The Climb Page 3

  Like other states that had once been members of the USSR, Kazakhstan had been struggling to find the monies to keep their mountaineering programs alive. It was hardly a surprise to Boukreev when Ervand Ilinski, who was to lead the expedition, announced that the team had not found the funds necessary to support the expedition, that they would have to delay their attempt on Manaslu until spring 1996.

  I found out about the expedition being canceled just prior to my departure for Nepal. I thought, “What is the use to stay in Almaty?” My opportunities as a high-altitude climber were in the Himalaya, and I needed to go there. If I waited for opportunity to find me in Kazakhstan, my career could be finished. So, I flew to Kathmandu in the hope that I could find some work as a guide or that I could find an expedition to an 8,000er that I could join.

  By the time I arrived in Kathmandu there were no guiding jobs to be found, but I did run into some Georgian friends with whom I had previously climbed in the Pamir and Tien Shan ranges of Asia.

  The Georgians, unlike the Kazakhs, had been able to find and hold on to the monies for a planned attempt on Dhaulagiri (8,167 m), and recognizing Boukreev’s experience and potential contributions to their effort, they invited him to join on the condition that he pay his own expenses and his proportionate share of the permit fee being charged by the Nepalese government. The no-free-lunch realities that had come with the breakup of the Soviet Union were slowly supplanting the generosity more common in the days of state support, and despite his limited personal resources Boukreev accepted the offer.

  Because the Georgians thought Boukreev’s presence on the climb could be misunderstood and dilute the potential public impact of whatever success they realized as a team, it was agreed that Boukreev would climb with them until it was time to make the final push to the summit; then they would go their separate ways. If they achieved the summit, the Georgians didn’t want to seem dependent upon the expertise of a Russian, especially one who lived in Kazakhstan. The issue was not so much competitiveness between climbers (a prevailing condition in high-altitude mountaineering), but a matter of national pride and politics.

  On October 8, 1995, Boukreev, alone and without the use of supplementary oxygen, made a push to the summit of Dhaulagiri. Without intending to, Boukreev set a speed record for the time of his ascent: seventeen hours and fifteen minutes.

  Returning to Kathmandu on October 20, Boukreev went immediately to work, looking for opportunities and planning to continue conversations with Henry Todd of Himalayan Guides, who had made him a verbal offer of a job. In May of 1995, it had been Boukreev who had guided Todd’s successful expedition on the north side of Everest while Todd was in Base Camp recovering from a back injury. Given Boukreev’s success, Todd was eager to secure his services for the 1996 season when Todd was planning an Everest expedition from the south side, via the Southeast Ridge route, the most popular route to the top.

  I had just finished breakfast and was walking in a narrow side street of the Thamel district where traffic had come to a complete standstill. In a confusion of jammed-up rickshaws, pedicabs, trucks, and cars, I heard someone yelling my name, and from one of the cars arms were waving and beckoning me into the street. Looking closely, I recognized several of my climber friends from Almaty, and I went to their car. They had just come in from the airport, and they were ecstatic. Somehow, the expedition to Manaslu had been moved up; someone had scavenged the necessary money, and now the plan was to make the ascent in December of ‘95, instead of spring 1996. This was good news on two counts. First, there was going to be an expedition! Second, I would have more flexibility in my efforts to find guiding work in the spring. It was a few days later that I ran into Scott.

  I was walking down a narrow side street when I saw him browsing in the market stalls near the Skala, a Sherpa-owned guesthouse, where I was staying. I thought maybe he wouldn’t remember me, so I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him what was happening in America. Immediately he recognized me and broke into a smile.

  “Hi, Anatoli. How’s it going? You have time for a beer?”

  We found a restaurant close to the Ministry of Tourism, where he had a meeting later that afternoon, and we began to catch up on what each of us had been doing since we’d last met. Scott told me that he had successfully guided from Pakistan an expedition to Broad Peak (8,047 m), and that now he was in the middle of permit discussions for Everest. Permit politics, he said, were incredible, and the price they were asking! “Fifty thousand for five climbers; ten thousand for each additional climber. Unbelievable.” He said he already had some clients signed up and that it looked like a “go” if he could just get the permit.

