In Search of Thin Air

The wind shrieks down the glacier like a midnight train. At 3 a.m., 16 souls, their lives attached to slim strands of rope strung up the side of the ice, plod their way upward through the howling night air. Each has paid $400 for this dubious privilege.

Behind is 11,000 feet of alpine meadows, volcanic rock and pitched slopes of snow, most of it traversed step by painful step over the better part of three days. Ahead is 1,000 feet of steep snow and ice, and over that, the black, star-shimmering bowl of the sky.

This, near the summit of Washington’s second-highest volcano, is finally what it is to climb a mountain: Grinding fatigue, the act of rising from a wind-lashed tent in the middle of the night and setting out on legs of jelly. Cold fear, at the prospect of hurtling off the mountain into the night. And the simplicity of pure will, the force that engages foothold after foothold in the snow, until the vertical horizon of ice shrinks to nothing, and two burning feet stand on top of the world.

“All the way up, I’m telling myself: ‘I’m never going to do this again. You’re an idiot. You’re insane,’ ” recalls Bill Broyles, a Texas screenwriter and journalist who signed up for the Mt. Adams ascent.

“I used to think climbing mountains was communing with nature. You know, I was kind of one with the mountain,” he says. “But the mountain doesn’t care. The mountain is just totally indifferent to whether you make it or not. On some level, I think it’s irrational, and absurd and pointless. At another level, it is the clearest, most fundamental thing I do.”

These were not mountaineers strung out on the side of a 12,276-foot mountain in the middle of the night. They included two securities analysts from San Francisco, an office manager from Phoenix, the developer of an online health catalog from Seattle and half a dozen software employees from Microsoft Corp., which organized the climb.

One of them had summitted Mt. Everest two weeks before. Two had never even hoisted a backpack. That they were there at all says much about the new challengers of mountains. With even Everest now accessible to those willing to pay a $65,000 guiding fee, the lesser peaks of the American Cascades, the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies have become irresistible lures for the untried, the untested, the dreaming deskbound willing to embrace the idea of hauling a 60-pound pack up the side of a brutal rock.

Nowhere has the phenomenon been more pronounced than in Seattle, which rivals Colorado as the epicenter of American mountaineering. The city’s loss of two popular climbers in a 1996 tragedy on Everest--guide Scott Fischer and postal worker Doug Hansen--has, in whatever perverse streak that propels people up mountains, dispatched even greater legions to the hills.

For the first time, guided trips up Seattle’s Mt. Rainier are booked solid through the end of September, and officials estimate last year’s record-setting 10,000 climbers up the 14,411-foot peak will easily be exceeded.

High-Tech World, Low-Tech Adventure

Mountain Madness, the Seattle guiding company Fischer stewarded, has been resurrected under new ownership and is planning its first new expedition to Everest in 2000. The waiting list for eight climbing slots is already at 60.

“In Microsoft, here we are at the heart of the high-tech world, it’s the global headquarters of world technology. I put out the word about this Mt. Adams climb, and it was immediately filled up with a waiting list for something that’s about as low-tech as you can get,” says Richard Bangs, the adventurist and Microsoft Expedia editor who organized last month’s Adams ascent.

Not surprisingly, in a city that helped spawn the software revolution, virtual mountaineering has kept pace with actual mountaineering. Climbs in the Cascades frequently feature live broadcasts of the ascent on the World Wide Web, complete with real-time voice transmissions.

The Mountain Zone, a Seattle-based mountaineering Web site, broadcast live expeditions on Everest in 1997 and again this year, attracting 5 million page views.

Last month’s Mt. Adams ascent was a very Seattle endeavor, assembling among others a dozen or more computer technicians, content producers and stock analysts from Microsoft on the side of a mountain, the last vestige of technology a lone outhouse at the bottom of the trail. They had come to take part in an adventure segment for Microsoft’s online travel service, Expedia, and the online-cable news network MSNBC.

Many of Microsoft’s employees immigrated here with visions of the great Northwestern outdoors, of white-water rafting, wilderness backpacking and, indeed, climbing mountains. But in the end, Microsoft is better known for its 18-hour workdays than its on-campus gymnasium.

Jim Laurel, a digital television strategist at the company, sent an e-mail to his manager when he signed up for the Mt. Adams climb. “He sent me an e-mail back,” Laurel says. “ ‘Sounds fun. Hope it’s relevant.’ ”

It probably wasn’t. But Laurel went anyway. “We live in a world now with all this high-tech. We look at things from a sort of a third-person point of view. We watch people doing exciting things on television, we spend our lives on the Internet. It seems as though there’s a need now to get out and experience things for real.”

“It’s good to know you can accomplish something that doesn’t involve staying at work till midnight, which in the software business is the only paradigm for success--that maybe I could succeed at something in a different way,” adds Miriam Adelman, an interactive content producer who is doing her first real climb since high school. “It’s discipline, I guess. It’s being scared of something, and then doing it anyway. And then getting scared of something else.”

