K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [92]
By the time I started climbing in 1977, all fourteen of the highest mountains in the world had long since been ascended. (Shishapangma was the last to fall, to the Chinese in 1964.) All the highest mountains in Alaska and Canada had been climbed. I don’t think there was a single summit in the Cascades of Washington State—my first stomping grounds—that hadn’t been reached. It was hard not to feel that I’d been born too late.
For Whymper, or Mummery, or Mallory, or even Fritz Wiessner, “mountaineer” was an unambiguous label. Mallory was the guiding force on the first three Everest expeditions, but he was also the best rock climber of his day in Great Britain. Wiessner had been one of the best rock climbers in the world as a teenager, one of the best alpinists in his twenties, and one of the best Himalayan climbers in his thirties. Climbing had yet to be subdivided into specialized disciplines.
By the 1980s, however, that subdividing was well under way, and by now it’s become extreme. Some young rope gun at Red River Gorge in Kentucky, trying to put up an 80-foot route that’s rated 5.14c in difficulty, knows almost nothing about the Himalaya. And guys who, like me, have specialized in 8,000-meter peaks know very little about Red River Gorge, or Hueco Tanks in Texas, or Mount Charleston in Nevada. We’re all still “climbers,” but our fraternities (and sororities) are so specialized that we scarcely understand one another’s jargon.
In 2009, there are serious climbers all over the world who’ve never climbed outdoors. Instead, they concentrate on artificial walls in climbing gyms, gearing up for “comps”—competitions complete with referees, stopwatches, and “isolation chambers” (so that one jock doesn’t get the benefit of watching another try the route of the day). There’s another whole gang composed of those who climb outdoors, but never use ropes. They’re into “bouldering”—doing the hardest sequences of moves possible on boulders lying in the woods. Boulderers rarely get more than 30 feet off the ground, and they’re secured by buddies spotting them and by springy crash pads laid out on the ground.
“Sport climbers” use ropes, and tackle routes ranging from one pitch to a dozen or more on real cliffs or “crags,” but they rely for safety on expansion bolts previously drilled into the rock every six feet or so. These athletes, like boulderers, are into the pure pursuit of difficulty, and the risks they incur are almost nonexistent.
“Trad climbers”—”trad” is for “traditional”—disdain the connect-the-dots bolted routes and insist instead on placing their own protection (“pro,” in the jargon of the trade), in the form of nuts and cams wedged into cracks to shorten a potential fall. These climbers think of themselves as purists, in touch with the long legacy of their pastime, and for them risk is a real issue. If your “pro” isn’t good, a fall can result in serious injury or even death.
I served my mountaineering apprenticeship as a trad climber. First at Devils Lake in Wisconsin with my high school pal Rich King, and then on more alpine routes in the Cascades of Washington State, I learned the basics of rope work, belaying, rappelling, and placing “pro.” All these skills would help me immensely when I turned to the highest peaks in the world.
Trad climbers overlap with “big-wall climbers,” who work out long routes on massive cliffs such as El Capitan in Yosemite. Those routes can take several days, but there’s also a subgroup of people who are into doing big routes in the fastest possible time. On El Cap, every major route has its speed record, and those times are coveted prizes for the men and women who go after them.
I suppose that true mountaineering begins with “alpine climbing.” Alpine warriors set their sights on fiendishly difficult routes in ranges such as the Alps, the Canadian Rockies, and the Fitz Roy Massif of Patagonia. Here, “objective hazards”—everything from avalanches to falling rocks to storms—play a critical role. At the cutting edge, alpinism is a very dangerous sport. (It’s somewhere on this spectrum