Tejas breaks out his travel guitar for a world-top guitar solo
Businessman Dick Bass changed mountaineering. Until Bass completed his climbs of the tallest mountains on each of seven continents, no guiding outfit and virtually no other climbers had thought of sweeping through the Seven Summits and labeling it an achievement. After Bass, an oilman who ran a Utah ski resort, finished the Seven Summits and wrote a popular book about it, climbers by the thousands became intrigued with the idea of replicating his feat. Born in 1929, Bass moved to Texas, where he later ran an oil company and a family ranch. Searching for an interesting physical challenge in the 1980s, Bass essentially coined the term Seven Summits. The mountains were always there, but no one had ever packaged them before.
Setting out with his friend, Frank Wells, the president of the Disney Company, Bass culminated his quest on April 30, 1985 by summiting Mount Everest. At the time, he was the oldest person to stand on top of the world’s tallest peak at fifty-five. Wells climbed six of the mountains, but Bass completed the circuit without him.
By conceiving of this adventure, achieving this tour de force of climbing, then writing a popular book about the challenge, Bass revolutionized commercial guiding of mountains around the world. Matching the tallest mountains with the continents provided a special appeal. Not only were accomplished mountaineers interested in having such a glittering deed on their resumes, but average adventurers, some with no climbing backgrounds, believed they could also take on the dare. They figured if a middle-aged man like Bass could do the Seven Summits with a minimal background in the mountains, they could, too. Outdoor adventure companies quickly began offering guided trips to parts of the world they barely knew how to locate on a map. Established guide services with experience on Denali and Mount Everest had a head start. Those firms were already in business with guides on staff. Suddenly, there was more work available than they anticipated. New markets opened for climbers who wished to go to Europe’s Mount Elbrus, Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, Australia’s Kosciuszko, Antarctica’s Mount Vinson, and South America’s Aconcagua.
Those who already guided the toughest mountains on the list, Denali and Everest, were ahead of others. When climb shoppers turned to the internet, they found a handful of guide companies listed. If the companies did not adapt and start offering trips to the other peaks, they would be left behind. They might not even hold on to Denali and Everest climbers. The new breed of citizen-adventure mountaineer tended to imprint with brand loyalty. If the climber had a good experience on Kilimanjaro, and especially if he bonded with a particular guide, he leaned towards sticking with the company that got him to the summit of one mountain.
In the space of a few years following Bass’s completion of the Seven Summits and the release of his 1986 book, engagingly written with climber-author Rick Ridgeway, interest in mountaineering exploded. Demand to climb the Seven Summits skyrocketed. It was a very good time to be a savvy mountain guide who had been around the right mountains.
Vern Tejas was just blossoming as a guide, making a reputation on Denali, and traveling to more places around the world first with Genet Expeditions, and then with Alpine Ascents. He never imagined he would spend most of his career guiding trips on the Seven Summits.
Until 1986, I was primarily a Denali guide. However, Genet owner Harry Johnson wanted to grow the business and was already receiving requests to guide 22,841-foot Aconcagua in Argentina. Harry thought of the idea of guiding the Seven Summits in 1986. Nobody else was doing it yet. Harry read Dick Bass’s book and right away said, “This is what we’ve got to do.” I don’t know exactly how he figured out there was a demand for it, but there certainly was. So we started doing Aconcagua, then we expanded to include climbs of Mount Kilimanjaro, the Roof of Africa, at 19,341 feet. Things snowballed, and climbing and guiding the Seven Summits gradually gained momentum. Todd Burleson with Alpine Ascents in Seattle took a page out of Harry’s playbook by 1989 and got on the bandwagon. Rob Hall and Adventure Consultants in New Zealand also got into the game. No company was offering all Seven Summits, and it wasn’t until 1989, when Genet started offering Everest as a commercial climb, that it became possible for the public to hire guides to do all seven.
In the meantime, Pat Morrow, a Canadian, was also entranced by the Seven Summits. However, his version of the Seven Summits included Carstensz Pyramid instead of Kosciuszko. That is because the British Commonwealth doesn’t view Australia as a stand-alone continent. In Canada, they teach that the seventh continent is Austral-Asia, or Oceania, not Australia. When Morrow completed his Seven Summits in 1986, it differed from Dick Bass’s Seven Summits, but Morrow will tell you that he had no other option really. He had to come up with an alternative to top Bass. If you ask somebody from Australia, Australia is a continent. In the United States, Australia is considered a continent, but in the British Commonwealth, they think of Oceania as the seventh continent. To some degree, Pat Morrow’s climb threw the entire Seven Summits concept into disarray and really formed it into Eight Summits. If you don’t want to have somebody question your accomplishment, you have to do eight summits to get seven summits indisputably.
