Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains Read online

  Fisher ultimately defused the situation by showing the big cheese with the pistol a folder of press clips he always brings along just for such incidents. Convinced Fisher was anything but a DEA agent, the pot growers allowed the boaters to continue on their way. A short while later they came to a village. According to Fisher, "There were no roads within 150 miles of the place: it looked like something out of a Clint Eastwood flick, with horses tied up to hitching posts and all these Mexicans walking around with scars on their faces and rifles slung over their shoulders, looking at us like we'd just climbed off a space ship."

  Before they pushed on, Fisher went into the center of town to take some photographs of a crumbling eighteenth-century mission while Kruger and Brunton kept an eye on the boat. While Fisher was away, three drunk young men who had been toasting the profitable delivery of a large load of pot to the village airstrip came down to the water and started hassling the gringos for amusement. As Fisher was walking back down to the boat, one of the Mexicans tried to kiss Kruger, prompting Brunton to step between them; Fisher arrived on the scene just in time to see the Mexican poke the muzzle of a gun squarely into Brunton's chest.

  Once again, Fisher managed to ease the tension before anybody came to harm. This time, amazingly enough, he did it by scolding the gunmen in pidgin Spanish: "Taking care not to establish eye contact-which would have been taken as provocation-I started screaming at them, telling them they were muy malo hombres, that they should be ashamed of themselves for bothering innocent tourists. And it worked. The leader gave me a sharp shove on the shoulder, then they put their guns away and left." Shaking uncontrollably, Fisher and company hopped in the boat and paddled away as fast as their arms would propel them.

  Canyoneering needn't be so rich in adrenaline, of course, nor does it have to involve travel to distant lands. This was impressed upon me near the end of my week in the Mogollon country with Fisher and his friends, when we visited a canyon the locals call Salome Jug. As the buzzard flies, it's not fifty miles from the canyon to the Scottsdale city limits-at night the lights of Phoenix glow on the western horizon like a movie marquee-but Salome was the most alluring of the five Mogollon canyons I spent time in. If a trip down some grueling chasm like Tonto Creek or the Barranca de Sinforosa is the canyoneering equivalent of going on a major mountaineering expedition in the Himalaya, traveling through Salome Jug is analogous to climbing a sunny three-pitch route in the Sha- wangunks.

  A half-hour stroll down an abandoned jeep road lined with flametipped ocotillo and thousands of towering saguaro brought us to the rim of the defile. It was narrow enough to spit across, and dropped in a clean two-hundred-foot drop to the sparkling waters of Salome Creek. A rappel looked inevitable until Fisher guided us to a hidden system of natural ramps, down which we scurried with ease to the canyon floor.

  Salome Jug ran for just half a mile from end to end, but what it lacked in scope was more than made up for by the intimacy and intensity of its wildness. The canyon was an utterly spellbinding slice of earth, like no place I had ever seen: The creek burbled by in a chain of long, skinny pools-tinted an astonishing shade of emerald by dissolved minerals-linked by a series of cascades ranging in height from mere inches to more than seventy feet; above this tableau shot walls of rose-colored granite sculpted into striking curves and sensuous angles, and polished smooth as a bowling ball.

  We decided to make a game out of making our way from one end of the Jug to the other, and spent the day stroking across the pools and clambering through the spray of the waterfalls. Whenever the spirit moved us, we stopped to sit in the sun and watch the clouds slide across the cobalt stripe of sky framed by the rim above. Lying on a delicious slab of granite toward evening, letting the warmth of the pink rock suck the chill from my dripping back, it dawned on me that it was my birthday. I couldn't have picked a better place to spend it, I decided, if I'd tried.

  ON A HOT AFTERNOON IN 1852, LEGEND HAS IT, THE SURVEYOR General of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, Sir Andrew Waugh, was sitting in his office in Dehra Dun when a computer named Hennessey (computers in those days being made of flesh and bone rather than disk drives and silicon chips) rushed in and blurted out, "Sir! I have discovered the highest mountain in the world!" The mountain he had "discovered" jutted out of the crest of the Himalaya in the forbidden kingdom of Nepal, and at the time was known only by the Roman number XV. By Hennessey's reckoning it stood a whopping 29,002 feet above mean sea level.

