Heidi's Story

"Fire! Fuego! Feu! Feuer! Stop the bus!" Our shouts are hoarse and punctuated by smoke-induced coughing as we writhe on our bellies across the sea of barrels and duffel bags piled inside the bus. The Pakistani driver and his mate in the front of the bus are oblivious to our panic, intent on performing yet another maniacal swerve around a hairpin bend 500 feet above the churning mass of the Indus River. Someone throws an empty water bottle into the cab to get the driver’s attention. He glances in the mirror, grins, cocks his head, and sweeps his hand through the air in a half-crazed gesture that is both magnanimous and apologetic.

"No problem. Just smoke. Is O.K.!," he shouts.

He hasn’t slept in two days. He has been driving our bus for fifteen hours, fueled by "wacky-backy" cigarettes, a fresh batch of hashish drying on the dashboard, and the high-pitched desirous whining of a female Pakistani singer. We have already experienced a brake system failure and a flat tire. Now the bus is on fire, and somehow we need to convince him it is worth pulling over.
We are six members of an American Himalayan climbing team traveling from Islamabad to the northern region of Pakistan along an infamous section of the Old Silk Road known as the Karakorum Highway. The Karakorum "Highway" is actually a narrow dirt road blasted into the walls of the Indus River Gorge. It winds through the debris of a geological collision zone formed by four of the world’s highest mountain ranges -- the Himalaya, the Karakorum, the Hindu Kush, and the Pamir. A rainstorm in this area can trigger massive landslides that take days to clear, so when the weather is good, drivers will typically work for up to four days without sleep.

Under the best conditions, this section of the road would be a challenge for an expert off-road driver in a rugged 4-wheel drive all-terrain vehicle. And to save money, we have chosen to ride in a traditional Pakistani junga bus. Anybody who has ever traveled in one of these vehicles will never forget it. They are regularly exploding, losing the steering or other vital functions, and running off precipitous cliffs. In fact, "bus" is a generous description. In size and maneuverability, they are closer to a cross between a dump truck and a London double-decker. They are driven by a wild-eyed breed of fanatics who pride themselves in expertly executing heart-stopping horn-blaring charges at oncoming vehicles. Slogans like "Road Warrior" and "King of Winds" are often added to the ornately painted exterior of the bus. The interior cab is usually adorned with red and gold tassels, prayers to Allah, and photographs of the driver’s children.

The thick black smoke from the oil fire at the back of our bus finally reaches the cab and the driver’s nostrils, and the bus lurches to the side of the road. "Deener time," he announces, as he staggers out and disappears into one of the roadside hovels. We tumble out and run to the opposite side of the road, half expecting the bus with our 100 canisters of fuel and other expedition gear to explode in a Hollywood-style inferno. It doesn’t. And so after half an hour of vainly trying to find the source of the fire, we, too, shrug our shoulders and disappear into a dirt-floor "restaurant".

Risk and real danger are an important part of the high altitude climbing game. Most climbers will admit that danger does play some role -- maybe even that they actually enjoy the peculiar, delicious chalky taste of fear -- but they’ll temper the admission with a disclaimer such as: "...but that’s not why I climb." Admitting that we are risk-mongers or adrenaline junkies is not fashionable, especially after the release of the made-for-TV movie based on Jon Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air. Still, there is something essential about the possibility of real loss, even death, in the game, and without the presence of danger many climbers would quit. Honing your ice climbing skills on a two-story ice cube simply isn’t the same as climbing, creeping, up a delicate, unstable icefall, where many two-story ice cubes can topple on you at any time. The first of these two activities leaves you with the pride of self-discipline and the warm glow of accomplishment. The second leaves you with that hair-raising, skin-crawling sense of how evanescent achievement is, how puny your own little dance is when compared with the sheer mass of motion in the cosmos.

To say that climbers are risk-takers is not to say that we are irresponsible bundles of hormones. A climber who is faced with a traverse across a knife-edge ridge with a 3,000-foot drop on one side and 2,000-foot drop on the other will do what any responsible, sane, prudent adult would do: lean (slightly) to the 2,000-foot side.