  Fischer was playing the Everest shell game. He’d been promoting his Everest expedition without a permit in hand, not an uncommon practice among commercial expedition packagers. Karen Dickinson said, “We were all sweating bullets. The year before, we were going to run a trip [to Everest] and we didn’t get the permit. And so we decided to bail on the trip. And so of course they gave us the permit, like late January, and we’re like, ‘Hey, it’s too late now,’ and our competitors had all lied and said they had the permit when they didn’t, and their trips ran. So in ‘96, we just said, ‘Oh yeah, we have a permit,’ … but we didn’t get it in hand until February.”

  Scott asked me what I was doing in Kathmandu, and I told him that I’d just come off Dhaulagiri, the second time I had climbed it. “Doing some guiding work?” he asked me. “No, just for the sport of it,” I told him. “I had the opportunity to tag on to a Georgian expedition and made a speed ascent.” Scott was, I think, surprised. “You weren’t guiding any paying clients?” he asked me, laughing. My pockets then were almost empty, and his question seemed reasonable. Scott knew the situation in the former Soviet Union where support for climbers had all but disappeared. Like me, he had heard the news; our mutual friend Vladimir Balyberdin had been killed in St. Petersburg while operating his personal car as a gypsy cab.

  I didn’t want so much to talk about hard times, so I told Scott, “I’m going to do Manaslu with a team from Kazakhstan next month. You want to come along?” At first he was silent, and then he realized I was serious, and he began to laugh again, saying how much he envied me and my extreme adventures.

  Scott knew, as I did, that no American had ever summited Manaslu. “You could be the first,” I told him. His eyebrows went up and his eyes brightened. “Oh, Anatoli, man, I would love to make that one, but I am so incredibly busy. I’m trying to put together this Everest package for May; I’ve got some stuff working in Kilimanjaro. Man, I’d love to do it, but I’m just too damn busy.”

  Fischer’s itinerary for Mountain Madness took him all over the world and away from the family he loved. His house in West Seattle was where he had clothes in the closet and where his wife, Jeannie, and his two children lived, but more and more often he was living out of a suitcase or an expedition duffel, suffering the hassles of humorless, palms-open border functionaries. He’d “had problems getting completely strip-searched at airports,” Karen Dickinson said, “because, of course, he’s coming through with his ponytail and his little gold earring, and [his] travel itinerary that makes no sense at all. You know, like … he went to Thailand; he went to Nepal; now he’s going to Africa, so the customs people always are like, ‘Oh, yeah, what are you up to?’ ”

  I tried to get him off his schedule, to do something for himself, to climb. I told him, “I don’t doubt that we’ll have success. We have a truly b team, and you would make it even stronger. Join us!” I could see it was hard for him not to accept my invitation. Clearly his business was pulling him one way, his love of the mountains in another. He told me, “I’m not as free as you are. I’ve got obligations, a business, family commitments.” His dilemma I understood. It is extremely difficult for high-altitude climbers to support their climbing careers without going commercial in some way or another. But, still, it was with disappointment that I heard him say no.

  As Boukreev and Fischer
talked, Fischer kept glancing at his watch, mindful of his upcoming meeting at the Ministry of Tourism, wanting to be punctual and properly respectful to the authorities. Good relations with the bureaucracy were mandatory. Nobody climbs without a ticket.

  When Scott got up to go, he asked me if I would meet him at his hotel, the Manang, the next day and join him for breakfast. He had some things, he said, he wanted to talk to me about.

  Boukreev was eager to see Fischer again because he knew Fischer was expanding his operations, looking for new markets, and Boukreev was hungry for opportunities. The years since the collapse of the Soviet Union had been more difficult for Boukreev than Fischer could have imagined. Soviet mountaineering had been decimated. Many of the climbers of Boukreev’s generation, some of the finest mountaineers in the world, were now near paupers. With families to feed, their ambitions went on the shelf when they took jobs running mountain hostels, or teaching skiing to the children of Mafia bosses—whatever would put bread on the table.

