Authors: Conrad Anker,David Roberts
Slava got Volod down to Camp VI, where he spent the night of May 9. Two other teammates climbed up to VI, to help out. Volod’s condition, in the meantime, had gotten worse. He could no longer walk under his own power. So on May 10, his teammates and some Sherpas from an expedition of Georgian climbers made a little seatlike basket out of a rope, to carry Volod in. They carried him the full 3,000 feet down to the North Col, two men on either side of him, rotating the job—another superhuman effort.
Meanwhile, Russell Brice, the experienced New Zealand guide, was organizing the further rescue effort from the North Col. He designated us, the Americans, to be in charge of lowering Volod down the steep ice slopes below the North Col, much more technical terrain than the north face from VI down to IV. Brice chose us, I suspect, because we had the most collective experience in rescue work.
Simo reported on MountainZone that “some expeditions have donated their oxygen and their Sherpas and other expeditions have refused to help at all. One group of Sherpas demanded $200 per person to help with the rescue.” Personally, I didn’t witness any team refusing to help or Sherpas demanding cash, but that was the scuttlebutt. As Simo wrote, an emergency like Volod’s does indeed “bring out the best and worst” in the climbers caught up on the periphery of it.
By the afternoon of May 10, Andy Politz, Jake Norton, Tap Richards, and I had climbed up to the North Col to help. Because the carry down from VI had taken so long, Volod didn’t arrive until 10:30 at night. We realized we were going to have to make a triage call, depending on the Ukrainian’s condition. Could he afford to spend the night at Camp IV, then go down the next day? Or was his case so critical we had to take him down right away, in the night?
It had been snowing sporadically; now it was dark and cold. We brought Volod into our cook tent, gave him some oxygen and an intramuscular shot of dexamethasone, a powerful stimulant. He was on the verge of being comatose, with a pulse of around 60 and a dangerously low blood pressure of 60 over 20.
And he was howling with pain. He could just barely talk to one of his teammates. Somebody said Volod’s feet were frostbitten up to the knees, but that may have been an exaggeration.
It became obvious that we had to get him down in the night. The four of us had everything organized by the time Volod arrived. In a rescue operation like this, one person has to take charge and decide how to rig it, then be the point man who calls the shots. This way, it’s simply more efficient.
DR
O
N THE
1999 M
ALLORY
& I
RVINE
R
ESEARCH
E
XPEDITION
, to use its official title, there were a number of very strong climbers. Andy Politz, Eric Simonson, and Dave Hahn had all climbed Everest before. They were also veterans of dozens of search-and-rescue missions.
Yet by May 10, it had become clear to them that the strongest mountaineer on the team was Conrad Anker—even though he had never been higher than 24,000 feet before. Most of the other members were professional guides. Conrad had done some guiding, but had purposely turned his back on that
modus vivendi
. At thirty-six, nearly two decades after he had started to climb, what motivated him above all else was the chance to put up difficult new routes on little-known mountains among the remote ranges of the world.
By the spring of 1999, Conrad Anker was no household name on the American outdoor scene. He made his living principally as a sponsored climber for the North Face, the equipment firm that had pioneered the practice—novel in the U.S. at the time, though common in Europe—of paying top-notch mountaineers a regular salary to design and endorse North Face products, schmooze with clients, make appearances at retail stores, and climb at the highest level the rest of the time.
Within the North Face stable of sponsored athletes, a rather keen rivalry at times prevailed. To this competition, Anker seemed oblivious. Meanwhile, as he racked up one sterling
coup in the mountains after another, celebrating his deeds only in the occasional understated note or article in the
American Alpine Journal
, his reputation among the cognoscenti grew. By 1999, he was recognized as one of the finest three or four exploratory mountaineers in America.
Though he spends most of his down time in Telluride, Colorado, Conrad’s heart still resides in the house in Big Oak Flat, California (in the Gold Rush country, just west of Yosemite Valley), where his parents live. His mother, Helga, is German, his father, Wally, an American of mixed German and Scotch-Irish descent. Despite his vagabondage, Conrad remains very close to his parents, whom he calls “my best friends.”