Certainly, Carstensz is a very good challenge, much more challenging than Kosciuszko. You could call that the highest point in Austral-Asia, if Austral-Asia is a continent. Every continent seems to have some exception to the continental terminology. Is a continent surrounded by water? Antarctica is. We call that a continent. So if that’s the definition you’re looking at, someone could counter and say North America is attached to South America by land. It’s not completely surrounded by water, so it’s not really a continent on its own. Then look at Asia and Europe; in Russia there is no water in-between at all. They’re hammered straight together. There’s no two ways about that. So it becomes a dispute over terminology, and you have to talk to cartographers, geologists, and people studying plate tectonics to come up with a clear definition. It’s still fuzzy. I think both Bass and Morrow took advantage of the fuzziness and said, “This is it.” Because Carstensz is a tougher climb, that stuck as the seventh summit for some, so to satisfy all critics, you have to do it. I made sure I did all eight.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, the housing market collapsed in Alaska due to an oil recession. In addition to owning Genet Expeditions, Harry Johnson owned a title company. Business was bad, and when the opportunity first came about in 1989 for Genet to take a group to Mount Everest, he wanted to lead it. I was going along, too.
However, the real estate situation became more complicated. Harry realized that if he worked at it and was creative, he could buy out all of his competitors and be riding high when things bounced back. He couldn’t spend three months on Everest. He said, “Vern, if you’re not going forward, you’re going backwards.” I could not relate to giving up the chance to climb Everest, but he said, “This is more important. I’ve got a family. I’ve got this opportunity.” The circumstances provided opportunity for both of us.
So he withdrew from the climb, and I moved up in the pecking order. Since we already had a concession on Denali and great programs on Aconcagua and Mount Kilimanjaro, being allowed to jump in on Everest from the China side was big-time. That meant Genet Expeditions guided the four toughest mountains in the Seven Summits group, and that same recession in Alaska was opening doors for Mount Elbrus in Russia.
I almost lost a toe on Everest on my first climb in ’89. I prefer to keep all of my fingers and toes and still be able to count to twenty on them. Let’s just say I am very attached to them, but it was a close call.
Originally, for that first trip, Harry was going to be the climbing leader and I was going to be the main guide, but I got bumped to climbing leader when Harry got bogged down with business. The Alaskan economy was changing, and he had to be on top of it. At the same time, the guiding world was changing, and Genet had to be on top of that. I had never climbed in the Himalayas, and all of a sudden, I’m a Himalayan guide. I had fourteen ascents of Denali, though; a half-dozen climbs on Aconcagua; been to the top of Vinson; and knocked off Elbrus. I had five of the seven summits under my belt. That’s not bad.
When I said I was going to Everest, people said, “Oh, cool.” I was not pushing my accomplishments. I was pretty modest, pretty humble, but people were figuring out I was close to climbing the Seven Summits. When the Everest opportunity came along, naturally I said yes!
Being climbing leader didn’t pay me any more money, but it did give me more responsibility. We had some good, experienced people. The base camp manager helped facilitate setting up. We had four very large bottles of liquid oxygen that we shipped out during the summer for our fall climb. They were loaded on a truck and, unfortunately, somewhere along the way twenty-five percent of it vanished. No explanation, no rebate, no nothing. When we got to base camp, there were only three bottles. That damaged our chances of everyone getting to the summit.
On the climb, things happened. There was bad weather and delays. The wind came up. I was high on the mountain with a deaf climber named Ken, who was very strong. He did not want to turn back. He was very motivated to show the world deafness was not a handicap. He wanted to stay on the mountain as long as it took to get a shot at the summit. There was really only one shot left, if that. Then, in late October, the wind died down when Ken and I were at Camp Three at about 23,000 feet. It was like camping on the top of Aconcagua for a month, really. We were acclimated, but were enfeebled by the lack of oxygen. It was the beginning of the day, and we were positioned on the North Col, fairly low on Everest, but above base camp and advanced base camp. There was also an interim Camp IV. We had been shuttling up loads of supplies so that we would be ready for a weather window. We had spent three weeks waiting for something to change, and it finally did.
