At Any Price
Bruce Miller (left) and I show the signs of altitude illness at a 23,620-foot bivouac on the Rupal Face. The swelling in our faces is due to peripheral edema, or swelling of the extremities. BRUCE MILLER COLLECTION
22,000 Feet on the Rupal Face, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan: August 15, 2004
I TAKE A DEEP BREATH and push the honed edge of the knife against the rope. It doesn’t cut. I whetted the edge for just this reason. Frustrated, I look at the small knife in the palm of my mitten. I have carried this knife upwards for four days, on a climb where every ounce counts both towards and against my own survival. The rope is sacred, both a symbol and the truest expression of partnership, but if I can cut it Bruce and I can rid ourselves of four pounds and climb to the summit.
Climbing ropes must be cared for, stored neatly, kept clean. When I was young, I skipped Sunday school, but knew that to step on a climbing rope was a cardinal sin. Panting, I straighten my cutting arm and lean in, sawing into the rope, pushing still harder.
Nothing. I sit back on my heels to rest; I have only a small nick in the sheath to show for my effort. I lean in one more time, holding my arm straight and letting the blade tip slightly. I feel it start to slice through. It is over quickly: the rope severed. I trumpet and thrust the two fresh-cut ends above my head, mocking the seriousness of our situation.
Bruce, on his knees in the snow, chuckles as he slowly coils the half we’re taking with us. Tufts of unwashed hair protrude from his thick hat and hood. His eyes are alive, his weathered face radiant. In his mirth the swollen red skin of his lips crack; the fissures are caked with five days worth of lip balm and phlegm.
I am sure that we won’t – that we can’t – come back here, so I toss the discarded rope at the base of a black horn of rock. I push my helmet and our rock-climbing gear into a small hill of snow-covered gear.
Standing up, Bruce finishes organizing our shortened rope. He turns and regards my rough treatment of the gear we’re leaving behind. I stand and start to climb off with the deliberate, comically rigid movements of high altitude. Five breaths are required to recover from moving one leg up one step. A few short feet take a few long minutes.
Bruce steps backwards, folds his lanky frame, and picks up the discarded rope in his thick, gloved hands. Kneeling, he wraps it forcefully to the rock again and again. He clips in my helmet and secures the rock rack. I shrug my indifference and stab my ice axe further up the slope, knowing that I’ll never see this place again.
Fourteen years earlier, in 1990, I celebrated my twentieth birthday at Nanga Parbat base camp. I was the youngest member of a Slovenian expedition that put two climbers, Jože Rozman and Marija Frantar, on the summit via the Schell route. It was my first Himalayan climbing experience, and the sour memory of it drove me from the greater ranges for years. The mountains were too high for my adolescent lungs, the walls too steep for my young legs, the experiences cut too deep for my thin skin. As I aged, those same memories fermented into something more complex: unresolved and alluring.
During that time Bruce Miller was unknown to me, a young carpenter living in Boulder, Colorado, working only when it was too hot or too snowy to climb. There he read Reinhold Messner’s provocative book The Seventh Grade in a house crowded with seven other climbers. In Messner’s book is a photograph of his brother Günther, a few days before his death, high on the snow-plastered Rupal Face with a small whiskbroom hanging inconspicuously on his harness. Armed with what he calls “this secret Rupal knowledge,” Bruce swept his way up a number of snow-covered rock climbs above Boulder.
A few hours higher, we dig a small platform on which to pitch our tiny tent. Diving inside, Bruce brews a pot of peppermint tea. He twists around to look at me, his face alight with excitement. “You know, I think we’re going to do this thing.”
“Yeah, I know.” I answer, lying back on a thin foam mattress. “I didn’t want to say anything yet.” I close my tearing eyes to rest my pounding head on the relative comfort of our tiny coil of rope. “We still have tomorrow, which will be the big day. I don’t know if we should take our bivy gear to the summit, or not.” I breathe deeply at the thin air.
At dawn we pack our one sleeping bag, strike the tent and leave our bivouac. I kick a trail of steps toward the top. We each carry 25 pounds of equipment, food and fuel to survive three more days. My footsteps don’t sink more than ankle deep in the snow. The air is calm and clear. Turning, I can see the curve of the planet stretching into India and across China.
My head hangs. For me it has been another bad night of little rest. Glancing at Bruce I see his face is puffy from the altitude. I am in worse shape. Our internal organs are subject to the same swelling. We’ve climbed into the “death zone,” the altitude at which nothing can live for long without supplemental aids, like bottled oxygen, something Bruce and I would never consider. For us sucking O is doping, cheating. Besides, carrying the heavy bottles of oxygen is physically impossible in our chosen style – alpine style – of climbing. The style is so named because it utilizes the same methods used to climb smaller peaks in the Alps. You climb with a backpack containing your food, fuel, shelter, clothing and climbing gear. And, if all goes well, you bring it all back down.
