Mountaineers Scale the Heights, Plumb the Depths

“Feel this,” says Paul Pritchard.

He touches a spot near the crown of his head with his left hand--the only hand that really works anymore. Beneath his shaggy blond hair, there’s a long, narrow soft spot, a hole in his skull. That’s where the rock hit him.

“It was about the size of a computer terminal,” he says. “It fell from 80 feet above me.”

That was on Friday the 13th of February 1998. Pritchard was climbing the Totem Pole, a 220-foot-high rock formation in the sea just off the coast of Tasmania. He never saw the rock. It hit him square on the head, knocked him off the cliff, damn near killed him. He lost half his blood before he was helicoptered to a hospital, where doctors spent six hours picking stone and bone out of his cranium.

Climbing was his passion, his obsession. He started in his teens in the abandoned quarries of his native Lancashire, England; then he moved to Wales, where he became famous, a daredevil willing to take on the toughest climbs on the treacherous red stone cliffs on the Irish Sea. He wrote a lyrical book about his adventures, “Deep Play,” and after it won a prestigious British literary prize, he was invited to climb all over the world.

But that’s all over now. He’ll never climb again. The blow to his head paralyzed the right side of his body. For a month, he couldn’t talk. For eight months, he couldn’t walk. Now, at 32, he shuffles along like an old man, dragging his useless right leg behind him. Still, he says, he has no regrets.

“How can you regret 15 years of amazing experiences?” he says.

He’s sitting in a hotel lobby in suburban Arlington, Va., his cane leaning against one leg. He’s come to the American Alpine Club’s convention to give a speech and autograph his new book, “Totem Pole,” which tells of his accident and rehabilitation. Now he struggles to explain what drove him to risk his life.

“The reward is the freedom,” he says. “Being in those mountains is absolutely wonderful. It’s . . . “ He stops. “That’s the thing--it’s hard to describe.”

He smiles and apologizes: The accident left him unable to find the right word when he needs it, he says. But he tries again. “I guess it’s a search for that one perfect moment. I guess I’ve had it like five times in my life. Like up on the edge of Mt. Asgard on Baffin Island, sitting and watching the sunset from your harness and there’s, like, 3,000 feet of air below you, and it’s all glowing red. That moment--it’s just electric.”

Pritchard spots Conrad Anker, the American climber who in May discovered the body of George Mallory, the legendary explorer who died trying to climb Mt. Everest in 1924. Pritchard holds out his left hand, and Anker shakes it.

“You did well,” Pritchard says. He’s not talking about finding Mallory. He’s talking about the moving eulogy Anker gave for his friend Alex Lowe, 40, who died last month in an avalanche.

“Thanks,” Anker mumbles. He, too, nearly died in that avalanche, and he moves with the grim air of a man in mourning.

In his eulogy, he told his fellow climbers he was finished: “There are more important things for me to do than climb another high peak.”

*

The Alpine Club convention was a joyous affair, it really was.

For three days, more than 300 climbers gathered from throughout the country. The beer and wine flowed freely, and there was a great deal of loud laughter. But of course the specter of death hung over everything. How could it not?

Climbing is a perilous sport, far more lethal than football or boxing or even auto racing. The Alpine Club’s most popular publication is the annual compendium “Accidents in North American Mountaineering”; with a paragraph on every major accident, the book usually runs about 80 pages.

Almost everybody here knows somebody who died climbing. Pritchard says he lost count at about 20 dead friends.

What possible thrill could be worth the terrible dangers?

“It’s not a thrill--thrill is too shallow,” says Abby Watkins, 30, an Australian-born computer software editor and one of the world’s best female climbers. “It’s a very present sport. You are brought into the moment. You are so aware of where you are, of the air around you. And it takes you to some stunning locations--mind-blowing views you couldn’t see otherwise.”

“In our everything-provided-for world, it’s one of the few things where everything depends on you,” says Geoffrey Tabin, 43, an ophthalmologist from Burlington, Vt. “You feel alive. You find out what you as a person can do. You’re pushing yourself to the limits to see what you can do. And you’re sharing a very, very intense experience with other people. My closest friends, and my bride, are climbing friends.”

*

Maybe the person who explained it best was the man who wasn’t there--Alex Lowe. Anker showed a short video, a collection of shots of Lowe--once described by Outside magazine as the “best climber in the world”--at play in his beloved mountains.

“True adventure requires an uncertain outcome,” Lowe says in one clip. In another, shot in the Himalayas, he hangs on a rope over a breathtaking stretch of snow-topped peaks. Back and forth he swings, making Tarzan noises and grinning like a kid. “Oh,” he yells, “I love it!”

It would make a great commercial for climbing. Except for one thing: Alex Lowe is dead.

They weren’t really climbing when it happened.

Lowe and Anker and their buddy Dave Bridges were up around 19,400 feet on Oct. 5, traversing a flat stretch on a mountainside in Tibet, when they saw it coming--a huge avalanche of ice and snow roaring down from about 6,000 feet above.

“We had about 15 to 30 seconds to run,” Anker says. “We ran in different directions. The direction I ran in ended up being--well, I escaped.”

Not completely. He was hit by the avalanche and dragged 60 feet, breaking two ribs, cutting his head, tearing a shoulder muscle. He was lucky. Lowe and Bridges were buried alive.

“I was laying down,” Anker says. “If I was standing up, I’d probably be dead.”

He’s gazing down as he speaks. He hates talking about this. His face is gaunt. His red hair, which he used to wear long and flowing, is cropped. He doesn’t smile. He’s unfailingly polite but obviously would rather be someplace else.

It’s been an intense year for Anker. In May he discovered Mallory’s body on Everest, which made him famous and led to a contract to write “The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mount Everest.”

But even that wasn’t fun. The day he found Mallory’s body, he found two other corpses--the twisted, broken bodies of modern-day climbers. A few days later, he helped rescue a Ukrainian climber caught in a storm on Everest, but one of the Ukrainian’s friends was never found.

And then there was the avalanche, and suddenly Alex was dead and now, at 36, after 20 years of intense, passionate climbing, Anker says he just can’t do it anymore.

“It’s time to move on,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of amazing things, but it’s far too dangerous.”

*

“He’s assuming he’s not going to beat the odds,” Jim Whittaker says of Anker’s decision. “I’ve always assumed I’d be lucky.”

And he has been. In 1963 he was the first American to climb Everest. He’s climbed lots of other high peaks too. In 1973 he started a sporting goods company called REI, catching the outdoors boom and making a ton of money. Retired now, his latest project is sailing around the world. It’s taking longer than he thought because he keeps stopping--three months in Tahiti, another three in Fiji.

“The journey is the reward,” saysWhittaker, a thin, ruddy man who looks at least 10 years younger than his age, 70.

He’s at the convention, signing copies of his autobiography, “A Life on the Edge.” A teenage boy walks up and sets a book down on the table. Whittaker asks his name, opens the book and writes: “To Greg, Good Climbing! Go for it!”

Whittaker keeps talking. “You want to taste life,” he says. “God, life is beautiful! As long as you’re on the right side of the grass, you’ve got to do things! If you push boundaries, life is sweeter. If you take a little bit of risk, the flowers look more beautiful, the people look different and things seem more real.”

He tells a story about Everest--not reaching the summit, but coming back down.

“Down at about 16,000 feet, you see the first blade of grass, the first flower, and you say, ‘Oh, my God!’ ” He leans over, miming the act of cupping a flower in his hand and sniffing it.

“You see that and you start to cry,” he says. He’s beaming now, his face aglow. “It’s so nice to be alive! It’s so damn nice to be alive! It’s a miracle! It’s magic!”