  Using precision theodolites, surveyors had repeatedly "shot" Peak XV from the northern plains of India in 1849 and 1850, but until Hennessey got around to computing their data two years later, nobody had the slightest suspicion that Peak XV was unusually high. The surveyors' observation stations were more than a hundred miles from the mountain, and from that distance all but the summit nub of Peak XV is hidden by towering massifs in the foreground, many of which give the illusion of being much greater in stature.

  In 1865, when Hennessey's computations had been thoroughly checked and Waugh was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that no other mountain in the Himalaya could rival XV in height, he officially christened the peak Mt. Everest, in honor of Sir George Everest, his precedessor as Surveyor General, unaware that the Tibetans who lived to the north of the great mountain already had several names for it that were not only more apt but considerably more mellifluous, foremost among them Chomolungma, which translates as "Goddess Mother of the Land."

  Before Mt. Everest-nee XV, nee Chomolungma-was measured, the title of World's Highest Mountain had been at various times bestowed upon a number of different peaks. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the prevailing wisdom held that Chimborazo, a 20,702-foot volcano in the Andes of South America, was the highest. In 1809 a Himalayan peak called Dhaulagiri was estimated by a British surveyor to be 26,862 feet high (Dhaulagiri's height has lately been adjusted to 26,795 feet), and thus had a more legitimate claim to the title. But most geographers beyond the borders of India thought such an extreme elevation preposterous and continued to favor Chimborazo until the 1840s, when the title was transferred briefly to Kangchenjunga, a 28,168-foot neighbor of Mt. Everest, and finally, in the 1850s, to Everest itself.

  Needless to say, once the pinnacle of Mt. Everest had been firmly established as the highest point on the surface of the earth, it wasn't long before men decided that Everest needed to be climbed: Getting to the top, declared G. 0. Dyrenfurth, an influential chronicler of early Himalayan mountaineering, is "a matter of universal human endeavor, a cause from which there is no withdrawal, whatever losses it may demand." Those losses, as it turned out, would not be insignificant: Following Hennessey's momentous announcement in Sir Andrew's office, it would take the lives of fifteen men, the efforts of thirteen expeditions, and the passage of 101 years before the summit of Everest would finally be won.

  It wasn't until the early hours of May 29, 195 3 that a rangy New Zealander named Ed Hillary and his compact Sherpa partner, Tenzing Norgay, found themselves inching up the final airy undulations of the south ridge of Mt. Everest. By late morning, Hillary later recorded, "we were starting to tire. I had been cutting steps continuously for almost two hours and wondered, rather dully, whether we would have enough strength left to get through. I cut around the back of another hump and saw that the ridge ahead dropped away and that we could see far into Tibet. I looked up and there above us was a rounded snow cone. A few whacks of the ice-axe, a few cautious steps, and Tensing [sic] and I were on top." And thus did Hillary and Tenzing, just before noon, become the first men to stand on the summit of Mt. Everest.

  Four days later, the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, word of the ascent reached England. "The Times," wrote Jan Morris, the journalist who first broke the story (though at the time she was still a he and wrote under the byline "James Morris"), "had printed the news in that morning's editions, the vast Coronation crowds waiting in London's rain had been told in the dark of the night, the world was rejoicing with us; all was well."
The conquest of the "Third Pole" (the North and South poles being the first and second) touched off a ground swell of British pride. Hillary was summarily knighted; Tenzing became a national hero throughout India, Nepal, and Tibet (all of which claimed him as one of their own). Every almanac and encyclopedia would record forever thereafter that the first men to conquer the world's mightiest peak were Sir Edmund P. Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Or so it seemed, at least until March 7, 1987, when a brief story, buried in the back of the New York Times, appeared under the headline, "New Data Show Everest May Take Second Place."

  The data in question had been gathered in the summer of 1986 by an American expedition to K2-a steep pyramid of brown rock and shining ice that straddles the Sino-Pakistani border some eight hundred miles northwest of Everest. After measuring electromagnetic signals broadcast from a military satellite, a sixty-five-yearold astronomer from the University of Washington named George Wallerstein calculated that K2-long thought to be 28,250 feet high-may actually have an elevation of 29,064 feet, and possibly even as great as 29,228 feet. If Wallerstein's findings proved correct, K2-not Everest, which in 1975 was pegged at 29,029.24 feet by a fastidious Chinese survey-was in fact this planet's highest chunk of terra firma.