I wrap my fingers over a rocky edge and pull myself to the top of a short, 40-foot cliff. I pause to catch my breath and Bruce steps ahead and leads off. I follow at a slow, all-day pace. I’m happy to be in his track, drafting. Yesterday I felt strong, but last night I puked up half my meager ration of food. I am dehydrated and sluggish, and my headache is worse now than when we bedded down.
Suddenly I come upon Bruce, leaning against his pack on a nondescript snow slope. I am a little disappointed that his stint in front has been so short.
“How’s it going Steve?”
I lean into the slope, put my head against my axe, and breathe hard. I am not going to lie; I’m not fine. But this pain is familiar.
“Uh. Okay.” I say as I stand.
“I’ve been waiting forty minutes. What’s wrong?”
“Forty minutes?” I don’t understand. I pant rapidly. “I just stopped.” Breathe. “To shit.”
“You don’t look so good.” Bruce starts to chuckle, but the laugh is lost in a hacking cough that doubles him over.
He lifts his head and takes two awkward steps back up his track. His track? It suddenly registers that Bruce has down climbed to me. His pace has buried mine. He watched me struggle for 40 minutes; watched me take five steps, then rest my head on my ice axe taking 10 breaths. Sometimes more.
Bruce raises himself up; his eyes try to meet mine. The cracks in his lips are packed with drying blood. He looks away and says, “I want to go down.”
I lean my forehead back on my axe trying to concentrate. I push back my mitten to look at the altimeter on my wrist. It reads 24,800 feet, just 1,900 feet below Nanga Parbat’s summit.
“Down? Why?” I lift my head and stare at him. He has pushed his hood back, but dark sunglasses hide his eyes. His face is too thin, waxy like a mask. He doesn’t look at me.
“We’re almost at twenty-five thousand feet.” I breathe. “It’s still early.”
“Then where are we going to bivy tonight? On the summit?”
Yes, I think, and then I say aloud, “Where we end up. Wasn’t that the plan?” Breathe. “I think we’ll be okay.” I gather my breath and force the words out quickly. “We have three more nights.”
I squat down on one knee and think. I try to imagine a logical argument against his decision to turn around. To keep climbing is flagrantly dangerous and selfish. Just like it always is. Not understanding Bruce’s change of heart precludes me from arguing against it. Faintly, I see that I don’t know this man. I nearly chuckle at the folly of us being here together, of not having tempered our partnership in the furnace of experience.
Three weeks ago, while climbing alone on K7, I had been so confident I rejected partnership. I knew that my trust in others had turned to dust, desiccated by ever-changing climbing partners, a failed marriage, and bearing witness to climbers trashing the mountain environments that I cherish. My desire to climb Nanga Parbat had usurped this knowledge.
There is no partnership, no marriage but convenience. There is just he and I. Separate in our desires. Mine to ascend at any price. Bruce’s to cash out now, before we have committed everything. I wonder, “Who is this man?”
The Indus Hotel, Skardu, Pakistan: August 5, 2004
I sit with bare feet sticking off the two inches of foam that pass as my bed; the shoulder bones of my back grind uncomfortably against a gritty whitewashed wall. At the center of the room a low, scarred wooden table is strewn with the contents of my repair kit: two folding knives, a pair of black-handled trauma shears, white cloth tape, a sewing awl, a book of needles, scraps of thread and a near-empty tube of waterproofing paste for leather. My newly rejuvenated insulated climbing gloves are wedged against the coarse screen of a window that overlooks a gravel hillside streaked with trash. A fly buzzes past my face as it circles towards the closed bathroom door where the shower drains into the same hole in the floor that serves as a squat-toilet. A second door leads into a thinly carpeted concrete hallway that leads out past the five large tables of the hotel’s lobby and restaurant and into Skardu’s main street.
When I step onto the road my feet sink softly into fine, black sand drifted across the road. My imagination turns east toward the sunrise, running along the shiny, rippling pewter surface of the Indus River. Dark with silt when the sun is high, the Indus runs between the hulking behemoths of the Himalayan Range and the angular, sharp tips of the Karakoram Mountains. South of me the Himalayas stretch 1,500 miles to the east reaching across India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and China. Forty miles away the range finds its western terminus in one final act of mountain building: Nanga Parbat.