  Boukreev knew the despair and humiliation that came with the loss of state support. After his successful 1994 ascent of Makalu, while Neal Beidleman and the other American members of the expedition were jetting back to the States, he was holed up in Kathmandu’s cheapest hotel and selling off his climbing gear to purchase a ticket home to Almaty. Looking into a mirror one day, he realized that after the rigors and challenges of Makalu he had actually gained weight on the expedition food, much better than what he could buy at home. All of his American counterparts had lost weight, some of them as much as nine kilograms (20 pounds). That was the near bottom of his career, and he wasn’t far above that now.

  I wanted to introduce Scott to the potentials of the mountains in Kazakhstan. The opportunities were there just waiting to be tapped. Long the training ground for climbers from the former Soviet Union, the mountains presented some interesting challenges. The infrastructure was poor; there were few hotels, but capital was starting to flow into the country, and someone with Scott’s skills, I thought, could make something happen.

  The next morning, over second and third cups of coffee, Fischer and Boukreev looked over maps of Kazakhstan and some brochures about the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges that Boukreev had brought to the meeting. Fischer was intrigued, asked a number of pointed questions, and then abruptly turned the conversation toward Everest. He wanted to talk about Boukreev’s experience there. Like all high-altitude climbers who stay wired to news of the Himalaya, Fischer knew about Boukreev’s success with Henry Todd’s Himalayan Guides the year before. Among the seven climbers whom Boukreev had guided on Everest, three were firsts: the first Welshman, the first Dane, and the first Brazilian.

  Scott talked a lot about Everest, and then we began to discuss high-altitude guiding and how it was different from his experiences at lower altitudes. He said he was interested in more than just Everest; he had big plans for the future, for all the 8,000ers. He was giving serious thought to a commercial K2 expedition. A lot of Americans were interested, he said. “I would need some good guides, maybe six, maybe Russians who were willing to take the risk, because there aren’t many Americans who could do it.”

  K2, though it is “only” the second-highest mountain in the world, is generally regarded as the most dangerous of the 8,000ers. Because of its pyramidal mass, the hardest climbing is done on its flanks at the highest elevations; it is one of the great high-altitude challenges. The difficulties of its routes and the dramatic stories, too many of them tragic, about the attempts to make its summit were well-known by Fischer. In fact, as Boukreev knew, Fischer had been a player in one of the most dramatic of those stories.

  In August 1992, after having successfully made the summit of K2, Fischer, exhausted and suffering from a shoulder injury, descended the mountain at night in a snowstorm, lowering below him the dead weight of a climber rigged to his climbing harness. The climber, Gary Ball from New Zealand and a business partner of Rob Hall’s, had been stricken with a pulmonary ailment and was unable to move under his own power. Fischer’s heroic actions helped save Ball’s life.*

  I told Scott, “What is true for Everest is true for K2. You know. You’ve been there. There is no room for mistakes. You need good weather and very good luck. You need qualified guides, professional climbers who know high altitude and the mountain. And clients? You need to screen them carefully; you need people who can carry the responsibilities and challenges of high altitude. This is not Mount Rainier. Climbing at high altitude requires a different set of rules. You have to develop self-reliance in your climbers because you cannot hold their hands all the time. It is dangerous to say that Everest can be guided in the same sense that Mount McKinley can be guided.” Scott listened carefully, then surprised me.

  “I need a lead climber,” he said, “somebody with your kind of experience. Come with me to Everest, and after Everest, hey, we’ll look at K2 with a Russian guiding team and the Tien Shan. What do you say?”

  I had to tell Scott that I had already been made a tentative offer by Henry Todd of Himalayan Guides, who, like him, was planning a commercial expedition from the Nepal side of the mountain if he got a permit and enough clients. I told him we have an expression in Russia, “You don’t change ponies at the ford of the stream.” Scott laughed and asked me what Henry Todd was paying. When I told him, he said, “Look, you’re a free agent. You don’t have a signed contract.” And then he offered to pay me almost twice what Henry had offered.

