-meter peaks in less than a day or to rapidly retreat in the face of advancing weather. The b
readth of his humanity surpasses his physical exploits. It is that quality that makes this book of his personal journals so compelling.

  Linda Wylie’s splendid introduction sets the stage for understanding Anatoli’s emergence from what she summed up to me as “the Soviet experiment that was not all Stalin and bad things,” as so many Americans believe. She also summed up how that same society “nurtured his purest desire to achieve spiritual and physical perfection” to a degree that American society did not during the same era.

  It would be a mistake to leave readers with the impression that all this controversy over style and motives on Mount Everest is uniquely contemporary. While books and articles may emphasize satellite telephone calls and Internet postings from the mountain as well as the personal eccentricities of wealthy clients, in a larger sense these are simply modern manifestations of states of affairs as old as humanity and nothing new on Mount Everest. The great British mountaineer, explorer, and writer Eric Shipton directly anticipated the style of expedition that met with tragedy in 1996 in the following words he wrote after his own 1938 attempt:

  The ascent of Everest, like any other human endeavor, is only to be judged by the spirit in which it is attempted.… Let us climb peaks … not because others have failed, nor because the summits stand twenty-eight thousand feet above the sea, nor in patriotic fervor for the honour of the nation, nor for cheap publicity.… Let us not attack them with an army, announcing on the wireless to a sensation-loving world the news of our departure and the progress of our subsequent advance.

  Shipton made several attempts on Everest before World War II with lightweight expeditions that reached over twenty-eight thousand feet without oxygen, much in the style that Anatoli preferred to climb. After the war, Shipton was summarily removed as leader of the 1953 successful climb because the Royal Geographical Society thought his style didn’t bode high enough odds for a British success. The society found a military leader, Colonel Hunt, to assemble the far larger, oxygen-supported effort that was victorious.

  Had Shipton succeeded on Everest without oxygen and an army of Sherpas, the history of high-altitude climbing would have unfolded entirely differently. Huge, overequipped Himalayan expeditions to big peaks—private and commercial alike—would have been hard to justify and harder to finance. And Anatoli might still be alive, pursuing Shipton’s dream of climbing the wild peaks of Asia with a few friends and a few classic tools.

  —GALEN ROWELL

  INTRODUCTION: TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE

  On Christmas Day in 1997, the rumble of falling rock and ice disturbed the cathedral silence in Annapurna Sanctuary. On the ramparts of the Western Wall a cornice collapsed and scoured an eight-hundred-meter-long couloir. Car-sized blocks of ice gathered speed and swept three men to the glacier below. The life of internationally renowned Russian mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev ended in the embrace of natural forces.

  Far away, in the world of record books, Anatoli left a list of accomplishments unparalleled in the sport of high-altitude mountaineering. To his credit were twenty-one successful attempts on eleven of the world’s fourteen highest peaks, including speed records on Lhotse, Dhaulagiri, and Gasherbrum II, as well as new routes up Central Kanchenjunga and the West Wall of Dhaulagiri. He is one of thirteen men who can claim the tops of the highest and hardest mountains on earth: Everest, K2, Lhotse, Kanchenjunga, Makalu, Dhaulagiri, and Manaslu. In 1989, as a member of a history-making team from the Soviet Union, he traversed the ridge of the four 8,400-meter-plus summits that form the Kanchenjunga Massif. All these challenges—except for the traverse of Kanchenjunga and the 1997 Indonesian climb of Everest—he surmounted without the relief of supplemental oxygen.

  During a 1997 summer interview in Kazakhstan, Reinhold Messner appraised him as “one of the strongest mountaineers in the world.” Respected American filmmaker and mountaineer David Breashears echoed that assessment in a CNN television interview with Larry King. “Anatoli is gifted,” Breashears said, “one of a handful of men who could have succeeded in rescuing clients from the death grip of a storm on the South Col of Mount Everest in 1996.” In an obituary in Outside magazine, premier alpinist Ed Viesturs remembered his peer as the “consummate mountaineer.”