Nanga Parbat is the ninth highest peak in the world. In Urdu the name means the Naked Mountain. Its Rupal Face, the largest mountain wall in the world, is so steep that winter snows do not cling to the smooth, black gneiss that glaciers slowly mill into the powdery sand piled in front of the hotel.
Our group of six is coming from the north side, the Karakoram side, of the big river. At the end of a four-wheel drive track sits the village of Hushe. A three-day walk past Hushe, through dusty goat-worn hillsides and across the rock-covered ice of the Charakusa Glacier, lies a cul-de-sac of mountains mostly untouched by man. In 1856, the British Great Survey of India named a dark-streaked granite mountain overlooking that glacier Karakoram-7. Its summit needle is a remote aerie of snow 8,000 feet above the valley floor.
Ten days ago I stood on K7’s summit at sunset. I frantically scanned the serrated horizon as it was being swallowed by darkness. Through the fog of 36 sleepless hours the shadows of a million mountains stretched off into the dusk. A few hours before I summitted, when a cornice dropped right in front of my chest, I had watched holding my breath as it fell silently. I gasped for air when it finally exploded below me. To get to this final pinnacle required seven attempts over two expeditions. There had been moments where my survival seemed secondary to my need for acute experience.
There is a gentle knock on the door of my Indus Hotel room: lunch is ready. As I enter the dining room Bruce is helping himself to a fragrant saffron dish of steaming mutton. Oblong stainless-steel bowls hold piles of rice. I drop into the chair next to him.
“Man, I’m hungry,” he says, big eyes fixed on the food.
Doug Chabot and Steve Swenson walk in together. “Alright! Lunch!” says Steve, pumping the air with his fist as he pulls out a chair.
Doug looks sideways at the 50-year old Swenson and laughs as he flops his thin frame into the heavy hand-hewn chair. “You’d think we hadn’t eaten in like four hours!” he exclaims.
“I’m absolutely starving,” says Swenson, looking deadpan at Doug, “and dead tired.” His black thick hair is flattened and stiff from lying on his pillow.
The four of us have shared every meal for two months. Six weeks of that at the 14,500-foot K7 Base Camp. The neat and tidy Doug runs the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center from the Federal Building in downtown Bozeman. Steve has worked for over 25 years to make partner at one of Seattle’s best engineering firms. Doug and the shaggy, sandy-haired Bruce summitted K7 just 24 hours behind me by following the first ascent route. After an avalanche swept his pack off the mountain, Swenson, Slovenian Marko Prezelj and Coloradoan Jeff Hollenbaugh turned back from high on K7-West, an unclimbed sister summit of K7.
Jeff was going to attempt the 13,500 foot-high Rupal Face with Bruce and I, but his motivation evaporated into thin air and his shaky post-divorce head-space. Jeff and Marko left for Islamabad this morning. Without Jeff, Bruce had cold feet about climbing the Rupal Face and has decided to join Doug and Steve Swenson to attempt the unclimbed west, or Mazeno, ridge of Nanga Parbat. We have allotted four days here in Skardu for resting, repairing, washing, and eating. Having been at altitude for so long our appetites are insatiable and the hotel cook is producing big meals full of the fresh vegetables and meats that we have been craving.
Between repairing, eating, and resting, I visualize climbing Nanga Parbat. I mentally dissect the wall into understandable pieces: I will carry a heavy pack across the cow pastures that run to the edge of the glacier. I will navigate the last crevasse and start up the narrow gully of snow transecting the rock buttress that leads to the first large snow slopes. Early the second day I will climb steep ice-covered rock to gain the ice slopes that lead to the glacier hanging onto the upper reaches of the wall. After another bivouac I will find a hidden passage to the broad gully that accesses the upper wall. Then I will traverse the final slopes to the summit pyramid.
Within my mental maps I weave the details of sharpening worn crampons, weighing rations of food, studying photographs to discover niches where I might safely rest.
As I mentally stand on Nanga Parbat’s summit, the equanimity I discovered on my way to the 22,700-foot summit of K7 starts to dissolve in the acid of ambition. After so many hard days on K7, I am seduced by success: I lust after the thrill, yearn for the accomplishment, crave the closure.
I know I can climb Nanga Parbat, but others know us by what we’ve done, not what we can do. With K7 I have respect. But Nanga Parbat will bring more. Few mountains, not even Everest, are as coveted by climbers as the naked mountain, the killer mountain. Thirty-one men died attempting its first ascent. The Rupal Face has been successfully climbed twice. A route has been established on both the left-hand and right-hand edges of the wall. Reinhold and Günther Messner – supported by a large team organized by Karl Herrligkoffer – climbed the first route in 1970. A joint Polish/Mexican team climbed the second route in 1984. As my thoughts drift down from the summit I allow the question: Will Nanga Parbat be enough?