Tejas breaks out his travel guitar for a world-top guitar solo
We had food and fuel and two bottles of compressed oxygen. We knew it would not be enough O2, but it was all we had. Liquid oxygen is in the bottle at -140 degrees, but once you bottle it, you have no control and it starts to warm up. You can either use it, which is great for sleeping, or it’s going to go away without being used. Since we had lost one bottle, we were low to start with. We had been using it up as we worked and waited. We were severely low that late in the season because we never expected to be there that long. The liquid oxygen stocks were almost all gone, so we only took compressed oxygen. We had them as part of our emergency medical stock, but we decided to use it for climbing.
At Camp IV, we knew how little oxygen we had, so we only took periodic small hits and turned it off. We knew we would need it more higher up. We pushed upward to 27,500 feet. We knew a tent from a French group was left there, and it was a goal for us. It looked like a mushroom sticking up. The winds blew everything else away, but there was a pillar of packed snow about two or three feet high left with a tent on top. We could see it, cocked at a rakish angle because of snow deformation, but it was a shelter we did not have to carry. The tent was our goal for the day, but we did not make it. We were still climbing when darkness fell. We were close, so we slowly crawled upwards in our hypoxic haze. Then Ken fell and his headlight went out as he slid down the North Face. I turned and called his name futilely into the darkness below. We were in a very dangerous area. This was the same face where a well-known climber named Marty Hoey disappeared on a Dick Bass trip, and where George Mallory disappeared back in 1924 on the first attempt to climb Everest. I was searching for Ken’s light and yelling, “Ken! Ken! Where are you?”
Of course, since he was deaf and mute, he couldn’t hear me or yell back. I was like, “Oh, my god, I’ve lost my client.” Thoughts of Lynne Salerno flooded my clouded mind. I dreaded the thought. I kept yelling hopelessly for Ken. Then, remarkably, he responded. About fifty feet down the hill from me, a light went on. He had slipped, and it slowly took him fifteen minutes to climb back up, but he was getting there. I started digging a platform in the snow to stay there until we could see what we were doing. This was too dangerous. So we made a bivouac at 27,300 feet. We did not make it to that tent. We called it a night, dug in, and flattened a place where we could lay our sleeping bags.
We had sleeping bags rated to minus-forty degrees, but it was so bitterly cold we could barely sleep. Ken slept some, but he got frost nipped in his sleeping bag where his hands were touching the zipper. His fingers had several black spots. Our communications were basically in sign language or written down. I still have some of the notes and they take me right back to the moment.
In one, I asked him, “What do you want for breakfast?”
“I was thinking bacon, eggs, some steak on the side.”
“How about granola?”
“Great, thanks.” We were parched, and I was trying to make water. Mt. Everest is one of the driest places on earth, but maybe the South Pole is drier. We’re dying of thirst, but couldn’t make water quickly on the stove because there was no oxygen to make the flames go. It took hours and hours with me staying up a good part of the night to melt snow for water. I woke up Ken and gave him some water. I was up most of the night, nodding off here and there while the stove was going. I woke to make him drink, and he went back to sleep, and I started melting more snow.
Morning finally came and we were exhausted, but we could see the tent above us. The tent was so lopsided that I decided to level it from the inside out. We shoveled snow inside the tent and then flattened it. Feeling hypothermic and hypoxic, we crawled inside for the next night. Anything above 26,000 feet is called the Death Zone and climbers do not want to spend too much time there. Climbers especially do not want to spend unnecessary extra nights. We were at around 27,500 feet and thought we could stay there and sleep indoors. It was probably negative ten degrees inside.
We had radio contact with the rest of the team. Call times were designated twelve hours apart, at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Some team members were coming up to support us. They were at Camp III, and we were at Camp V. At 3 a.m., Ken and I drank some water and ate granola bars. We threw a liter of water into our packs and were out the door by 4 a.m. going for the top.
We progressed and reached the first step. There, you can get to the ridge itself and look down across the Kangshung Face, the east face of Everest. It is a huge and amazing wall of ice. It was bitterly cold, but our heads were above the ridge and hot because of the brutal sunshine. Due to the steepness of the ridge’s incline, our lower bodies were in its shadow which was negative fifty degrees Fahrenheit. We were freezing hot; it was a terrible paradox. I cannot ever remember being colder than that. My metabolism was shutting down. We did not have much food, we were cold, and we were dehydrated. We started traversing below the ridge to where the Chinese Ladder is. I was so dehydrated, I felt I was swallowing via a leather throat. My throat was crisp and raw, and I felt as if it was breaking apart. I had to have water. I reached into my pack and pulled out the bottle and the water was frozen. It was as solid as a rock. I felt like throwing it away—it was no good to me then—but I knew I would need it later.
