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Mountaineers are compelled to test their fate
By Carl Heintze
It's a statistical fact that two of every eight climbers who challenge the Himalayas don't come back.
The literature of mountaineering is replete with stories of those who have died on mountains. One of the most famous was Willi Unseold, one of the first Americans to climb Mt. Everest. The father of four children, he named one of them for a peak near Nepal where he spent a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer, although his chief aim seems not so much to have helped the Nepalese as to climb mountains. Maybe the two goals are the same.
Anyway, Unseold was smitten with climbing, and named his daughter Nandi Devi for a mountain in the highest range in the world. Nandi grew up and not unnaturally became a climber, too. So Willi decided to take her, her boyfriend and a few other folk on an expedition to the same mountain.
They didn't get to the top, however. His daughter died on the mountain and after her death was "buried at sea" by being shoved off a cliff.
Willi came back to Washington only to lose his own life climbing Mt. Rainier with a group of youngsters. The youngsters survived; Willi and his co-guide died in an avalanche. Thus ended a mountaineering dynasty.
This story is not unusual. Dozens have died on Everest and assorted other peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Alps.
For awhile I thought of these mountaineering biographies as heroic, even epic. Men have climbed to the highest places on earth at great personal cost.
And women certainly are no longer exempt. Marty Hooey, one of the great female climbers of the 20th century, fell to her death on Everest, probably because of a simple mistake: she didn't fasten her climbing harness properly to the rope she was using.
Why? It's hard to know, but it may have been a lack of oxygen that dulled her normal attention to safety. Or, maybe, it was just fate.
It seems to me that's carrying equal opportunity too far, however.
The death list goes on and on. Two women in the all-female expedition to Annapurna didn't get back to base camp. And half a dozen people died in a storm on Everest a couple of years ago. The mountains are unforgiving .
You only get to make mistakes once if you're a mountaineer, even the best mountaineers. Remember George Mallory, the famous British climber? Nothing has been done and redone so much as his legend or his mantra, reputed to have been his answer when asked why he kept trying to get to the top of Everest: "Because it is there."
Mallory died on Everest, in part, because he made a foolhardy try at the summit when he should have come down to safety.
No one is sure if he reached the top and then died or simply died part way up of exposure. A recent expedition to the mountain spent a lot of time looking into just this question. but didn't come up with a definitive answer.
Whether or not Mallory actually said "Because it is there," it remains a statement that makes no sense to non-climbers. But, then, neither does trying to scale mountains over 20,000 feet.
So what? So are a lot of other challenges in life.
But then climbing high peaks doesn't make any sense for the most part to most people. It's mystical only to those who attempt it. It's a mystery to those who stand on flat ground and watch climbers climb.
It wouldn't be such a tragedy if climbers climbed alone. But most of them also carry special baggage with them--wives, children and parents who wait for them to come back, even when they don't.
It's for this reason that I've lost much of my admiration for mountain climbers, particularly climbers who want to do the highest Himalayas or Denali or the North Face of the Eiger in the dead of winter.
It seems to me, if they want to challenge the mountain gods, they need to think less about themselves and more about those whom they presumably love and are left behind. Courting death for one's own peculiar reasons doesn't make sense if at the same time you are depriving someone you love of part of their lives.
I suspect, however, that this argument will keep few climbers at home simply because climbers are, at heart, selfish in their wish to play footsie with death. It's the thrill of having done this and survived that propels them onward and upward--and all too often downward. And no amount of begging them to think of others is going to make them change their minds.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
