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I was very gratified, then, when Pemba Gyalje was hailed by National Geographic Adventure in December 2008 as its Adventurer of the Year, an award I had won in 2005. The National Geographic Society, or NGS, flew Pemba to Washington, D.C., for the ceremony, and I heard that he really enjoyed it, as he stood beaming and holding aloft his trophy, while the audience in the posh society headquarters gave him a wild standing ovation.

Topping off the encomiums, the American Alpine Club bestowed its most prestigious honor, the David A. Sowles Memorial Award (for heroism in saving the lives of other climbers), on Pemba at its annual meeting in Golden, Colorado, in February 2009.

People often ask me if a disaster like last summer’s is bound to happen again on K2. And my answer, sadly, is yes. Too many of the climbers who survive such a fiasco tell themselves, Well, I got away with it. And too many others, planning their own future expeditions, think, Oh, it’s not going to happen to me.

The most those of us who have climbed the world’s highest mountains can hope to do is educate others. I also tried to educate myself every step of the way on all of my climbs, realizing I could never learn enough. But sometimes I wonder if even trying to educate others is a lost cause. Little that we say or do seems to sink in. The appeal of risk seems to outweigh the rewards of discipline on hazardous peaks. To cite an oft-quoted statistic, after the 1996 season, when so many inexperienced clients came to grief on Everest, in 1997 the numbers of applicants willing to pay as much as $75,000 apiece to get guided up the highest mountain significantly increased.

After No Shortcuts to the Top was published in 2006, I got hundreds of letters and e-mails from readers. Very few of them were negative or critical, and many folks wrote to say that they were captivated or even inspired by my story. But the e-mail that probably moved me the most—the one that almost stunned me, it came so out of the blue—didn’t arrive until December 2008. That e-mail alone helped reaffirm for me that it was worth writing and talking about the risks and rewards of our glorious but dangerous pastime—that some good may yet come out of sharing with others what the mountains have taught me.

The e-mail was from Chris Klinke, the American on K2 in 2008 who, dismayed by the traffic jam on August 1, turned back. Klinke and I had never met, but he wrote:

Hi Ed,

I wanted to thank you for something that you are not even aware of at this point. But as I was making my decision to turn around just below the Bottleneck I kept remembering a discussion that I had with my teammates at BC….

The thing that helped me make the decision was the discussion we had about your feeling of regret about your summit on K2 because you violated your own personal rules of listening to your gut….

In remembering that conversation with my teammates and your description of that feeling in your book I made the decision to turn around. Despite the fact that there were 24 people heading to the summit, despite the fact that the weather was amazingly perfect, I felt my gut telling me something entirely different.

Listening to that feeling was a good decision for myself, and I appreciate the fact that I had the ability to get guidance from those on the mountain and those who came before me.

I hope to meet you in the future and I thank you for blazing the trail on so many mountains.

Be Well,

Chris Klinke

2

DECISION

In 2007, after another controversial spring season on Mount Everest—record numbers reached the summit, but seven climbers died—I was asked by the New York Times to write an op-ed piece. The editor’s only half-articulated premise was What can we do about this mess? As we talked and e-mailed back and forth, I began to realize that what she really wanted from me was a rigid set of rules and restrictions that somehow could immediately be put into action. When I told her that I thought you couldn’t make rules about mountaineering,