I looked at Ken and took stock of myself. The big toe on my right foot had been cold for hours and hours. I was dehydrated and feared I was going to be frostbitten. I had tried to warm up the toe by slipping a hand warmer in my boot, but it had slid around and was inhibiting circulation. Ken reached the Chinese Ladder, slipped his pack off, and actually got a drink. With my frozen fingers doing the talking, I told him he was strong enough to go for it, but as his guide, with the wind returning, it would be unwise. We were probably only 700 feet below the summit. At the speed we were going, and it being late morning, it might have taken another five hours. It would be either late afternoon or night before we got to the top. I told him I was going down and that I thought he should, too. He looked up and looked back. I could hear the wind roaring. He was stronger than me at that time, but he decided to go down. He got way ahead of me, and I was so dehydrated that I ended up crawling. Our goal was to get down to the camp at 23,000 feet, to the others, and below the Death Zone. I needed some help and crawled into the night. It was probably 10:30 p.m. when I saw team members coming out of camp waving flashlights. I was trying to save power in my headlamp, so it was off. Also, I knew if I ran totally out of gas, being able to turn on the headlamp was the only way they could find me.
The classic sign of dehydration is that you can’t hold water. It’s paradoxical, but true. Upon crawling into camp, the others gave me a cup of water, and I puked. I was so cold and dehydrated that I would drink water and throw up. Ken has a wicked sense of humor and handed me a plastic bag like I was on an airplane. The third time I threw up, he gave me a bag with a hole in it, so when I tossed, the vomit ran down into my suit and my sleeping bag. He was laughing so hard. I was so pissed off, but I was too weak to retaliate. I slept fitfully as my frozen body slowly warmed up. The next morning, somewhat recovered from the ordeal, I realized I had a frostbitten toe, yet was able to descend to base camp. Our doctor at base camp told me to take an aspirin, and it would make everything OK.
Ken could also effectively communicate a temper or sense of outrage. Before our summit push, at that 23,000 camp, Mike McDowell, our base camp team manager was cooking. He wanted to get higher on the mountain for a potential shot at the top. Mike was sharing a tent with Ken. I was outside when this happened, but it was kind of hard not to notice the fireball. Mike ran out of gas in the stove. Your fuel bottle is empty so you don’t think about turning the stove off. You screw on another bottle and the stove is on full. There was another stove burning next to it. WHOOSH! Half the tent vestibule went up in flames, just disappeared in a flash fire. Ken flipped out. He started cussing out Mike in sign language, waving his arms making very rude gestures. It was very humorous to watch. For a guy unable to be vocal, Ken was pretty expressive.
The next meal, Ken took over the cooking and the gas ran out. When he changed the bottle, the same thing happened. Ken looked dumbfounded because he had repeated Mike’s mistake. Mike repeated all of the same gesticulations back at him, angst, anger, in sign language. I was rolling on the ground laughing. That will stick with me forever.
We retreated from the mountain and traveled by truck to the Nepal border, leaving Tibet, or China. We drove straight to Kathmandu, but I didn’t even go into town. I got dropped off at the airport and took the first plane out. Within seventy-two hours, I was in Anchorage visiting with the late Dr. William Mills, the frostbite expert, about my big toe. I had met him at mountaineering meetings, but I had never been a patient. He was one of those grandfatherly figures in the climbing community. Dr. Mills had also come to rescue group meetings from time to time. We consulted him on frostbite issues. I told people he wrote the book on frostbite and that is literally true. More than that, he wrote the encyclopedia.
He could be pretty funny. When I went to see him he said, “So, you’re a climber.” I said, “Yeah.” “That means you probably don’t have much money.” I said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “You probably want to be one of my study guinea pigs.” I said, “Yeah.” “OK, that means the government is paying for your treatment.”