  For Boukreev it was a welcome invitation, and the offer of prospects beyond was promising. Boukreev had a great deal of confidence in Fischer’s ability to handle the complexities of fielding an expedition and appreciated him as a climber. Also, Beidleman was a friend. Boukreev had assisted him in his effort to climb Makalu in 1994, Beidleman’s first 8,000er, and had a lot of respect for the determination Beidleman had shown in his exhaustive effort. His endurance was extraordinary, Boukreev noted, because he was an ultra-marathon runner. But the demands of high-altitude climbing are very different from those of long-distance running and Beidleman had no Everest experience.

  I didn’t want to say no, but didn’t feel that I could say yes at that moment, so, instead, I asked for $5,000 more than what Scott was offering, thinking if he agreed, Henry would more readily understand my acceptance. Scott put his coffee down and looked at me as if he couldn’t believe what I’d said, and responded, “No way. No way.”

  I said, “Okay, no problem.” Honestly, I thought that was the end of our conversation, that I’d be working for Henry Todd as I had the year before, but then Scott said, “Think about it, what I’m offering you,” and he got up to leave for another appointment at the Ministry of Tourism. As he was leaving, he said, “Let’s have breakfast again in the morning at Mike’s. Nine? Think about it.”

  The next morning Boukreev arrived earlier than the appointed 9:00 A.M. at Mike’s Breakfast, a restaurant in the Durbar Marg area that is popular with American climbers and the expatriates of Kathmandu because of its coffee and pancakes, a conscious pandering to home-away-from-home comfort food desires. Finding a table, Boukreev rehearsed the English for what he was going to say to Fischer, that he would agree to the terms as Fischer had offered them the day before. Boukreev was not going to hold out for the additional dollars. The relationship with Mountain Madness, he thought, could be a productive one, and if it had no beginning, it might not have a future. Thirty minutes went by; then an hour was gone. Boukreev ordered breakfast, suspecting Fischer had changed his mind, that the opportunity was lost.

  I had already finished breakfast and had paid the waiter when I noticed Scott walking into the restaurant with his agent, P. B. Thapa of HimTreks, the Kathmandu company that would be organizing logistics for the Mountain Madness expedition in Nepal. Scott came to my table, smiling as always, said, “Good morning,” and immediately, before I could even respond, said, “Are you ready to go to Everest with me?” And I said, joking with him, “Are you ready to pay me my price?” Without hesitation he said, �
�Yes.”

  The decision made, P. B. Thapa, Fischer, and Boukreev began to discuss details of expedition planning. Of immediate concern to Fischer was the oxygen he needed to order for his climbers. He’d heard about a new Russian source, Poisk (meaning “quest” in English) in St. Petersburg. They were supplying a lightweight, titanium canister that was at least one-half kilogram (1.1 pounds) lighter than the usual three-liter canister used on the mountain, and Fischer was interested in keeping the weight down for his clients. Boukreev had contacts in the St. Petersburg factory, and it was agreed that as soon as he came back from Manaslu, Boukreev would begin negotiations with Poisk.

  A few days later I met with Scott at the hotel where my Georgian friends were staying, and I showed him some high-altitude tents made in the Urals that the Georgians had used in their ascent of Dhaulagiri. Good quality, and proven in the raging winds at high altitude. Scott bought one of them and said he would like for me to have another manufactured to his specifications, and it was agreed that, like the oxygen, I would tend to getting it ordered.

  Boukreev and Fischer parted, both pleased with their agreement. For the first time in years, Boukreev could see real possibilities ahead, and this year, because Fischer agreed to advance him some money on his contract, he wouldn’t have to sell his ice ax or any other gear to get a ticket home. Similarly, Fischer was satisfied. For his expedition and his clients he had been able to secure the services of one of the Himalaya’s strongest climbers. Boukreev, he told friends later, was hired for a very specific purpose. “If we get our butts into trouble, Anatoli will be there to pull us off the mountain.”

  Karen Dickinson recalled Fischer’s excitement over having recruited Boukreev. “I heard Scott say, ‘You couldn’t ask for a stronger climber than Anatoli to be up there with you. Who knows what might happen up there?’ ”