Base Camp, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan: August 10, 2004
Coming out of the mess tent I toss a stone at the herd of small, high-ribbed goats eating the grass behind camp. They scatter as I gather my sleeping bag dried by the morning sun. Slipping my bag into the half-zipped door of my tent, I bend down and reach for a daypack. Bruce approaches slowly.
During the early morning hours of the second day, we climb close together to minimize the hazards of rockfall and the risk of dropping ice onto each other. STEVE HOUSE
“Hey Steve. Mind if I come along and have a look at the Rupal Face with you?” he asks as I pack the spotting scope and a collection of photographs. It is early morning, and the first full day in base camp. The weather is fine and clear. Clear weather on a big mountain may last only a few hours; I want to take full advantage of my first chance to study the wall in person.
“Sure.” I stand. “But don’t you want to go with Doug and Steve? They’re going to check conditions on the Mazeno Ridge.”
Bruce is wearing dark cotton pants, the cuffs worn to rags. His fleece jacket is rumpled, the collar twisted in. He kicks at the grass, and answers. “Well, when I saw the Rupal Face this morning. It’s so amazing here.” After a pause he looks up. “I figure I owe it to myself to have a closer look before ruling it out completely.”
I stand from packing my backpack and turn to look at the wall as I cross my arms across my chest. “Well. I don’t know.”
I have been grappling with the idea of climbing this massive wall alone for the past two weeks. Now Bruce wants to come? I’m confused, but also relieved. It would be much safer to have two of us up there. Climbing K7 had taken seven attempts over two summers to learn the intricacies of route-finding on its 8,000-foot wall. The Rupal Face is even more complex, and the summit soars to the incredible height of 26,660 feet. The lightweight approach I used on K7 was an evolution of lessons learned on 20,320-foot Denali. Adapting those lessons to the 22,749-foot K7 took time. Climbing to Nanga Parbat’s summit looms as another exhaustive, mind-rending evolution.
Seeing Nanga Parbat’s summit being born into the red dawn of day, I just want to climb it. I want to stand on the summit and partnership offers the greatest probability of achieving that.
Dropping my arms to my side, I turn and say, “I guess that makes sense.” I pause to take in Bruce’s rugged, square-cut profile, his lean, fit body. He gazes up at the wall, fingers interlaced behind his head.
“Okay,” I start slowly. “I’m up for it. I think we have to go back down across the lower meadow and out by the river to get the best view.”
24,800 Feet on the Rupal Face, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan: August 15, 2004
Bruce is right. My vomiting has dehydrated me, nearly incapacitated me. If I go higher I am sure to get worse.
Ambition has fueled this drive towards the summit of Nanga Parbat. I have sacrificed everything to climbing: I am newly divorced, living out of a van, without savings and with no real job. I’ve paid too high a price to allow failure. I am willing to sacrifice my friendship with Bruce, but am I willing to die here?
In the sun on the windless upper slopes of the world’s highest wall we stand and wordlessly decide our future with a single glassy-eyed look. I am in disbelief. I am soloing again. Soloing in my mind, but irrevocably tied to this partner for survival. I have no choice. Bruce is not going to allow me, or himself, to risk more than we already have.
At 10:30 in the morning on what should be our summit day, Bruce starts down. I lean against the snow, watching him descend. I think about striking upwards on my own. Then I remember that he’s got the stove. I carry the fuel. We would both die.
I stare at the steep slope below. One set of closely spaced tracks leads up to my seat. Next to them, widely spaced prints mark Bruce’s departure. Live or die, the two tracks ask. I make a few strides down before a confused wave of emotions engulfs me and I drop into a sitting position.
Looking out from Nanga Parbat, I am the highest thing around. In Indian Srinagar, cumulus cells build with the day’s heat. To the east the backbone of the Himalaya marches across India.
My butt is cold and I have to stand. I’m already facing out, so slowly, I follow Bruce’s track down. Rounding a rock tower, I hear Bruce calling.
“Hey!” I shout down. “I’m coming.”
I remember that two years ago Bruce lost a partner who fell to his death on a similar slope. He must be worried. For a moment I wonder how long I sat there, but the thought is crushed by the painful drumbeat of my pulse in my head.
