Introduction: The Man to Match the Mountain
If ever there were a man built to climb mountains, it's Ed Viesturs. Now he puts his stamina and ambition to the test, and attempts once again to climb Annapurna, last link on the chain of 8,000-meter peaks.
By Richard Bangs
The paramount moment in mountaineering history was when Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay stood atop the apex of the Earth in 1953, the first to crown that glory after a half-century of attempts.
For Americans, the second-most hailed event in such narrations was when an all-U.S. team, led by Jim Whittaker, summited Everest in 1963. Whittaker's achievement was treated as if we had put a man on the moon—six years before we did.
But these seminal achievements pale next to the objective that we are reporting, exclusively for MSN, over the next weeks: the attempt by Ed Viesturs to be the first American to complete the quest to summit all 14 peaks in the world over 8,000 meters (26,250 feet), into what climbers call "the death zone"—all of them without bottled oxygen, the ultimate in physical and mental challenges. The final summit in Viesturs' odyssey is the 8,091-meter (26,545-foot) Annapurna, perhaps the second-most famous Himalayan mountain after Everest, and notably more difficult and dangerous to climb. Statistically it is the world's most hazardous mountain: roughly one climber dies for every two who reach the summit.
The club of 8,000-meter conquerors is tiny. Only a handful of people have ever attained this utmost coronet (Austrian Reinhold Messner blazed this conceit in 1986), and no other American has come close. Ed, who is known for his judicious approach to mountain safety, has twice turned around on the 5-vertical-mile-high frozen monolith of ice and stone that is Annapurna, citing suboptimal conditions. But the stakes are higher now than ever before in this 18-year pursuit. Ed is on the far side of his middle 40s and has a wife, Paula, and three young children—Gil, 7; Ella, 4; and now Anabel, born just last October, awaiting his return. He now climbs to come home.
I first met Ed in 1996 when David Roberts, the renowned mountaineering author, brokered a get-together in Seattle. I was so impressed with Ed's soft-spoken demeanor, his sensible style—the antithesis of the swaggering, feverish, mountain-sized ego, risk-it-all personality that infuses so many extreme adventurers (sometimes fatally)—that I decided to become involved in his quest. At the time I was a founding executive at Expedia, and so I arranged for the company to sponsor Ed on his attempt at Annapurna … twice.
I was mightily impressed that despite the sponsorship dollars, and a watchful press, he turned around within tantalizing sight of the summit. If there is a man who knows and breathes the management of risk, it is Ed Viesturs. In 1988, on his first attempt on 29,035-foot Mount Everest, Ed turned around 300 feet from the crest. On 26,289-foot Shisha Pangma, he stopped 20 feet shy of the top.
"The mountain decides when you go up, not you," Ed likes to say.
Made to climb mountains
Ed sometimes calls himself a "freak of nature." Though he hails from, as he puts it, "the great mountaineering state of Illinois," Ed possesses a phenomenal physiogamy and a unique mental toughness. He was tested at a physiology lab at the University of Washington, with results showing his lungs much larger than normal, allowing an abnormally high intake of oxygen at altitude. Whereas climbing stairs at sea level takes the wind out of most of us, he doesn't find the wheeze until he's half way up the Himalayas.
He's climbed Everest six times and has broached mountains over 8,000 meters high 21 times to date, a world record. Some, in a green-eyed way, call it serial summit disorder.
In character, Ed has devised a plan to iron out as much risk as possible in the cloth of this next climb. Along with longtime partner, Veikka Gustafsson of Finland, he is doing a series of high-altitude practice runs on nearby Cho Oyu (which Ed topped in 1994 and 1996), a mountain on the border of Tibet and Nepal that reaches even higher than Annapurna at 26,906 feet, 8,201 meters , but is considered a less-pernicious peak. Also with Ed is Wyoming-based photographer Jimmy Chin, who joined Ed last year on Everest as they were shooting scenes for an upcoming feature film based on Into Thin Air, the best-selling account of the 1996 Everest disaster that killed Ed's pals and climbing partners New Zealander Rob Hall and Seattle-based Scott Fischer, along with seven others.
Ed was on the mountain on that fateful May 10 working on the IMAX film Everest. An unexpected storm blew in, lashing climbers near the summit with 100-mph winds that obscured their route down the mountain. Ed and the rest of his crew had decided not to attempt the summit that day so instead were reduced to communicating over the radio as Rob Hall slowly froze to death, trapped high on the mountain. Ed tried to cajole his friend to his feet, but it was too late.
"We knew he was going to go to sleep that night and that he wasn't going to wake up," Ed remembers. "We started crying. We felt so helpless."In the days that followed, Ed and other members of the IMAX team became rescuers. Then Ed had to face the next question: Would he attempt to summit Everest in the aftermath of so many deaths or back out and, in the process, put the multimillion dollar project in jeopardy? Ed decided to attempt the summit, which he achieved on May 23. He found Hall's and Fischer's bodies in the snow.
"Coming down, all I could do was sit there and spend some time with them," Ed recalls. "Both their wives had asked me to retrieve some personal items—Scott's wedding ring and Rob's Rolex—but I just couldn't do it."
The climb this time
This time Ed and his team plan to acclimatize on Cho Oyu for several weeks, and then on or about May 1, they hope to helicopter to the base camp on the north side of Annapurna, the camp that Frenchman Maurice Herzog set in his epic first ascent of an 8,000-meter peak in 1950. The now classic story was chronicled in the all-time best-selling mountaineering tome, Annapurna, which back in high school inspired Ed to be a climber after he read the grisly account, checked out from the public library.
Shortly thereafter Ed started climbing at Devil's Lake, Wis., a regular haunt for members of the Chicago Mountaineering Club. During college at Washington State University, Ed became a guide on 14,410-foot Mount Rainier and climbed it nearly 200 times. Then in 1988 he reached the summit of 28,169-foot Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, his first 8,000-meter peak, and was hooked. "I decided then to go for all of them," he recollects.
Our First and Best media team will trek in from Pokhara, the hill-town to the west of Kathmandu, and rendezvous with Ed for his final push to the top of the world. Ed is hoping to make that last step in a little over a week on the mountain, after fixing ropes and studying the mountain from as many vantages as possible. When and if conditions are ideal, and the mountain calls, the team will make the attempt alpine-style, with no sherpas or extra gear … light and fast, hoping to close at last the gap between human limits and the summit of the last 8,000-meter peak.
Our specialized media team will be covering the climb from the 14,000-foot base camp. Didrik Johnck will act as field producer, while adventure author Lindsay Yaw and I will alternate reporting duties. If all works as designed, images taken by Jimmy Chin on the upper mountain will be transmitted to base camp, and then back to the First and Best team in the United States. On this site, you'll be able to follow the final progress and news, in a way not before presented and not found elsewhere.
The last thing Ed said to me before departing to Nepal was his personal mantra that he recites at practically every public appearance and in private conservations: "Getting to the top is optional, but getting back down is mandatory."
It all started with Annapurna. And, one way or another, it will end with Annapurna.
Follow us as we report of Ed's amazing quest in this last great first.