“My mother likes to say that I began climbing in the womb,” says Conrad—because while she was pregnant with him, her third child, she and her husband hiked the rim of Yosemite. As a child, Conrad tagged along on extended back-packing trips with his family. He feels today that those outings gave him a solid grounding as a mountaineer. “Nowadays a lot of people come to the sport by training in a climbing gym,” he says. “They may know how to pull up an overhang, but they don’t know what an afternoon cloudburst can do to you if you don’t pitch a tarp. I learned that at a ripe young age.”
Despite his apprenticeship in backpacking, Conrad did not begin to rock-climb until the relatively late age of eighteen. He showed great promise from the start, leading pitches of 5.7 difficulty (on a scale ranging from 5.0 to 5.14) in sneakers only weeks after he first tied on to a rope. His first expedition was an attempt on Mount Robson, the majestic and dangerous peak in the Canadian Rockies: “We failed miserably.”
In 1987, the American Alpine Club gave Conrad a $400 Young Climber’s Grant to pursue an expedition to the Kichatna Spires, arguably Alaska’s most jagged and daunting low-altitude mountains. With three companions, he made a five-day first ascent of the southeast face of Gurney Peak, thus entering the elite of American mountaineers capable of pulling off cutting-edge climbs in major, bad-weather ranges.
Meanwhile, Anker desultorily pursued his education, finally graduating from the University of Utah at the age of twenty-six, with a degree in commercial recreation—“basically hotel and resort management,” he explains. “I didn’t go straight
through. I took every spring off for an expedition, and I worked to help pay for college.”
Like most passionate climbers, Conrad in his twenties chose jobs not with a view toward career potential, but according to how much freedom they gave him to take off at the drop of a hat—“anything,” he clarifies, “that I could work at, save up some money, then quit to go climbing.” In this fashion, he paid the bills for five years by working construction. During college, he had tended the counter at the North Face store in Salt Lake City, selling carabiners and Gore-Tex jackets—his initial connection with the company that would later pay him to climb.
A brief sortie into entrepreneurship—with a climbing buddy, Conrad started Alf Wear, a two-man firm peddling fleece hats and river shorts—left him dissatisfied. He credits his father, a bank examiner, with giving him a crucial push. “My father told me to go climbing, to make the most of it, because you can always sell hats when you’re sixty-five. So I sold the company for $10,000, which seemed like big bucks at the time.”
Freed to pursue his passion, Conrad developed into not only a first-rate mountaineer, but an exceedingly diversified one. Most climbers focus on a specialty: pure rock-climbing, alpine walls, expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks in the Himalaya. Conrad has excelled in all the branches of the mountaineering art. By now, for instance, his résumé includes numerous one-day ascents of eight different routes on El Capitan, in Yosemite, normally the province of rock-wall specialists who barely know how to hold an ice axe. Yet Conrad has also pulled off fiendishly difficult climbs on the “Big Three” Patagonian towers, Cerro Torre, Torre Egger, and Cerro Stanhardt; soloed serious new routes in the frozen wastes of Antarctica; and put up elegant first ascents on such formidable mountains as Latok II in the Karakoram of Pakistan and Mount Hunter in Alaska.
Anker’s sometime partner, photographer, and veteran mountaineer Galen Rowell hails this versatility: “Conrad can ski down virgin faces of big peaks in subzero Antarctica, climb El Cap routes in a day for fun, sport-climb 5.12, speed-climb up Khan Tengri in the Tien Shan faster than the Russian Masters of Sport, climb the north face of Everest or Latok, ice-climb the wildest frozen waterfalls, run mountain trails forever, plus
enjoy hanging out with his friends talking about other things besides mountains.”
The formative influence on Conrad as a climber, the one partner who served as a true mentor, was Terrance “Mugs” Stump, whom Conrad met in 1983, climbing outside of Salt Lake City. More than ten years Conrad’s senior, Stump was already a legend, known for visionary ascents in the great ranges, often performed solo, with no self-publicizing fanfare whatsoever (he did not regularly write notes for the climbing journals). Stump had been a star defensive back for Joe Paterno at Penn State, had played in the Orange Bowl, but had wrecked his left knee playing football. He discovered his true métier only in his late twenties.
“He was really motivated to become a true climber,” remembers Conrad. “He’d say, ‘You can’t sell out, guiding bumblees up glorified ski runs. You’ve got to do real climbing, you’ve got to climb this and this and this, that’s where it’s at.’”