He gave me a Silvadene antibiotic, which is really expensive, some circulation meds, and a portable whirlpool bath. Then he told me to stay off of my toe. I followed the instructions to a T and, to my dismay and delight, about a month later, the whole end of my toe, from the knuckle on down, calved off. Inside, underneath where it slid off, there was a little, itsy, bitsy pinky toe about half the size of my big toe. That was the core that was saved that includes the bone, and, for some reason, the toenail. I don’t know how that happened, but my toe not only regenerated itself, the toenail came back even though it was black back to the knuckle and should have died. It all came back, and today I have a normal looking toe.
I must be part star fish. I can still dance and run and do all of those good things. It is because I went to the best frostbite doctor in the world as soon as possible and followed his rules perfectly. All of my toes are cold all of the time, but that’s just from too much cold exposure.
Ken and I probably got within 700 feet of the summit of Mount Everest and turned back. But we lived to tell the tale. Discretion became really important. You have to make good decisions based on the information available. The information was that the wind was back in a big way and the two of us were almost dead already. If we continued, it seemed all it would do was prolong the misery, and we would be likely to die later that night on the way down. That was versus going down then and believing we might live to climb another day. We lived.
My first time on Everest was not a lot of fun. It was a heck of a challenge. I felt very close to dying as I was crawling along. I made the decision to turn back when I thought I would never get back to Everest and have another chance. Before going to Everest, Gail had gone into labor with Cayman. I had a newborn son waiting for me at home.
I was still going to guide on Denali and Aconcagua, but then Todd Burleson asked me if I wanted to go back to Everest for Alpine Ascents. I was back in the saddle, ready to rock and roll after the frostbite healed.
For my second trip to Everest, I worked with two European guides and another American guide. I met Willie Prittie, who was co-founder of Alpine Ascents with Todd. Todd was the marketing brains, and Willie was the engine. Todd was the mastermind in the company, but Willie made sure things worked smoothly on the mountain.
One of the guides was Peter Habeler, the Austrian who was one of the most famous climbers in the world. Along with Reinhold Messner, he was the first to climb Everest without oxygen in 1978. That achievement was thought to be impossible at the time. He was a big deal in the climbing world. I found out Alpine Ascents was paying Peter a lot of money, and I was making like zero. Todd knew he was a big draw and his weight was considerable. He had super mountain cred. We also had Martin Zamuletta, the first Spanish mountaineer to climb Everest. So we had some well-known guides whose reputations helped fill the trip.
On our way to the mountain, we took a flight out of Beijing. We were in our seats and one of our climbers sitting next to me started bumping me and pointing out the window. We were starting to taxi, and this guy realized our luggage was still on the runway, a whole cart full. So I stood up. The flight attendant came running down the aisle to tell me I had to be seated. I said, “Our baggage is on the runway. We’re not going anywhere without our baggage.” She ran up front and told the pilot. He stopped while the leftovers were loaded on.
The whole trip got a little bit wacky. Our two high-cost guides from Europe went over the bottom of the route, and they said the rock fall was too dangerous to pass through. The group wasn’t climbing it. I’m going, “What the heck?” There was a different route Habeler was interested in, and he asked the Chinese if it was OK if we switched. They said it was alright with them, but there was another group on it and we needed permission because it was paid for. The other “group” was a European soloist with his girlfriend. Peter had a lot of prestige, and this guy who knew he was.
The guy was not happy about having a bunch of Americans on his route. If Peter or Martin wanted to climb there, no problem, but we might as well go home because they’re supposed to be working for us. This debate went back and forth for days, and stretched into a couple of weeks. He kept waffling back and forth, “Yes you can, no you can’t.” We tried to cut deals like saying we would build the camps and he could take the first shot at the top. Ultimately, Peter took a fall on the top of the West Ridge and that, combined with an impasse on the route, spooked him, and he went home.
I still wanted a shot. We were on the mountain for close to two months, and at the end of it, I was very frustrated about how the European guides acted. They didn’t interact with the clients at all and spent very little time with the Sherpas. It just seemed as if these guides were more there for themselves than the clients, taking Todd’s money. My payoff was getting another shot at the top. That’s why I wasn’t making a salary. I asked Todd to give me a stove, food, and permission, and he said he couldn’t do it. At that point, no one had been hurt, so he considered it a successful expedition. He was afraid I would go up alone and die, and it would reflect badly on him and the expedition.
He offered me a deal to come back in 1992 from Nepal working for him. The chances of success are better from the south side than the north side. I stifled my ambition and agreed. I was hoping my third time on Everest would result in a summit climb, and it did.