AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 14Climbing Mount EverestWhat It Takes To Reach the SummitAn ascent involves money, hype, sex, stamina, skill and thefaint beat of great wingsBy John Skow
Last fall the mountain known in Tibet as Chomolungma, or
Goddess Mother of the World, and in the West as Everest permitted
itself to be climbed by 33 people, withheld permission (in the form
of benign weather) from a much larger number and killed nine
climbers. Are those good odds or bad? A flatlander's question, an
observer decides, after asking it of Stacy Allison and Peggy Luce;
to mountaineers, the answer is a shrug. The odds are the odds.
Allison, a contractor and house framer from Portland, Ore., and
Luce, a bicycle messenger from Seattle, members of a U.S.
expedition from the Pacific Northwest, were among the 33 summit
climbers. More important, as these matters are reckoned, they were
the first and second U.S. women in history to reach the 29,108-ft.
top of Everest (among the 200-odd climbers who had summited before
were six other women, beginning with Japan's Junko Tabei in 1975).
The drive to put a U.S. woman on Everest had been something
between grail and financing gimmick for at least a decade.
Everything -- gender, nationalism, internationalism, ever more
dangerous routes, climbing solo and without oxygen, and climbing
quickly with little equipment, "Alpine style" -- is a gimmick to
Himalayan climbers, whose hobby is absurdly expensive. The most
strenuous effort is not on the wind-racked ridges above Camp 4; it
is in corporate conference rooms, where idlers with powerful legs
try to persuade achievers in powerful suits to pay for their
vacations.
At any rate, Allison, who was weathered out on Everest in 1987
after reaching 26,000 ft., then retreating and spending five days
in a snow cave, was by several days the first of three climbers
from her expedition to reach the top last fall. (A male climber,
Geoff Tabin, made it to the top just ahead of Luce.) Thus she
settled what she somewhat dismissively refers to as "the
American-woman-on-Everest thing." (Tired of hype and of fund
raising, she had put $9,000 of her own money into the expedition
pot.) No doubt she also quelled some of the grousing from the Old
Guard of male Himalayan climbers that women aren't equipped for
extreme-high-altitude climbing, complaints that have subsided for
the most part into gossip about the undeniable problems that love
affairs cause on expeditions. (Allison herself does some grousing
on this subject, and she says that one of the reasons her 1988
expedition was successful was that everyone understood the concept
of delayed gratification.)
As Allison saw it, she and the mountain settled some unfinished
business. That was that. But hype has a life of its own, and she
was rewarded on her return with her country's equivalent of a
knighthood, an interview on David Letterman's late-night TV show.
She is little, blond and cute, and probably could have carried
Letterman on her back to the top of the Statue of Liberty. His
questions were gingerly and puzzled. She, as it happened, had never
seen Letterman's show, but friends had explained its tribal
rituals. No 19th century explorer snacking on pickled sheep's eyes
could have honored bizarre local customs more graciously. She took
a rock out of her pocket, explained that it came from the top of
Everest, and asked politely whether she could heave it through the
studio window. "Of course," said Letterman. She chucked it with a
good sidearm motion, and there was the familiar sound effect of
breaking glass that Letterman fans have grown to love. Fade to
commercial.
Some weeks ago, as the press and TV uproar began to subside,
the two women spent a couple of days sorting photos in the Portland
house Allison shares with her boyfriend, a local doctor. Allison
and Luce did not know each other before the expedition, and though
they are friendly enough, it seems doubtful that their lives from
this point will take them in similar directions. The contrast in
character is too great. Even the extraordinary physical and mental
strengths that each possesses are of sharply divergent kinds. Luce
is a big, powerful, easygoing soul who for several years ran her
own restaurant in Seattle. When the restaurant began to consume her
life, she quit cold and took a job as a bicycle messenger. With
nothing much in the way of climbing credentials, she volunteered
for the Everest trip. "I've always wanted to do adventures," she
says with a big grin.
Allison doesn't like that idea at all. For her, adventures are
what happen when you make a mistake. She has been climbing, she
says precisely, "for 11 1/2 years." She is a gifted rock climber.
At extreme altitude, she is an aerobic marvel, renowned for
climbing at unusual speed. She and the rest used bottled oxygen
much of the time because of the dangers of altitude sickness. A
reporter with some experience at altitude asks whether she felt
sluggish and slow-thinking when she wasn't using oxygen. This is
what he remembers and what virtually all climbers report. Not
Allison; she said she had no problems, with or without oxygen. And
clearly this is true; at the summit, which she reached without
trouble, she spent 45 minutes waiting for her Sherpa and
photographing herself with the logos of various corporate sponsors.
Then she made an unbelievable descent all the way to Camp 1, at
about 21,000 ft.
High winds battered the mountain on the day of Luce's summit
try, and she hung back, breaking off from Tabin, her climbing
partner, and her summit group's Sherpas. Then Luce (no relation to
TIME's co-founder) decided to try for the top. At some point her
goggles fogged, so she took them off. By that time the men had
passed her on their way down. She reached the top alone, dulled and
sluggish, and stayed about five minutes, not bothering with photos.
As she started down, she realized her unprotected eyes were going
snow blind. What she did not realize was that she had run out of
oxygen. And on a steep slope just below the summit, she leaned over
to try to see a foothold through the blazing retinal glare. The
empty oxygen tank overbalanced her. She somersaulted downward.
Then strength and her adventurer's enchanted luck took over.
She swung her ice ax, sunk it into the snow face and performed a
perfect self-arrest, just the way they teach it in climbing school.
She ditched the oxygen bottle and found her Sherpa. The only thing
she could see by this time was the blue of his boots, so she
followed the moving blue blobs. The next day her eyes were swollen
shut.
Had the experience taken either woman into unexplored places
in her character? "No," says Allison, not surprisingly. But then
she adds, "Getting to the summit didn't. Winning's easy. Not
getting there the year before did. Yeah, failure teaches you
things." Luce says, "Maybe I'm calmer. Friends say I seem more
mature. Maybe just tired." She and some partners heard the beat of
great wings when they were cuffed by the edge of a large avalanche
at the Khumbu Icefall. Being in peril, she says, "sharpens your
senses for life."
"No, I don't think so," Allison says. She is not a contentious
person, but she can't abide what seems to be imprecision. "That
implies that people who don't climb don't feel life sharply.
Children feel life sharply . . ." "O.K., you're probably right,"
says Luce amiably. "Strike that last answer." What next? Allison,
the house framer, has gone back into contracting. She and her
boyfriend want to spend a lot of time kayaking. And there is some
$60,000 still owing (of the $250,000 total cost) on the expedition.
Luce has quit her messenger job. She and Carl Jones, a Seattle
filmmaker, plan to pedal mountain bikes from Vladivostok to
Leningrad, camping or sleeping in the houses of ordinary folk along
the way, in a five-month tour starting in May. Four Americans and
four Soviets will make the trip with cameras rolling, and then they
will do a similar tour in the U.S. next year. The Soviets are
enthusiastic, says Luce. Only one element is still uncertain. Right
the first time. So it is back, with smile and mandolin, to the
powerful-legs, powerful-suits scene. Back to those cold, cold phone
calls to the vice president for sales and aggrandizement of
Monstrocorp, or at least his secretary: "Have I got a marketing
