Summit fever
High above the Baltoro glacier, the wind whistles over corniced ridges and between teetering seracs. It whips spindrift off the snow and the icy fog sparkles with the wayward light of a hidden sun. I began to imagine, in my worsening hypoxic delirium, that that magical realm above the clouds was the gateway to another world. And so it was for five of us.
(my take on The Endless Knot, Kurt Diemberger’s account of the 1986 K2 disaster and an epic portrayal of adventure, love, and loss)
I’m such an armchair mountaineer. Right now I’m in the middle of the classic Annapurna by Maurice Herzog, who completed the first ascent of that mountain in 1950. Early in the book, while reconnoitering the area, Herzog attempts to ford some frigid river and slips. The sun sets; he and his wet clothes spend the night in the open under light snowfall at 14,000 feet. Upon reading this I automatically recall the time I was shivering mildly in a 20-degree sleeping bag at 11,000 feet; the temperature outside the tent had settled around fifteen degrees, and a chill wind was blowing through the mesh in my inadequate summer tent. Some part of my mind naively nods in understanding: mhmm, so Herzog’s episode must have been like that, but much worse. Rockfall, crevasses, extreme altitude, exhaustion, triumph, loss—in every case, my mind likens the unknown to the known.
But, in reality, I suspect that some experiences are unbelievably worse than even the greatest horrors I can conjure through extrapolation of my own experiences. Joe Simpson’s unplanned crevasse adventure, the subject of the book Touching the Void, comes to mind. Joe broke his leg while climbing in the remote Peruvian Andes, fell into a crevasse, and miraculously crawled out alive over several excruciating days. When he came to after his fall, he was crumpled on a ledge deep in the glacier, a hundred feet beneath the surface and farther still from the bottom of the crevasse. Lacking the strength or the equipment to climb out, Joe was confronted with the choice to either succumb to the cold over a few days, rappel into the crevasse knowing he could not climb back up, or simply roll off the ledge into the yawning black void and end his misery. He did manage to escape, by descending farther into the darkness until he found a patch of sunlight streaming through a weakness in the immense walls of ice. However, those hours he spent on the ledge defy comprehension. Alone, cold, starving, he agonized over whether he preferred a slow death, a fast death, or immense pain and suffering (his already broken leg had been mangled further by the fall, and any motion triggered nauseating bolts of pain) followed by almost certain death anyway. Even after rereading his book two, three times, how could I possibly understand?
That incident is an extreme example of what can happen during even routine activities in the mountains. Given such titanic risk, I can only imagine that the reward of climbing skillfully and summiting must be greater still, and that mountaineers must be fueled by an intense, unstoppable desire to climb. I’m obsessed with reading about this esoteric pursuit because each story makes me feel emotionally impoverished: have I ever wanted anything as much as those brave people want to stand at the top?
Personally, I don’t feel any particular pull to the mountains (actually, mountaineering kind of freaks me out). But a line by Herzog comes to mind:
There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.
So each day I sift through the threads of desire that connect me to the future, searching carefully for the one that skirts the cracks and crevasses, and sweeps upwards along the great ridge—in places frosted with rime, but everywhere affixed to solid anchors—the thread whose billowing arc tugs me insistently towards the summit, in whatever form it may take.