And to say that climbers are risk-takers is not to say that any type of risk is acceptable. There is a huge, if ephemeral, difference between risking your life at the hands of a zealot such as the Pakistani junga bus driver, and putting your life at the mercy of the whims of nature. The first is terrifying. The second is just a variation of a risk we take every day.

Of course too much of a good thing is a bad thing, and too much risk would dampen the spirits of even the most ardent adventurers. So the way climbers climb is calculated to maintain a certain acceptable level of risk and uncertainty. "Style" is the word that is usually used to describe this process. Using an aluminum ladder to climb a wall at a rock gym, for example, would be considered "bad style". It would simply be too easy. But using ladders to climb the Khumbu Icefall on Everest is considered standard practice. The icefall is so dangerous and so difficult that you may die anyway, with or without ladders. At some level, the style process plays a role in almost all the risky games we play -- driving a car, climbing the career ladder, developing relationships. It’s just easier to recognize in climbing, where the risk is overt and the rules that help maintain the uncertainty of the outcome are easier to identify.

Attitude is another useful tool in maintaining an acceptable level of risk , as I realized during one bad weather stint with another climber on an 8,000-meter peak. We were down to two handfuls of mashed potato powder, spindrift avalanches were pummeling the twisted remains of our tent, and there was no sign of a break in the storm that had pinned us in the tent for days.

My partner was morose, convinced that we were going to have to turn around. It was true. There was no way that we could climb for three more days with only one canister of fuel to melt snow, but to enjoy the game we both needed to believe that there was some element of uncertainty in our predicament. While he burrowed deeper into his sleeping bag, I stuck my head and shoulders out of the tent to empty a pee bottle. When I pulled back inside, I nudged him and thumped my mitts together.

"Hey, guess what, take a look outside: there’s almost no wind and I saw a break in the clouds," I announced, "I think it’s gonna be calm tomorrow. Might be a good time to brew some water."

He grunted, poked his nose and one hand out of his bag, muttered some irreverent prayer to the weather gods, and unzipped the tent a few inches. Another gust immediately blasted icy shards through the crack.

"Almost no wind, huh?" he said with smug satisfaction.

"Yeah, well, it might be a little breezy now," I conceded, "You gotta look fast."

Where the attitude of a single climber can make a difference, the opinion of an entire community or society can have a profound effect on risk assessment. Even a slightly different communal perspective, a different set of mores, can lead to a dramatically different view of danger, individual life, and individual responsibility. The view in many parts of Asia that children are naturally responsible, for example, often leaves an indelible impression on the minds of Himalayan travelers. Trekking to base camp through the remote eastern regions of Nepal last spring, I met a Sherpani busy building a new house for her young family. The structure mirrored the simplicity and strength of its creator -- expertly carved hand-hewn beams, notched and tied together with hand-woven jute cord, cemented with walls of orange clay. Up in the open rafters of the house, one of her children, a boy of two or three years, played happily with a twig.

As I eyeballed the twenty-foot drop below the unsupervised child, I thought about devices like plastic stair gates that have presumably saved the lives of countless American children. One of the two Nepali porters who was accompanying me came up behind me.

"Isn’t that dangerous?," I queried, pointing to the toddler.

The porter looked at me with a bemused and slightly confused expression. Then he smiled, shook his head, and asked, simply, "Why he jump?"

In the West we live in a safe and relatively comfortable world. We do everything we can to preserve and prolong our physical existence. Life is an "inalienable right" -- a right so inalienable that under most circumstances we don’t have the right to decline it. We vaccinate our children, pass laws that mandate seatbelts, develop life-saving devices like airbags and tamper-resistant packages. And we spend exorbitant amounts of energy developing products that enhance physical comfort: soft-ride suspension systems, scented fabric softeners, high-tech shoes with gel and air bubbles.

Longevity and comfort are, of course, good things. But amid our preoccupation with the needs of the body, the primitive urges of the mind are sometimes forgotten. In our quest for physical comfort, we often neglect our spiritual need to honestly and openly confront both our own mortality and the fragility of our world. We pad all of the sharp edges in our lives with bleached cotton or high-tech foam, and then wonder why the notion of a wild wind whipping across an exposed ridge both terrifies and fascinates us. We deny our kids real challenges, guarantee that they’ll move from grade to grade, and then wonder why they respond with apathy and indifference. We travel to work in climate-controlled vehicles and spend the day in a gray cubicle, and then wonder why we crave caffeine and other artificial stimulants.

