It is better to travel well than to arrive.
It was late May 1996, seventeen years after the Fastnet storm. I had returned from an expedition to Everest to my office in Hong Kong, where I was working as a corporate communications manager in the giant container terminal, a job which allowed me to take part in at least one major expedition each year. Waiting for me was that all too full in-tray and its pile of unopened mail.
I felt very odd. Just over two weeks earlier I had been involved in the co-ordination of a rescue on Everest after a storm had hit the mountain. Eight climbers had died. The events of that day were still making worldwide headlines and many of us who had been there were coping with daily requests from the Press to give our personal views about what had happened. I had already given television, newspaper and magazine interviews and I was totally fed up with explaining to people, who had absolutely no understanding of mountaineering, what it was like to cope with events on the mountain during such an extreme storm.
I tried very hard to concentrate. It seemed so unreal, sitting there in my sterile office, clean-shaven, wearing a shirt and tie, and reading correspondence which ranged from complicated and urgent issues to junk mail and trivia. I couldn’t help thinking about the families of those who had died on Everest, who would still be coming to terms with the deaths of their loved ones. To me they had been friends and climbing companions, but to others they were much closer: nappy changers, children, lovers, and breadwinners, not dead frozen tissue which would in some cases act as route markers for future generations of climbers challenging themselves on Everest.
Someone had sent me a postcard, which was a welcome change from both the serious and the routine mail.
I glanced at the picture on the front and, without fully comprehending which mountain it showed, I idly flipped it over. Was this some joke? There was Rob Hall’s signature, staring back at me, but Rob was dead, and his body was lying somewhere near the summit of Everest. Three members of his team had also died on our side of Everest, along with another expedition leader, Scott Fischer.
The message was brief. It stated, actually boasted, that Rob Hall’s commercial climbing company, Adventure Consultants, had been successful yet again in guiding clients to the top of the world. It went on to encourage the reader of the postcard to join Adventure Consultants if they too wanted to achieve success on future expeditions.
It was obviously not a joke and my emotions simmered, then boiled, into anger. How could anyone be so crass? People die climbing Everest, but here was a company so confident that they would achieve success that they had pre-written postcards to advertise the feat to encourage others to join them on future expeditions. I was particularly incensed that the postcards had been sent in the brief time between Rob getting to the top and him becoming trapped with his client, Doug Hansen, not far below the summit. Was it so necessary and vital to get such news out so quickly, considering the time it would take the world’s postal systems to deliver the cards?
This was the second postcard I had received from a climber who had died by the time the postcard arrived. My friend Peter Boardman had written to me shortly before his death in 1982, when he disappeared with Joe Tasker on the north side of Everest. But that had been different: Pete was alive when he wrote the card, still confident about the future, using the card to arrange to have a drink when he passed back through Hong Kong.
Had climbing now become a competitive business to such an extent that expedition organisers had started adopting aggressive marketing techniques?
For the first time since arriving back in the office, I turned on my computer, and pulled up my news service programme. I entered ‘Rob Hall’ and ‘Everest’ and double clicked the search button. Up came a report which I had not previously read, written by the doyenne of mountain journalism in Nepal, Elizabeth Hawley. The report mentioned Rob Hall’s team’s ‘success’ and the achievement of Taiwanese climber Makalu Gau. But there was no mention of the climbers in Scott Fischer’s team and there were more of Scott’s team than there were of Rob’s on the summit that day. Was this simply an overconfident, pre-organised marketing ploy which had been assisted by the respected Hawley, whose report had been circulated before the facts were confirmed?
Hawley’s report stated that two New Zealanders, two Nepalese, one Australian, one American and one Japanese had reached the top. Actually, two Americans, from Rob’s team, had reached the summit on the afternoon of 10 May. More noticeable was the complete lack of any mention of any of the members of Scott Fischer’s team, most of whom had reached the summit before the majority of Rob’s team got there.
Elizabeth Hawley is a legend amongst high altitude climbing circles for her recording of Nepal mountaineering expeditions. Although she has never climbed a big mountain, her knowledge of the mountains of Nepal is second to none. If you are named as the leader of a mountaineering expedition you can be assured that not long after your arrival in Kathmandu – or on your return at the end of an expedition – Liz Hawley will have left a message at your hotel to arrange a meeting. Some climbers see the Liz Hawley interview as being a rubber stamp which proves that what they are intending to do is a worthy mountaineering venture. But unless you are amongst the world’s climbing elite, the purpose of the interview is simply to add you, your team and the expedition to Liz Hawley’s database.
My first interview with Liz Hawley was when I was leading an expedition to Annapurna II and IV in 1992. The interview served no benefit as far as I could see other than adding information to the database, and I didn’t even get a thank you for giving up my time, which would have been better spent on last-minute logistics before we left for the mountain. I have since met Elizabeth socially and she is a charming and intelligent lady, but on many occasions I have ignored her requests to meet, simply because expeditions in my view are about people and emotions and this is something that Liz isn’t in the business of recording.
A second report by Hawley, filed on the same day, said the team members had reached the summit at 8.30 a.m. GMT. This was 1.15 p.m. local Nepal time, over two hours before the second American team member, Doug Hansen, reached the summit. So the information must have been transmitted to Kathmandu sometime between 2.15 p.m. and 3.45 p.m. Nepal time.
By Elizabeth Hawley
KATHMANDU May 10 Two foreign-led teams scaled Mount Everest on Friday, one day after a Taiwanese climber died following a fall, the Nepal Tourism Ministry said …
Two New Zealanders, two Nepalis, one Australian, one American and one Japanese reached the top first. It was not the first time that two teams had reached the summit in one day …
New Zealander, Rob Hall, 35, a mountain guide from Christchurch who has scaled four other 8,000-metre (26,250-foot) peaks, led the 11-member first team, ministry officials said.
It was his fifth successful ascent of Everest.
The others who reached the top were Andrew Harris, 31, a climbing and skiing guide from Queenstown, New Zealand; Michael Groom, 36, a climber and lecturer from Brisbane, Australia; Jon Krakauer [42, a journalist from the United States]; and Yasuko Namba, 47, a courier service employee from Tokyo.
The climb made Namba the second Japanese woman to reach Everest’s summit. The first woman of any nationality was Junko Tabei of Japan, who gained the summit in May 1975.
Why was it so important to get out this news, without even waiting until all team members had reached the summit? And why wasn’t the success of Scott Fischer’s Sherpa guides reported, along with the one Russian, seven American and one Danish climber? Would it have made any difference if the news had been more accurately reported the following day? Had Rob Hall made a deal with Hawley?
My mind was still in distant Nepal, rather than in the far-removed urban world of Hong Kong. I felt so many different emotions. What was happening to the sport of mountaineering which I loved? I had seen nothing wrong with commercialism in climbing, which gave those with the necessary experience the chance to climb big mountains which had previously been restricted to the elite of the sport. But in one bound, a leap had been taken into something crude, and unwelcome – it had become more like a horse race. The report should probably have said, ‘seven climbers made the top of Everest today, there were five fallers’.
Reading the report from Hawley while flipping over Rob Hall’s postcard in my hand was perhaps, for me, the moment that I realised that mountaineering was no longer a pastime, for many it was becoming a business.