  In the nearly fifty years since Hillary and Tenzing first paved the way, more than two hundred men and women have struggled to the top of Mt. Everest, and thousands of others have tried and failed, all of which has involved the expenditure of untold millions of dollars, amputations of dozens of frostbitten toes, and the loss, at last count, of more than a hundred human lives. All those who made these sacrifices were firm in the belief that in doing so they were pursuing the biggest trophy in mountaineering. But if Wallerstein was right, says Lance Owens, the leader of the 1986 American expedition to K2, "it means that everybody's been climbing the wrong mountain." Indeed, if Wallerstein was right, honors for making the premiere ascent of the world's tallest peak would belong not to Hillary and Tenzing, but to a pair of little-known Italian climbers named Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni, who, in 1954, became the first men to stand on top of K2.

  Most expert geographers and geodecists, however, were quick to warn that it was a little early for Hillary to hand in his knighthood or for Italians to start popping champagne corks; Wallerstein himself repeatedly made clear that his "observations were of a preliminary nature," and that it would be a mistake to declare that K2 is definitely higher than Everest until both mountains could be meticulously resurveyed with modern satellite technology. Wallerstein was well aware that recent Himalayan history does not lack for instances in which men have claimed to have discovered the existence of one mountain or another that surpassed Everest in elevation, only to be proven woefully wrong upon close inspection of their evidence.

  In the early 1930s, for instance, there was a flurry of excitement over an impressive-looking peak called Minya Konka (now known as Gongga Shan) that towers over a remote corner of China's Sichuan province. In 1929, after returning from an expedition across that part of the world in search of the giant panda, Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., sons of the rough-riding president, wrote a book in which they alluded to claims that Minya Konka "rises more than 30,000 feet and is the highest in the world." Adding credence to these rumors were the reports of one Joseph Rock, a self-taught botanist with a flair for the dramatic and a loose way with the facts. Rock had visited a monastery at the base of Minya Konka, used a pocket compass and a barometer to come up with an estimate for the mountain's height, and then promptly cabled the National Geographic Society: "MINYA KONKA HIGHEST PEAK ON GLOBE 30,250 FEET. ROCK."

  The Society, which was sponsoring Rock's explorations in China, balked at publishing that figure, and subsequent, less sloppy, surveys would show Minya Konka to be but 24,900 feet high, nearly a mile beneath Everest's summit. No matter, though, for Rock had hedged his bet by reporting that another peak, four hundred miles north of Minya Konka, was also at least 30,000 feet high. This peak, believed to be the dwelling place of gods by the fierce aboriginal people who lived at its foot, was called Anye Machin (now Magen Gangri), and rumors of its great altitude would persist long after those about Minya Konka had been laid to rest.

  The seeds of the legend of Anye Machin were planted by Brigadier General George Pereira, an accomplished British explorer who in 1921 embarked from Beijing upon an ambitious journey, intending to trek through Tibet, India, Burma, and southern China before returning to Beijing. Pereira died en route, but in 1923, before expiring, he bumped into Rock in the Chinese province of Yunnan and told him of an immense peak in the Anye Machin Range that he was sure would prove higher than Everest. Rock immediately resolved to go there.

  Rock made the arduous trip to Anye Machin in 1929, and estimated its height from a distance of about sixty miles-once again using nothing more than what Galen Rowell, the photojournalist/ mountaineer who in 1981 made one of the first ascents of Anye Machin, has described as "compass sightings, altitudes calculated from the boiling point of water, and his usual zeal to come up with an astounding figure." Mr. Rock determined that the elevation of Anye Machin was 29,529 feet, some 500 feet higher than Everest.

  The speculation about Anye Machin's height lay dormant for most of the next two decades. It flared up again in a big way, however, near the end of World War II, thanks to a story that appeared in a score of international newspapers. In 1944, an American DC-3 participating in the airlift from Burma over the "Hump" to Chunking was reportedly blown far off course by a violent storm. Somewhere in the vicinity of the Anye Machin Range the pilot climbed out of a layer of clouds at 30,500 feet-the plane's altimeter, the pilot said, was working perfectly-and looked up to see a snow-covered peak jutting far above the cloud ceiling, hundreds of feet higher than his aircraft.