Seattle’s Surroundings Beckon Climbers

Seattle’s link to mountaineering grows out of the peaks that surround it, the Cascades to the east, the Olympics to the west. The first three Americans to summit Everest in 1963 came from Seattle and did their training on Mt. Rainier; many of the leading climbers in the world reside, or did, in Washington.

Fred Beckey, whose guidebook to the Cascades is considered one of the most remarkable works on mountaineering, still climbs occasionally and lectures. Tom Hornbein, whose dramatic traverse of Everest with the late Willi Unsoeld in 1963 rivaled the premier American ascent to the summit that year, is the retired head of anesthesiology at the University of Washington. Jim Wickwire, a Seattle lawyer and author of the recent book “Addicted to Danger,” is one of the first two Americans to summit K2, the Himalayan peak that is nearly as high as Everest and, many climbers say, far more difficult. Pete Schoening’s dramatic salvation of six fellow climbers by driving his ice ax into the snow on K2 in 1953 remains one of the epic feats of modern mountaineering.

It is a diffuse community--mountain climbers do not climb without a keenly developed attachment to isolation--but includes one of the largest outdoor clubs in the nation, the 15,000-member Mountaineers, and the world’s first indoor climbing gym.

The retail co-op REI’s new flagship store in downtown Seattle attracts tourists from around the world with its famed pinnacle, a 65-foot-high, free-standing climbing rock that was once the tallest in the world. (Las Vegas, as is its wont, has since outdone it.) The pinnacle attracts up to 250 climbers a day.

The store stocks the look that is not only de rigueur on the mountainside, but also for those in Seattle (which is to say, almost everyone) who wish it to be thought that they spend more time taming wild rivers than occupying a desk. (Indeed, it was downtown Seattle law offices that pioneered casual Friday.) An entire floor is set aside to assure that co-op members do not venture onto the mountain incorrectly attired: racks of Gore-Tex, Polartec fleece and down parkas in sizes down to 6 months.

The serious mountaineer, however, would not be caught dead in REI. For the true aficionados, there are the small, musty outfitter shops on Seattle’s back streets, shops like Feathered Friends and the Swallows Nest, whose names are known by climbers all over the world.

Jon Krakauer, whose account of the disaster, “Into Thin Air,” propelled the ill-fated Everest expedition of 1996 into the popular consciousness, hails from Seattle but has recently left, in part, friends say, because the tragedy’s lingering controversies haunted him wherever he went in town.

Indeed, the mountaineering community continues to burble over many of the long-simmering issues Krakauer laid bare in his book: the use of oxygen and Sherpa support on high-altitude climbs, guiding inexperienced climbers past their own abilities, the growing popularity of solo ascents with minimal equipment, as opposed to the old “expedition style” of climbing, in which dozens of climbers make a virtual military assault on a mountain.

Then there are the disputes over which of America’s mountain ranges is preeminent. On all lists is the Alaska Range, home to the highest peak on the continent, Mt. McKinley, but that stands as a world apart. There is Yosemite, famed for rock climbing, but that is not true mountaineering. Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48, tends to be hiked rather than climbed. There are, of course, the Rockies, which boast 54 peaks greater than 14,000 feet. But most of them can be easily approached by car and climbed in a day or two. It is the Cascades Range, stretching from Northern California to British Columbia, that most closely approximates true Himalayan mountaineering.

“The Cascades are such a good training ground. We have glaciers, we have steep terrain, we have bad weather: All the things that are in the Himalayas are outside your back door. If you can take and learn from them, it doesn’t shock you when you hit the Himalayas,” says Ed Viesturs, one of the world’s preeminent high-altitude mountaineers and likely to become the first American to summit all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter (over 26,256-foot) peaks.

Lou Whittaker, a longtime climber whose twin brother, Jim, was the first American to summit Everest, says mountaineering found its niche in the Northwest when a cadre of some of Europe’s best climbers settled here in the 1940s, hiring locals as scouts.

Wickwire figures much of it has to do with the looming presence of Mt. Rainier, suspended almost surrealistically over Seattle, visible through the clouds only part of the year, sometimes spectral through the fog at dawn. “Who could live in Seattle and not want to climb Rainier at some point in their lives?”

Believing ‘All Things Are Possible’

The ascent of Mt. Adams began at daybreak in a North Seattle park-and-ride lot, where a red Mountain Madness van began taking on backpacks laden with heavy climbing boots, ice axes, crampons, harnesses and ropes.

Sleepy climbers, nursing steaming latte cups, clamber into the van and emerge four hours later at the base of a mountain whose icy summit looks impossibly distant.

Bangs, whose adventure travel exploits as founder of Sobek Travel have landed him on unexplored rivers and untamed peaks around the world, emerges wearing a T-shirt with a motto: “The greatest thing in life is to believe that all things are possible.”