Conrad quickly progressed from protégé to equal partner. “Nietzsche has a passage in which he talks about the ‘ball of knowledge.’ We wouldn’t be where we are as human beings if it weren’t for the collective knowledge that’s passed on from one generation to the next. It was like that with Mugs and me. He had this ball of energy and knowledge. Some days he would pass the ball to me, and I would climb better than he, and other days he wanted it back. We were really well paired, we had the same sense of humor, and he set me on the path to becoming a professional climber.”
For four years, Mugs and Conrad lived together in Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake, in a house provided them by John Bass (nephew of Dick Bass, the first man to climb the Seven Summits, or highest points on all the continents), who had the remarkable idea of supporting American mountaineering by giving promising climbers such as Stump and Anker a helping hand.
Mugs and Conrad climbed together often, ranging from Yosemite to Alaska. Their “epic” occurred on the Eyetooth, a savage pinnacle of ice and granite southeast of Denali. A ferocious storm kept the two men trapped on a portaledge—an artificial tent platform hung from pitons over the vertical void—for seven days and nights. “We ran out of food,” recalls Conrad. “We probably
could have rappelled off, but Mugs was into hanging, so we just relaxed and stayed there till the storm was over.”
Stump had come of age during the time before American climbers could live off sponsorship. He became a professional climber only by guiding nearly full-time. Rather than settle into the rut of guiding the same trade route over and over, like the standard walk-up on Rainier or the West Buttress on Denali, Stump took ambitious clients onto less-traveled routes. It was on one such outing, in 1992, descending Denali’s South Buttress, that Stump, scouting a crevasse that blocked the path, had the upper lip collapse beneath him. He was buried under tons of debris, his body never found.
Mugs’s death was perhaps the most devastating setback of Conrad’s life. In a sense, he has never gotten over the loss. Much of his resolve not to make a living as a guide springs from Mugs’s “pointless” accident on an easy route, as he tended clients. “On Everest this year,” says Conrad, “the day we packed up Base Camp was the seventh anniversary of Mugs’s death. I took all the leftover juniper from the
puja
, half a gunny- sack-f, and torched it up into one big billowing cloud.”
Like all serious mountaineers, Conrad has had his share of close calls. The closest came in 1991, on Middle Triple Peak in the Kichatna Spires of Alaska. Conrad and longtime pal Seth Shaw had made the second ascent of the mountain’s splendid east buttress and were completing the descent. With only eighty vertical feet remaining between them and the glacier, Shaw reached the bottom of his rappel and prepared to clip in to the anchor Conrad had set up two feet away. Just as he reached out a carabiner to clip, the snow platform on which he had come to rest broke loose. Shaw was still on rappel, at the end a 300-foot rope doubled through the anchor on the pitch above. Climbers customarily tie knots in both ends of the rappel rope, so they don’t slide off the end by accident; normally the snow ledge breaking would have been inconsequential.
“We were just exhausted,” remembers Conrad. “We’d been on the route five days. We’d gone into the Kichatnas super-light, with only fourteen days’ food, and this was our twenty-first day. Somehow I tied a knot in one end of the rope and not in the other.”
Thus as Shaw’s weight came on the single knot, it pulled
the rope through the anchor above, like a line whipping unchecked through a pulley. Shaw fell eighty feet and landed hard on the glacier.
“I thought he was dead. So here I am in the Alaska Range, with no radio, the nearest other human being sixty miles away, eighty feet up, with no rope. I thought, Oh, my God, how do I get out of this?”
All Conrad had to extricate himself from a hopeless predicament was a small “rack” of climbing gear, a few cams and nuts and five or six pitons. He began to place what gear he could in marginal cracks in the vertical wall and aid-climb his way gingerly down. He had to put his weight on one insecure piece, transfer it to the piece below, then remove the upper cam or nut to reuse as he got lower. At all times he tried to keep three interconnected pieces affixed to the rock. “It was like trying to cross a desert,” he says, “with twenty feet of railroad track that I had to keep pulling up from behind and resetting in front.
“I started hearing voices. Human voices, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying. It’s the eeriest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. Eventually, Seth came to and got up. Amazingly, he wasn’t even badly hurt. We talked to each other. He was wallowing around in the snow. There was still nothing he could do for me. He didn’t have enough gear to lead back up to me with the rope, and besides, he was utterly exhausted.