Mount Everest Pure And Simple

I was on Mount Everest for 50 days before I felt real fear. It came suddenly while climbing a stretch I'd already been up and down eight times. Blood rushed through my head as I looked between my legs down a white wall that dropped thousands of feet to a glacier.

Looking down in itself didn't bother me. Twenty-seven seasons of mountaineering has conditioned me against freaking out simply because I am on the middle of a sheer wall. Just under my skin, however, I have the instinctive fear that all humans share: not a direct fear of heights as many of us wrongly suppose, but a more basic fear of being out of control in any potentially dangerous place. Confidence in technique and equipment assuages my fear on Everest, just as confidence in pilot and craft calms most people's fears in a 747 at an altitude even higher than the mountain's 29,028 feet.

What made me feel out of control at this moment was a tiny piece of ice, no larger than a dime. In all other ways I was surprisingly comfortable. Even at 22,000 feet, my state-of-the-art insulated climbing suit kept me as warm as I would be in my living room in Berkeley, Calif. I was carrying a heavy pack, but my breathing had been normal at rest—until I realized what that ice chip could do to me.

I was following 7,000 feet of rope fixed securely to the mountain's west shoulder by long screws in the ice. With the aid of a pair of mechanical ascenders, I held the rope like a handrail as I moved upward one slow step at a time. The ascenders were designed to slide up with ease, but under the slightest downward pressure they would lock. Suddenly the upper ascender slipped, and I found myself dangling from my waist harness a few feet lower than I had been. The lower ascender had held me. Looking down to where I might have fallen, I resisted an urge to panic.

Seeing that ice had formed on the ascender's metal teeth, I took my hands out of my gloves and scraped them clean with a ball-point pen and a toothbrush. Minutes later the same ascender slipped again, and I toppled over backwards with a scream. Again, the lower ascender held.

Ice was building up on the ropes, something that hadn't been happening before. For almost two months the snowfalls had come in the form of dry, cold powder that didn't stick to anything, and the mountain had been in perfect climbing condition, with its ribs of dark rock and blue ice always exposed. On May 8 it had changed overnight. One storm iced Everest over like a wedding cake, and this time DO amount of wind blew it clean. Ropes, camps, rock and ice were buried. The storm was a forerunner of the monsoon, a seasonal wind that in the summer months blows rain clouds from the warm Indian Ocean toward the Himalaya, where the clouds freeze and drop heavy blankets of wet snow. When the monsoon hit with full force Everest would be out of condition for climbing until September.

My fear increased in direct proportion to the the ice buildup inside the ascenders. Each slip stripped me of my peace and comfort. My heart would pound and I would gasp for breath. My fingers would go numb trying to clean the devices. Warmth and confidence would return as I began climbing again, only to instantly disappear with another slip.

My perceptions became attuned to a bizarre rhythm. After each cleaning, I set out into the great silence of high altitude, a blue and white world so intensely beautiful that just to glimpse it seemed to justify all privations. But as the ascenders iced up, my apprehension let this pure beauty dissolve into a grotesquely twisted landscape, unfit for human life.

I had come to Everest with 16 other climbers in March, just when the peak was emerging from the deep cold and high winds of winter. Today only four of us were left on the upper mountain. Two men—Jack Tackle and Dr Robin Houston—were in Camp V at 25,000 feet, waiting to make a last-ditch effort to finish climbing the mountain before the monsoon. Kim Schmitz and I were moving up to join them.

I was the climbing leader of the 1983 American Everest West Expedition Our goal was a completely self-contained ascent of the difficult Direct West Ridge. We had no native porters, no motors of any kind, no bottled oxygen.