Deprived of risk and real danger, many of us invent games that artificially re-create the adrenaline rushes. Some of us even invent artificial problems and enemies, like psychosomatic illnesses and soap-opera relationships. In many cases, our muffled minds are simply craving true challenges and real journeys, experiences in which the outcome is not certain and real loss is possible.

The outcome is never certain in Himalayan climbing, as I discovered during an expedition earlier this year to Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world. After seven weeks of fixing ropes, acclimatizing, and carrying loads, I found myself climbing up to the last camp for a summit bid with a teammate named Scott McKee. The weather was perfect, our movements were sure, and we were climbing for the sheer joy of movement. At 25,000 feet, Scott scrambled up to the top of a 10-foot boulder that was perched like a stray meteorite in the middle of a wide terrace. I laughed at his recklessness, threw back my head, and howled. Risk and fear were behind us, in a remote and alien world. We were exhilarated by the view of the glacier snaking like a river 10,000 feet below us, the sea of peaks around us, and the new moon hanging in the deep blue sky over the vertical white horizon above us.

We spent the last three hours of daylight chipping out a tent platform with a Slovak climber, and then crawled into the tent. Scott announced that it was his 37th birthday. I tried to make a candle out of our last Power Bar. We drank hot apple cider, toasted the spirit of the mountain. We were exuberant and strong, only 2,000 feet below the summit, silently certain that we would reach the summit.

Several hours later, after struggling to sleep on the tiny, roughly-hewn tent platform in hurricane-force winds, the exuberance and some of our strength had dissipated. We awoke at 2:30 a.m., fumbled with the cold stove, pulled on our boots and crampons with wooden fingers, and finally stumbled out of the tent at 5:30.

Plumes of spindrift curled over the summit ridge, and as we inched slowly up the slope, blasts of snow and ice swept across the face, forcing us to hunch over our axes to cover unprotected skin. Two steps, breathe, hunch, blast; five steps, breathe... We were climbing without bottled oxygen in the interest of "style", and finding the energy for each step was difficult. If we had been able to establish a rhythm it might have been more bearable, but the gusts came at irregular, chaotic intervals.

"Stop fighting, just dance with the wind..." -- there were voices around me, exhorting me to find the wild pulse of the windstorm, to move with the surges of flying ice and snow, to breathe deeply the thin air. I paused to listen, but the ebb and flow of the wind was unnatural, unpredictable, and I found myself stumbling, sprinting in between each blast to warm my frozen hands and feet.

Above us the low roar of the jet stream and the 50-mile-long wind plume trailing from the summit signaled impossible conditions on the final ridge leading to the summit. The jet stream moves at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour, and a climber on the exposed ridge would have been blown clear into Tibet.

"We’ll never make it. Let’s save our strength for tomorrow," I suddenly heard my voice shouting, piercing the wind and our high-altitude stupor. I saw Scott nod, and we turned and stumbled back down towards our bivy site.

Back in the tent, we crawled into stiff bags and nursed numb fingers and toes. The bottles of water we had carried next to our bodies inside our down suits were useless cylinders of ice.

"Think we should go down?" Scott asked casually.

"No way." It was my ninth consecutive day on the mountain, and my seventh day above 20,000 feet. Earlier in the expedition I had been strafed by a falling serac and buried by an avalanche. The impact of the avalanche had perforated my ear drum, and I had endured 72 hours of pain and continuous shoveling alone in a wind storm at 21,000 feet. To be forced back at 26,000 feet by the jet stream simply didn’t make any cosmic sense. I knew that our bodies could succumb to the inevitable effects of altitude exposure at any time, but I wanted to give the wind one more chance to life its veil.