  That famous flight, as it happens, was fabricated wholesale (a DC-3 can't fly anywhere near 30,500 feet) by bored Twentieth Air Force officers looking to play a joke on British war correspondents who had been pestering the pilots for gripping stories of derring- do. In 1947, however, when a fifty-five-year-old American pen manufacturer named Milton "Ball-Point" Reynolds first read about that "flight" in a new book by James Ramsey Ullman, he-like most of the rest of the world-hadn't been apprised of the hoax. What Reynolds did know was that Ullman, in Kingdom of Adventure: Everest had concluded a passage about Anye Machin thus: " ... if the mystery mountain is indeed higher than Everest, its discovery will rank as the most important geographical event of modern times."

  Reynolds-a short, round, balding millionaire with a penchant for publicity-liked to bill himself as the inventor of the ballpoint pen. In fact, the ballpoint was the brainchild of a Hungarian named Laszlo Biro; Reynolds just brought it to the American public. Claiming of his newfangled instrument that, among other attributes, "It Writes Under Water!" (neglecting to add that in truth the pen was often barely functional on perfectly dry paper), Reynolds managed to sell $13 million worth of pens within a year.

  In April 1947, accompanied by a crackerjack twenty-seven-yearold test pilot named Bill Odom, Reynolds had broken Howard Hughes's around-the-world flying record. No sooner had the considerable hubbub from that stunt subsided than Reynolds was struck with an idea for bettering it: He and Odom would fly to China and prove that Anye Machin was the 30,000-plus-foot mountain spied by the Burma airlift pilots.

  Reynolds and Odom embarked for China on February 29, 1948, in a giant four-engine C-87 christened the China Explorer, which had been specially outfitted with state-of-the-art aerial surveying instruments. In Reynold's entourage was the renowned alpinist and mountain surveyor Bradford Washburn, recruited from Boston's Museum of Science to ensure that Anye Machin would be accurately measured. In the plane's cargo hold were ten thousand goldplated ballpoint pens that were to be a gift for Madame Chiang Kai-shek. When one of Reynolds's assistants pointed out that the balls in the gold pens were malfunctioning, that they didn't write worth a damn, Reynolds replied, "I know, but the Chinese can't write anyway, and they'll be glad t
o have them."

  The expedition did not get off to a good start. In Beijing, while taxiing to the runway prior to taking off for Anye Machin, Odom got the C-87 stuck in the mud, and then attempted to free the plane by gunning the engines. As the Chinese and American scientists on board peered out the windows in horror, the right landing gear collapsed from the strain and the big plane dropped to its belly, rupturing a fuel tank and destroying one of the propellors. Nobody was injured, but Reynolds sadly announced that the expedition was over.

  By and by the landing gear was repaired, and Reynolds and Odom flew the C-87 to Shanghai to get a new propellor that they hoped would enable them to get the expensive aircraft back to the United States. After the propellor was replaced, though, Reynolds was struck by an inspiration: He proposed to Odom that instead of heading home, they make an unannounced (and highly illegal) flight directly from Shanghai to Anye Machin without Washburn or any meddling Chinese observers, measure its height themselves, and then proceed directly to Calcutta.

  They took off with this scheme in mind on April 2, but Odom underestimated the fuel they would need to pull it off. Anye Machin was fifteen hundred miles from Shanghai, Calcutta was another two thousand miles beyond that, and by the time the China Explorer neared the mountain Odom realized they would have to turn around immediately if they were to avoid a crash landing somewhere in the wilds of Tibet. "At that instant," Reynolds later wrote, "I saw ahead a huge mass of land coming out of the strata of clouds below and reaching right up into the 31,000-foot overcast ... At last, I was actually looking at the highest mountain in the world!"

  The China Explorer made it back to Shanghai with fifteen minutes worth of fuel left in its tanks, whereupon the Chinese, who were boiling mad, promptly impounded the aircraft and escorted the Americans to their hotel under armed guard. Reynolds was unrepentant. A few days later he and Odom sneaked back to their plane to attempt an escape. As Reynolds told it, no sooner had they gotten inside the aircraft than an angry "mob of Chinese" approached. As a diversionary tactic, Reynolds hurled his last two hundred gold pens out the door at them, Odom gunned the engines while the Chinese fought among themselves for the pens, and the Americans skimmed away under a hail of bullets.