Together we down climb to where, hours before, we had cut our rope and abandoned the gear we no longer needed for the summit push. Mechanically, I uncoil the rope in my pack and tie it to the piece we left behind. Bruce rigs the anchor. We will rappel all the way back to where we spent last night. As he sets each anchor I pull the ropes and toss them off. He goes down first.
I wait for him to call up that he has the new anchor set before I go down. Each rappel is as long as the two halves of our rope: 120 feet. While the sun is still hot, we reach our bivy ledge hacked from the snow at 22,000 feet.
In the tent I close my eyes and pretend to sleep. Bruce melts snow for water and makes soup. I sit up when I hear the stove shut off and Bruce gently hands the pot to me. I slurp the thin soup. His eyes try to smile, but neither of us speaks.
The next morning we traverse into Messner’s 1970 route. Bruce leads down, doing all the work. I think he may be going down the wrong way, rappelling over an ice cliff, but I don’t care. I have given up, relinquished control of my fate.
Two days later we are reunited in base camp. Doug and Steve have successfully traversed all of the previously unclimbed Mazeno Ridge to its junction with Nanga Parbat’s flanks, which they then descended via the seldom-used Schell route. That night Doug, Steve and Bruce decide to leave for home. The next morning in the already harsh sun, a few thin leathery men load the trio’s gear on abused donkeys, and suddenly everyone is gone.
Bruce back in base camp with what little gear remained after our descent from the Rupal Face. STEVE HOUSE
I remain, alone with the base camp cook, Fida, and our government-assigned liaison officer. The departure of my mates leaves an unexpected vacuum that I cannot fill. I have nobody to talk to who understands my questions, no one to provide me with answers. I search my memory of those upper slopes for clues to what happened. There is no explanation. Everything had seemed to be going so well. We had felt sure that we were about to succeed. So why did we fail? How sick was I? Would I have allowed myself to die up there?
Yes, I entered into the partnership willingly. Yet I struggle with the power necessarily entrusted to my partner. Tying in with Bruce was the wrong decision because I wasn’t prepared to share as a partner must. Yes, I would have died for Nanga Parbat. No, I can’t expect others to feel the same. Why was I willing to go so far? Why was I so quick to trade familiar solitude for what I thought was a greater chance of success?
I felt invincible on K7; soaring on the euphoria of new experience. Perhaps Nanga Parbat was too big and I was simply too tired.
Before the morning’s sun turns hot, I am out doing aerobic recovery tests. I step up on a knee-high rock repeatedly for five minutes, then measure how long it takes my heart rate to return to normal. It doesn’t ever get below 90. Even in the mess tent an hour later, the monitor still reads 96. Before the attempt my resting heart rate at the 12,000-foot base camp was 48.
I sit in the meadow with the blank page of my journal and a thermos of tea. Looking up at the wall, I am tormented with another clear and sunny day. I can’t know what would have happened had we kept going. Maybe the swelling would have caused fluid to leak into my lungs, disabling me near the summit. We might have gone to the top and then become lost trying to descend the opposite side of the mountain. Maybe we would have been crushed in an avalanche, like Günther. Maybe we would have walked out of Diamir Valley, flush with the experience. Proverbially speaking, we would have been rich, we would have been kings.
I know that had we succeeded it would have been the greatest American climb in the Himalaya since Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein climbed the West Ridge of Everest in 1963. Theirs was the first traverse of a major Himalayan peak, a climb for which Willi sacrificed nine toes. President John F. Kennedy presented Unsoeld and Hornbein with the National Geographic Society’s highest honor.
Climbing the Rupal Face would have been the greatest accomplishment of my life. I had to go down with Bruce because his no was necessarily stronger than my yes. That his no might have saved my life does not sit well with my ego.
Five days after my partner’s departure, I start climbing the three-mile high Rupal Face alone. It is midnight under a new moon. At dawn I give up, not having climbed one-tenth of the wall.
My body is wrecked, my mind in chaos. I am not climbing with the lightness I had known on K7, but with a burden I have acquired on Nanga Parbat.
At the base of the wall I sit on my pack and spit green phlegm into the snow. I can barely lift my pack. I stumble beneath the crucifix of failure. Even if I had the physical strength to climb, it would be impossible to carry such a weight up the Rupal Face. Not the weight, I think, the imbalance. The imbalance created by my relentless drive for success.
I stand and face my twisting path downward, toward home. I hope to climb Nanga Parbat someday, but hope – this burning, blinding desire – now seems to be the problem. So I let go. I walk away. I begin the journey back. Back in time, back in place, back in mind. Back to the beginning.
Bruce heads down to base camp during one of the final rappels off Nanga Parbat. STEVE HOUSE