Bangs said he chose Mt. Adams precisely because, at 12,276 feet, it is about 2,000 feet lower than Rainier: The also-ran. The other volcano.

“I thought it would be terrific to look at a mountain that’s sort of in the shadow of Rainier,” he says. “Rainier, like Everest, gets all the attention, and here is a mountain that is equally challenging, perhaps even more stunning, and I like this whole concept of exploring the right-behind.”

Leading the expedition are Keith and Christine Boskoff, a pair of vacation climbers who turned their hobby into a business last year when they bought Mountain Madness from Fischer’s widow.

For this expedition, the Boskoffs have assembled a team of four experienced Cascades guides and a cargo of culinary ingredients ready to transform the simple campfire meal into haute cuisine en l’air: chicken with vegetables and Thai peanut sauce at 6,500 feet and rotini pasta with tomato and fresh basil, salmon, bagels and cream cheese at 9,200 feet.

The misery doesn’t begin until close to 10:30 a.m., when a 40- to 60-pound pack is strapped to the back at the 4,500-foot trail head and a path begins winding out ahead, heading upward at a pitiless rate.

The shortness of breath begins within about 2 1/2 minutes. There are 33 hours, 57 minutes of steady climbing to go, 7,000 feet of sky yet to mount. Up through flowered alpine meadows, through high, stubby fields of Ponderosa pine, up over the tree line through arid fields, up tortuous bluffs of huge volcanic rocks, up 45-degree snow slopes and, finally, up perilous sheets of glacial ice.

“It’s kind of like being chained to a StairMaster that you can’t turn off,” says Laurel.

By twilight on the second day, the group is encamped high above the tree line on a perch of rock and snow at 9,200 feet. The last climbers have trudged in at close to 8 p.m., a couple of hours behind the lead group. After hastily assembling the tents--some wedged directly on the snow--and downing a hasty meal, Boskoff and the guides assemble the group for a last briefing.

Don’t go, they say, unless you know you can: Know you can climb the last 3,000 feet, know you can keep standing when the wind tries to blow you off the mountain, know when it’s over you can still turn around and climb back down 7,000 feet of brutal terrain.

Lights are out at 11 p.m., but in the shrieking wind, few sleep. The wake-up call sounds 2 1/2 hours later. Headlamps are strapped on, light packs shouldered, climbing harnesses tethered.

No one is more grim-faced than Broyles, the screenwriter of the movie “Apollo 13” and former editor of Newsweek and Texas Monthly, who has been one of the main raconteurs throughout the expedition. This morning, Broyles is virtually wordless, though this is not his first mountain summit--he already has Argentina’s Aconcagua, at 22,834 feet, on his resume.

“I do it because, increasingly, I think we all live in a world where things are sort of cushioned by our network of friends, the comfort of our technology, the kind of confusing status of our lives, and all that’s kind of vague,” Broyles explains.

“Whereas a mountain is incredibly specific. Either you get to the top or you don’t. Your resume, your connections, where you went to college, who you know, what kind of car you drive, doesn’t make a difference. I do it because it’s like this moment of just total clarity.”

Not everyone makes it those last 3,000 feet above high base camp. Laurel drops off with his bad leg, midway up the last ascent, and the British desert expedition guide on his rope team is forced to halt with him. Four remain behind at high camp, one with a busted knee, another suffering a prolonged bout of diarrhea and vomiting, two simply too tired to go on.

The summit looms at daybreak, as the remaining 12 climbers pull themselves up the last stretch of rope and stand blinking in a gathering dawn that stretches from Oregon to Canada. For them, there is no need to explain why mountains are climbed.

To Fall Would Be to Fly

The descent is even more chilling than the climb. Perched perilously on a steep snow slope, the only foothold a narrow step kicked into the ice with a boot, the mountain seems to drop all the way down to the Columbia River, 7,000 feet below. There is no rope. To fall would be to fly.

Then, guide Gary Brill steps carefully out to the edge of the ridge, a point beyond which one can see nothing but air. He fixes a rope, then motions to a line of waiting climbers to make their way out, tie on the rope, and drop over the edge.

No one moves. He motions to the first climber, who insists she can’t give up the dubious safety of her narrow foothold in the snow for the invisible rope. Finally, Brill grows impatient. “Do you ever want to see anyone again?” he says quietly.

This is the essential fact of mountaineering: What cannot be done, must be done. There is no alternative to coming down.

Six hours later, the group files off the last of the trail to the waiting van. There are no cheers, no congratulations; that will come later. For now, there is just the silent unloading of packs and the removing of boots. The businesslike stowing of crampons, ice axes and harnesses in the fading twilight. The cough of the van as its dust-clogged motor comes to life. High above the trail head, the mountain gleams under a rising moon.