K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [93]
Alpinists are interested in beautiful “lines” on major mountains, but the height of the mountain above sea level is pretty irrelevant. Some of the scariest and most challenging peaks in the world, like Cerro Torre in Patagonia, are only about 9,000 or 10,000 feet high. And sometimes climbers will complete a difficult new route on an alpine peak but won’t bother to go to the summit. The route itself becomes the goal.
Finally you get to my group, which we might call Himalayan or high-altitude climbers. Even within our coterie, there are subgroups. There are guys like the American Steve House, who with one partner climbed the notorious Rupal Face on Nanga Parbat alpine-style, but who’s also done very hard new routes on smaller peaks in Alaska and Canada. He’s taken the technical skills he’s honed on lower peaks and applied them to 8,000ers. I admire House immensely, but I don’t have the technical skill or the interest to attack some unclimbed face in the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier just south of Mount McKinley. And House has no interest, as far as I can tell, in climbing all fourteen 8,000ers.
From the start, technical climbing per se didn’t hold a great appeal for me. I didn’t ever pursue it seriously enough to know whether I could have become a top rock climber. But I loved a physical challenge, especially if it involved commitment over the long haul—not just several days but weeks or months. That’s why, I think, I gravitated to the 8,000ers, starting with my first attempt on Everest in 1987. That was a huge step, but a logical one, beyond Mount Rainier, where I’d been guiding since 1982. (Some of my fellow RMI guides also turned to 8,000-meter peaks, but they were the exception, not the norm.)
And from the start, I felt instinctively that I wanted to climb those big mountains in as pure a style as possible—without the aid of supplementary oxygen, without the support of Sherpas hauling my loads, and on expeditions that I organized myself. When I go around the country giving slide shows, a lot of people in the audience assume that what I called Endeavor 8000—my quest for all fourteen 8,000ers—was a project I had formulated from the start. Not so: I was three or four peaks into the roster before I could envision a way of completing the whole cycle. And when Annapurna started to seem my “nemesis,” as I called it, I would have been willing to walk away with only thirteen under my belt.
Of course, it was gratifying to become the first American to climb all fourteen, and only the sixth mountaineer in the world to do so without bottled oxygen. Maybe I hadn’t been born too late after all! I can imagine some young guy in, say, 2025 reading about my era in the Himalaya and the Karakoram and saying to himself, “Damn it, imagine what it must have been like when no other American had been on top of all the 8,000ers. I guess I was born too late….”
I did gain a fair amount of attention after I completed the cycle of 8,000ers, appearing on talk shows such as Charlie Rose, the Today show, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And my book about the quest, No Shortcuts to the Top, generated an unbelievable amount of fan mail, mostly from nonclimbers. But I was first surprised, then hurt when I started to realize that in a certain small portion of the climbing world, there was a nasty backlash against my modest celebrity. I’d hear thirdhand that so-and-so had said, “Big fucking deal. So Viesturs climbed the standard route on Cho Oyu. Why doesn’t he try something new or really difficult?” Nobody ever said anything quite like that to my face. So I was sort of left sputtering my answer into the void. I was tempted to say to a critic like that, “Okay, dude, why don’t you try climbing three 8,000ers in two months.” (That’s what I’d done in 1995.) I’ve never claimed to be anything I’m not. I’ve never pretended