Later that morning, Scott announced on the radio, "Heidi wants to give it another go, so, against my better judgment, we’ll stay up here one more night." I looked at him and laughed. Judgment? What’s that? Somehow judgment or reason at 26,000 feet seemed like an oxymoron. Strange things happen to your brain when oxygen is in short supply. The longer you hang out in the "death zone", the more disconnected and incoherent your thoughts become, and at altitudes above 21,000 feet, it is not unusual for climbers to experience hallucinations. One of the early Everest climbers, Frank Smythe, fed all of his biscuits to an imaginary companion at around 22,000 feet, and one of the first climbers to reach the summit of Everest without oxygen, Peter Habeler, was troubled for days at base camp by vivid hallucinations of insects and worms filling his tent.

We weren’t plagued by hallucinations or bizarre high-altitude dreams, but that night the wind was even more intense. Melting snow on the hanging stove became a four-hand job, and shards of wind-blown ice tore into our single-wall tent like shrapnel, leaving fist-sized holes that sucked in spindrift. Somewhere in the night I woke with a dull ache in the back of my skull -- not from altitude, but from the wall of the tent slamming into my head each time the wind hit us broadside with the force of a freight train.

When we awoke to begin the routine of melting snow again, things were even worse. The water that we had kept inside our down suits, inside our down sleeping bags, was frozen, and Scott was partially blind from retinal hemorrhages in one eye.

Eighteen hours later, we were relaxing in the mess tent at base camp. Retinal hemorrhages are one of those nasty little side effects of high altitude that can worsen quickly and cause serious problems on the descent. With this in mind -- and with visions of enormous helpings of our cook Songay’s specialty, deep-fried potatoes -- we had descended quickly, from 26,000 feet to 17,000 feet in a single day.

That night there was a party in the mess tent of the British military expedition. Two of the climbers were talking about Alison Hargreaves, a famous British alpinist who became the first female to solo Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1995, and then died three months later on K2. Frustrated by a season of unusually bad weather, she had decided to stay late in the season to make one last attempt.

She and her partner, Rob Slater, had reached the summit in deteriorating weather, and had been blown off the mountain during their descent in a typical high-altitude storm. I climbed with one of Alison’s K2 partners in 1996, so I already knew her story, but something in the tone and flow of this particular conversation made me pause.

Both Alison and Rob, these two climbers felt, had been blinded by their "reckless enthusiasm." Rob had even adopted the motto, "summit or plummet." Despite his retinal hemorrhage, Scott still wanted to give the summit another go. I had planned on joining him, but now I found myself re-evaluating the situation. There was something eerily familiar in Alison’s story. It was May 18. We were already beyond the normal dates for a "weather window" in eastern Nepal, and by the time we were rested and ready to go back up -- May 22 or May 23 -- it would be "late in the season."

All of the other expeditions at base camp were preparing to leave, and at dinner our cook had announced "monsoon weather here." I decided, suddenly and impulsively, to leave. The jet stream had been relentlessly scouring the upper reaches of the mountain for over a month, and not one of the 37 climbers on the north face had summited.

The decision seemed to make sense. And then four days after I left, Scott McKee went back up and became the only climber to reach the summit this spring, alone and in deteriorating weather. "You should have been there, Heidi," he said when he returned to Montana, "You would have made it." Yeah. I know.

I do not have an inflated image of the importance of my own accomplishments. I know only too well how transient and self-indulgent achievement is. And I know the summit isn’t the most important thing, that reaching a destination is only part of a journey. The trick is to come back, summit or no. Still, the closure of reaching the summit is important, and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I have had to deal with an internal barrage of doubts, regrets, and criticism.

My only consolation is that, in assessing the risk and determining my own risk threshold, I followed my intuition. As I was packing my bags at base camp, I paused to watch five choraks playing in the thin air above the moraine. They flew in almost perfect synchronization, moving to some silent inner rhythm, dipping up and down, diving at sharp angles to some invisible target below. Under them I felt the pulse of our own precarious movements: the frenzied movements of the climbers, crawling like ants across the surface of the earth, and the steady undercurrent of the earth’s shifting seasons, snow to rock, winter to monsoon.

There was something raw and elegant about the black birds flying over a white world, both the birds and the world in motion, suffering the same restlessness, the same perpetual motion, the same hapless glee. And somehow, pausing in the midst of my own motion, it seemed suddenly as though my decision was part of some larger reality. A reality in which nothing is untimely and no death is unnatural, in which risk is a tool and fear is superfluous. A reality in which intuition is a reflex.

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