They’ll Take the High Way

High altitude is in the air, you might say.

Mount Everest books are best-sellers, not just with mountaineers but with the lay public. “Everest” the film has broken all Imax records. Climbing disasters make for gripping copy on prime-time news shows, educational channels climb on the bandwagon with Everest-related documentaries.

While Orange County can boast a burgeoning climbing community, life in the Death Zone, so-called for conditions of oxygen deprivation experienced near the world’s highest summits, is for the most part not on its agenda.

There are exceptions. Mark Tucker, who grew up in Huntington Beach, became the first Orange County resident to reach the 29,028-foot summit of Mt. Everest in 1990. At the time he was working as a guide, mostly at Mt. Rainier in Washington.

In 1994, Steve Untch, who also grew up in Huntington Beach, fell thousands of feet to his death while attempting to rescue a fellow climber on K2, in the Karakoram range. At 28,250 feet, K2 is the world’s second highest peak, but more notorious than Everest.

And there are others. But don’t for a moment think that serious mountaineering only takes place on the most renowned peaks.

“There’s fame with big peaks,” said Donald Graham of Newport Beach. “People know the biggest peak in a range, they don’t know the second highest. But people for the most part don’t understand what it’s like to be up there in any case, and it doesn’t make a difference to me if I’m on the highest or second highest . . . So why don’t I just climb what I like?”

What Graham likes are classic snow and ice couloirs. He hardly focuses on summits at all.

Not so David Evans of Tustin: While the Sierra Club officially recognizes 13 California peaks over 14,000 feet, Evans says there are 22 including subsidiary summits, and he’s snagged “every bump on every ridge.”

And then there’s wild, woolly Wally Barker.

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By day a mild-mannered accountant for a Big Six accounting firm in Costa Mesa, Barker has climbed Nameless Tower, a citadel of stone near K2 in the Karakoram. He has climbed Mt. McKinley (a.k.a. Denali), the highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet, and South American peaks including 21,709-foot Yerupaja in Peru.

Soloing Yosemite big walls is business-as-usual; he has climbed El Capitan “a bunch of times.” Barker specializes in remote big walls, spending weeks ascending rock monoliths in places such as Baffin, an island off the northeast coast of Canada, and in frozen waterfalls.

To afford four months off a year to indulge his passion, and air fares, Barker, 39, leads a spartan existence. It doesn’t hurt that North Face is one of his sponsors.

As for the physical and emotional hardships that go with such undertakings, Barker said, “I’m numb.” Or maybe just insulated.

“It hurts sometimes,” he admitted. “Two winters ago I lost my friend, he died right in my arms.”

They’d been climbing a frozen waterfall in the Canadian Rockies.

“The waterfall collapsed, carried him over a few cliffs, pretty much crushed him,” Barker said. “I would have been dead if I’d not made a desperate leap--I was hanging there getting hammered by big chunks of ice, all I could think of was ‘I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.’ I don’t know how long I was there. Maybe only five seconds. Then it stopped. And Chris was gone.

“I knew I had to go find him . . . I rappelled down and found him balanced on the edge of another cliff, twisted, incoherent, skull fracture, hanging upside down, screaming . . . I had to move him just so he wouldn’t suffocate. When I said I’m numb to it, it’s not that I don’t feel it. That event had a pretty big impact.”

It wasn’t Barker’s first brush with death, however.

He had reached McKinley’s summit the year before, in 1995. (Measured from base to summit, McKinley is the tallest mountain on earth; because its elevation above sea level is substantially lower than Everest, there is more oxygen, but because it lies is so much farther north than Everest, temperatures at the top can be more extreme.)

While other climbers might have called it a successful season at that point, Barker and his partner had something else in mind.

“Our plan was to go down to the base and climb it again,” he recalled. “The first route was a warmup on the regular route. We were kind of in a rush to get down to climb it again, and because we were fairly experienced, we made the decision to travel in pretty bad weather. Brutal weather.

“We ended up getting stuck in a whiteout with a Swiss group for two days in a place called Windy Corner, ice-swept--you don’t want to be traveling around in zero visibility. We rappelled down into a crevasse, and brought the Swiss group with us. We decided to hole it up in a crevasse, and it was the right decision.

“But three other people didn’t come with us, and the place they decided to tough it out wasn’t a good choice. They froze to death. We didn’t go for the summit again. The body count was too high.”

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Coincidentally, Evans, 40, was on McKinley at the same time, pinned down by “horrible weather” half way up the mountain. He counts the trip less a success than a learning experience.

“The most important thing I learned was to always go with people you know super-well,” he said. “Never go with strangers on an undertaking that stressful.

“Not summiting was no big deal,” Evans said. “But we’d been carrying 120 pounds each on a giant snow slog. We also realized we needed to go somewhere better suited to the kind of climbing we liked. Denali? Not interested.”

Although Evens is on staff at Rockreation, an indoor climbing facility in Costa Mesa where Barker and Graham train, he’s also not interested in sport climbing, a fairly gymnastic endeavor.

He considers himself a “trad” or traditional climber: “It’s a matter of seeking the adventure instead of pursuing hard numbers,” Evans said, referring to route ratings. “I’d rather set off into the back country with friends, where you’re guaranteed an adventure every time. Not just cranking. When you’re sport climbing, you’re eliminating the variables that make things complicated, that add spice. The Sierras have a fair amount of objective danger.” He has also climbed high-altitude Mexican volcanoes.

“I’ve got epics to tell, but things generally go pretty well,” he said. “I’ve got most mistakes eliminated.”

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Graham, 36, has been climbing since he was a teenager; he and his father climbed about a dozen of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. The engineering firm president has also bagged five of the Sierra 14,000-footers, but ticking off summits has lost its appeal.

“I’d be more interested in an interesting mountain than a high mountain,” he said. “The height of it isn’t a pull, an important criteria, at least as much as it used to be. I’m looking for an interesting route, or an aesthetic mountain, or one that has history, or that’s in a range I haven’t been to before. I suppose when you’re younger you want to climb the highest peak you can.

“I don’t want to climb Denali. The regular route there’s a million people on it. I’d rather climb an interesting peak adjacent to Denali. Mt. Foraker, for instance, gets ascended some unbelievable fraction of Denali, maybe 1%, and it’s a spectacular peak. Denali is taller, so people go there.”

He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro last year, but the attraction had more to do with cultural considerations than the peak’s 19,340-foot elevation.

“First of all the Tanzanians--the guides, the porters. Second, the people you meet on the trail . . . The mystique of Kilimanjaro has worldwide pull.”

Graham estimates that 90% of the people on the trail, himself included, suffered effects of altitude--”extreme headaches, moving slowly, weird vision.” That Kilimanjaro otherwise is considered a slog points up the challenge of high altitude.

“You can be totally in shape, totally technically prepared, but you have to have that third thing down,” he said. “If you don’t have the logistics of altitude wired, you could be the strongest climber in the world, and fail.”

And as the recent spate of climbing disasters has shown, you can be the strongest climber in the world, have those logistics wired, and still fail.