dreaming.”
Doug spent even more time writing faxes to his two grown kids—Angie, nineteen, and Jaime, twenty-seven—whom he’d raised as a single father. He bunked in the tent next to mine, and every time a fax would arrive from Angie he’d read it to me, beaming. “Jeez,” he would announce, “how do you suppose a screwup like me could have raised such a great kid?”
For my part, I wrote few postcards or faxes to anybody. Instead, I spent most of my time in Base Camp brooding about how I’d perform higher on the mountain, especially in the so-called Death Zone above 25,000 feet. I’d logged considerably more time on technical rock and ice than most of the other clients and many of the guides. But technical expertise counted for next to nothing on Everest, and I’d spent less time at high altitude than virtually every other climber present. Indeed, here at Base Camp—the mere toe of Everest—I was already higher than I’d ever been in my life.
This didn’t seem to worry Hall. After seven Everest expeditions, he explained, he’d fine-tuned a remarkably effective acclimatization plan that would enable us to adapt to the paucity of oxygen in the atmosphere. (At Base Camp there was approximately half as much oxygen as at sea level; at the summit only a third as much.) When confronted with an increase in altitude, the human body adjusts in manifold ways, from increasing respiration, to changing the pH of the blood, to radically boosting the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells—a conversion that takes weeks to complete.
Hall insisted, however, that after just three trips above Base Camp, climbing 2,000 feet higher on the mountain each time, our bodies would adapt sufficiently to permit safe passage to the 29,028-foot summit. “It’s worked thirty-nine times so far, pal,” Hall assured me with a crooked grin when I confessed my doubts. “And a few of the blokes who’ve summitted with me were nearly as pathetic as you.”
* There are fourteen so-called 8,000-meter peaks: mountains that stand more than 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) above sea level. Although it is a somewhat arbitrary designation, mountaineers have always attached special prestige to ascents of 8,000-meter peaks. The first person to climb all fourteen of them was Reinhold Messner, in 1986. To date, only four other climbers have repeated the feat.
SIX
EVEREST BASE CAMP
APRIL 12, 1996 • 17,600 FEET
The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It’s a small scale model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious .
A. Alvarez
The Savage God:
A Study of Suicide
Ascending Everest is a long, tedious process, more like a mammoth construction project than climbing as I’d previously known it. Counting our Sherpa staff, there were twenty-six people on Hall’s team, and keeping everyone fed, sheltered, and in good health at 17,600 feet, a hundred miles by foot from the nearest road head, was no mean feat. Hall, however, was a quartermaster nonpareil, and he relished the challenge. At Base Camp he pored over reams of computer printouts detailing logistical minutiae: menus, spare parts, tools, medicines, communications hardware, load-hauling schedules, yak availability. A natural-born engineer, Rob loved infrastructure, electronics, and gadgets of all kinds; he spent his spare time endlessly tinkering with the solar electrical system or reading back issues of Popular Science .
In the tradition of
Doug spent even more time writing faxes to his two grown kids—Angie, nineteen, and Jaime, twenty-seven—whom he’d raised as a single father. He bunked in the tent next to mine, and every time a fax would arrive from Angie he’d read it to me, beaming. “Jeez,” he would announce, “how do you suppose a screwup like me could have raised such a great kid?”
For my part, I wrote few postcards or faxes to anybody. Instead, I spent most of my time in Base Camp brooding about how I’d perform higher on the mountain, especially in the so-called Death Zone above 25,000 feet. I’d logged considerably more time on technical rock and ice than most of the other clients and many of the guides. But technical expertise counted for next to nothing on Everest, and I’d spent less time at high altitude than virtually every other climber present. Indeed, here at Base Camp—the mere toe of Everest—I was already higher than I’d ever been in my life.
This didn’t seem to worry Hall. After seven Everest expeditions, he explained, he’d fine-tuned a remarkably effective acclimatization plan that would enable us to adapt to the paucity of oxygen in the atmosphere. (At Base Camp there was approximately half as much oxygen as at sea level; at the summit only a third as much.) When confronted with an increase in altitude, the human body adjusts in manifold ways, from increasing respiration, to changing the pH of the blood, to radically boosting the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells—a conversion that takes weeks to complete.
Hall insisted, however, that after just three trips above Base Camp, climbing 2,000 feet higher on the mountain each time, our bodies would adapt sufficiently to permit safe passage to the 29,028-foot summit. “It’s worked thirty-nine times so far, pal,” Hall assured me with a crooked grin when I confessed my doubts. “And a few of the blokes who’ve summitted with me were nearly as pathetic as you.”
* There are fourteen so-called 8,000-meter peaks: mountains that stand more than 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) above sea level. Although it is a somewhat arbitrary designation, mountaineers have always attached special prestige to ascents of 8,000-meter peaks. The first person to climb all fourteen of them was Reinhold Messner, in 1986. To date, only four other climbers have repeated the feat.
SIX
EVEREST BASE CAMP
APRIL 12, 1996 • 17,600 FEET
The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It’s a small scale model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious .
A. Alvarez
The Savage God:
A Study of Suicide
Ascending Everest is a long, tedious process, more like a mammoth construction project than climbing as I’d previously known it. Counting our Sherpa staff, there were twenty-six people on Hall’s team, and keeping everyone fed, sheltered, and in good health at 17,600 feet, a hundred miles by foot from the nearest road head, was no mean feat. Hall, however, was a quartermaster nonpareil, and he relished the challenge. At Base Camp he pored over reams of computer printouts detailing logistical minutiae: menus, spare parts, tools, medicines, communications hardware, load-hauling schedules, yak availability. A natural-born engineer, Rob loved infrastructure, electronics, and gadgets of all kinds; he spent his spare time endlessly tinkering with the solar electrical system or reading back issues of Popular Science .
In the tradition of
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