  Mountain climbers like Anatoli are a breed apart. Like a latter-day Ulysses, he journeyed in a world of cataclysm and giants, armed only with wit and strength, to meet destiny unafraid. The recognition of his peers would have meant more to Anatoli than any laurel for literary achievement. And though Anatoli was the first to admit he was no Dostoyevsky, his unique personal history and the magnitude of his accomplishments give his journals a compelling authority. In the following chapters you will find an uncompromising picture of the forces at work above the clouds. Even for the uninitiated these writings clarify the complex challenge of high mountains for the men and women who climb them. As history these journals chronicle the ten years when one of the earth’s pure inviolate frontiers became an unlikely commercial business: the pricey peak experience. For the Western reader, they personalize a nationality and are a window into a Russian man’s quest for meaning in life.

  The financial security and patronage that would have allowed him to express his full capacity eluded Anatoli. His greatest achievements went unrewarded in Kazakhstan and Russia. While Western alpinists of high caliber, such as Messner, Loretan, and Carsolio, returned to countrymen who took their successes to heart, Anatoli’s bent for individual accomplishments made him an anomaly in the USSR. When he was thirty-three, the collapse of the Soviet Union shattered the fabric of his life. At the peak of his physical potential, political instability and economic chaos opened like a great yawning crevasse, swallowing opportunity and destroying the ethic that supported his athleticism. His role as an Honored Master Athlete in Soviet society evaporated.

  Ill prepared for the pitfalls of capitalism but unwilling to give up a quest that had charted his course in life since the age of sixteen, he turned to the mountains. That trail would lead him to America, to the Karakoram, to the Himalayas, and then always home in search of a place in his motherland. Fifteen years of hard-won experience earned him work as a guide in an emerging international marketplace: the world’s 8,000-meter peaks. During the spring of 1996 on Mount Everest the game turned deadly. Anatoli Boukreev found himself center stage, thrust into a spotlight of attention created by an American journalist’s interpretation of the tragedy. A popular outdoor magazine rushed to publish an article that held Anatoli accountable for the Damoclean forces of nature and a complex web of ambitions that had spun beyond his control. There followed a storm of controversy that threatened to eclipse his brilliant career and unquestionable bravery. He was fortunate to meet and collaborate with writer Weston DeWalt on The Climb. Anatoli’s version of the 1996 Everest tragedy was published by St. Martin’s Press only two months before his death. The scope of that work was necessarily narrow and investigative. It could not communicate the depth of Anatoli’s contribution to mountaineering or his measure as a man.

  Soviet citizens lived out values and ethics molded in a society that is little understood in the West. A generation ago, the Russian faces we knew were those of Khrushchev and Stalin: stolid, humorless, unknowable for most people. Anatoli was born in January of 1958, three months after the successful launch of Sputnik marked a milestone in human scientific achievement. For Russians, it validated their arrival in the twentieth century. Their scientific success provoked a respectful wave of paranoia in America: we headed for the moon. In the sixties and seventies our two nations’ rivalries were played out on different stages. Soviet education and their science of human performance produced dazzling results. Adept prodigies captured the imagination of audiences on international platforms, with their music and ballet and with their athletic prowess and grace on Olympic playing fields. There were cracks in the wall, but fear and suspicion contorted the humanity glimpsed from both sides. For Americans, the varied population that inhabited one-sixth of the world’s landmass was reduced to a
few stereotypes.

  In 1991, when the walls came down, generations of Russians were left standing in the shambles of their country to sort out who they were if they were not Soviet. God and the czar were far away. Who would they be without the ideology of Communism, and how should they act in the world? The idealism and inner strength that Anatoli possessed are common among his people. These values endure in the population of average citizens independent of the strange political machinations that have played out throughout their history. Anatoli was not ashamed of his Soviet upbringing. He salvaged what was positive from his culture, marrying the bewildering political and social contradictions into something exemplary, something uniquely Russian.

  Deprived of the political context that had created his role in Soviet society, he went out in the world to make his own place. Ingrained in him was a conservative, utilitarian view of materialism. He never mistook the accumulation of objects for wealth or freedom. Direct physical experience was refined into meaning. Most of what he needed he learned to carry on his back. Monastic simplicity lent Anatoli a paradoxical kind of elegance. His motives for climbing reflected a rich interior world with a bedrock of idealism that seemed more grounded in the mystical tenets of his mother’s Orthodox faith than in his indoctrination as a Communist.

  Big mountains are a completely different world: snow, ice, rocks, sky, and thin air. You cannot conquer them, only rise to their height for a short time; and for that they demand a great deal. The struggle is not with the enemy, or a competitor like in sports, but with yourself, with the feelings of weakness and inadequacy. That struggle appeals to me. It is why I became a mountaineer.