The Age of Extremes 1971–1996

 

We entered the mountains as strangers," Charlie Houston wrote of the members of the 1953 K2 expedition, "but we left as brothers." As much as any venture in the history of Himalayan mountaineering, Houston's expedition embodied the highest ideals of expeditionary culture. It was a true brotherhood of the rope; every member of the expedition owed his life to Pete Schoening's famed belay at a moment of mortal danger.1 Many expeditions failed to achieve the ideal of fellowship displayed by the American K2ers. Nonetheless, at least through the 1960s, the notion of a brotherhood of the rope served as a kind of bedrock moral principle and social norm from which, most mountaineers would have agreed, the duties and obligations they owed one another derived. "You're bound together symbolically by the climbing rope," Willi Unsoeld explained to audiences at his slide shows about the 1963 Everest expedition, "the very umbilical of your connection with each other, and there's a constant awareness of the other members of the team and a closeness and a cooperation that grows up among mountaineers that is the nearest thing I've seen to the brotherhood of the battlefield."2In the final decades of the twentieth century that sense of duty and obligation to others waned. Those who entered the mountains as strangers often departed estranged—and even more tellingly, seemed to expect little more from the experience. As John Roskelley, a leading Himalayan climber of the 1970s and 1980s, told an interviewer: "If we're not belaying, I unrope. That's rule number one. That way I don't kill them and they don't kill me."3

The climbing rope, once a symbol of protective solidarity, was becoming instead a symbol of fatal dependence. Himalayan mountaineers unroped from one another both literally and figuratively, as the old expeditionary culture frayed to the breaking point. Durable climbing partnerships became scarce. The path to mountaineering fame increasingly took the form of the solo ascent. Professional guides led groups of amateurs up Himalayan peaks on a strictly business, cash-paid-in-advance basis. And a culture of blame and recrimination took root in the mountaineering community.

It had not been unusual in earlier years for multiple accounts of a single expedition to be published: within two years of the completion of the first American Everest expedition, for instance, four separate narratives had been published by its members. These included the official Americans on Everest by James Ramsey Ullman, a National Geographic article by Barry Bishop, and books by Tom Hornbein and Lute Jerstad. The differences among these works were mostly of emphasis; all were written in a fashion genuinely respectful of the other participants. The American Everest expedition had not been without conflict, but it would take a careful reader to detect animosity. Expedition member Al Auten wrote to Ullman shortly after the publication of Americans on Everest to report himself "particularly pleased at the artful way the problems and frictions among the expedition members were handled [in the book]. It would have been foolish to pretend that all was sweetness and light throughout the entire time, but your balance between the problems and their solution was masterful."4Over the next two decades an Ullmanesque "balance" in mountaineering literature came to be replaced by an edgier setting-the-record-straight perspective, especially noticeable in, though by no means restricted to, books about American expeditions. No one reading the following apparently verbatim exchange between two climbers in Rick Ridgeway's account of the next American team to reach Everest, the 1976 Bicentennial expedition, would be left with any illusions that sweetness and light characterized that enterprise:

You haven't done a damn thing that I can see. . ..

Fuck you I've done the hardest part of this mountain. . ..

I have a problem climbing with a guy whose ambitions are about ten times as big as his abilities. . .

I'm so fucking impressed. . .

He doesn't think I can climb. Prove it, you little turd. . .

I can prove you're an asshole [etc.].5

It did not matter whether expeditions failed or succeeded (though two Americans summited Everest in 1976, in Ridgeway's book their success somehow seemed secondary to the conflicts preceding their triumph). Galen Rowell's In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, about the failed 1975 expedition to K2, and Ridgeway's The Last Step, about the 1978 expedition that placed four climbers, including Ridgeway, on the summit of the mountain, were both warts-and-all accounts. Ridgeway's K2 account led a British reviewer to complain about the American taste for the confessional: "On this side of the Atlantic, climbing writers usually take it for granted that climbers are extremely self-centered and quarrelsome on the hill, and that the myths about them make better reading than the reality."6 But on both sides of the Atlantic—and, more important, in the Himalaya—the confessional, the confrontational, and the commercial came to the fore. It was the age of extremes.

From: Fallen Giants

A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes

Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver